Night Games

by Anna Krien

  Magnay’s case was successful and made it illegal for national sporting clubs to discriminate against reporters on the basis of gender. The Tigers were forced to issue a public apology to her. But by then, Jones had left Balmain and taken up his post as a radio shock-jock. ‘He continued to criticise me on his show.’

  *

  Yet is entering the players’ change room after a football match really a victory for equality, a coup for female sports journalists? Jason Whitlock on ESPN, the American sports media network, doesn’t think so:

  A woman’s opportunity to get to do the same dumb stuff that men do is not equality. You achieve equality when you share in the power and get to shape the rules and traditions so that they make sense for you.

  When I put this to Magnay, she agreed. ‘I have lobbied strongly with the NRL to interview the players in a mixed zone when they come off the field – after all, the radio guys have the chance to interview them on the field. We could have a chance, in the tunnel, or some way en route to the dressing room, to get quick quotes from the players after the game. But they never ever allowed that.’

  In recent years, though, there have been changes. ‘As the game is becoming more professional, it is becoming less of an insiders’ club. Most journalists are now on the outer, you’re not part of the inner sanctum anymore,’ said Magnay. And the ‘roll around in the same drip tray’ relationship between male journalists and footy clubs, a relationship resembling to Magnay an endless Sunday barbeque, is less prevalent. ‘Now, with immediacy, there isn’t time for that.’ Press conferences are held outside the change rooms, with coaches and captains sitting in front of sponsor-emblazoned banners. But journalists still go into the locker room to get comments from the players.

  On ESPN, Whitlock described the feeding frenzy as a star player steps out of the shower and walks towards his locker:

  We, the media, will open up a walkway for the athlete to get his space, then crowd back around him and stand within 2 feet of him as he drops his towel and begins to undress.

  Somehow, we manage to cover wars and presidential campaigns and murder trials without going into sweaty filthy bathrooms for interviews … Reporters can wax on about all their journalistic reasons to enter a locker room. It’s bull … a significant number of ‘journalists’ love going into the locker room because it’s something the average fan can’t do. Makes ’em feel special, cool, important.

  Football insiders dismissed female sports reporters as ‘groupies,’ but what they failed to acknowledge was that the locker room had been frequented by groupies long before women were allowed in.

  ‘Talk about women being groupies, the men were outrageous,’ said Carlton’s first female director, Lauraine Diggins, a fine arts dealer and the daughter of Brighton Diggins, the Blues’ 1938 premiership captain-coach. Her presence was a true feat considering former president John Elliott’s declaration that no woman would make it onto the board at Carlton unless she’d played 100 games of football. Diggins laughed as she recalled going into the locker room after games. ‘I used to treat going into the change rooms as a job, but the men, they had this adoration. They were in awe of the players. I had expectations, while they had adulation.’

  And with this in mind, perhaps the likes of Alan Jones were right. Women were intruders. Coming in from the outside like a draft under the door, the presence of female reporters such as Magnay in the inner sanctum broke a spell in this sweaty place where players could do no wrong (and if they did, no one would say a thing). Suddenly being worshipped may not have seemed so much fun: being a god now came with responsibilities.

  *

  ‘What connection have you got to footy?’ It is a question I was asked often while researching this book – a question that women, be they insiders or outsiders to the game, must continually confront.

  ‘Well, I’m female, for starters,’ I retorted defensively to one insider. The issues I was exploring, I continued, were as much about women as they were about footy. The reply worked – he went quiet – but I didn’t like the implication, that I was writing this book for the sisterhood. Why did I have to explain myself? Surely the fact that I was a writer was enough?

  When I was asked the question again – this time by a former player who then added that footy is just a game – I changed tack. This time I gave the hard-nosed journo response. Footy is big business, I said; its influence is vast. And it’s not too difficult to make the connection between footy and power. Politicians, media moguls and businessmen – many of whom hail from an ‘old boys’ private school network – woo one another in corpor-ate boxes, while league executives and star players take home million-dollar pay packages from a ‘business’ that, and here’s the clanger, isn’t taxed. Football clubs, football leagues, don’t pay tax. Most sporting bodies don’t. They are not-for-profit, so to speak, their status much like that of a charity. As the AFL’s annual report explained in 2010, the league is exempt from income tax because its activities ‘are solely the promotion, administration and development of Australian Rules Football.’ The NRL’s status is the same. Surely, I’d say, these perks must come with responsibilities? My foray into this world was an investigation like any other. I didn’t need a connection to footy.

  But still the questions continued.

  A former player who now worked for the AFL asked me, with faux casualness, what team I followed. ‘I like footy,’ I started. He let out an almost imperceptible sigh. People don’t like football – they love it. ‘But I do like it!’ I said, frustrated. ‘I like watching it on telly and having a kick in the park. But I don’t come from a football family. I never had a team.’ I paused as I scrambled for the words, and then found them: ‘I grew up playing sport, not watching it.’

