Night Games

by Anna Krien

  But one scene, in particular, raised the ire of onlookers. It showed the frozen chicken carcass being hurled into a wall and run over by a van before the rubber chicken returned to penetrate it. Boris just didn’t know when to stop.

  *

  Brent Crosswell once wrote a reminiscence of Vinny Catoggio, a player with a ‘gentleness and pureness of heart,’ a ‘rather odd figure to find in football.’ The young player was loved and celebrated by teammates, club officials and the media – at least he was until he put in a dismal grand final performance in 1973. ‘He was a delightful player to watch, and he loved playing football,’ wrote Crosswell, ‘but after 1973 he was always struggling for a game.’

  ‘It was the worst moment of my life,’ Vinny told Crosswell. ‘I was so upset and ashamed that I didn’t want to look up. In fact I remember a committeeman coming along the lockers patting blokes on their heads. “Well done … Hard luck,” he was saying, but when he got to me he stopped, hesitated, and then moved on and patted the next bloke … that really hurt me so much.’

  On the day, Crosswell tried to console Catoggio in the locker room, saying it was ‘just a bloody game’ and recounting his own run-in with the fickleness of love lost after his own poor perform-ance in a grand final. ‘When I came into the rooms at half-time,’ said Crosswell, ‘Serge Silvagni, a player I admired, yelled, “You weak bastard,” and threw an orange that splattered down the side of my face.’

  As Crosswell pointed out, every footballer is only as good as his last game, and that insecurity can inform how they treat one another.

  Because of the pervasiveness of the sporting ethic that winning is everything and losing is nothing, in fact worse than nothing, immoral, Vinny and all those players who fail are made to feel unworthy, are ‘shamed’ … Winning has become simply not losing but ‘failing.’ It seems an indictment of professional sport when the philosophy of winning is incompatible with the character of the Vinnys of this world.

  And in this world of football, where winning and failing are the only two outcomes, it’s not hard to see where Schadenfreude comes in. Winning not only requires a loser, but it can become tied up in the desire to see someone lose. They go down, you rise up.

  Off-field, this Schadenfreude can become perverse. In a study of social and sexual relations between young men, the sociologist Michael Flood spoke to students at a military academy about their tight-knit male-only groups. He learned that a man who passes up on an outing with his mates to be with his girlfriend is called a ‘WOM,’ or ‘Woman Over Mates’ – in other words, pussy-whipped.

  But the reverse term is perhaps more precise. Boys and men are being ‘dick-whipped’ by each other. Describing a culture of ‘mateship built on sexism and homophobia, competitive banter, and an emphasis on stereotypically masculine exploits,’ Flood pointed to a similar self-policing of such attitudes among male athletes and, in the United States, in college fraternities, where superiority is constantly reinforced and tested through sex, pranks, initiations and physical feats. Any threats, such as females, are fended off, while humiliating new members can bolster one’s own ranking in a group.

  But of course, this is just the top and bottom of the great macho ‘stacks-on.’ In the middle, somewhere in between the ringleaders and the unfortunate lambs, are the onlookers and spectators, neither winners nor losers, but the dick-whipped – the people who make this performance possible.

  ‘When I told Vinny … that football is “just a bloody game,”’ Crosswell concluded, ‘I wasn’t telling him the truth.’

  No, football isn’t just a game. And some jokes just aren’t funny.

  CHAPTER 6

  In 2004, in the incident that prompted the AFL to consider the game’s relations with women, the police questioned St Kilda’s Stephen Milne over the alleged rape of a nineteen-year-old girl. She claimed that Milne and his teammate Leigh Montagna, whom she had known for a couple weeks and consented to having sex with, swapped rooms after ducking out for a glass of water or a piss. According to her, it was only when the bedroom door clicked open, the light revealing Milne in bed with her, that she realised she had been duped. She grabbed her clothes and left the house.

  Scott Gladman, the detective who worked on the case, told Nine News that Montagna had sent the girl a text message the next day saying, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘We thought you knew.’ But what would be the point of the prank if she knew? He also alleged that Milne sent a text to the girl’s friend apologising for the ‘mix-up.’

