IN REFUSING an interview request from this columnist this week, St Kilda commercial operations manager Anthony Moore wrote in part:
"Matt Schmidt, as GM Communications and Community Relations, is your key contact on all media activities. Matt has a very good team under him and his business unit is a key part of our Commercial Operations team.
"I believe we are now well placed to manage the many media requests we receive each week."
From a football club to a sports reporter: "key contact", "media activities", "business unit", "key part", "well placed to manage"? And all those Self-Important Capital Letters?
I wasn't asking for a business plan or mission statement, I was asking for an interview. Not with a player, coach or committeeman, but with the fitness adviser, the man who oversees the stretches and sit-ups.
Actually, Dave Misson is better than that. His fitness program made Sydney virtually indestructible in the celebrated seasons of 2005 and 2006.
Since seemingly all that has stood between the Saints and the premiership these past five years has been their infamous failure to keep their best team on the ground, Misson's recruitment shapes as the coup of the new season. Coincidentally or otherwise, tonight they play in the pre-season grand final.
It makes Misson topical. In the way of football clubs, that makes him automatically off-limits. It's a big week for the club, said the GM Communications and Community Relations. He's over-exposed. Someone else? Or another time?
But it is not THAT big a week: the coach already has said that pursuit of victory tonight is subordinate to planning for round one. Imagine the cone of silence that will descend when the Saints get to a REALLY big match, i.e., one they want to win.
Football clubs have become so secretive, suspicious and precious as to make Stalin's Russia look like Glastonbury.
Once, the secretary handled media, then a lone media officer. Now all clubs have media departments, sorry, Communications and Community Relations Units.
This growth is proportionate to the growth in media, but the growth in guardedness and paranoia is not. Too typically, the media department is a counter-media department. Moreover, there appears to be nearly as many people — including journalists — working in anti-media as media now.
Further, these anti-media departments mostly fall under the auspices of marketing departments. This puts media relations into a murky area; it implies clubs are no longer interested in communicating with their supporters, but selling to them: guernseys and stubby-holders in merchandising, spin and lines in media.
Media departments are chary of media requests, but devoted to "media opportunities", flooding the inboxes of football reporters with details of them day after day.
These are banal occasions at which a designated player or coach speaks at a designated place for a designated time, and don't forget the sponsor's backdrop. It is not about media relations, but media control.
And woe betide media subversives who do not comply.
An Age reporter who asked Hawthorn for an interview with Lance Franklin in the off-season was refused, with the usual apologia and the usual rider about the possibility of "something down the track". Usually, it's a train.
When The Age's man asked about other senior players, he was asked in turn by communications manager Clinton Bown what angle he intended to take, what questions he would ask and when the stories would run.
A little more paperwork, and it would have counted as a Freedom Of Information request. The perversity is that clubs invest heavily in "media training" for their players, then do not trust them to get their lines right all by themselves.
It is paternalism gone mad.
Another Age reporter asked to interview Stuart Dew, and was offered instead Stephen Gilham.
Pursuing his initial request, The Age man asked why Dew was unavailable and was told that the club was taking a low-profile line with him. At that very minute, Dew was on a stage, speaking freely to supporters at a family day.
For the record, yes, The Age man intended to ask Dew about his fat legs. He was pretty certain that after a decade as an AFL footballer, Dew would have the wit and wherewithal to deal with it. Hawthorn was not.
St Kilda and Hawthorn are not the only offenders, or even necessarily the worst. They are simply examples at hand. Nor is the control freak mentality limited to lesser lights. How much have you heard of Terry Wallace this off-season? Rodney Eade?
Does this state of suppression matter? It matters only as far as football matters. It is not as if there is no football out there to read, watch or listen to.
On the contrary, there is more than ever as outlets proliferate — press, television, radio, internet.
All carry something about football, and in the modern environment, something — anything — will do. It is called content.
But if the football dialogue is to be constantly enriched, it needs more than content. We do not accept rations of time and pasteurised and homogenised information from our politicians, although they also have thrown up layers of media protection around themselves, and we need not accept it from our football clubs. Some understand this.
The contrast between briefs a week apart could not have been more stark. Last week, I asked to speak to the chief executives of the AFL, NRL, ARU and FFA, and all readily made themselves available.
This week, I asked for an audience with St Kilda's conditioning coach, and was refused. The new season is about to begin, and the gulag is on the ball.
