Sport in its purest form is a wonderful thing. Around Australia, around the world, sports clubs provide young girls and boys with opportunities to learn about not just their game but life as well, guided by hard-working volunteers. Many of those young girls and boys go on to be volunteers, bringing up new generations in this positive environment.
Sport in its purest form allows people to test themselves, to overcome challenges and to share in triumphs and handle disappointments. That can be done at every level, in the seventh-grade Australian football team or in elite competitions such as the AFL, the NRL, and of course, at the international level.
We revel in stories of men and women who overcome setbacks, whether of a personal nature, or perhaps a severe injury, to win a gold medal or a World Cup or the Norm Smith Medal. These stories become the inspiration for our own lives, reinforcing the notions of never giving up, getting up when you can’t – a whole set of values that can be applied to everyday life as well as to sport.
In many ways, the AFL has sought to use the tradition of sport as an exemplar to benefit the Australian community. It has led the way on embracing Aboriginal people, on making the game more accessible to women, on welcoming refugees, on eradicating senseless violence. It has taken to a moral high ground with a relish that has set the standards for other sports in this country. Yet, you only have to scratch the surface, as the Essendon Saga did, to discover that many of these apparent virtues are nothing more than condiments to hide a darker truth.
The AFL is primarily about the money and holding on to supreme power. Anything, any person, can and will be sacrificed to protect its power, image and the bottom line. So, instead of behaving with the greatest of purity when the Essendon Saga erupted in February 2013, the AFL delved deep into its bag of dirty tricks – character assassinations, fabrications, abuse of process, bullying, leaking.
Footy hadn’t changed much at all, it was still a boys’ club, the plaything of a few blokes whose own manhood was to be judged by how people cowed before them and just how big their bottom line was. There was nothing that wasn’t to be done if it might mean stopping a hit to the bottom line and someone standing up to them and exposing its failures.
If that meant trashing a legend, then so be it.
If that meant belittling James Hird’s wife, Tania, then so be it.
If that meant destroying the reputation of a club doctor who was a paragon for sports doctors around the country, then so be it.
If that meant concocting evidence, then get concocting.
If that meant defrauding Essendon of $2 million to prove its toughness, so be it.
If that meant breaching the provisions of Commonwealth and State and Territory laws, then so be it.
If that meant lying, then lie, then deny you lied.
If that meant there was no evidence to convict Hird, just choose the optic solution.
While, in their luxurious ivory tower, the AFL commission believed themselves to be clothed in the finest threads of propriety, the Essendon Saga proved them to be about little more than grasping for naked power. Not to everyone, well not yet.
They have fooled some of the people some of the time. In the case of the media, people such as Caroline Wilson, Tim Lane and their Age colleagues, some of the people all the time.
But even with the AFL’s lavish media unit, their threats, their lies, their various unacceptable activities, they haven’t been able to fool all the people all the time.
And the time when the number of fooled is about to shrink exponentially is now here.
Essendon AFL Drug Saga 