Overland literary journal

OVERLAND 193
summer 2008
ISBN 978-0-9805346-0-3
published 19 November 2008

MURDEROUS EXHIBITIONS

Michael Winkler confronts mixed feelings about sport and violence

The New South Wales team was marauding downfield, thirteen taut torsos in improbably fey pale blue shirts. State of Origin Rugby League, circa 2008.

All the champions were there: the bloke who bit the woman; the bloke who sexually harassed a woman over the telephone; and the bloke whose rape charge had recently been dropped. In the middle of the field there was the bloke who had been suspended for ten weeks for kneeing an opponent in the head, and the bloke who split an opponent’s face open then later used his fingers to prise the wound further apart. Alongside them was Willie Mason.

Their Queensland opponents included a born-again Christian, a fervent Mormon and a Fijian-born prop who speaks like an accountant and works with troubled youth. But I didn’t really care who won. They were all smashing each other, apparent saints and alleged sinners, and for their willingness to hurt and be hurt they had my awe.

*

My first heroes were my parents and my older sister. When I was about five I discovered heroes from outside my household. The first was Ned Kelly. He was dangerous, charismatic and powerful. He protected himself with steel, and punished aggressors with guns.

In my first year of school I went along to the annual dress-up day as a schoolgirl – as my sister, really. I wore her green check dress, a red ribbon in my hair. I was chubby and pretty. The experience was predictably traumatic. Teachers were confused; big kids were unkind, I was banished from the boys’ toilets and pushed into the girls’.

In my second year of school I went to the dress-up day as Ned Kelly, encased in painted cardboard that felt like impermeable gun-grey armour.

I discovered football at eight or nine. My first sporting hero was a glamorous young star of the Victorian Football League, as it was then. He ran fast and looked fantastic. The story goes that at some point during his career he trapped a woman by winding up his car window on her neck or head, then coolly got out of the car and raped her from behind. I am glad that I did not hear about this until I was older.

Cricket was my next passion. We lived a long way from the major cities and did not own a television. When I was twelve my father took me to the MCG for the first time, and I saw my first day of Test cricket. It was intoxicating and confusing. I was used to having the cricketers in my head, construed through radio descriptions by Alan McGilvray, pen portraits in the ABC Cricket Book, and the no-fuss journalese of Peter McFarline in the Age. But here they were, the word made flesh, close enough to call out to, and surrounded by thousands of other fans like me. I hated the realisation that I had to share my cricket heroes. I felt disconcerted that they had an existence outside my containment. Worse, it dawned that my heroes were ultimately people. People just like me.

*

In 2004 NSW centre Mark Gasnier rang a woman he had never met before – her name and number were found on a teammate’s mobile phone – at 3:41 am during a State of Origin bonding period. The message he left on her answering machine is exemplary. In its vivid conveyance of his attitude towards women, and perhaps the attitude of many sportsmen towards women, it has an inadvertent compressed power that sounds like blank verse:

Where the fuck
are you? There’s
four toey humans in the cab.
It’s
20
to
four.
Our cocks are fat and
fucking
ready to spurt sauce.
And you’re in bed.
Fuck me.
Fire up, you sad
cunt.

At the end of 2008 there will be a Rugby League World Cup held on Australia’s east coast. The advertising theme for the event is Heroes. One ‘hero’ has been chosen for each of the eight competing countries. Australia’s is Mark Gasnier.

*

In my late teens I encountered a book by Sheldon Kopp which I have revisited with varying levels of satisfaction in the years since. In If You Meet the Buddha on The Road, Kill Him, he writes, ‘If you have a hero, look again; you have diminished yourself in some way.’

I took those words to heart. I was disenchanted with heroes anyway. Perhaps I threw the baby of due reverence out with the bathwater of false hierarchy – but if so, that would have been a snug fit with my twenty-something smugness.

I made my living for some years working in print, radio, television and the internet as a football writer and producer. AFL football. The more I saw of footballers, the less I worshipped them. Many were dull, some were arrogant, a few were obnoxious, but I was angry with them, too, for not being the towering figures of my childhood imaginings. In the end I fell out of love with the sport that had been an addiction for a couple of decades. I turned to Rugby League as my methadone, and soon I was hooked all over again.

