On the night of the opening ceremony, 24 January, Cyclone Wanda crossed the coast at Double Island Point north of Noosa. It didn’t have the devastating winds of cyclones like Ada and Althea that smashed the Whitsundays in 1970 and Townsville in 1971, and it weakened rapidly, but the monsoonal trough it forced south to Brisbane stayed there for days. Small oscillations in its movement and intensity generated many stretches of drenching rain.

Across Brisbane, 600 millimetres fell on the first three days of competition in Christchurch — twenty-four inches, or two feet, in the language of the time. This was three times the city’s average rainfall for January, its wettest month. On 28 January the trough weakened and retreated north. A drier, cooler air mass from the south finally brought some blue sky to the capital of the Sunshine State.

The river peaked in the early hours of 29 January at a height not seen since 1893. Residents woke to find about 13,000 buildings damaged. Children due back at school that morning got an extra week added to their Christmas holidays.

Across the Tasman in Christchurch, Australia had won a bag of gold medals while the river rose. Raelene Boyle retained the 100 metres sprint title she won in Edinburgh, fourteen-year-old Newcastle schoolgirl Sonya Gray won the women’s 100 metres freestyle and Mexico Olympic champion Mike Wenden the men’s. As the waters receded, Boyle and Gray added the 200 metres to their 100-metre golds and Don Wagstaff completed a double in the diving pool.

The deputy lord mayor reported Brisbane’s promotional T-shirts “were without doubt the most sought-after item at the Games.” Its souvenir match boxes and coasters “were widely distributed and caused much interest.” Sandwiched amid coverage of the floods, the full-page advertisement for Brisbane’s bid in the Christchurch’s main paper, the Press, caused “some concern,” but it was not fatal because “most people realised that occurrences such as these were not the normal thing.”

Whether or not the 1974 flood was abnormal depended on the time scale. The “River City” had not seen a flood as high in the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century it had seen four as high, including three much higher, and a total of eight floods classed as “major” according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s current classification system (3.5 metres at the City Gauge). Only two other “major” floods occurred in the twentieth century, the last in February 1931. This century is different again. The February 2022 flood was Brisbane’s second major flood after the even higher one in January 2011, and a further “minor” one occurred in January 2013.

The inaugural meeting of Brisbane’s Commonwealth Games Committee was held two months before the Christchurch Games. Chaired by lord mayor and sports fan Clem Jones, the meeting was told an application had already been lodged for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games. Business representatives thought the city council’s report on possible venues was technically excellent but lacked ambition. By 1982, they thought, the city “would deserve a sporting complex of world-wide standard.”

Council representatives baulked at the zeal. They “could not commit the City to structures which could become ‘white elephants,’ or to a financial burden which it might be virtually impossible to meet.” After the floods, the committee’s next meeting was deferred, but not for long. Lord Mayor Jones and his deputy flew over the city in the 4KQ helicopter and were “amazed at the number of places which could be regarded as possible sites for the Games.” A sites sub-committee was whisked around nine possible venues in a council bus just three months after the flood’s peak.

The choice narrowed to the Northside versus the Southside. Deputy Mayor Walsh, representing the Chermside ward on the Northside, wanted Marchant Park redeveloped. Mayor Jones, representing the Southside’s Camp Hill ward, liked a site in the new suburb of Nathan, adjacent to the Mt Gravatt Cemetery and Griffith University, which would accept its first students the following year.

In late July, six months after the flood, a decision was reached: the Southside. It would be closer for visitors staying at the Gold Coast and more convenient for residents of the rapidly expanding southern suburbs.

The campaign for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games succeeded, although the likely “phenomenal” cost was much criticised. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, where the Commonwealth Games Federation met to decide the venue for the ’82 Games, Brisbane found itself the only bidder. Montreal’s diabolical financial outcome scared others away.

New lord mayor Frank Sleeman assured Brisbane ratepayers they would pay only for the “bare essentials.” A new stadium would be built in the new suburb, but it would have a permanent grandstand seating just 10,000. “Temporary” seating would accommodate another 48,000. Work began immediately and the venue was first used in late 1975. Two years later, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, it was named the “Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Sports Centre,” or “QEII.”

