David Penberthy: Hypocrisy is writ large in Mumford drug case
THE AFL should bow out of dealing with footballers’ drug offences and leave it to cops and doctors. And hypocritical journos with their own drug history should keep their traps shut, writes David Penberthy.
I RECENTLY attended a media awards night where the congested state of the men’s toilet cubicles suggested there had been a mass outbreak of amoebic dysentery.
The animated demeanour of those emerging from the dunnies suggested that they didn’t have any gastroenterological problems, only pharmacological ones.
Just say “no” to drugs, Nancy Reagan told us. Thirty years on and the answer for many people remains an enthusiastic “yes”. They include the AFL footballer Shane Mumford, busted on video this week doing his bit to bolster the bottom line at the Medellin Cartel. Never mind that his apparent coke-snorting — let’s drop the cute “white powder” vagaries, by the way — happened three years ago. Mumford, currently seeking to restart his AFL career, has faced calls from the more zero tolerance circles to be drummed out of the game on the grounds that he has brought shame upon himself, his family, his team and his code, and failed in his social duty as a role model.
DAVID PENBERTHY: Our drug habits expose our hipster hypocrisy
I do not think the guy should be penalised at all, and nor do I think that any other athlete who is busted taking non performance-enhancing illicit drugs should be penalised, either.
What Mumford has done should be dealt with in the personal realm as a health issue and in the public realm as a criminal one. It is up to him, with the support of his family and club, to seek medical help for his drug use, if indeed he is still using drugs. And if he has broken the law, it is also up to Mumford to co-operate with the police as to whether he will face any charges over his behaviour. The criminal law is there to mete out the punishment, and in my view it is punishment enough without an extra layer of sanctions by a sporting body.
The Mumford case stands as a case study into the weird double standards that exist both within the world of sport, and between sport and the rest of the community.
I am not condoning or downplaying illicit drug use. I would argue however that the abuse of drugs such as cocaine is the kind of pursuit that will usually have just one victim — the abuser — and potentially their loved ones should they have to deal with the abuser’s aberrant behaviour, illness or even death. What seems strange is how there are so many blokes kicking around in the world of sport who have bashed their partners, assaulted women or men who were total strangers, or been caught in the highly dangerous and wholly anti-social act of drink-driving, and faced no significant sanction or enduring damage to their reputation.
The language surrounding Mumford has been so overblown. How is the private act of taking cocaine with friends at a party a bigger crime than knowingly getting blind and driving across Melbourne with one eye open so you can see the road? I can think of former AFL club captains who have done as much, but are still feted as heroes of the game and top blokes to boot despite the fact that, unlike Mumford, they could have killed someone.
When it comes to bringing shame on your club, I would have thought that having sex with your captain’s wife on top of the washing machine at a BBQ at another’s player house created more of a team-wrecking environment than anything Mumford did three years ago. Yet for some people this has been a precursor to a fruitful media career. Mumford’s actions also had less impact than any punch Barry Hall ever laid.
The tired old argument goes, of course, that these people like Mumford are role models purely because they are good at kicking and marking a football. This, we are told, is the great danger, in that impressionable kiddies will see this behaviour and regard it as normalising drug-addled behaviour.
I would happily show this Mumford video to both of my teenage kids as it seems to be a handy case study into how mind-blowingly stupid drug abuse is. Seeing the bloke’s eyes rolling around in his head like Ray Liotta in the extraordinary coke-fuelled final scenes of Goodfellas strikes me as an excellent demonstration of how truly screwed up you become when you’re off your head.
Organisations like the AFL have a duty of care as employers to promote an anti-drugs message and to provide support to people who make bad choices. While some would argue it would be an abrogation of duty, I believe the AFL should completely vacate the space of handing out sanctions for these misdemeanours. There is no consistency in the penalties anyway, as in the Mumford case, he will not be punished to the full force of the laws as he was not a listed player when the video emerged, whereas other players caught doing drugs have been rubbed out for years.
The greater inconsistency comes when you compare the treatment of athletes to people from other professions. I wonder how many of the financial institutions recently paraded before the Royal Commission have knowingly been home to Bright Young Things who weren’t averse to sneaking into the loos at a swish Martin Place wine bar to celebrate the receipt of another obscene performance bonus? And what about us in the media? Breathtakingly, I’ve seen media people this week who have had drug problems of their own taking part in chin-scratching discussions about the various aspects of the Mumford case.
If Mumford were a banker or a journo none of us would know about his drug problem at all, a drug problem that may well have ended three years ago anyway. All he has done is something that is stupid, but stupidly normal when measured against the conduct of the broader community. He should be allowed to play. Everyone should lay off the bloke. He doesn’t deserve an endless metaphysical hangover for what might have been one regrettably stupid night.