*

Masculinity has been celebrated culturally at least since Homer. For most of that time there was common agreement as to what constituted masculine behaviour. The aspects of this behaviour currently celebrated in sports figures were expressed across a broader range of activities in past times. In modern Australia there has been a strong push towards promoting attributes traditionally tagged ‘feminine’, such as gentleness or nurturing, as traits of the ‘real man’, and there is less tolerance of hairy-chestedness in office culture, the family home or even political life. These behaviours, where they occur, are vestiges of what Australian culture used to be like, or tried to be like: don’t be a bludger; don’t be a whinger; only girls cry; only sooks dob. Echoes of such attitudes can still be found in many half-time addresses in Rugby League dressing sheds.

*

Queensland defends on its own line. The big Blues’ forwards repeatedly bend the Maroons’ defensive line in the middle of the field, but it does not break.

At half-time I put the kids to bed. My wife has finished shuffling the towels on the clotheshorse and returned from the kitchen with a hot chocolate for each of us. The heater is on and she snoozes lightly on the couch, her feet on my lap.

Me? My body is inert but ablaze. As big tackles are made, I flinch. As the ball zips left or right there is a corresponding jag from the nerves around my hips and pelvis although I do not actually move. I try to isolate where I feel Rugby League – here, on the warm couch, one thousand kilometres from where the match is being played. Because I feel it in my core, I assume at first that the kinaesthesia must occur in my stomach or my balls.

I am surprised that it is neither. In fact I feel the game in my bowels. The exact same place I feel terror and shame.

*

Rugby League is the most brutal of team sports. The body contact, viewed close, looks homicidal.

The sport has little poetry but it does have purity. There is an almost prelapsarian perfection about the collision of two men when it is stripped of any greater meaning than the collision itself.

There are no Hamlets in league. This, arguably, is a failing in the sport – cricket, for example, has been enriched by the occasional Hamlet, just as it has by its Lears and its Pucks and its Richards the Third.

Instead, there are men who act without thinking. This cannot be what sports watchers refer to as instinct: there is nothing instinctive in sacrificing your body to stop another man moving a ball forward. Rather, it is a triumph over instinct, the willingness and ability to erase all thoughts of self-preservation. These men exist in the moment sufficiently to perform their pain-filled tasks without questioning the act’s worth or wisdom. For this, I give them my awe.

*

For most of human history there has been gender separation or segregation, with men spending the majority of their time living out their masculinity amongst other men. In tribal times men bonded away from home, proving their mettle and competing in hunting contests. In contemporary Australia, where the genders live together, where the concept of masculinity has become less precise, where opportunities to express that masculinity have narrowed, sport has become a greater preoccupation. The sporting arena is the last ritualised space for boys becoming men. For a time it was also one of the last citadels where masculinity was not only a goal but also an excuse. Men bashed and men raped and, if they were good enough footballers, if they were sufficiently superior examples of masculinity, their sins were hushed up and smoothed over.

The enjoyment of violence is an inextricable part of being an animal – but only one part. The will to do violence, and the passive willingness to see violence done, rubs against another function of our animalism: that we are extremely social. Consequently the sporting sphere is not untrammelled but ritualised and obsessively rule-laden. This is the nexus between the individual desire to prevail over everyone else and the need to live in society. You cannot prevail outside society (you cannot win a sporting contest if you are not allowed to participate in that contest) so there is a tension between wanting to win via violence and using social instinct to govern the expression of that violence.

In Rugby League, only a team with great aggression and physical commitment can win, but the whistle is constantly blown on over-aggression. A player such as Les Boyd – suspended for fifteen months for eye-gouging Billy Johnstone and twelve months for breaking Darryl Brohman’s jaw with his elbow – was ultimately policed out of the game; the near-homicidal vigour which made him a Rugby League champion could not be reined in sufficiently for him to remain within the sport. John Hopoate showed little awareness of where the game’s boundaries lay. Paul Gallen dances along this liminal.

*

Roget offers index options for ‘hero’ that include doer; brave person; prodigy; person of repute; loved one; favourite; and good person.

It dawns gradually that I may have my definitions of ‘hero’ criss-crossed: that, just because I see these men as brave and doers and even prodigies, I assume that they are also good people, people who I respect and even love.

And I don’t. I don’t respect the average Rugby League player as much as I respect the average teacher. I don’t love the average Rugby League player more than I love the average train driver.

