I feel free! Why I am abandoning footy tipping this year

Footy is back and I’m feeling terrific about it for a simple reason – I have abandoned the office tipping competition.

And I am not the only one. Even footy-addicted 3AW is giving the 2024 office tipping contest the heave. Yes, the radio station’s army of AFL commentators will still broadcast their tips – but the in-house competition back in the office has been dumped.

Though I am now immersed in the AFL capital of the world, many of my key footy moments still remain off the field.Credit: Matt Davidson

I have sprung free of the shackles and I feel a weight has been lifted. Two footy fanatics told me last week they are also giving it a miss, including one who had invited me to Friday lunch but warned he would probably be “fairly glum ... given the woeful effort by the Demons”. Even the fanatics are jumping off the bandwagon.

Right now, during the authoritarian imposition by the AFL of the sinister-sounding round zero, with no matches played in Melbourne, I’m feeling the same contented joy I felt after buying my first Melbourne home and realising there were now a billion variables I no longer needed to think about.

I’m not from these parts and my attempts at social integration via last year’s office comp was a failure. For the first few rounds, I soared like Cazaly, before painfully crashing soon after to 3/9. From there, I struggled to get off the bench, a perpetual coodabeen. I tried to arrest my cellar-dweller status by copying the tips of The Age’s tipster marvel, Peter Ryan. But the success felt hollow and I was a mid-season drop-out.

Almost immediately, I became happier and less angry. Here’s the thing. Last year by Sunday night, I would be filled with rage about teams I ordinarily never cared about – all because they had lost when I had tipped them to win. Being pissed off at the Brisbane Lions and whatever those Adelaide teams are called is simply no way to live.

To be clear: I am not calling for a return of legendary columnist Keith Dunstan’s Anti-Football League. Footy is great. But fellow Melburnians, beware of too much of a good thing. What event do you think was more consequential last week, and what got more media coverage? The Melbourne Declaration by Australia and our South-East Asian neighbours at the ASEAN summit, or the head knock on exciting combo midfielder Jy Simpkin?

Melbourne footy fans are the best in the world. Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

As an interstater, I never watched the game growing up and thus my key impressions were formed as the old VFL marched off the field and into the culture thanks to passionate fans such as playwright David Williamson and dancer Graeme Murphy.

Williamson wrote the brilliant football play (later a film), The Club, about power, tradition, success and loyalty. English teachers at boys’ high schools fell upon it with relief. Students loved it, too, not least because it included the memorable line about the game they could quote in their essay with impunity: “It’s a load of macho competitive bullshit.”

Murphy created an incredible dance work, Beyond Twelve – about a boy whose love of soaring for a mark on the footy field was soon replaced by joys of dance. It was commissioned by The Australian Ballet.

Graham Kennedy and Jack Thompson in the film The Club. Credit: Fairfax Media

Though I am now immersed in the AFL capital of the world, many of my key footy moments still remain off the field, such as the sports editor running down the newsroom late one Saturday last September screaming, “Ron Barassi is dead! Ron Barassi is dead!”

And Brownlow medallist Shane Crawford playing wildly against type by starring as the Pharaoh in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Why on earth? Because footy!

Shane Crawford makes his theatre debut as the Pharaoh in Joseph.Credit: Simon Schluter

Fan enthusiasm is joyous but extreme judgment less so. I will never forget the newsroom during Geelong’s 2022 grand final trouncing of Sydney after 11 barren years. One Geelong superfan, whom it would be unfair of me to name because it would be detailing a private conversation, complained about the scoreline being so lopsided!

“I like it much better when the game is closer,” Sunday Age chief subeditor Judy Evans said.

All of which is a way to say I am happy to enjoy the game on its merits rather than through a warped football-tipping lens where great effort counts for less than whether the result matched my tips.

One of my favourite things to do on a Saturday was venture away from newsroom to the Spencer Outlet Centre atop Southern Cross Station and watch the tide of humanity sweep up the escalators from the V/Line trains for a coffee or a feed before the game started.

There would be families of mum, dad and three kids ready for the match, all dressed head to toe in Western Bulldogs or Bombers colours, bringing Bruce Dawe’s poem, Life Cycle, alive before my very eyes:

When children are born in Victoria
they are wrapped in club-colours, laid in beribboned cots,
having already begun a lifetime’s barracking.

Witnessing moments that show how football is the social glue holding the place together, rather than the false competitiveness of the tipping comp, has motivated me to build relationships with office footy fanatics.

The key is to have a genuine – but brief – conversation and then get the heck out. So here is my tip on how to do it. Approach office superfan armed with one key fact about their weekend game. Repeat said fact. Stand there displaying a slight smile while they talk at you non-stop. When it is time to leave, mention you are a North Melbourne fan (this can be true or not) and they will immediately lose all interest and the conversation will die. You can then walk happily away.

Stephen Brook is a special correspondent for The Age.

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