There was one big problem with siting the main stadium on the top of a hill. One of the signature events at major games, the marathon, traditionally starts and finishes in the stadium. After the local distance-running community rejected a plan for the runners to complete three laps along the nearby South East Freeway, ending with a sharp climb back up to the stadium, organisers agreed to start and finish the race away from the stadium. (It was men’s only; the first women’s marathon was run at the 1986 Games in Edinburgh.)

A flatter, “city” course was mapped, like those becoming popular in places like New York, Chicago and London. For Brisbane, this meant using the river. The new route started and finished on the south bank, opposite the CBD. It headed out through the city and “The Valley,” across Breakfast Creek to the river at Kingsford Smith Drive, then doubled back to the river bank around the University of Queensland. TV cameras would capture the city at its most picturesque, spectators would get accessible viewing spots, runners would appreciate the cool breeze and flat ground in a city that doesn’t have much of it.

Held the day before the closing ceremony, the marathon did not disappoint. Big crowds lined the route. Australian favourite Robert De Castella found himself well behind two Tanzanians who were close to world record pace at the halfway mark. He set off to chase alone, catching Gidamis Shahanga just before they passed a heaving Regatta Hotel, then ran side-by-side with Juma Ikaanga for a kilometre along Coronation Drive (named in 1937 when George VI was crowned). Morning peak hour traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge slowed as commuters tuned car radios to the struggle. Finally, “Deek” made a decisive break and won by twelve seconds.

Building the main stadium for the Commonwealth Games on a hill in the southern suburbs had helped, paradoxically, and indirectly, to re-energise an old conceit. Decades earlier, tourism promotions dubbed Brisbane the “River City.” Soon, the first of several major arts and cultural organisations began setting up on the South Bank. Expo 88 would draw millions of people from the suburbs, the state, the nation and the world to the banks of the big river.

Despite the best intentions, QEII struggled to avoid the fate those Brisbane City Councillors feared: becoming a white elephant. Track and field events take centre stage in Olympic and Commonwealth Games but local athletics events, even the biggest interschool carnivals, attract much smaller crowds at other times.

For a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, QEII was back in business. On joining the national rugby league competition in the late 1980s, the Brisbane Broncos played at the sport’s traditional home in the city, Lang Park. A few years later, after the temporary seating at QEII was made a little more permanent, they moved there and started drawing Commonwealth Games–like crowds to the renamed “ANZ Stadium.”

Annual State of Origin matches against New South Wales, though, stayed at Lang Park. The regular monster crowds at ANZ declined. Eventually the state government and others decided to revive the old cauldron. The two “Origin” matches played at ANZ in 2001 and 2002 while Lang Park was rebuilt were the last.

In 2003, the Maroons and Broncos returned to the new “Suncorp Stadium.” They have been there ever since, sharing the venue with the Queensland Reds (rugby union) and Brisbane Roar (soccer). Last year, it was at Suncorp that the Matildas played their World Cup quarter-final against France, which ended in that epic, victorious penalty shoot-out.

QEII went back to being a track and field venue, the Queensland Sports and Athletics Centre, “QSAC.” It was used as an evacuation centre during the 2011 floods. After Brisbane won the right to hold the 2032 Olympics, there was a chance it might be revived again as a temporary venue for cricket and AFL while the traditional home of those sports in Queensland, the Gabba, was being remade as the main Olympic stadium at a cost of $2.7 billion.

That was until Monday, when QSAC got an even bigger future. Queensland’s government considered the recommendations of a committee set up to propose further options after the earlier rejection of the Gabba rebuild. The committee recommended that a wholly new stadium be built at Victoria Park, at a cost of over $3 billion, and eventually replace the Gabba as the home of cricket and AFL in Brisbane. Both recommendations were rejected. (Victoria Park was one of the sites rejected by Clem Jones’s 1974 committee.)

