Everyday Racism: Eddie, Goodesy and a 13 Year Old Girl

Adam Goodes points out the fan who called him an 'ape'

Racism is both awful and unfortunately all too common. There are some people in society who think it isn’t particularly common anymore and that it is a relic of the past, but those tend to be the people who aren’t on the receiving end.

This past week’s incident where a 13 year old female Collingwood fan called Sydney Swans’ Indigenous star Adam Goodes  an ‘ape’ (during Indigenous Round no less) was an unfortunate reminder of this. The fact Collingwood president and media personality Eddie McGuire went and made it worse on radio only makes it harder for Collingwood’s message to reach their fans to improve their conduct.

To be clear, the blame in this unfortunate incident does not lie with a 13 year old. I think overall the media has done a pretty good job of not making her the villain in all of this, although if you do internet or twitter searches on it, some folks are.

It is entirely possible that the girl used the word ‘ape’ without even understanding the racial undertones of it. If she had called him another name that didn’t have a history as a racist word, none of this would be an issue as name calling from the stands is standard sporting protocol. But even if she didn’t know what the word actually meant, she clearly had picked it up from somewhere. You don’t just happen to choose such a specific name to call someone at that age if you haven’t heard it used elsewhere. So whether or not she meant it in a racist way, I think it is a fair assumption that the original user of the word that she heard it from did use it in that context.

Collingwood famously has a history with racist abuse coming from the stands. 20 years ago St Kilda star Nicky Winmar was a victim of such abuse and in a wonderful act of defiance and pride he lifted his shirt and pointed to his skin colour on his body. Since those dark days, Collingwood has tried very hard to distance itself from racial abuse, as well as taking a hard stand against any fan caught doing so. They are at the forefront of the discussion of eradicating racism from football and society in general.

Unfortunately, either their fans seem to have a higher propensity to resort to this behaviour, or perhaps they are just the ones getting caught doing so. I’m sure it happens at other games and I myself have heard racist terms used by fans at numerous sporting events.

People like to make jokes about the intelligence of Collingwood fans, but that’s mostly because they are the team we all love to hate. However, incidents like this one do nothing to squash that stereotype.

The girl in question from this incident however is a product of the society she came from. That starts at home with her parents and includes her extended family, her school and her neighbourhood. Whilst it is possible she didn’t know what she was saying, the fact of the matter is, she SHOULD have known what she was saying because education on such matters should be taught to kids from a young age.

This is not a subject to wait until a child is in the last few years of high school to discuss. Kids need to grow up with it imprinted into their brain that people are all created equal and they need to understand that certain words mean certain things. I’m not saying they need to learn the specifics of some of the awful things that have been done in the past by racists at such a tender age, but they should certainly be learning about equality as well as what is offensive.

Most importantly, this education shouldn’t have to be coming from a bloody football team. It is admirable and important for sporting bodies to take a stand on these issues and influence the conversation in society. However, it is not the job of sporting bodies to actually be the ones teaching people not to be assholes. It starts at home and at school and the fact I even feel the need to write that makes me sad.

To make matters worse, after the way Collingwood did a good job directly after the incident, Eddie McGuire then went and undid a lot of that good work on his radio show by suggesting Adam Goodes come to the opening of the King Kong musical in Melbourne (it was actually hard to even follow what he was suggesting). I don’t believe Eddie McGuire is a racist person. He has done plenty of good work in that field, so I’m not saying he is racist. However, the thinking process it takes to get from King Kong musical to Adam Goodes has an inherent racism to it.

It may have been “the opposite of what he was trying to say” as he claimed, but even still, somehow his brain went from King Kong to Adam Goodes and making a joke about it. Even if he was claiming that back in the day when racism was more tolerated they would use situations like this to capitalise, it’s still a thought predicated on race.

