There is clearly a problem in footy which goes beyond any one club | David Penberthy
I wonder whether the problem is actually more acute in AFL than it is in other codes, most notably rugby league, writes David Penberthy.
Opinion
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The allegations that have been levelled against the Hawthorn Football Club are truly appalling.
It is impossible to fathom how any of what is said to have occurred could have been allowed to happen.
There was allegedly a set of rules in place to govern the personal lives of Aboriginal players which were completely different to the white members of the team.
The rules, as alleged, went to how these Indigenous men managed their personal lives, whether they continued relationships, in one case whether a player’s girlfriend continued with her pregnancy.
If true, the level of intrusion is extraordinary, its impact on those players, their partners and families hard to comprehend.
As AFL chief executive Gill McLachlan said on Wednesday, everyone in this process is entitled to natural justice and we should suspend our judgment against former Hawks coach Alastair Clarkson and his former assistant, now Brisbane coach, Chris Fagan, until they have had the full opportunity to put their side of what occurred.
But boy, you could say by way of massive understatement that these two have some seriously explaining to do.
One of the more juvenile and dispiriting features of sport is the propensity for fans to view everything through their allegiance to the club they adore.
When your own club stuffs up, it’s a beat-up, when a club you can’t stand has a problem, you hail it as the greatest scandal ever to befall a sporting organisation.
Against that backdrop it has been unsurprising that during the past few days a lot of South Australians who barrack for the Crows have been commenting about how all this Hawthorn stuff makes the notorious Crows camp seem like a gentle stroll in the park.
This form of thinking completely misses the point.
Whatever you might think about the often overblown and over-egged nature of the camp coverage, none of that alters the fact that what happened on that camp should not have been allowed to occur, and that it caused lasting emotional damage to a group of Aboriginal players.
The specifics of it are well-documented and do not need to be repeated ad nauseam here.
The simple version of what happened though is that a bunch of well-meaning white people signed off on an exercise which had the immediate and irreversible result of alienating every Aboriginal member of the club, because the organisers and their backers were tone deaf to Indigenous sensibilities.
The idea that anyone would almost gleefully seize on the Hawthorn allegations in an attempt to feel better about themselves, or to rationalise a scandal their own beloved club endured, is a cute mechanism to avoid any reflection on where your own people might have also gone wrong.
There have now been so many examples where Aboriginal players have been mistreated, or simply just misunderstood, that there is clearly a problem in footy which goes beyond any one club.
I wonder whether the problem is actually more acute in AFL than it is in other codes, most notably rugby league.
We AFL fans are wrong to stare down our noses at league where it comes to the treatment of Indigenous players. It has endured none of the player booing and abuse that plagued someone like Nicky Winmar or Adam Goodes.
It also seems more adept at ensuring that its vast number of Aboriginal and Islander players have fewer dramas moving from the country to the city to become embedded in their chosen teams.
My hunch is that, unlike the much more grassroots-driven NRL, the AFL suffers from the fact that it is a much more corporate organisation with cashed-up commercial interests.
As befits its corporate culture, the AFL has done a great job in a slick marketing sense of getting its external messaging right.
We’ve got Indigenous rounds and Indigenous jumpers and all the sponsors doffing their caps to Indigenous culture in their advertising, yet meanwhile, there’s Indigenous players crying themselves to sleep on account of the treatment they have endured, be it from boofhead fans or inept management.
There are things I would ask in light of these latest allegations.
The first goes to Indigenous representation at the board level and AFL House level. It feels like Indigenous people in football administration hold the type of roles where they’re called upon occasionally to run an Indigenous eye over how things are being run.
They are certainly called in to run an Indigenous eye over things when they are being run badly, in keeping with one of the first rules of crisis management.
But are they actually running things themselves in a day-to-day way?
Why aren’t there more Aboriginal executives and board members to balance out the vast numbers of people drawn from the corporate world?
Secondly, how is the AFL the right organisation to be spearheading an inquiry into all these allegations when the AFL itself might be part of a problem?
Is a more arms-length process needed, given there’s a chance as has happened before that the old mate’s act might kick in, and people will end up facing less onerous scrutiny on account of the fact that most people in AFL circles reckon they’re good blokes?
Just to be clear. What happened at Hawthorn doesn’t make the camp any better. Nor does it make Tex’s comment, for which he rightly apologised and made amends, any less worse.
It is merely the latest sorry example of the shabby treatment a uniquely talented group of footballers face as they try to do nothing other than entertain us all by playing our great national game.
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