The Gabba is going to stay the Gabba, with a modest upgrade. Victoria Park is going to stay Victoria Park.

The winner is… QSAC! The stadium on the hill will rise again to host the track and field events at an Olympic Games fifty years after it staged them for the Commonwealth Games. At a cost of $1.6 billion, permanent seating will be increased to 14,000, and total capacity will touch 40,000 for the period of the Olympics, some way below the 1982 full houses.

The other winner is Suncorp Stadium, with its larger capacity of more than 50,000, which will get the opening and closing ceremonies.

The marathoners? They will surely follow the river again, winding out, back, out and back, sticking to the old, deceptively gentle watercourse that has always drawn people to this place. •

Information about Commonwealth Games planning is taken from Brisbane City Council committee minutes and files, and about the 1974 floods from the Department of Science/Bureau of Meteorology’s “Brisbane Floods January 1974” (AGPS, 1974). Other information drawn from Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (2023), Margaret Cook’s A River with a City Problem (2019) and Jackie Ryan’s We’ll Show the World: Expo 88 (2018), all published by UQP.

The post Olympic origins appeared first on Inside Story.

As recent summers go, this has been a relatively successful one for Australian cricket. The test matches have kept fans’ attention, the crowds have been good and the television audiences robust. But the season also brought with it the most ominous sign yet of an existential threat.

The team South Africa sent to New Zealand to play the test series was very much a second eleven. Why? Because it wanted to give priority to its own relatively new Twenty20 competition. South African officialdom ordered all players with deals to play in the SA20 to stay home. They cancelled a one-day series with Australia a year earlier for the same reason.

Twenty20 matches have been played since 2003 between countries and domestically, but the format took what turned out to be a radical new turn when the Indian Premier League, or IPL, emerged in 2008. That league’s ten city-based franchises bid against each other for players’ services, with each team allowed several international players. It has become by far the richest cricket competition in the world: last year the media rights for 2023–27 sold to Viacom18 and Star Sports for US$6.4 billion, making the value of each match US$13.4 million. Its contracts with leading players dwarf their payments from official sources.

(Most women’s contests, by contrast, have been short-form matches, and nearly all cricketing nations have well-established domestic and international Twenty20 calendars for women. The franchise model — Australia’s Women’s Big Bash for instance, which began in 2015 — is also popular, although only in 2023 did a women’s competition become part of the IPL; the prices paid for leading players immediately soared into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a welcome boost for traditionally underpaid players.)

None of IPL’s fast-multiplying imitators — including Australia’s Big Bash League — has reached anything like its heights. Age journalist Greg Baum says that at least twelve domestic Twenty20 competitions now exist, not only in South Africa but also in the Caribbean, Pakistan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Many of these competitions have teams owned by IPL franchises: all six South African teams, for example, and three of the six teams in the UAE’s ILT20. As IPL franchises set up more satellite operations, they may gain even more commercial leverage and be able to offer multi-competition or even year-long contracts to players.

For the players, these competitions offer new and lucrative opportunities. For several — especially from poorer countries where official payments are much lower — the competitions promise a lucrative twilight for their career, tempting them to retire from test cricket earlier.

But they are also shaping players’ careers much earlier. Already some players — from the West Indies, for example — give priority to the new competitions over test cricket. Increasingly, they can have a professional career while only occasionally interacting with the sport’s established structures. Australia’s up-and-coming twenty-six-year-old, Tim David, will play in seven different competitions in 2024, four of these non-Australian. Former England batsman Alex Hales is on the books of six clubs around the world; in those circumstances, being loyal is playing for only one club in any given competition.

The accelerating profusion of franchise-based competitions presents challenges for the mainstream cricket industry, which has already faced and only partially overcome two other challenges.

The first of these, already alluded to, is the balance between the format that brings in the most income and spectators — limited-over “white ball” cricket — and higher-status “red ball” test cricket. The second is the increasing dominance of audiences for international sporting events over those watching domestic competitions. Even though domestic competitions are crucial to the viability of the sport, some have suffered a decline in both audiences and income. Australia’s Sheffield Shield is a dramatic example: its crowds are a fraction of what they used to be, and it receives only fleeting attention in the media.

