Another footy season is well underway and as is the norm, stories about footballers behaving badly are legion. Generously sprinkled throughout the sports pages of the national dailies are reports of Ben Cousins flipping the bird live on Channel 10, Tim Cahill being booted out of a Sydney nightclub or in the NRL, another debacle occurring at the hapless Cronulla Sharks. As a cricketer, Andrew Symonds had to muck up pretty spectacularly in England in order to get his fair share of column space in amongst all the misbehaving footy players.
When you consider some of the truly newsworthy things going on in the world, the fact that some of these things make the paper is an indictment on both sports journalism as a profession and all of us as readers. Most of the things that sportsmen get up to either on or off the field, for example, losing your temper, drinking to excess and chasing tail are things that all of us are guilty of from time to time. Very few people care when Joe Public engages in this sort of behaviour, however slap a Waratahs or Collingwood guernsey on the offender and suddenly it is front page copy.
The media when confronted with the latest scandal are quick to get on their high horse about footballers being "public figures" and "role models" and needing to set an example for their young fans. Well, bollocks to that. Since when did being a sublimely talented athlete oblige someone to stay at home, read the bible and cook a roast for their grandmother every Sunday when most of their mates are out doing what young people like to do? Ask any high-profile sportsman and you would find that pretty much all of them either intensely resent the media attention paid to their every move, or at best accept it with a weary exasperation. In truth, apart from needing to be more self-aware than the rest of us due to their public profile, the only real behavioural obligations that footballers should have is to ensure that their conduct does not breach their contract of employment with their club nor transgress the other standards expected of the rest of civilised society.
The second point is highly relevant when you consider the recent expose concerning Matthew Johns in New Zealand in 2002. In this case, the behaviour exhibited by Johns and his teammates as represented on the 4 Corners report was so repellent and bizarre that it would be newsworthy in its own right even if the participants weren't members of an NRL team. It would certainly have featured prominently in the Adelaide Advertiser where serial killings, indecent exposures and perverse sexual acts are the order of the day. Yet strangely given a media which usually dines out on stories of this nature, this particular scandal took 7 years to come to light, and was uncovered by the ABC, of all organisations. Yes, the boring fuddy-duddy, pinko-lefto ABC, who couldn't normally distinguish a crossbar from a point post, somehow managed to scoop the sporting scandal of the year.
How did this happen, or not happen, as the case may be? It's hard to believe that Johns' employer Channel 9 and the press in general weren't aware of what happened that fateful night in Auckland. In fact, Channel 9 journalist Danny Weidler has admitted that had known about what happened for years but "didn't consider reporting it". One can only speculate why he chose not to do so. Based on the media storm over the past few weeks, it can't have been because the story wasn't newsworthy. The cynical but most logical solution is that Channel 9 deliberately hushed the incident up.
If there has indeed been media a cover up, then it doesn't take much of an imagination to work out why. The simple fact is that despite their recent retirements and various misdeanours during and after their careers, Johns and his brother Andrew are Rugby League royalty. Andrew is regularly bracketed with Wally Lewis as the greatest player to have played the game in the last 30 years, while Matthew was a more than serviceable 5/8 for Newcastle and until his fracas came to light, a rising media star on the Sydney Footy Show. Given the clearly explosive nature of the story, Channel 9 would have been hoping like anything that the woman involved kept her mouth shut and that the whole thing got quietly put in the "what goes on on tour, stays on tour" category. Unfortunately for both Johns and Channel 9, this ultimately didn't happen. And as is usually the case when this sort of transgression came to light, the consequences for Johns, his family, the NRL and the media have been quite severe.
But then, so the conseqences ought to be. Given the circumstances, the argument about whether high profile sportpeople should be subjected to more scrutiny than the rest of us is irrelevant. So too is any hand wringing about the effect this is having on Matthew Johns's family and the fact that the sport of Rugby League has been brought into disrepute. What is most important, and what has been lost in all the column space written on the subject, is the effect Johns' and his teammates actions had on the victim.