Yet there is a fascination, and a little-boy admiration, that sits in me like a secret. These thugs and mercenaries are my heroes, along with the other participants in their varying shades of ethical acceptability. This veneration is something dark but undeniable. When the players are certifiable bad boys, it only intensifies the titillation.

At the point when I fell out of love with Australian Rules, the sport was undergoing a cleansing. Dirty play was punished with a new severity. Coaches discovered that swots and solid citizens executed their new, highly complex game plans better than the cowboys and mavericks who had starred in the ad hoc football of the past. Forceful body contact was minimised.

Rugby League is a sport out of time. It may also be a sport without a future. Traditionally played and enjoyed by the working class, it is dying at its roots as children of the bloated middle class are directed towards less brutal pastimes. Connoisseurs of flowing sports such as soccer and Australian Rules deride the league spectacle as ugly: two serried gangs smacking into each other like waves in a rip, scrabbling for inches of advantage. Crowds are diminishing.

I watch a lot of muay thai, kickboxing, mixed martial arts and boxing. These contests have a clarity, an internal logic, and they feed the same odd uncomfortable need in me that men have had since antiquity: to observe other men in violent sport. Rugby League is a muddier prospect because the violent contact is less certain, less choreographed, less personal.

I have never had a clue what Sartre meant when he said that in football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team. For me it sometimes seems that everything is complicated by the presence of the ball.

*

Tatian, an early Christian, wrote of pugilists and gladiators in the second century, ‘I have seen men weighed down by bodily exercise, and carrying about the burden of their flesh, before whom rewards and chaplets are set, while the adjudicators cheer them on, not to deeds of virtue, but to rivalry in violence and discord; and he who excels in giving blows is crowned.’

And I think, yes, that is how it works.

‘And for these the witnesses take their seats, and the boxers meet in single combat, for no reason whatever, nor does anyone come down into the arena to succour. Do such exhibitions as these redound to your credit? He who is chief among you collects a legion of blood-stained murderers, engaging to maintain them; and these ruffians are sent forth by him, and you assemble at the spectacle to be judges, partly of the wickedness of the adjudicator, and partly of that of the men who engage in the combat. And he who misses the murderous exhibition is grieved, because he was not doomed to be a spectator of wicked and impious and abominable deeds.’

Tatian coined the ageless term, ‘a cannibal banquet for the soul’. I wield the remote like a serviette and feast at this banquet every chance I get.

*

Our culture rests on a fault line, between claims for the moral superiority of non-violence and the worship of violent sport. Just as some people read crime novels without becoming killers themselves, I manage to enjoy – almost lust for – violent sport while remaining a peaceful member of society. There may or may not be an element of catharsis. I am equally uncertain whether there is value in the idea that if you have no communion with that aspect of your animal self it becomes repressed and then bubbles up in uncontrolled ways. To argue this would be to argue that watching violent sport is a social good – but, paradoxically, one of the attractions to me is that there is nothing ‘good’ about watching Rugby League. Watching bad boys playing rough is less fun if it fulfils some useful social function such as catharsis.

Perhaps instead it is the value of the pagan epiphany. A crack opens. You see inside the tornado. There is a hint that the spectacle might provide a speck of self-knowledge, the self-knowledge that is only gained by peeping through a window into the dark heart of ourselves.

*

I have an appetite for violent, visceral sport. Given my complete unwillingness to be anything other than a spectator, to get any closer to the pain than the edge of my couch, am I in moral quicksand? My hunch is that I probably am. I elevate the participants for their courage. I am excited more by the bad boys than the born-agains. I build them up, like a beast being fattened, and then I consume them. They are, as individuals, completely expendable to me. There will always be another hero to dine on – at least until society decides that a sport mimicking battle plans of the Somme has no cachet in the superhighway age.

The truth is, I liked State of Origin Rugby League more when punch-ups were guaranteed. If the ritualised brutality of front-on tackling is the main course at my soul’s cannibal banquet, then the garnish is unscheduled acts of illegal barbarity. I need it, all of it, like Ned Kelly needed his Colt revolvers. It appeases something deep inside me; balls and stomach, as well as bowels.

What would the little boy dressed as a schoolgirl think about this drive to watch human buffaloes smashing into each other over and again? What would he think about making heroes of men dedicated to delivering pain? I don’t know, and it probably doesn’t matter anyway. I destroyed that sissy a long time ago.

Michael Winkler is a writer living in Melbourne.
© Michael Winkler
Overland 193-summer 2008, p. 25

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