Cricket Australia’s response has been less than convincing. The Sheffield Shield now plays five rounds from early October to the beginning of December, has a nine-week hiatus, and then plays five final rounds in February and early March. A final eventually comes, anti-climactically, in late March, only to be broadly ignored by the nation’s media and a sporting public by now focused on football. It must rank as one of the most bizarre professional sporting fixtures in the world.

Australia’s answer to the IPL, the Big Bash League, has two fundamental weaknesses compared with the original. The first is that the best and best-known Australian players are rarely able to participate because of overlaps with test matches. David Warner, for example, one of the biggest drawcards in Australian cricket, didn’t play in the BBL for nine years, has played far more IPL than BBL matches, and has almost certainly made far more money playing for the IPL than for Australian teams.

The second structural problem is that overseas stars come and go depending on the other financially rewarding commitments they have, and are often missing at the season’s crunch time. Already this year, Brisbane Heat captain Colin Munro and teammate Sam Billings and the Sixers’ James Vince have all abandoned the BBL, and missed its final round, to join their ILT20 teams in Abu Dhabi.

Discontent with such weaknesses has even been expressed by the sport’s broadcaster. In 2022, in an unprecedented legal action, the Seven Network sought to get itself out of its $450 million broadcast deal by arguing that Cricket Australia had failed to deliver the BBL at the contracted quality and had thus depressed viewer numbers. Peace has apparently since been restored.

Cricket Australia is certainly subject to conflicting cross-pressures, but the fixtures for the Sheffield Shield and BBL strongly suggest that it has failed Sports Scheduling 101. Its main response has been to pack the cricket calendar ever more tightly, loading it up with too many events of little significance.

After the fifty-over World Cup finished in 2023, Australia played India in a series of Twenty20 matches. But most of each team’s best players were rested. It was still called an international fixture, but I wonder if any cricket fans can remember, or care, who won. Quantity is no substitute for quality; what’s needed is not more matches but more structured, meaningful contests.

What makes the challenge even more difficult is the fact that cricket’s problems are occurring amid rapid changes in the larger media–sport complex. The ever-increasing growth of gambling is the first of these problems: especially online gambling, which can cross national jurisdictions. In just three years from 2018 to 2021, legal sports wagering in the United States grew from less than US$5 billion in bets placed to US$57 billion. More than a million gambling ads were aired on Australian free-to-air TV and radio last year, with an unknown number more on pay TV and streaming services.

Apart from the human problems associated with gambling, cricket has had particular problems with corruption — namely match fixing and spot betting — associated with illegal gambling. In private leagues with weak checks and balances these problems could easily increase.

The second recent trend is “sportswashing,” a term that was selected by the Language Council of Norway as its 2021 word of the year. Sportswashing refers to the effort to improve one’s image, or redirect public attention away from human rights abuses and other shortcomings, by sponsoring global sport spectaculars. Wealthy Saudi Arabia, a noted human rights offender, has made significant inroads into tennis, golf and soccer. (The Saudis might also be using their financial muscle to create continuing profit flows from these sports.) So far the major Middle Eastern involvement in cricket has come from the United Arab Emirates.

The media part of the media–sports complex is also in flux. Streaming services increasingly assert themselves in what was the preserve of free-to-air and pay TV services. Amazon recently reached a deal with the International Cricket Council for the exclusive broadcast rights to ICC games in a deal spanning 448 live games in 2024–27. None of these games is on Australia’s anti-siphoning list, which primarily covers games played in this country. But Australians — probably along with people in the other participating countries — will have to pay to watch the next cricket World Cup. It may make the broadcasters and the ICC money, but it could substantially reduce the viewing audience.

Tackling this mix of problems will require concerted international action by the cricketing nations, but here too obstacles exist. Test cricket seems to be viable in England, Australia and India but much more fragile elsewhere. Moreover, one country, one vote doesn’t prevail in international cricket policymaking. India now accounts for 80 per cent of international cricket revenue, so any solution must be acceptable to it; equally, though, any lasting solution must also see funds flowing to the poorer countries.