  Footballers love pranks. In fact, many of us do. Walking down a suburban street recently, I stopped mid-step as a dead rat tied to a piece of string dropped down from a tree in front of me. Looking up, I saw two boys hugging the tree branches and wobbling with suppressed laughter. The piece of string dangling from one of their hands was jiggling so hard that the rat looked like it was coming back to life. Not wanting to ruin the joke for them, I hid my smile and gave the rat a wide berth. A few metres away I turned and listened as the boys let out their gasps of laughter and the rat slowly jiggled its way back into the canopy.

  I also remember watching footage of an AFL teammate hide under the bleachers after a training session and jump out, yelling ‘Boo!’ as Brendan Fevola walked past. The beautiful stupidity of it, the stunned look on Fevola’s face and joy on his teammate’s face as he pulled it off – I loved the boyish silliness of it.

  A woman I interviewed told me about an AFL footballer who lived on her street and how one morning all the neighbours woke to find their wheelie bins had been arranged into a pyramid at the end of his driveway.

  Some neighbours were grumpy – you know how precious people are about their bins – but I thought it was hilarious. His teammates had blocked his car in the drive and the poor guy was scratching his head how to dismantle the pyramid without them all toppling down.

  There can be an adorable childishness to pranks, a simplicity and an admirable ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this’ intense commitment. When I was young, I used to roam the streets with a gang of siblings and neighbours, making smoke bombs out of ping-pong balls, collecting dried dog poo and putting it in mixed lolly bags to give to unassuming kids, and, of course, knick-knocking. It was physical comedy, nothing cerebral about it, and it had an inexhaustible hilarity. But how do such silly, somewhat loveable pranks turn into spiking a drink with Rohypnol or bringing a girl back to a hotel room with five mates hiding in the bathroom?

  *

  ‘We used to have the Downlows,’ recalled Craig Dermody, who played ‘amateurs’ in Gepps Cross, a rough part of Adelaide. The Downlows was Gepps Cross’s equivalent of the AFL’s Best & Fairest Brownlow Medal and it went to the local club member who did the most debauched thing on the end-of-season trip. The first Downlow that the then sixteen-year-old witnessed was at a seafood restaurant with the team and coach. ‘The owner was getting drunk with us and our coach took the owner’s tobacco pouch out of his front shirt pocket, pissed in it and put it back in the man’s pocket.’ Everything that could be drunk in the restaurant that night was drunk, said Dermody. The waitress – the owner’s daughter – was screwed in the corridor. When I asked if they at least paid the bill, Dermody shook his head. ‘Nah, the owner loved us. He wanted to be one of us.’ For his ‘pissing in the tobacco pouch’ gag, the coach got the Downlow that year.

  Another gag the Gepps Cross Rams liked was taking a piss while standing at the bar as the next round of pints was tallied up. When the St Kilda player Fraser Gehrig did the same thing in 2004 and pissed on the woman standing beside him, the media had a field day. Gehrig later claimed it was ‘splashback’ that had got her.

  *

  ‘You’re not getting it, Anna,’ said the former player Tony Wilson kindly, when I asked why pissing on a woman’s leg at a bar was funny. ‘It’s comedy – this is their comedy. It is stunt-based, it’s “Fuck, did you just see what so-and-so did?”�
��

  When I asked Wilson about some of the antics he and his teammates got up to off the field, he rubbed his face as if still trying to gauge what expression he ought to have when talking about his playing days, a time in his life he loved, despite knowing, even then, that something was amiss.

  ‘The vast majority of good times were non-sexual and non-nude. The most common prank was someone doing something to another’s player’s car, like filling it up with sawdust or hiding someone’s bike.’ Wilson paused. ‘But in hindsight, I’d also argue that football is an abnormal society, and the off-field strangeness is very strange.

  ‘In one team, in a huddle after a win, we had the Victory Chuckle which would then lead to the Victory Chopper, which involved one guy flipping out his dick. Or in the showers, you’d feel a splash of something warm on your leg and realise someone was pissing on you.’

