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.
Ben
Roar Guru
Well put.
Ben
Roar Guru
Let it go, for crying out load! Lodge made a silly mistake, which he has paid for by losing two years of his career already. Carney only had 1,587 warnings/sackings for doing stupid crap, and I actually agree he has served his time since his last brain explosion. I know I will likely not get an answer from you, due to your own moral deficiencies. But would you think it's fair if you received a $1 million dollar speeding fine? Or are you more interested in virtue signaling?
Ben
Roar Guru
"but the second someone actually commits a crime, break and enter, violence against women, drug taking, the NRL allows these criminals to keep their jobs" Brett Stewart, Semi Radradra, Shaun Kenny-Dowell... These men didn't commit a single crime in regards to violence against women, yet were unfairly punished by the NRL for it. I hope you have sympathy for them.
Gray-Hand
Guest
Actually, getting caught with a small amount of drugs, even serious stuff like cocaine is usually slap on the wrist stuff for the first couple of offences. Good behaviour, no convictions etc. Seriously, the Courts aren’t in the business of ruining a person’s whole life just because they were silly enough to try some drugs once or twice.
Sam Jones
Guest
You seem to be the only one saying this Barry.
BigAl
Guest
and of course this applies to every commercial endeavor that relies on the public and it's opinion to haul in the . . . filthy lucre !
Jason Andrews
Roar Pro
Your hypothetical arguments about what laws may be or not be changed is pointless. As it stands illicit drug taking is illegal and that's is all there is too it. There is no excuse for illicit drug use, morals don't come into it. The sooner society relearns this the better.
Jackson
Guest
Who is Big J?
Jason Andrews
Roar Pro
dentists use to you cocaine for pain relief before it was outlawed so time in the 1920's. If alcohol was outlawed tomorrow, that would only be a good thing.
The Barry
Roar Guru
Get lost BigJ... You realise everyone knows you’re a m0r0n so you create a second account. Coward
Matt P
Roar Rookie
"Having a beer is a legal activity and has been forever in this country since 1901." Do you understand what forever means? "Taking Illicit drugs has been illegal since the 1920’s." So it was legal before then? Are you basing your entire sense of morality on whether something is legal or illegal? How does that compute with drugs, then? If they used to be legal, it should be acceptable, just like drinking, shouldn't it? Does the law change magically turn something from being acceptable to not being so? What if the government, this very day, passed a law that made all alcohol consumption illegal? Would you still drink? Would you still consider it morally acceptable to drink? What if they concurrently passed a law that legalised all illicit drugs. Is that now morally acceptable?
thomas c
Guest
With things like cocaine, social approval or normalisation might impact on imitation. I don't think anyone looks at Matt Lodge and things I'm going to try being out of control.
Matt P
Roar Rookie
That's cr@p. Most professional athletes aren't the smartest fellas going round, everyone knows that. Plenty of them come from pretty disadvantaged backgrounds, and they'd have zero prospects in life if they weren't great athletes. They get thrown into an extremely vicious environment from a young age, and they usually aren't taught how to cope properly. Yeah, an ordinary person would have to serve their sentence. After that, any ordinary person can get any external resources they need to resume their lives, no spotlights shining on them. These athletes? Half of them are barely employable outside the sports environment. They don't have anywhere to turn outside of sport. They get publicly crucified for mistakes; they get people like you demanding they be made unemployable the moment they screw up. Why? Who's interests is it in for sportsmen to get dumped the moment they screw up? It's not in theirs. It's not in the club's. It's not in mine. It's not in yours, unless you're one of those weird people who gets gratification from other people's suffering. Probably explains the whole redtube thing. If they get multiple chances and they don't learn their lesson, fair enough. But everyone deserves a second chance. Yeah, sure, those "buggers" (woah, such strong language!) get paid lots of money. Some of them, anyway. The average NRL player manages less than 50 games over 3 or 4 years. I'm sure they're really rolling in cash. Yes, some of them earn bucketloads of money, and yes, I think some of them are ridiculously overpaid. But professional sport is hardly a privilege once you retire. Unless you consider CTE, chronic pain, all that fun stuff, to be a privilege. You can jerk to your holier-than-thou, "moral" stance all you like (and even post it on a certain site, if that's what gets you going), but don't give me any of that rubbish. The moral course of action is to give as much help as you can to those who are in need of it. That's the entire point of society. You can have whatever opinion you like, but don't pretend you're morally righteous here. Yours is just self-gratifying "superiority."
Jason Andrews
Roar Pro
What harsh realities, its pretty simple, don't do drugs, don't commit crimes of violence or theft, follow the rules, had hard is that??
Gray-Hand
Guest
I reckon Lodge would be more likely to pass the coffee test than Milford, Thaiday or Roberts.
Gray-Hand
Guest
Opium, marijuana and cocaine all used to be legal. Marijuana will probably be legal for recreational use in Australia within the next decade or two, as has already happened elsewhere in the world. Opium is legal for recreational use in some countries. Cocaine might very well go the same way in Australia within our lifetime.
Rabbitz
Roar Guru
Precisely this. Taking the money means you accept the rules and responsibilities that go with it. The problem appears to be that since many of these players have been treated as some sort of magical being from an early age, they haven't had to learn these harsh realities.
Simon
Guest
Lmao how on earth are kids gonna know what drugs players are doing unless the media/nrl sniffs it out then makes a big show and dance and then somehow that information filters to kids. When I was 10 I had no idea my uncle had a drug problem let alone football players
Peter Mc
Roar Rookie
will anyone care next year? Maybe Craig Bellamy - the famous coffee test!
Jason Andrews
Roar Pro
Matthew I can't speak for you but if I was test positive for any kind of illegal or non prescribed substance even certain pain killers now I would be sacked on the spot, do not past go do not collect 200 dollars, same with most jobs. These buggers are earning a minimum of 100,000 per year to have the privilege to play pro football. If they cant simply keep themselves within the arks of the law and the policies set down by the NRL and their individual club, then they don't deserve to have their job, simple as that. Can't keep within the law, don't get to keep your job, its that simple.