Whilst it was good that he called a press conference and apologised and admitted his mistake, he got a bit defensive when he was asked questions. Only once the fallout to that wasn’t ideal did he become more contrite and now might offer his resignation pending the AFL investigation into the matter.

The main problem with Eddie’s gaffe is that Collingwood are trying to educate fans and discipline those who don’t comply, but their credibility on the matter is now compromised because even their boss has fallen into it. You will now see uneducated fans thinking that if Eddie can do it, they can too, even if he did apologise.

This is why it shouldn’t even be falling on Collingwood to educate their fans at all. Yes they should throw out the bad ones, but the issue of education should be done well before someone enters a football stadium.

Some think this entire story has been blown out of proportion and that everyone is getting too touchy, but those people miss the big picture. This isn’t about individual incidents of racism in a public forum. This is about the society in which we live and the fact that this is still happening every day.

As a member of a minority that has been the subject of so much horror for such a long time, I always have my ears pricked up when I hear things that are racist. I am fortunate to only have experienced direct racism a couple of times in my life, however because I am white, the fact I am part of a minority is not so externally obviously. That fact has probably enabled me to avoid being a target more often.

Racism at the footy is not the story and nor should it be. A 13 year old girl making a racist comment isn’t the story either. What people need to focus on is trying to be part of a society where we eradicate this thinking entirely, much like we did with polio and smallpox. But remember, the only vaccination for racism is education.

Is Anyone Else Underwhelmed?

The Panthers celebrating during their huge win over the Warriors

We are now 10 rounds into the 2013 NRL season and I think that is a fair enough length of time to reflect on what we have seen overall so far. Whilst from a biased perspective as a Rabbitohs fan the season has been great, as a general rugby league fan I feel like 2013 has been quite frankly, rubbish.

Taking all bias out of consideration depending on which team you support and which teams you hate, if you simply look at the games player this year, in my opinion the quality of matches has been poor. There have simply been more bad matches than good compared to previous years.

When you look at the NRL ladder there is certainly a logjam in the middle of the table, which is something the NRL is striving for, as only the few bottom teams have been truly uncompetitive and out of contention. However does the fact that excluding the top and bottom outliers, everyone else can seemingly beat each other on any given day make the league better overall?

Obviously the entire purpose of the salary cap is to prevent overwhelming dynasties and prevent teams from not being able to compete. But so far this year, just because the league is close has not meant the matches have been good.

Many games have been blowouts, culminating in Round 10 when an overwhelming majority of games were complete massacres. Funnily enough, it ended up being the round that ended with a draw after Golden Point, but that was played between two of the premier teams of not just this season, but the decade as a whole.

After watching the Rabbitohs destroy the Tigers, in expected fashion mind you, 54-10 on Friday night, the odds you could have gotten that it would be the biggest margin or winning score of the weekend would have been very short. However Penrith then went on to beat the NZ Warriors 62-6 the following night. Adding to that, the Broncos beat the Titans 32-6, the Dragons beat the Eels 32-12 and the Knights beat the Bulldogs 44-8. All of those blowout winners were the home team.

Interestingly enough, those last three matches I tipped the losing team to win the game and I was proven to be extremely wrong. So the league is close enough and competitive enough for it to be possible to have no idea who is going to win (or least I clearly didn’t), but the individual matches have so often been uncompetitive. Why is it that teams seem to either turn up and play great or not to turn at all?

For the couple of weeks prior to their Newcastle loss, the Bulldogs started to build some ominous form, with their players returning and some impressive performances. But then the simply don’t turn up for the Newcastle game.

The Warriors have had a terrible season, but have been competitive in numerous matches before blowing late leads. But when they travel away from home, they leave all their talent in Auckland.

There have even been numerous matches this season that were close on the scoreboard but poorly played on the field. The high flying Roosters beat the Broncos earlier in the season 8-0 in one of the worst games I’ve ever watched and even my Rabbitohs have won a couple of games I’d rather forget about.

