Essendon drugs saga: renaissance melodrama fouls the air
Seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin described fortune as “that blind madwoman”. She was given to wild, fickle and malevolent ways, playing with the lives of the poor humans who came within her grasp. Poussin was drawing on an ancient Greek tradition that personalised the most powerful supernatural force of all as female: Necessity, aided by her daughters, the three Fates. Necessity was more powerful than the gods.
Poussin was taking up further a distinction common in Renaissance political thinking, led by Niccolo Machiavelli, that politics was governed by the interaction of two forces: virtu and fortuna. Virtu is the character of the leading individuals, their qualities, strengths and virtues. Success in leadership and, in turn, the wellbeing of the state depends on virtue combining with good fortune.
The value of this pair of categories applies more widely than the domain of politics, as Shakespeare later would demonstrate. And today we can still learn from wise precedent. The largest sporting story in Australia in a very long time is a case in point: the Essendon drugs saga. It played out much like a Renaissance melodrama, inflated with bombast, caricature, shock and derision, and outrage and scandal. Actors caught up in the drama might come to curse that blind madwoman.
There are many reasons for this story’s singular prominence in the media and in the attention of the nation. They include soap-opera events, some larger-than-life agents, and an intensity of passion for football in the southern states that bewilders other Australians and overseas visitors. Further, I shall suggest, it provided a vehicle for public reflection on the universal forces that come into play in the dramatic turning-point moments in real life as we experience them. Projected on to a very large screen (front page, day after day; lead story on television news), it provided a spectacular means for reflecting on good and bad behaviour, responsibility, stardom and fall, and ultimately on virtue and fortune.
It is now possible to get a pretty accurate picture of what happened, thanks to the meticulously researched and judiciously argued book The Straight Dope by The Australian’s Chip Le Grand, which won the Walkley Award this year for sports book of the year.
The curtain rises on February 5, 2013. A press conference at AFL House is informed that Essendon is under investigation for using performance-enhancing drugs. Two days later, at another conference, this time called by the Australian government, two ministers launch into highly charged rhetoric that will lead to the defining tag of “the blackest day in Australian sport” — which, as the story unfolds, will seem more and more like farcically inflated hyperbole.
Then justice minister Jason Clare portentously intones that Australian sports fans will be shocked and disgusted by what they are about to hear. Essendon has been linked by the Australian Crime Commission with banned drugs (it will turn out there is no evidence).
Essendon states it has nothing to hide and invites in the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority. Concurrently, it initiates an independent inquiry that turns out to be highly critical of governance at the club, referring damagingly to a “pharmacologically experimental environment” that was not properly controlled.
The experiment involved regular and multiple injections of players in 2012. The program was set up by Dean Robinson, head of the high-performance department, who had appointed Stephen Dank as the club’s “sports scientist”. Dank becomes a law unto himself and leaves few records of which players were injected with what. In September 2012, Robinson is stripped of all responsibilities and Dank is dismissed.
After the blackest day in Australian sport, the AFL decides to take over, and during the next six months will ruthlessly do almost anything it takes to get its way. By June its senior officers have decided that Essendon will not play finals and coach James Hird will have to go — even though there is still no evidence of a crime. In what follows the AFL will evade any court challenge, seemingly out of fear of exposure of its weak case and cavalier behaviour.
Essendon is excluded from the 2013 finals, is forced to pay a $2 million fine, and loses player early draft picks for two seasons. Hird is banned from coaching for 12 months. The following year, ASADA, crawling through the affair at a bureaucratic snail’s pace, decides to prosecute 34 Essendon players for doping. Its case is emphatically rejected by a tribunal in March this year.
As a final twist, the World Anti-Doping Agency has sought a rehearing of the ASADA case, which is yet to occur — presumably with the same failed outcome, as there is no new evidence. The Essendon team finally becomes demoralised during the 2015 season and badly underperforms. Hird resigns as coach in August.
VIRTU
So how did virtu and fortuna play out? First there are the key characters and the way their strengths and weaknesses influenced what happened. The leading players in the Essendon Football Club were the high-performance duo. Robinson, nicknamed The Weapon, was a big, burly, barrel-chested fitness expert with a licence to make the players bigger and stronger. Although management proved not to be his strong suit, he had been put in charge of all fitness, sports science and medical staff. Dank’s speciality was helping players recuperate after matches; he was known to use exotic substances.
