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I have for some time thought it might be a good idea for sporting bodies to give up attempts to act as moral arbiters, to restrict their jurisdiction to sporting matters only and get out of players’ private lives altogether.
If players break the law, let the police deal with them. Should they go to jail, that will obviously take them out of the game. Otherwise, let administrators pull their noses out of their employees’ business and get on with the job.
This idea seems a better one by the day.
The first reason for believing this is that so much of what sportspeople (well, sportsmen really, let’s be honest) get punished for in terms of off-field infractions falls into the category of “I don’t give a shit”.
I do not care what athletes imbibe or snort. I don’t care who they have sex with, where they do it, or whether someone got it on video. I really don’t care if they think it’s funny to urinate in their own mouths.
Any of these things might affect my opinion of whether the sportsman in question would make a good dinner party guest, but never will they affect my opinion of whether they should be allowed to keep their job.
But of course there are sometimes more serious matters at hand. Matters of violence, of harassment and abuse. A sporting organisation, surely, needs to be seen to take such matters seriously, doesn’t it?
This brings me to the second reason for wanting administrators to get out of the moralising business: they’re terrible at it. All that sporting officialdom’s determination to display a squeaky clean image has achieved is a rolling demonstration of repellent hypocrisy, and frankly the world of professional sport would look a lot more honest if it just admitted that providing moral instruction is not in its skillset and from now on it would stick to what it’s good at.
Let’s take the case of Todd Carney, whose signing this week by the North Sydney Bears – to play suburban footy, effectively for a reserve grade side – angered Norths’ associate South Sydney so much it has apparently caused them to pull the plug on their affiliation with the Bears.
Does Todd Carney deserve one last shot? (AAP Image/Action Photographics, Grant Trouville)
Carney’s list of sins are well-documented and have resulted in dismissal from a string of NRL clubs, absence from the top level for the last four years, and a career that will now never come close to fulfilling its potential.
Fair enough, many would say – he has only himself to blame. If a man can’t stop being an idiot, he can’t expect the world to be endlessly forgiving.
So now let’s take the case of Matthew Lodge.
In 2015, Lodge, then-20, was arrested at gunpoint in New York after he followed some complete strangers into their building, threatened to kill them, assaulted a man and smashed up a woman’s apartment while she and her nine-year-old son hid, terrified, in the bathroom. For his crime Lodge was ordered to pay $1.6 million compensation to his victims, which he has not done.
In May 2016, Lodge – who claims to have never hit a woman – pleaded guilty to a charge of common assault stemming from his relationship with Charlene Saliba, who has detailed the extensive violent abuse she was subjected to while she was with Lodge.
Matthew Lodge is now turning out every week with the Brisbane Broncos and is highly valued by his teammates and coach.
Matt Lodge (Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
The details of Lodge’s crimes are positively harrowing. Certainly anything Todd Carney has ever done pales into insignificance next to the Bronco’s psychotic New York rampage. Luckily, though, that did happen in New York, allowing Lodge to not only escape his legal obligations, but the intense scrutiny that would come from, say, a photo of him trying to wee in his mouth.
Lodge is living his NRL dream. Carney isn’t. The league and its clubs will always say they take these things seriously, but just how seriously will always depend on myriad factors in which the volume of adverse publicity and the potential for personal embarrassment of officials will always loom larger than any objective assessment of the facts, even when they’re able to overcome their natural inclination to base punishments on the talent level of the player involved – which is rarely.
Which is why a drug bust is more likely to lead to a suspension than is a domestic violence charge.
Rugby league is not the only culprit here, just the one that makes it easiest to locate glaring examples. In pretty much every professional sport you can find examples of appalling behaviour being given a pass while the merely embarrassing is cracked down on hard. And sport seems incapable of overcoming these inconsistencies, so it might be time to stop asking them to.
The only reason to be disappointed in sportsmen’s failure to be good role models is that they say they’re trying to be. The only reason to decry sporting bodies’ failure to set a good example for society is that they pretend they want to. They don’t.
They want to get big crowds and fat TV deals and crow about numbers – a social conscience is something someone told them they need to be able to do that. But they’re so terrible at having a social conscience, let’s grant them some mercy. Let them off the hook. It’ll save us all a lot of disappointment.