In the immediate future the proliferation of franchise-based domestic Twenty20 competitions will play havoc with cricketing schedules. While past and present champions will solemnly declare their continuing commitment to test cricket, cricketers from other countries and those not quite in the top echelon will vote with their feet.

Within these manufactured contests, the dynamics are yet to become clear. How much team spirit will be generated in a group of players brought together by commercial opportunity? Despite the profusion of fan merchandise, how involved will spectators be in competitions between recently created franchises? Rather than traditional rivalries built up over decades, these may be soulless contests. “Ever since I was a child I wanted to play for the richest franchise” doesn’t quite have the same resonance as “Ever since I was a child I wanted to represent my country.”

All these competitions are essentially parasitic structures (as indeed was Kerry Packer’s World Series cricket in the 1970s). Feeding off the talent nurtured by the representative institutions, they offer undreamt-of riches to the most marketable stars. But they do nothing to build the future of the game. If the balance of power — financial and political — between the representative institutions and the franchises swings too far, the problems are likely to be more severe than the sound of members at Lords spluttering into their gin and tonics. •

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From the stand, Manasseh Sogavare, the Solomon Islands prime minister, looked on with relief and satisfaction. “Sports is the glue that holds the nation together,” he had told local reporters earlier. “It binds and unites us. It brings out the best of us, as individuals and collectively as a nation.” Regardless of “misinformation and shallow opinions” about the Pacific Games, “especially by a few foreign media,” Solomon Islands was united and proudly telling its games story to the world.

The games, which kicked off at that ceremony last Sunday night, have lifted the mood here after three years of turmoil and hardship. A dispute in November 2019 over Sogavare’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing led to ethnic-influenced rioting that trashed Honiara’s old Chinatown — the unrest ended, Sogavare’s government saved, by Australian troops and police flown in from Townsville. Then came Covid-19 and two years of isolation that shrank the economy by around 5 per cent.

Economic growth returned this year, but the mood was still gloomy. Along with the daily struggle for their livelihoods, people were mostly concerned about how their home provinces were doing, rather than the Solomons more widely, says veteran Honiara journalist Dorothy Wickham. “The only time you see Solomon Islanders proud of their own country is when there are things like this,” she says, referring to the games.

“I think that was one of the reasons the government wanted to go ahead,” Wickham adds. “They felt this country needed a unifying event. Even though it has come at a big cost, it was needed at this time. Especially after we’ve come through the ethnic crisis and people are fragmented.”

The cost of building facilities and hosting 5000 athletes is a big one for a country of 720,000 people with a per capita GDP of about A$3500, its deficit in trade and government spending covered largely by foreign aid and growing remittance flows from the 7000 seasonal workers now in Australia and New Zealand.

But the games have also became the focus of another competition that Solomon Islanders sum up in one word: geopolitics. China spent around A$120 million building playing courts, pools and the main stadium. While some feared that Honiara would be left with facilities unduly expensive to use and maintain, the stadium is far from grandiose — more like a typical Australian sporting club’s home ground than a grand final venue. New or improved halls of residence for visiting athletes are attached to seven colleges and schools around the city and will be a legacy for Solomon Islands students.

In the lead-up to the games, Chinese chargé d’affaires Ding Yonghua was dispatching influential Solomon Islanders off for tours of his country: all the provincial premiers for two weeks in October, a group of journalists for nine days in November. Two ambulances and four dental chairs arrived from a city in Guangzhou that has old trading links with the South Seas. In mid November, a squad of Chinese police installed metal detectors and video cameras at the games venues. Though only about fifteen-strong, their presence led to some overheated reports of Chinese police “patrolling” the city.

Big projects are being rolled out by Chinese contractors. One has just completed a new terminal and tarmac resurfacing at the airport in Munda, a tourism hub in the country’s west, which will enable direct Airbus flights from Brisbane. Huawei, the much-suspected Chinese telecommunications giant, will build 161 new mobile telephone towers funded by a A$96 million soft loan.