It now appears he was an insubordinate snake-oil merchant, part con man, judged by the tribunal during the ASADA case as more incompetent than malevolent. The players came to regard him as mad. He had administered banned drugs to support staff and perhaps in his various businesses outside football — but probably not to the 34 Essendon players. For this, he has attracted a life ban from sport. The problem in 2012 was compounded by the fact Robinson’s direct boss, football manager Paul Hamilton, failed to exercise sufficient control over him.
Chaotic club management involved the combination of a weak football manager, a chief executive who focused on the commercial side of club administration, and a board that seems to have been in the dark about the drugs program. Club doctor Bruce Reid, who was opposed to the injections throughout, was sidestepped and disobeyed. The high-performance department operated as a law unto itself. Hird, the novice coach, assumed his orders about using only WADA-approved substances were followed, and focused on the players.
The second main character in this drama was the AFL, and in particular its senior management. This widely admired and brilliantly successful corporate giant, the biggest in Australian sport, degenerates through this affair into an erratic, bungling bully, breaking promises, breaching confidentiality, often making misleading if not false public statements, leaking to the media, and all the while charging blindly towards predetermined outcomes. Its chief executive, Andrew Demetriou, insults Reid on radio and mocks Le Grand; his deputy, Gillon McLachlan, who will succeed him as chief executive, is adamant in February 2013 that banned drugs were taken at Essendon.
Hird eventually describes his agreement as one reached extremely reluctantly, under “great duress, threats, and inducement”. His lawyer, Julian Burnside QC, refers to the AFL process as shambolic and unjust. Hird’s solicitor afterwards angrily reflects on the AFL: “Its default position, quickly reached, is to bully and threaten and, when challenged, to ignore you until you are overwhelmed or capitulate. It is constantly horsetrading and constantly changing its position, a form of deliberate chaos to try and wear you down.”
A senior female official at ASADA explodes that seven-year-old girls are more reliable negotiating parties than the AFL.
The AFL even succeeded in strong-arming Essendon president Paul Little to bow to its will, even though he had fumed about losing confidence in the league.
This was no mean feat and indicative of the AFL’s near-despotic power, for Little was famous as a tough negotiator and for winning. As chief executive of Toll Holdings, he had transformed a modest-sized company into the biggest transport conglomerate in Australia.
The AFL wielded a big stick in having the power to cripple Essendon for years if it so chose by turning it into a pariah — giving it an unfavourable match draw, including little free-to-air TV, thus damaging its attraction to sponsors, taking away its blockbuster Anzac Day match, and so on. Also, refusing to settle would likely have led to protracted legal battles, with no resolution, and no clean air for the club and its players.
The third main character was ASADA, called into a case in which it was profoundly out of its depth. It was understaffed and underskilled. A senior Victorian police officer who became involved commented: “God preserve us from enthusiastic amateurs.” In the end, ASADA decided to prosecute an unwinnable case with no hard evidence. Its incompetence stretched the process out to two years, subjecting the quite innocent players to protracted — and potentially career-ruining — stress.
Fourth, in terms of virtu, there was the media, which for the most part went into a sensationalising frenzy, whipping up lynch-mob hysteria with the atmospherics of a medieval witch-hunt. It was led by the Queen of Hearts, Caroline Wilson at The Age, who screamed in column after column: Off with their heads. In particular, the head she really wanted was that of Hird, who she said had been “derelict in his duty” and “incompetent and naive to the point of delusional”. Eventually she got her way.
FORTUNA
Those most conscious that they were mere playthings in the hands of something like the blind madwoman were the Essendon players, most of the coaching and support staff at the club, and the fans (of which I am one) — innocent victims of this pressure-cooker drama. To them, it seemed as if something out of classic Greek tragedy had descended on the club — a miasma, a kind of vast and pestilential vapour that settled over events in bad times, a supernatural malignity that blanketed out the light and choked the breath of the unfortunate actors who happened to be caught up in it. We can now, with the knowledge and wisdom of hindsight, piece together the chemical components of this stupefying fog.
The first fateful and completely unwitting move was made by former Essendon captain Mark “Bomber” Thompson, who, after a long and distinguished coaching career at Geelong, which included winning two premierships, had been brought in to mentor Hird.