  I was in two minds about being interrogated on my connection to football. On one hand, I resented it. It got my back up. Would a man be asked this question? But on the other hand, I was asking myself the same question. What was I doing here? What was any woman doing in this world of men? And why can’t football be just a game? Why make more of it? Why ruin it with seedy accusations of a shadowy macho subculture, one that can just as easily be found in the military or even the construction industry, and then counter this with shrill claims that these men, boys, are heroes, ‘role models’?

  Nor was it hard to conclude that football had put itself at the mercy of a highly strung and self-righteous media. When CCTV footage of the former AFL player Brendan Fevola taking a piss in a shop alcove can be aired on Channel 7 and result in his club fining him $10,000, the codes do, at times, seem to be taking themselves too seriously. Then there was the $5000 fine imposed on Richmond’s Matthew Richardson when he gave the finger to spectators, and the schoolmarmish, over-the-top posturing from journalists when Ben Cousins did the same to Channel Ten’s remote-operated tilt-and-zoom camera installed in the change room (one might argue that cameras in the change room are over the top). Was I about to join this pious media chorus?

  Over and over I asked myself this, especially when I watched a game on TV, singing ‘shake down the thunder’ for the Sydney Swans (my partner’s team), watching in awe as Lewis Jetta, a lean Aboriginal player for the Swans, sprinted towards the goals while Collingwood players lumbered uselessly after him. Or laughing at the endless commentary about the seagulls that dotted the oval and bobbed in the air like a mobile, oblivious to the men pounding the turf.

  The last thing I wanted to be was a killjoy – and yet I kept recalling the words of the Australian sociologist Lois Bryson. She once wrote that feminists who ignore sport do so at their own peril, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all the more true when it came to footy.

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘I suggested that Denis might like to drop around to our home after a Sunday morning training session, have a coffee with us and tell our girls to their face how pathetic their gender was,’ said Mary Crooks, cackling. It was 2
005 and Carlton were down by seventy-seven points at half-time when their coach, Denis Pagan, lashed out at his players, calling them a bunch of ‘schoolgirls and sheilas.’

  A few days later, the back page of the Herald Sun carried the story. ‘Pagan was alleged to have hurled all the abuse he could at his players for being in this terrible predicament at half-time,’ recalled Crooks, ‘and it seems the worst barb was to suggest they were playing like sheilas and schoolgirls. I had a flash of anger!’ Crooks took to her computer and wrote Pagan a letter. She told him about her work at the Victorian Women’s Trust, in particular overseeing an exhibition to mark 100 years of federation called Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives.

  ‘Hundreds of women,’ said Crooks, ‘from all walks of life, doing the most amazing things – usually unheralded, unremunerated and most certainly not in football’s Halls of Fame.’ She wrote about how women’s unpaid work was devalued and about her and her husband’s two daughters. ‘I wrote that we were intent on bringing them up to feel confident about themselves, filled with positive qualities and, importantly, wanting to be positive contributors to their society.’

  Crooks then suggested Pagan come over for morning tea and tell her daughters that this upbringing was all for nothing, given their gender. Within a week, Crooks received a phone call from Pagan. She smiled, recalling the coach trying to make amends. ‘He wriggled, squirmed and said that he sort of, had not really said what the Herald Sun had printed and that maybe he sort of, might have said that girls were not as physically strong as boys.’

  ‘Poor Denis,’ said Lauraine Diggins, who was at Carlton the same time as Pagan. ‘He was so surprised, he had in no way intended to demean women. Footy was just so separate from the rest of the world. He learnt something that day.’

  A couple of days after Pagan’s call, Diggins phoned Crooks and told her that the Women of Carlton – the official female supporters group of the Blues – loved the letter. By the end of the month, Carlton’s club president sent a formal invitation to Crooks asking if she would be interested in becoming one of the female ambassadors for the club. Crooks happily accepted.

  *

  In the finer zoos of the world, species of animals are often added to the mix because they have a calming effect on the group as a whole. It’s a strange idea but it does work. You don’t fight the problem – you shift it by changing the power dynamic of the group.

  So wrote Damien Foster, a professional mentor, in the Age, in light of the spate of sexual assault allegations against footballers – and slowly but surely the leagues and their clubs have been doing exactly that. Women are taking up jobs once offered only to men, support roles as fitness advisers, podiatrists, dieticians, physiotherapists, trainers, counsellors, public relations managers, sports scientists, umpires and referees.

  Many of these appointments come with teething problems. Elaine Canty was appointed to the AFL tribunal in 1996. The tribunal is a curious scene with foldaway chairs, where players turn up in often ill-fitting suits with top-notch QCs or footy-tragic lawyers working for free for their favourite club, and where the jury might find itself watching a seven-second television grab of a controversial tackle for hours. When her role was announced, Canty was inundated with hate mail. A central objection – most notably from the legendary coach Ron Barassi – was that a woman couldn’t do the job, having never played in the league. And it was true: the lawyer and broadcaster had never played professional football. But nor had the majority of the other members of the panel. This revelation produced an uncomfortable silence – no one had ever thought of asking the question of the tribunal’s male members.

