OF A recent and much-publicised list of the top-50 all-time VFL/AFL footballers, at least seven of the top 11 have had brushes with the law. This week's headlines told of Brendan Fevola's loss of continence outside a nightclub called the Candy Bar, and of New Idea's paid interview with Wayne Carey, dwelling, among other things, on drugs and domestic violence. Carey, incidentally, was No. 1 on the top-50 list.
What, for instance, was Fevola's teammate and No. 1 draft pick Matthew Kreuzer to make of all this?
Fevola's night, it emerged, had begun at the McLaren-Mercedes Benz launch and proceeded via Heath Scotland's engagement party to a series of nightclubs, finishing around 5am. Not a bad lifestyle, if you can have it. Carey had been paid a king's ransom for his story of woe. Not bad work, if you can get it. Is this Kreuzer's heritage?
Kreuzer and his mates spent some of the week learning how to screw in light bulbs and wash their own clothes. Unarguably, football is better than it was at preparing young men for the journey. Still, their paths are strewn with mixed messages. Even the worthy messages are distorted by fame, wealth and adulation.
Be responsible, sportsfolk are told. Yet, tacitly, clubs, coaches and fans are depending on their recklessness. Roy Masters' book Bad Boys, published last year, explores this dichotomy. In it, rugby league legend Blocker Roach says: "If you want to be good at anything, especially boxing or football or wrestling, you have to have that bit of madness in you." Repeatedly, you will hear it of a sports star: "He's mad." It is a compliment.
Anyone who has played football has listened to a coach's frothy-mouthed address about manliness, pride in the guernsey, love of the club. Related outside the walls of the changeroom, it sounds infantile, absurd. Yet within a team on match day, in the build-up to the faux combat ahead, it works.
Also in Bad Boys, Hawthorn premiership player Ray Wilson remembers the state that coach John Kennedy would work himself into sometimes, especially when playing Melbourne. "In the language of today, you'd say he'd lose it," Wilson said. Kennedy was a legendary coach, teacher, later chairman of the AFL Commission, a sage of the game (and still a friend of Wilson).
Footballers are discouraged from gambling, yet David Parkin, a Kennedy protege and multiple premiership coach, is not surprised that they do because it is their instinct to take risks and because they are told repeatedly by coaches that they must back themselves. Footballers are encouraged in delusions of invincibility, then sometimes torn apart for believing themselves to be invincible. Witness Ben Cousins.
Garry Linnell addresses this in his 2003 book Playing God, a study of the tormented genius, Gary Ablett. "Having turned him into something he never was," writes Linnell, "they (the football industry, media, public) now resented him for failing to live up to the same impossible ideals they themselves could never match."
Footballers live in a half-world. They are told that their time at the top is likely to be fleeting and that they had better prepare themselves for life post-football, yet are paid so lavishly that there is little incentive for them to develop other skills, even though time is now made for it in their schedules. Almost all dreamed only of playing football, so few can be expected to keep a bigger picture in mind.
Without doubt, footballers are dwelled upon, massively, disproportionately. The vogue term for it is role model, though it is used so often and indiscriminately as to have become nearly meaningless. "Football used to be about the working man's sport, rugged and rough," said Richmond president Gary March recently. "Now it's about appearance and, more importantly, being a role model." March was speaking at the unveiling of a hairdresser as a club sponsor; meantime, three Tigers were having their hair coiffed and dyed.
Linnell scorned the role model concept. "Football saved Gary Ablett," he wrote. "Saved him from a life on the fringe and a stretch in prison. It did more than save him. It completely remade him. It transformed him into something he never was, and had never hoped to be."
But footballers are models, and must choose their roles. Ablett's sons are instructive. Gary junior, once almost as reclusive as his father, has chosen to embrace his role, albeit sometimes chafing against the restrictions. He is now a columnist and a television regular, not to mention a superstar. Nathan tried, compared and chose his old life: less watched, vastly less paid, but less judged, too.
Carey and Fevola, Footy Show regulars, took on the role model's life, but seemingly on their own terms. They disappoint because they want to have their cake and eat it, too: the fame, the fortune, the trappings, but with no duty of care to the thousands who look up to them. Still, they are only the tip of the iceberg; beneath, hundreds of footballers live lives no more or less blameless than yours or mine. It is just that this week, the tip was so visible.
The last word belongs to an all-time great, who as far as we know has no convictions, quoted by Masters in Bad Boys thus: "They say, best men are moulded out of faults, and, for the most, become much more the better for being a little bad." It is Shakespeare.