Thompson was, in effect, responsible for the appointment of Robinson — they had worked together at Geelong. Robinson hadn’t even been on the shortlist for the position of high-performance manager until Thompson recommended him as the perfect person for the job. Without Thompson there would have been no Robinson; without Robinson, no Dank; and without Dank, no scandal.
Then there was federal minister Kate Lundy, who wanted to assert herself in her new sports portfolio. Her zeal conjoined with an ACC understandably worried about the infiltration of organised crime into the distribution of illicit drugs in sport, and itself keen on a high-profile case to facilitate its cause.
They not only put the investigation in the hands of the inexperienced ASADA but, by rushing in where prudence would have advised caution, they fed the scandal-hungry media with the inflammatory language summed up as the blackest day in Australian sport.
This, in turn, prompted the arrogant, power-intoxicated AFL, used to getting its way, to take over and sort the thing out quickly, before too much damage was done to the reputation of its code.
To be fair, Demetriou had been increasingly concerned about the infiltration of illicit drugs into the game, so the timing was unfortunate for Essendon, which fell into the role of scapegoat. Rumours have abounded about other clubs having similar injection regimes.
The politics of Australian football pits a very powerful king at the centre, the AFL, in a struggle with the club presidents, who are cast in the role of feudal lords. The wellbeing and prosperity of the sport does depend on a strong centre. But that is no excuse for the intensity and ruthlessness of intimidation deployed in this case.
The miasmic fog of misfortune was spread by crusading journalists, acting like a chorus in Greek tragedy, giving out an increasingly high-pitched chant and determining the terms of the story, irrespective of the moves made by the various actors on the stage.
Interest in facts was often incidental; journalistic integrity was treated as a laughable anachronism. For the first six months, moralistic fury centred on anti-obesity drug AOD 9604 — even though the ACC had made it clear from the beginning of the case that it was not on the banned list.
As a consequence, Essendon captain and best-and-fairest medal winner Jobe Watson, who had admitted to having been injected with AOD 9604, found himself booed at matches by opposition fans.
The righteous indignation pouring out of the press against Hird included no mention of the fact he was not Dank’s boss. Indeed, he had no authority over the high-performance department, which was at the same level in the larger football department as his own domain, coaching. The age of the coach as grandmaster is long gone.
So far I have considered only the bit players. The orchestration of character and the blind madwoman, in this story, is projected on to a floodlit stage with monolithic shadows moving across it, a stage occupied by one actor. Hird is Hamlet, brooding centrestage throughout. A pack of journalists stalks him for months, marauding him at the front door of his home in Toorak every morning, with microphones jammed into his face as he tries to get into his car. The affair was mainly about him.
Hird was charismatic, good looking, brilliant and courageous as a player. Many considered him the best player of his generation, his play characterised by a seemingly effortless poise and nonchalance, commanding timing and vision. He was tertiary-educated, highly intelligent, well-spoken, modest and genuine, and a devoted family man. He was not out of the usual mould of extravagantly paid, idolised and spoiled young men given to nightclubs, drugs and womanising.
Hird made an obvious target for envy. As a player, he occasionally attracted the epithet “St James”. He was deeply and warmly admired by most Essendon fans. Some media behaviour during the drugs saga bore the acrid whiff of rancour.
In terms of virtu, the negative case against Hird has some weight. He was naive about drugs, desperate to gain a slight edge over other teams. His most foolish error of judgment was to discount misgivings about the supplements program expressed by the trusted and highly experienced club doctor.
In mitigation, injections were familiar to Hird, for he had needed them regularly to numb the neuralgic pain caused by a major operation after a football accident in 2002 that had fractured his face in seven places and required the insertion of titanium plates.
Further on the negative, he proved a poor judge of character in the cases of Robinson and Dank.
The drugs saga did bring the game into disrepute (the AFL’s main charge). Mind, the disrepute was less because of what actually happened at Essendon than a consequence of the phenomenal and tempestuous media attention and exaggeration, much of it generated by the fact of Hird’s involvement. And the AFL’s bullish tactics boosted the temperature. Here was another unfortunate confluence of forces.
Overall, Hird’s sins were minor while the punishment, both direct and indirect, was severe. He was more sinned against than sinning in this affair. The finale was tragic for him. His coaching dream was over, probably forever. During his 12-month forced exile in 2013, his main thought, apart from constant regret at having settled with the AFL, was getting back to his love: coaching.
