Longneck
August 2013
Post-physical: AFL’s whole new world
Australian Rules Football stands on the cusp of a great and historic revolution – more innovative than white shorts for away games, more desperate than Ron Barassi at half time of the 1970 Grand Final pleading with his players to handball handball handball, more chic than the tattoos that adorn the arms, legs, torsos and necks of all self-respecting modern midfielders. The AFL is a handball into space away from becoming the world’s first post-physical activity sport. It’s true: they’re going to cancel the game itself.
And not before time. Think about what really matters in 2013. It’s not Buddy Franklin grabbing a loose ball on the wing, bouncing twice through heavy traffic and – pinned hard up against the boundary line, on the wrong side for a left-footer, opponents hanging off him like oars on a boat – letting fly from 60 metres and splitting the middle. What matters is that Buddy’s heroics provoke conversation. What’s the best goal he ever kicked? Is his best better than, say, a Peter Daicos special (Daics used to ease them off his big toe, making the ball meander as if following a creek bed until, like a dribble of water defying a drought by reaching the sea, it crossed the goal line)? Can Daics or Buddy top the winning goal Malcolm Blight kicked after the siren in 1976, North Melbourne v Carlton, a screw punt that caught a thermal current and came down six months later?
Why bother with any more twelve-goal maulings, Hawthorn v Anybody, when there are enough topics to keep footy chat going for decades. Who was the better centre-half-forward, Dermott Brereton or Wayne Carey? And who partied harder? Who rivals Nathan Buckley as the game’s most overrated champion? And never forget the disputational value of the AFL’s ‘we really care’ community engagement: Indigenous round; women’s round; multicultural round; endangered species round (with a nod to pandas, those loyal Collingwood fans, but with a principal concern for the decline of the pure full-forward, the second ruckman, the shirtfront).
The Essendon supplements saga has shown the AFL what’s really possible. I don’t know who’s playing who this weekend but I can picture James Hird’s driveway, where he meets the media to periodically deliver an alpha male-dipped ‘no comment’. That’s why Essendon’s predicament isn’t a once-in-a-generation crisis but the tipping point the AFL has been craving – a political, legal and moral controversy that, all going well, will simmer like a volcano.
At the moment, Dalai Lama-Hird and his spin doctors, along with Essendon’s board and administrators, the evil sports scientists and the childlike playing group, must all deflect and deny. But in time, after the punishments and the court cases, after the UN human rights delegation come and goes, a grateful nation will laud Essendon. That’s when Hird, who on the field appeared out of nowhere to perform magical and brave deeds, will seize the moment. He’ll give an interview to Bruce McAvaney, Australia’s Oprah Winfrey, but instead of weeping with shame and begging forgiveness he’ll claim credit for reinventing the game. Quite right too.
The champions of the future AFL will come from all walks of life. I anticipate rousing oratorical jousts, like Bill Clinton on the together-we-can-save-Africa qualities of Eddie McGuire’s worldview versus J.K. Rowling on whether footy or Quidditch is the grander spectator sport. Physicist Paul Davies will answer the question ‘Is Gary Ablett Senior really God?’ Ballet Australia will choreograph the pack mark Leo Barry took to save the 2005 Grand Final. The Australian Society for Medical Research will convene a panel to determine any correlation between ugliness and hardness at the ball. The poet Les Murray will ponder the elegiac qualities of Richmond forever finishing ninth; Clare Bowditch will sing Murray’s words at Covent Garden. And after a lifetime of research, the eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey will publish his 18-volume masterpiece, Use and Abuse of the Holding the Ball Rule, 1877-2013.
This new AFL will be truly egalitarian. Anybody and everybody – men, women, children, even outcasts with unreconstructable knees – will participate. The nation will embark on a journey of lifelong learning, footy transformed from the greatest game on earth into a philosophy of everything. Like Alex Jesaulenko taking the mark of the century in the 1970 Grand Final, the broadcast rights will soar.
TAGS afl longneck patrick allington
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