  Unofficial initiations were also part of joining a team. Wilson recalled the ‘nude broom,’ in which a younger player had to strip and run around with the broom whenever the senior players called out. When Wilson was the youngest player in his team, he was designated the ‘Queen of Alcohol’ at the end-of-season trip. ‘I was stripped naked and then dressed in toilet paper and shaving cream. I had to deliver the alcohol to everyone. I would’ve looked funny and I’m not bearing the scars of that. But at the same time, it’s odd and insular behaviour. It’s not sexual, it’s about humiliation and the older generation of “footballer” comedy.’

  But then, said Wilson, there was the more serious stuff, instances where women were obviously being groomed.

  ‘There were some deliberate creations of dangerous situations for females. One club I was at had the “Camel Night,” which was a night where everyone was to get a hump. Each player and club official had to invite two girls who were not your girlfriend or wife and presumably not females you cared greatly for. So you had this party with no prying eyes, no one would get in trouble with their missus and tonnes of alcohol were supplied for these girls, who were basically nobody’s responsibility.’

  *

  The sixties activist and prankster Abbie Hoffman once said that most pranks fell into one of three categories: satirical, vindictive and neutral – that is, soft on the stooge. In a New York Times article on the ‘purpose of pranks,’ the reporter Benedict Carey elaborated:

  The bad ones involve vindictive skewering, or the sort of head-shaving, shivering-in-boxers fraternity hazing that the sociologist Erving Goffman described as ‘degradation ceremonies.’

  The ‘satirical’ prank often aims to reveal something about the joke’s prey. Take as an example Hoffman’s own stunt in 1967, when he and fellow hippies stood on a balcony overlooking the New York Stock Exchange and showered the floor with dollar bills. Stock traders famously knocked each other to the ground as they dove for the cash, the stunt bringing the tickertape to a halt for six minutes.

  Similarly, vindictive pranks are revealing, but unbeknownst to the instigators, the revelation says more about the perpetrator than the victim. The New York Times quoted Jonathan Wynn, a sociologist at Smith College in Massachusetts, who believes pranks serve ‘to maintain social boundaries in groups as various as police departments and sororities. And you gain status by being picked on in some ways. It can be a kind of flattery, if you’re being brought in.’

  Consider Sam Newman’s response to public outrage at his mannequin gag about Caroline Wilson. He said it was a compliment of sorts, a sign that the Footy Show culture ‘accepted’ her. In other words, it wasn’t really about Wilson, it was about them. About a subculture of men trying to find a place – albeit a very lowly place – in their world for a woman. Considering that it’s all about the boys, the prey doesn’t even need to be present. The photo of Wilson staple-gunned to a mannequin sufficed.

  I remember one time, during my childhood exploits, when an older couple who lived in the old hat factory behind us, on whose door a gang of us repeatedly knick-knocked, stopped me on the street. I was on my own – the worst thing for a kid whose bravado relied on being surrounded by a mob of accomplices. In faltering English, they asked me, ‘Why do you keep ringing our door? What have we done to you?’ And I remember squirming, and saying, ‘Nothing. You haven’t done anything.’ I couldn’t understand why they thought they had to have done anything to be subjected to endless doorbell persecution. Why did they think it had anything to do with them?

  And I wonder, how often does a woman realise this halfway through having sex with a footballer and then his mates when they get in on the action? Initially she is the subject of their attentions, they are all in on this together, but then, suddenly sobering, she realises she is not one of the guys, that all this, that guy who is taking pictures with his mobile phone, the other guy who has his pants down and is waiting his turn, has nothing much to do with her.

  As a prank bonds its perpetrators and isolates its subject, does she realise that she really has nothing to do with what is happening around her, to her? And sure, it doesn’t have to be a prank; possibly she knows how it looks on that guy’s phone, that she was ‘up for it.’ And she was. She has no real recourse, only the slow dawning realisation that these guys, they don’t really like her and maybe they never liked her. That this, this fucking, has nothing to do with her at all.

  ‘We’re not the “regrettable sex squad.”’ When I explained my confusion about a person’s lack of recourse in such situations, this is what an ex-policeman told me his fellow officers often said. And perhaps they are right, it isn’t a matter for the police, but I still wonder about the grey area, this gulf of uncertainty between consent and rape.

  When we discussed this, Catharine Lumby nodded. ‘Yes, there are many instances of behaviour that we found in our research into players’ experiences that did not equate to sexual assault but are definitely extremely unethical behaviour – such as after having sex with a girl, throwing her out of your hotel room naked without her clothes for a joke. Or suddenly asking, “Do you mind if I invite my mate back?”’