It almost certainly would have been better for him to have not capitulated in August 2013, and to have forced the AFL into court. Reid did this, and won. Hird was often accused of selfishness; but in this, the key decision, he sacrificed himself for what he thought was the good of the club.
His wife and his lawyers were urging him not to settle. On the other side, Little was threatening him with being cut off by the club if he didn’t settle, with no contract extension; insisting he stand down as coach — with the implication he would never coach again; and suggesting he would be hunted by the AFL, which, besides, would wreak diabolical revenge on the club.
But given what came to pass, one wonders: the reality was that the team would be overshadowed, and damaged for another two years by ASADA and WADA. The club might have been better served by a war in the Supreme Court, led by Hird — forcing the AFL into a humiliating retreat, including some senior resignations.
Without doubt, the bitter sense of injustice gnawing away at a man who had always acted unflinchingly according to his own standards and principles might have found some salve.
The second major cost to Hird was damage to his reputation. Time will pass, of course, and the greatness of his playing career will rise again in the public mind. But, however forgiving Australians are, the stain will never be completely gone. Nor will the sense of tragic interruption to a coaching career that had a good chance of being outstanding, and with prospects of continuing for another two decades. Now, at 42, Hird has been cast adrift in the churning wake of a career brutally terminated
Hird shared with Tiger Woods a reputation for integrity and honesty, with a kind of Sir Galahad aura. But he was quite different from the star golfer in that there was no Mr Hyde alter ego hiding in the shadows.
In Woods’s case, spotless virtu was exposed as a sordid, hypocritical sham. In one so self-consciously straight as Hird, the damage may be timelessly galling.
What of the blind madwoman in this affair? Fortune had favoured Hird’s playing career — in joint action with virtu. In his second season, 1993, aged 20, he was part of the “baby Bombers” premiership team; in 1996, he won the Brownlow Medal for the game’s best and fairest player; he won the Anzac Day Medal three times; in 2000, he was captain of another premiership team, on this occasion winning the Norm Smith Medal for the grand final’s best player.
His career spanned 16 seasons and included 253 games. He was inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame, having achieved everything possible as a player.
His 40th birthday marked the inauguration of the scandal in February 2013 — 40, the age of punishment (40 lashes; 40 years in the wilderness), and how in his case!
From this day on, he is the brooding Danish prince cast unwillingly centrestage, surrounded by hostile powers, bathed in blinding spotlights by the agents of screaming interrogatory public opinion, witheringly alone (with his wife) as he is swept along by events over which he has no control.
So he struggles valiantly to fight malevolent fortune that is dumping this black morass — this miasma — on his life; striving to protect himself and his bewildered and anxious players, whom he manages to coach for half a season of success.
Miraculously, they win their first six games in 2013. But there is no diverting the blind madwoman. She is grim, pitiless, and inexorable. By the end, all is failure, ruins, and despair.
The aftertaste left by this affair, once the curtain has come down, is foul. Many of the actors have been tainted and diminished. Innocence has been abused. There is no classical resolution, no edifying moral and no redemptive climax.
For one, the narrative arc is at odds with how we humans want to be able to interpret events. When things go wrong, we like having someone to blame — so we can project a moral, reinforcing our own beliefs and prejudices, and thereby making sense of the potentially senseless.
We are desperate to find a meaning. The finding of culpability means there is objective judgment, and the possibility of punishment and reparation, leading to completion.
In this saga, there are a number of actors with minor cases of blame to answer for, but cumulatively their actions don’t amount to much in terms of flawed virtu. Even Dank is more pitiful than transgressive, more bumbling fool than satanic Frankenstein. The human players are puny and inconsequential, even in the aggregate, when set alongside the magisterial presence of the blind madwoman. It is her narrative arc that rules the show.
Poussin’s own bitter, exasperated, and resigned evocation of fortune in 1648 seems to have reflected a similar experience of there being times when things are out of joint, and comprehensively and unrelievedly so, as they have been for Essendon since 2012, with the outcomes all bad. And we cannot escape the fact, despite our best attempts at clear-eyed sceptical realism, there is a moral.
For individuals, however much character, virtue and confidence they manage to impose on their lives, with however much grit and command, it all counts for little, no more than froth, when blasted by hostile fortuna.
John Carroll is professor emeritus of sociology at La Trobe University.
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