By Mark Butler
This is the second of an occasional series of articles by contributing authors under the general title of FARRAGO*.
MY initiation in 1956 as a seven-year-old into the realities of sporting fervour was terrifying. My father, who was taking my older brother and me on one of his post-desertion, pre-divorce excursions out of Sydney, this time to inspect the Snowy Mountains scheme with a side trip to Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road, had decided we needed to experience an afternoon of the footy at a packed MCG.
I had never seen so many mainly male people in one place, and the noise they generated for the next 90 minutes or so instilled in me a lifelong horror of large crowds. One man in particular I could not take my eyes off: his face cycled through several shades of red, from puce to livid crimson, and the veins in his neck bulged and pulsed as he screamed his approval or disapproval at what he was watching transpire on the field, none of which made any sense to me. I feared his head was about to explode.
The roar of competing supporters may be music to others’ ears but to me, largely because of that experience, it is a deeply disturbing, primal sound. A prelude to a riot. Or a massacre.
Shortly after our return to Sydney, the Melbourne Olympics began, fortuitously coinciding with the arrival of television, and I found myself becoming more and more absorbed by the feats of young fellow Australians with names such as Dawn Fraser, Lorraine Crapp, Jon and Ilsa Konrads, Murray Rose, Betty Cuthbert and Shirley Strickland.
I related to these individual sportspeople as I watched their achievements replayed on TV sets in shop windows, perhaps because there was no crowd noise. Cuthbert, her blonde hair gleaming, her slender frame seeming to cruise effortlessly above the ground, was a special favourite, as was Fraser, whose grit and knockabout demeanour spoke to and of the world I lived in.
The Olympics were the sports gateway drug, and I was hooked, as were millions of my contemporaries. Tennis, rugby league and cricket claimed much of my attention for the next 50 years.
But no longer. I have gone cold turkey and kicked the habit. Because sport is different now, a commodity, content to be auctioned off to megatainment behemoths in pursuit of that holiest of modern grails, eyeballs. In the process those who run sport have discovered that though they may own the broadcast rights, the broadcasters call the shots.
The news that the Saudi Arabian Government’s richly funded ploy to take over world golf has succeeded, thereby handing the sport to a regime whose leader is regarded by many around the world, including me, as a murderer and a despot, was confirmation that this trend is irreversible. As Dylan memorably wrote, “money doesn’t talk, it swears”. Mind you, there is an upside, for as part of the deal that odious thug Greg Norman was shafted.
Then there is the cancer of gambling, which is eating out the soul of professional sports. This takeover by the gambling industry of most of the sports I have loved has sapped all my remaining enthusiasm. Just tuning in to watch feels like an act of bad faith.
That takeover happened without anyone noticing, through incremental relaxations here and there of gambling laws by feckless state governments eager for the painless tax revenue that gambling provides for them. On top of that came online gambling, so that anyone with a mobile phone, anywhere, anytime, can punt on pretty well any sport anywhere in the world, including low-grade games on suburban parks. (This was one of the more startling revelations of the June 12 Four Corners episode – Game, Bet, Match: Gambling with Australian sport – investigating the connections between bookies and sports governing bodies, connections that are numerous, as it turns out.)
The result is that you cannot watch any sport on free-to-air TV without being bombarded with gambling advertising, most egregiously on a public broadcaster, SBS. No thanks.
So what’s the problem? As casinos have proven recently, despite the best-laid regulations gambling is always owned and operated, eventually, by gangsters. And sooner or later, the gangster capture the regulators. It has always been so, yet we seem to have to learn this lesson over and over again.
But what about horse racing? I hear you say. I rest my case. It wouldn’t exist without gambling.
Any time I want to see the power of gambling I can drive along the Golden Highway in the upper Hunter where I live and within 15 minutes be passing the Godolphin stud at Jerrys Plains, which is owned by some lesser Middle Eastern grandee able to lavish millions on his horses and land. Each of the stud’s many evergreen paddocks, watered by the Hunter River, routinely carries upwards of $30m of prime horseflesh in it, including Melbourne Cup winners.
Those thoroughbreds only have value because of gambling; indeed, they owe their existence to it. Their beauty, grace and elegance are bonus extras, but irrelevant. I doubt the sheikh gives a shit about such things.
I fear a similar fate awaits all elite sport, which should be about the joy and wonder of human physical achievement, not about providing an opportunity for someone to make a quick buck. It has been reduced from the Olympics on down to being the equivalent of a gangster’s moll or a casino hostess.
Sure, it still thrives at the grassroots, because there is no profit in that, and it will continue to thrive because of the passion and commitment of thousands of volunteers who love their games and want their children to play them. But elite professional sport is rotten to the core.
Count me out.