PETER’S MAGICAL SAFETY BANDANA

I don’t know anything about rugby union, except that it was always fun watching Jonah Lomu smash into frightened Englishmen. Nevertheless, I may have come up with a tactic that could revolutionise the game.

Wear this and you’ll always be completely protected

I don’t know anything about rugby union, except that it was always fun watching Jonah Lomu smash into frightened Englishmen. Nevertheless, I may have come up with a tactic that could revolutionise the game.

Imagine if, instead of getting beaten up every time you got the ball, there was some verbal means of incapacitating opponents even before they were within tackling range.

Imagine if mere words had the power to make men fall to the ground, twisting in agony.

Never saw the bloke play, but it’s entirely possible former Wallaby Peter FitzSimons pioneered this exact strategy. The Fairfax newspaper columnist and author of Father’s Day books seemingly written during red lights on the way home certainly has the armoury.

Consider this cringe-inducing play-stopper from an ABC Q & A broadcast in 2010. But please brace yourselves. Not even the great Lomu himself could absorb this level of punishment:

“With my son, not long ago, I was playing chess and I was white and he was black and I was winning and he started crying. And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because this reminds me of what happened to the Aboriginal people’.”

What — they lost chess games? And here was me thinking our indigenous fellow Australians were more of a backgammon crowd. Anyway, FitzSimons subsequently shifted his virtue signalling to the specific issue of Adam Goodes, the great Aboriginal ex-Sydney Swans player whose final seasons frequently saw him booed by AFL crowds.

Sometimes it went beyond booing, as FitzSimons noted in 2013 following a match at the MCG. “Adam Goodes heard someone in the crowd calling him an ‘ape’, and turned to see it was a 13-year-old girl,” he wrote.

“What to do? Just cop it sweet? Ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen? Or actually take a stand — this far and no further? Of course, we all know what happened. Goodes made a stand. As the cameras rolled — in a scene we will see for years to come — he called security and the girl was ejected.”

Well, Goodes for him. He got a little girl chucked out of a footy ground. FitzSimons continued: “Let the word go forth from this place and this time, that we don’t do that in Australia any more. And if you do, you will be called to account.”

Called to account, you say? Let’s remember that. Let’s remember those exact words.

In 2014 FitzSimons wrote about another match-day insult directed at Goodes, and applauded the Essendon football club for withdrawing the membership of a man who’d called the dual Brownlow medallist “Magilla Gorilla”. In the same piece, Peter FitzSimons took broadcaster Alan Jones to task.

“Jones couldn’t possibly think that calling a black man a ‘gorilla’ is not racist, could he? COULD he?” FitzSimons raged. “But no, Jones went on to vociferously defend the 13-year-old Collingwood supporter who last year called Goodes an ‘ape’.”

Considering he writes like one, you’d think FitzSimons would be the one defending a teenage girl. Solidarity with the sisterhood, Peter.

“If calling a black man a ‘gorilla’ and an ‘ape’ is not racial abuse, what the hell does it take?” Australian Republican Movement chairman Fitzsimons continued. “I repeat, Alan, if that is not racism, what DOES it take?”

What DOES it take? Apparently it takes being Peter FitzSimons, who last week called a black man a gorilla — and, despite his earlier declaration, now denies it was in any way racist abuse.

(Continue reading Peter's Magical Safety Bandana.)

UPDATE. Pay this:

Daily Tele's funniest writer Tim Blair destroys Peter Fitz with this piece of gold.. pic.twitter.com/9vhkGuXmIw

— Mr C&D demographic (@MrCsandDs) November 28, 2016