Overall, I seem to walk away after each footy weekend thinking that more than half the matches were simply bad and I know I’m not alone as numerous friends have said the same.

But why is this happening? We have a lot of great young talent coming through and there is clearly quite a lot of parity through most of the competition. The only answer I can come to is that there is a lack of age and experience shining through right now.

In an age where teams are trained to exploit any weakness in a defence, young players or defensively frail players have nowhere to hide and are being exploited over and over again.

The Holden Cup competition has given us many good young players, but the defensive side of that competition leaves a lot to be desired and the gap to the NRL has widened. This is why many clubs are now finding it smarter to have their young players play in the NSW or QLD Cup competitions where they compete against men as opposed to other boys.

Teams like Parramatta and the Warriors have brought up numerous young and talented players and on paper it seems like they should be competitive. But when they actually take the field, there are simply too many players who haven’t been conditioned to defend against quality attacks and they are being torn apart. Additionally, the pace of the game at NRL level is so much more physically demanding and it gets faster every year, so players are getting tired quicker and are being exploited for it.

I love watching the Under 20’s competition and following the young talented players, but the process of bringing them along in first grade is complex and requires patience and timing, which is something many teams either haven’t shown or are unable to show due to injuries or lack of depth.

When you compare it to the NBA, every year teams talk about the young, talented, up and coming teams full of great athletes and how they are taking the NBA by storm. Then the playoffs roll around and they get manhandled by the old pros and sent packing.

Teams need to find a way to better prepare their younger players for the NRL before they are thrown to the wolves, or else these sorts of inconsistent performances will continue.

Long term I think the NRL should change the Holden Cup from U20s to U22s or even U23s so players are given more time to develop in the NYC competition as opposed to the State competition. For right now though, I think we are simply going to have to get used to these lacklustre performances while we wait for the talented players to actually turn into good ones.

Measuring the Intangibles: Brains Over Brawn

When it comes to measuring an athlete’s skills there are a lot of things we use to evaluate them. Things like size, strength, speed, endurance, ball skills and more depending on the sport itself. There is also something we hear about called ‘intangibles’, which is something some athletes have and some don’t. ‘Intangibles’ includes several things like personality, leadership, brains, decision making, attitude, heart, effort and all those attributes that can be harder to quantify and thus they are not tangible.

To create a successful sporting team you don’t need every single player to have those intangible qualities, but you definitely need a core of them. Culture is so important in sporting teams and the ones that create success for sustainable periods are those with an inbuilt culture of success.

Now obviously we can’t measure every aspect of the intangibles but we certainly can try measure elements of it. If I were running a sports team and able to choose the players we sign (and hopefully one day I will be), I would implement a system to make sure I was bringing in players not only of high character, but also of high intelligence, decision making in limited time and logic/reasoning ability.

Quite simply, I would make all players take an aptitude test. Some players would probably hate it and to be honest it might rule out certain players who shouldn’t be ruled out. But overall, I think I’d be doing pretty well on average if I was signing primarily players who scored highly on an aptitude test.

In the salary cap world, the actual talent of the players across most teams is relatively even. Yes there are outliers at the top and the bottom, but by and large most teams have a few stars surrounded by a bunch of role players with enough talent to be playing in the league. What separates the good teams from the bad are things like decision making in important moments, playing and sticking to the team plan and structures as well as some luck with injuries and the bounce of the ball.

The Melbourne Storm aren’t just built around three of the most talented players in the league, they are built around three of the smartest. The same can be said for the San Antonio Spurs, a team that has been in the title picture without fail since 1998. The Storm and the Spurs have a lot of similarities. They both are built around a coach and system that ties in perfectly with their star players and then smartly surrounded by underappreciated role players. These role players are crucial because they need to completely understand not only their role, but everyone on the team’s role. If one guy gets hurt, they are easily replaced because everyone buys into the system and understands it.

It sounds simple and easy, but if it were, everyone would be doing it successfully.