  As I scribbled Lumby’s words into my notepad, I was reminded of a story I had heard from a young footballer about his time in the AFL. It wasn’t the father-and-son day he and his dad attended, not knowing it was to be a beer-soaked event with strippers and one guy simulating sex with one of the ladies on a raised platform – he and his father tried not to look at each other for the entire day and never spoke of it afterwards. No, it was a story told to him by players about their end-of-season trip to the Gold Coast.

  Four or five of the guys had gone back to a woman’s house after meeting her at a club and had sex with her. At one stage, while she was occupied, a senior player shat in her shoe. The players who saw him grinned. When they were all gathering their clothes and things together later on, she offered them a lift back to their hotel. They accepted. She put her shoes on, foot straight in the shit.

  And do you want to know the worst thing, went the punchline. She laughed with them, washed it off and drove ‘the boys’ home.

  PART 2

  THE GREY ZONE

  CHAPTER 7

  ‘You can skin a cat a number of ways, Your Honour,’ prosecutor Ryan said to Judge Taft. They were back on the subject of getting the Magpies’ Dayne Beams to give evidence at Justin’s trial in spite of his club’s refusal.

  The judge agreed. ‘You can,’ Taft replied, ‘and whether it is a cat or a magpie may not be material.’

  As the magic triangle continued to lay down the ground rules for the forthcoming trial, I gleaned snippets of the full story. The defence counsel, Malcolm Thomas, made the suggestion that Sarah’s complaint against Justin was an afterthought. He read from Tom Shaw’s police statement:

  Then I asked how she got home. She said it was a $40 taxi ride from South Melbourne. ‘Some guy put me in a taxi’ and then somehow his name, Justin, came up.

  ‘There is no complaint made at that
stage,’ said Thomas.

  The judge wanted to know what Thomas was getting at. ‘Do you want to cross-examine her about delayed complaint?’ he asked. He reminded Thomas that if he was considering visiting what went on in the townhouse in front of a jury, he was entering risky territory.

  Thomas nodded, countering that, ‘If they [the Crown] want to be talking about being raped by a bunch of footy players, they themselves are introducing into evidence the sexual activities of the complainant.’ But, he continued, he was only covering his bases. The defence had no desire to enter the bedroom of Dorcas Street, but he wanted to protect his client from any unforeseen arguments the prosecution might throw at them.

  At this, prosecutor Ryan piped up. ‘Can I be just a bit cautious and I may be out of court about this, but on the basis that I’m not leading with distress and on the basis I’m only leading the injury as to the knees, I don’t want to be met with arguments at the end of the case that there was no distress. I just want to make sure. It has happened to me before, Your Honour.’

  To an outsider, this was fascinating. It was like two enemies laying down the rules of engagement before going to war. And yet, it seemed to me that the true aspects of the war, the very reasons for going to war, were being smothered. By introducing the bedroom evidence, the court believed the charges being heard could be contaminated – but hadn’t that already happened? Surely, whatever happened between Justin and Sarah in the alley had been precipitated by what happened in the townhouse?

  As I watched Ryan and Thomas negotiate the trial’s terms and conditions, I scribbled a note to myself: listen to what’s not being said. It is an essential tenet of journalism, and as the night in question was being carved up, pieces of the puzzle removed and filed away, it had never been more pertinent. I realised that the jury members – when they were chosen – and I would be on vastly different trajectories: each of us would be seeking a truth, but these truths might well be at odds with each other, yet at the same time eerily similar. After all, the jury would have only two options, ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ – a verdict of ‘innocent’ was not open to it. And I thought about Justin’s family, their adamant belief that he had done no wrong: not only had he not raped Sarah, but he was wholly innocent. Was there no uneasy grey zone for them, no wondering what exactly Justin and his mates were doing that night? Was it just a case of their son picking up the wrong ‘type’ of girl? And Sarah – had she scrutinised her own actions, whether with perplexity, regret or rage? If a rape did not occur that night, then what had happened? Did she think a finding of rape would absolve her, and if so, for what did she want absolution?