  Speaking to the AFL Record in 1999, Canty emphasised why women needed to be represented in the league: ‘It’s an industry, whether we like to think so or not, and it has to be a reflection of women’s place in the general community.’ She added that these changes were not simply about wanting to be virtuous: ‘I think they’ve [the AFL] made a cold-blooded commercial decision that it is in their interests to involve women in the administrative side of football.’

  It certainly beats ragging out single mothers, as the league did in its 1994 report, blaming them for the decline in junior participation in the eighties: these over-anxious mothers were said to be steering their children away from footy and into sports they considered less dangerous, such as basketball and soccer. And it certainly makes up for the 5.7 million hours of unpaid work that 48,000 female volunteers contribute to the game annually. That’s approximately $69 million in free labour, according to the AFL’s calculations in 2003.

  ‘The future of football is feminine,’ announced the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) boss Joseph Blatter in 1995 – and Australia’s football codes caught on. The AFL is one of the few male-only sports codes in the world that can boast a large proportion of passionate female supporters. The columnist Chris Kenny did the maths in the Australian:

  Men still dominate attendances, with Australian Bureau of Statistics figures from 2010 showing that 1.7 million males attended Aussie rules games compared with 1.2 million women. So female attendances are more than two-thirds the male number.

  Rugby league, by comparison, had a million men attending and 600,000 women – something less than two-thirds. While the fractional differential is not large, when combined with the overall higher attendances it shows there are twice as many women attending Aussie rules as league.

  In England, less than 15 per cent of those attending Premier League football are women. So you can see why the ‘future is feminine’ – what successful business would alienate half of its clientele?

  Cue the NRL’s ‘To the Women in the League. We Salute You’ campaign. Accompanied by the melodic tinkling of a piano, promotional footage shows selfless mothers painting white boundary lines on the oval, pumping up a football, stapling documents, hauling boxes of trophies from their cars, opening the cafeteria and attending to a player’s leg injury.

  Over the images a deep gravelly male voice says:

  This is dedicated to the unsung heroes who ask for nothing and give everything. You are the guardian angels, the gatekeepers, and the champion’s champion, carrying the weight of thankless tasks with selfless hearts, you are the wind beneath our winners, the goddesses of war and peace, the patron saints of the sideline, the canteen queens who wear a beanie like a crown, you are the dream makers [camera flashes to little boy wearing footy jumper] who understand that greatness is not born, it is earned and easily squandered. You sculpt lives of greatness out of grass and dirt and mud, you don’t seek fame or glory, but know this – our victories are your victories.

  Excuse me while I vomit.

  Are we changing stereotypes here or simply reinforcing them? With soppy advertisements like this one, it would be easy to keep seeing women as mere service providers. You have the mothers who cheer from the sidelines, drive to and from games and training, cook carbohydrates the night before, volunteer in the canteen and scrub the grass stains out of uniforms; women idolising their ‘boys’ who can do no wrong. Then there’s the female support staff tending to the players’ injuries, massaging their hamstrings, studying their eating habits and micro-managing their media image.

  These are the ‘good’ women – or, as Kevin Sheedy and Carolyn Brown wrote in their book, the ‘forgotten heroes.’

  Oh, and let’s not forget the WAGs, the tail of the dog. Otherwise known as ‘wives and girlfriends’ of footballers, they are expected not only to take over the reins from Mum, but to look hot too. They are service providers and trophies (and at the other end of the spectrum is the player who wins the wooden spoon for picking up the ‘ugliest chick’). In the Herald Sun: ‘Every sport has them, their stars wouldn’t perform as well without them … Take a look.’ On radio: ‘Triple M makes a calendar of Melbourne’s Hottest WAGs!’

  When three Brisbane Broncos players found themselves under inv
estigation for claims of sexual assault at a nightclub, where they said they’d engaged in consensual sexual acts with a woman in a toilet cubicle (one of the men had filmed it on his mobile phone and phoned another player, saying, ‘Guess what’s happening inside here?’), the Daily Telegraph thought it relevant not only to note that one rugby player had ‘lost his girlfriend Emma Harding’ as a result of the incident, but also to link to a photo gallery titled ‘Bronco Stunner Emma Harding.’

  And amazingly, Wayne ‘the King’ Carey’s fall from grace in the AFL came not after he grabbed a woman’s breasts on a city street and told her, ‘Why don’t you get a bigger pair of tits?’ Nor was it when it came to light that his North Melbourne club had negotiated a $15,000 settlement with a woman who claimed to have been sexually harassed by Carey and another AFL player. Nor when he provided a character reference in court for the drug dealer and gangster Jason Moran, who was later murdered in Melbourne’s gang war. No, Carey hit an all-time low in the popularity stakes in 2002 when he shagged teammate and vice-captain Anthony Stevens’ wife in a bathroom at a party.

  Touchingly, the Kangaroo players publicly linked arms around their vice-captain and Carey was shunned. But the issue wasn’t about morality – if it had been, Carey would have been shunned years earlier. It was about propriety and betraying a teammate.

  While I understand that employing more female support staff helps chip away at an entrenched and blinkered male society, and that the presence of professional females can help to re-humanise women in the eyes of these young men, it’s the absence of females at the two most powerful ends of football that stands out: at the top and on the oval.