Picture this. You are a young girl, 19 years old, newly sexually aware and heading off to footy match. You wangle your way into the players' inner sanctum after the game for a few drinks, one thing leads to another and then suddenly you are back at the away team's hotel for the after party and more than likely, a bit of a one-on-one tumble with one of the players. However, the atmosphere very quickly turns ugly and all of a sudden it's not one but several players taking turns on you while a number of their teammates stand round laughing and joking and calling you every derogatory name under the sun.
The position of a woman in this type of situation is very awkward. Apart from the immediate issue of the physical and sexual abuse she is being subjected to, there are more consequences if she complains. Because she willingly went back to the hotel with probable intent to have sex, she runs the risk of being dismissed as a slut and having the blame for what happened shunted back on her, even though no woman in their right mind would have gone back to the team hotel knowing what was in store for her. The law in this area is quite tricky too. Rape is a very difficult charge to make stick, one of the reasons being that the question of consent is quite a blurry one. In this situation, an accused can quite easily argue the point that if the victim didn't consent to have sex, then what was she doing back at the team hotel? Further, the only witnesses in this case would be Johns' co-accused, who would hardly support her version of events.
According to reports, there was nonetheless a complaint made shortly after the incident and a police investigation which failed to result in any charges being laid. Johns and his Cronulla teammates doubtless heaved a huge collective sigh of relief, dismissed the whole thing as just another day in the life of an NRL footy player and went back to sticking their fat heads in scrums. However, clearly that was not the end of the matter as far as the victim was concerned. She has carried the incident round with her for 7 years and has only now found out the courage to speak out and tell her story. Despite some ignoramuses claiming she was only doing this to big note herself and get her 15 minutes of fame, this can't have been an easy decision for her to make. In telling her story, she would have to revisit afresh the mental anguish of reliving the incident and risked being judged in the court of public opinion, not knowing which way it would fall. Would she be seen as a naive but nonetheless innocent young girl who was taken advantage of by a bunch of boorish louts, or would she be seen as a filthy tart who asked for everything she got?
As it turns out, though, her role in the whole media story has been very secondary, with everyone instead focussing on the effect on Matthew Johns and his family and the damage the incident has done to the NRL. Surprisingly, the one notable exception to this came on "A Current Affair" when Tracy Grimshaw interviewed Johns and his wife shortly after the story broke. I didn't see the interview but it was widely reported the next day how Grimshaw had repeatedly tried to get the Johns' to stop focussing on how this had affected them and instead to see the incident through the eyes of the true victim of the piece. Needless to say, neither Johns nor his wife Trish got the point, with Trish saying the greatest crime committed was infidelity to her - the clear implication being that the trauma to the victim was secondary to the trauma suffered to their marriage.
Similarly, the NRL has come out and made its usual banal statements about these sorts of incidents needing to be stamped out as they bring the game into disrepute. What they completely fail to see is that these sorts of incidents will NEVER be stamped out until footballers stop behaving like oversexed gorillas, start exercising a modicum of self-control and understanding the pain and hurt that their actions are likely to cause the victim. One simple question they should ask themselves when confronted with this sort of situation is : "Would I be pleased if this was happening to my girlfriend or my sister?", or even "Would I like to read about this in the paper tomorrow?" . The answer to both questions would of course be an unequivocal "no".
Because these things keep happening, the NRL should take the initiative and start educating its players better in this area. While elite sportmen live in a heady and sometimes surreal world, and while they should not have their every move scrutinised, they do need to have regard to the moral and social codes that the rest of us in society live by. Whatever the NRL are currently doing in this area to educate the players is clearly not getting through the large layers of meat around their brains.
A good way for the NRL to start would be to publicly name the rest of the anonymous and gutless Cronulla players who were involved in the incident and have them publicly apologise to the victim. I don't, however, think that will happen. Apologising might be the noble thing to do, but it would probably adversely affect the players' marriages, not to mention bring the game into disrepute. And we all know those considerations are far more important than what has happened to the victim.
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