Michael McGuire: Even ignoring the lurid headlines, the famous Crows camp sounded deeply silly
As always with footy clubs, the Collective Mind camp had a lot of faux-military nonsense – which comes across as six-year-old boys playing soldiers at recess, writes Michael McGuire.
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The camp. Like Beyonce, Bowie and Britney, the shortened title tells you all you need to know.
There is no doubt the piece by former Adelaide coach Graham Cornes about the Crows 2018 Gold Coast camp in SAWeekend last Saturday and in the Sunday Mail was a fascinating read.
Cornes, always a staunch defender of the Crows, has consistently maintained the criticisms of the camp were a Victorian plot to undermine the club. Why the Victorians feel the need to undermine the Crows when they were doing such a bang-up job of it themselves is never quite explained.
But anyway, Cornes gave the crew from Collective Mind the opportunity to air their side of the story, which is entirely fair enough. Collective Mind could have been renamed Collective Guilt, such was the rush to hang them when the Crows’ slide into anarchy really took off.
They had obviously been busting for a while to outline their story, but the Crows had taken their usual approach to media relations: “Shut up and tell ’em nuffin.”
Still, it’s possible they should have just shut up and maintained a dignified silence.
What’s that old saying? “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”
Even if you discount some of the more lurid allegations that have surfaced about the camp, and accept the Mind’s view that it was all hunky-dory, the whole exercise comes across as deeply silly.
Some of the quotes from Collective Mind duo Amon Woulfe and Derek Leddie were just cringey, others were laugh-out-loud funny. And not in a good way.
About one activity: “Once participants come to a place where they chose to accept and let go of their immature traits, they then start pulling towards the two chosen teammates with the mature traits they aspire to, with the full support of everyone. A blunt knife was used to symbolically cut themselves free at the end.”
As always with footy clubs, there was a lot of faux-military nonsense, which comes across as six-year-old boys playing soldiers at recess. Some of it was apparently built on the Crows’ internal “warrior’’ theme. The camp had segments called Path of the Warrior, Code of the Warrior, Heart of the Warrior, Mark of the Warrior, all of which sound like films from the tail end of Jean-Claude van Damme’s acting career.
There were ex-soldiers holding wooden guns, leaving me hoping they went all the way and did the sound effects, shouting “bang, bang you’re dead” whenever one of the Crouch boys hove into view.
Footy loves its military cliches. They are wheeled out every April 25, when players are lauded for displaying “Anzac spirit”, as if million-dollar players running around a well-manicured green oval is at all comparable to being sliced apart by machine guns on a muddy battlefield in Turkey or France.
One of the goals of the camp was to “build great men”.
The “great men” line is certainly one to savour. Apparently one of the key points in Collective Mind selling itself to the Crows was a conversation former captain Taylor Walker had with South Sydney rugby league player Sam Burgess.
Burgess apparently told Walker Collective Mind was the reason the Rabbitohs won the 2014 NRL premiership.
Anyway, Burgess. Possibly not a “great man”. He is currently charged with intimidation after a clash with his former father-in-law. He has pleaded not guilty. Then there was the time Burgess was involved in a sexting scandal while his now ex-wife was heavily pregnant.
Still, it would be ridiculous to blame Collective Mind entirely for the fate of the Crows since 2017. There are many other factors at work, both on and off field. And while it was devastating for the club to lose the 2017 Grand Final, it was no reason for the club to fall apart. Since 1991, West Coast (twice), North, Geelong and Hawthorn have all won a grand final 12 months after losing one.
But the Collective Mind charter was to build “deep connections between the players, strengthen relationships and promote authenticity”. Hard to argue the Crows have seen any of that since 2017.