Up until they reach the professional level, a lot of athletes have relied purely on their natural talent levels. But at the professional level everyone else has that talent level too.  This is why we see guys with immense talent become ‘busts’ and never reach their potential at the pro level.

For this reason, if I was comparing an athlete with A level talent but a C level brain to an athlete with B level talent but an A level brain, I’d likely take the B level talent. I want to know I can maximise the talent of the player and get the consistency that comes with someone who will fit in to what the coach is trying to accomplish.

To evaluate this, I would likely look to implement the Wonderlic Test used for players entering the NFL Draft. The Wonderlic is a multiple choice test of 50 questions to be answered in 12 minutes or less. A score of 20 indicates average intelligence and 10 points is required to at least be considered literate.

It is considered important in the NFL primarily for positions with the most decision making, namely quarterback and the offensive linemen who protect him. It may surprise you, but those monsters protecting the quarterback are usually the smartest guys on the field and average the highest scores in the Wonderlic. This is because to be good as an offensive lineman, you need to process a lot of information very quickly and make the right decision, or else your pretty boy star quarterback will end up getting smashed. It is a high pressure job and requires brains, not just brawn. For reference, the average score for a quarterback is 24 and an offensive lineman is 26.

In rugby league for example, obviously the positions that would need to score the highest would be the ‘spine’ of the fullback, five-eighth, halfback and hooker. They are the playmakers and decision makers pulling the strings and implementing the coach’s system.

Without naming names, there are many players I have never rated or felt like were overrated because I felt like they didn’t have these qualities to lead their team. They had natural ability, but that doesn’t get you as far at the elite level. These are the players that lead fans to look at each other in shock when the player makes the worst decision at the worst time as opposed to someone maybe less talented, but does the smart thing and keeps his head and composure.

Cameron Smith looks like he should be doing your taxes and yet he is one of the greatest footy players of all time because he is like a coach on the field. Darren Lockyer was the same way and believe it or not larrikins like Andrew Johns and Brad Fittler were genius decision makers, not just talents, when it came to football. I bet they would score higher on the Wonderlic than some would imagine.

Look at a guy like Jeff Robson at the Cronulla Sharks. He would barely have enough natural talent to be in the NRL and yet he has become the glue of that team and Todd Carney absolutely needs Robson next to him to harness his own abilities. Fans of other teams and even some Sharks fans may wonder why they stick with Robson, but I’m sure Shane Flanagan trusts no one more than their number 7.

Obviously teams need some X-Factor type players and you don’t need an entire team of brain surgeons to win. But you need brains where it matters and you certainly do not want the lunatics running the asylum.

I think it would be fascinating if the AFL implemented the Wonderlic prior to the draft the same way the NFL does. I wonder how much it would accurately predict success at AFL level and whether teams would value it as highly as I do.

Also teams struggling and in need of a rebuild, like the Wests Tigers or Melbourne Demons, could implement the test to their own players and potential recruits, looking to use a different edge to get back to challenging for the NRL premiership. They already evaluate other factors; the brain should be in there too.

Getting a bunch of big, strong, fast guys will get you so far, but you need to make sure you have enough smart guys pointing them in the right direction. If the big, strong, fast guys also double as the smart guys, then that’s even better and how you end up with LeBron James or Greg Inglis.

Sometimes the best ideas are to steal other people’s ideas and implement them where they aren’t being used. The NFL has a good idea and it’s time we look to steal it.

Floyd Mayweather is Too Good

Floyd Mayweather celebrating victory

Floyd Mayweather is one of the greatest athletes of all time. I don’t see how there is any way to dispute that. In fact he may be the best boxer ever, even if he will never be as great in a broader sense than Ali or never have the famous wars against other legends the way Sugar Ray Leonard and others had.

