Opinion
If you don’t think we’re living in weird times just have a look at the sporting world
Peter FitzSimons
Columnist and authorBlood moons eclipse the sun, the dogs howl, and the day of the locusts is upon us. Australian sport meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and nothing is ever quite the same again.
For ain’t it a bit like that famous Hunter S. Thompson book right now? Ain’t there madness in the air, mendacity on the tube, drug-crazed nutters wandering free where good men die like dogs and snarling reptiles with bloodshot eyes hide behind every corner?
Australian sport, at least in the public domain, used to be as prim and proper as an Alan McGilvray ABC broadcast of a Test cricket match at the SCG. You bring the Pimm’s, I’ve got the pumpkin scones, and we’ll meet on the mauve picnic rug my Aunty Rod has laid out on the Hill in front of the old scoreboard.
Right now, though, there is madness in the air, meanness on the fields, loucheness lurking in dark corners, and killers on the blood-shot streets.
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie insists that you can’t spit over your shoulder on a Saturday night in Melbourne these days without hitting a drug-crazed coke-fuelled AFL player in the eye!
Out on the field, AFL players are muttering dark homophobic slurs.
It’s been a mad week of sport.Credit: Getty/Fairfax Media/Marija Eregovac
The vicious booing of Latrell Mitchell may, or may not be racist in nature, but whatever its base, its very viciousness shocks.
North of the Tweed, one nutter has been found guilty of sending online abuse to a match official and his wife during last year’s Rugby World Cup. Who DOES that? And since when?
In the NRL, they were within a whisker of honouring a player who was banned for testing positive to drugs, was found in a civil court to have so wronged his wife he had to pay her $500,000 in damages, but hasn’t done so. But look, maybe we should have a little ceremony as the cameras roll and say “Well done, great to have you back!”
What were they THINKING?
Another player gets his head in the way of a charging opponent, is knocked motherless, but we’re told “he’s fine”. Afterwards, when one journo lightly suggests it might be an idea to stop long kick-off as a way of limiting 120kg men running full speed right into other 120kg men on the boil, he is all but told to get the hell out of the studio and never to darken their towels again.
In soccer, another nutter insists he wasn’t doing a Nazi salute at game, it was just that his right arm was indeed outstretched at that distinctive angle, but he was no, having a beer.
Complaints are made about fans racially abusing a player at a Shute Shield game.
In where else but Las Vegas, two boxers are covered from head to toe in one bloke’s blood as they try to batter each other’s heads to such a point that one will suffer enough brain damage to sink into unconsciousness – and it is proclaimed as “a great fight”. No, really!
Somehow, through it all, the days of watching a sporting contest just like mother used to make where two teams simply do their best and shake hands at the end without fear, favour, or rancour, or millions of dollars changing hands not far away, seem long gone.
Tim Tszyu in the third round of his bout against Sebastian Fundora in Las Vegas.Credit: Getty
And just as if no-one was in the forest to hear a tree fall, did it make a sound ... you can’t really be sure any major sports contest has taken place unless it generates its fair share of blood-curdling, spittle-soaked ranting on social media, guaranteed to feed the news cycle.
A sporting contest is no longer merely just that, it is a product to be spiced, sliced, diced, spliced and distributed on as many platforms as you can turn a buck on – and there is nothing more lucrative than getting it on the platform where every bastard is a poor sap loser, or they are no longer welcome to gamble.
Take us out, Hunter S, just before Johnny Depp fires your ashes out of the cannon into the Aspen wilderness: “We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they’re dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.”
I will be in my trailer, watching Trump campaign speeches on YouTube, until Elvis and I shoot the lights out.
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