Mayweather is the highest paid athlete in the world right now after earning a reported $32 million for his fight against Robert Guerrero this past weekend and he could make as much or more if he fights again in September as he says he will. Basically, his nickname of ‘Money’ Mayweather could not be more accurate, even if I was always partial to the Pretty Boy Floyd moniker he used in his younger days.

It is pretty amazing for a guy to step out of jail and make that sort of money for 36 minutes of work (obviously not counting all the work he put into training), but he is such a huge pay-per-view draw that even after serving jail time for assaulting his girlfriend, every fight fan in the world wanted to watch his fight.

In his 44^th professional fight, Floyd Mayweather did what he did for the 43 that came before it… win, whilst barely getting hit. Mayweather is not a knock out artist, especially after multiple hand injuries made him have to adjust how he fights and he tends to win his fights nowadays by dominating the scorecards. He would certainly be the best defensive boxer ever, as he is so fast and elusive that it doesn’t matter how powerful his opponent is, you can’t knock out what you can’t catch.

After his master class against Guerrero this weekend, the only part of Mayweather that looked like it had been in a fight was his right hand, which was swollen and hurt from connecting so many times.

The problem is Mayweather is actually too good. Whilst we watch the fights to witness greatness in action, even if we know the result beforehand, it takes two to tango. When we watch Black Caviar race, we know she is going to win, because she is basically competing against herself. However with a sport like boxing, styles make fights and so does talent. Mayweather fights become boring after the first round or two because it becomes very obvious that the rest of the fight is going to play out like a training session for one and a nightmare for the other.

Mayweather has had some great opponents over the years. His fight with Oscar De La Hoya is what took him to that next level of greatness and he has also fought the likes of Miguel Cotto, Shane Mosley, Juan Manuel Marquez and Ricky Hatton (at the end of his career), but none were on his level and once they stepped in the ring it became apparent quite early on that his opponent wasn’t quite at the level required.

People pay to see Mayweather’s greatness, but they also pay to this if his opponent is finally the one who can legitimately test him. So far the answer has been a resounding ‘no’.

Robert Guerrero is a very good boxer and certainly showed a lot of heart, but he was not a household name before the fight and the promoters tried to talk him up as a worthy opponent with a great record who deserved his opportunity to fight Mayweather. All that might be true, but Guerrero isn’t even at the level of some of the men Mayweather has already dispatched and many fans that bought the fight or attended the fight became quite upset when it became apparent yet again that this was not going to be much of a contest.

There was quite a lot of booing in the arena and dissent on the internet during and after the fight, not at Mayweather’s greatness or even at Guerrero’s efforts, but more just at the fact that they felt duped into believing the result might be in doubt.

This is why for so many years we all wanted to see Mayweather fight Manny Pacquiao. If Mayweather had defeated Manny (in his prime at least) the way he defeated everyone else, that would be an opponent at the level needed to take Mayweather’s case for greatest ever to the next level.

Ali had Liston, Frasier and Foreman. Leonard had Hagler and Duran. Mayweather, despite the best efforts of his opponents to date, has simply not had that transcendent fight, through no fault of his own. Manny Pacquiao was that opponent and for any number of reasons we never got to see it. It is too late now. Even if they one day get around to it, Manny Pacquiao is no longer Manny Pacquiao.

Mayweather is much richer financially every time he fights, but to me his legacy is about the same as it was a few fights ago. He remains undefeated and virtually untested and clearly the best boxer of my lifetime. He is probably in the discussion for greatest overall athlete of all time, but it also feels a little hollow not having that seminal memory or moment from a great contest to remember.

There are rumours he might fight ‘Canelo’ Alvarez next and that is definitely who he should fight. ‘Canelo’ is young but is an undefeated stud and has the potential to end up an all-time great himself. Hopefully that fight is a close battle where Mayweather is at least tested and could end up being the lasting memory of his career.

Mayweather might be a victim of his era, or he might be a victim of his own ability or success. Then again, when you look at his bank account, he isn’t really a victim at all.

‘Money’ indeed.