Not to be outdone, Australian high commissioner Rod Hilton has been in diplomatic overdrive, dispensing A$17 million in games assistance, including teams of sports medicine specialists. Together with Sogavare, he flew to Taro, the main town in the prime minister’s home province of Choiseul, to mark completion of the local airport’s hard surfacing and night-landing lights.

The Australian navy’s amphibious ship Choules arrived in early November to deliver two 4WD ambulances, vast numbers of uniforms and much other paraphernalia for the games, along with rolls of newsprint to keep Honiara’s two papers on the streets. A hundred Australian Federal Police officers flew in, on top of the fifty stationed in the Solomons since the 2019 troubles. New Zealand brought in two helicopters. The day the games opened, the US navy hospital ship Mercy arrived as part of the United States’ annual Pacific Partnership exercise, its great white bulk anchored off the city.

Australia won the VIP stakes at the opening ceremony, fielding governor-general David Hurley, who also used the opportunity to open new Australian aid projects. China came up only with Cai Dafeng, an architecture professor who is a vice-chairman of its National People’s Congress and leader of the China Association for Promoting Democracy, one of the eight tiny parties allowed in the NPC alongside the Chinese Communist Party. Despite the mission implied in his party’s name, Cai figures in the US sanctions list of officials alleged responsible for subverting Hong Kong’s limited democracy.

“The switch to China? I see some benefits in it,” Wickham says. “The best thing is the Americans have come back in, and the Australians are making more effort now. They are falling over themselves.”

Sogavare has played a hard game to fight back from his troubles of four years ago. Those troubles were driven by Daniel Suidani, then premier of Malaita, the country’s most populous island and historically the one that has sent out the most ambitious people to take advantage of the modern world.

Suidani, alone of the premiers, refused to back the switch to Beijing and cultivated continuing links to Taiwan. At one point he talked of a referendum about seceding. Sogavare’s supporters in the provincial government put up three motions of no-confidence to unseat him. The first failed. Street protests in the Malaita capital Auki prevented the second from getting to a vote. Early this year, though, the third was passed. Soon after, the central government used its supervisory powers to banish him from the provincial assembly, a move Suidani is still contesting in the courts.

While it lasted, Suidani’s defiance won support from anti-China hawks in Washington and Canberra. In a perhaps ill-judged move, the US government announced a US$25 million aid program for Malaita focused on sustainable village and forestry development. Honiara insisted such aid had to come through the central government, and when the US tried to send the funds via a civil contractor posing as a non-government organisation, the central government delayed work permits for its managers and experts.

Though some of those projects are visible in Malaita, Sogavare’s relationship with the Americans is still testy. A proposal from Washington in 2019 to resume sending Peace Corps volunteers, after a twenty-five-year absence, is still awaiting approval by Sogavare’s cabinet.

Although accusations of bribery have flown thick and fast around the votes of no-confidence that kept Sogavare in office and unseated Suidani — with sums of up to A$10,000 allegedly offered to MPs to switch sides — Ronnie Jethro Butala, the speaker of the Malaita assembly, says he saw no evidence of corruption. The explanation, he tells me, was simpler: Malaitans could see they were losing out.

“A lot of the Malaita public were getting tired of geopolitics,” he says. “No more funding was coming from the national government, and also the national government diverted all the projects from Malaita to other provinces. So it came to a stage where a lot of people said, ‘Okay, we are fed up of geopolitics, politics of different countries. We want the [provincial] government to go back to joining the [national] government so they look to ways to improve Malaita, especially with the roads and infrastructure.’”

As well as lacking development funding, Malaitans were being passed over for senior positions in the central government. Officials from the island used to be strongly represented among departmental secretaries, police commissioners and heads of authorities. Under Sogavare, preference has gone to officials from the Western and Choiseul provinces, the prime minister’s home ground. “A lot of experienced Malaitans now, most have found their way back to the village,” says Butala.

Still, Malaitans were used to being singled out and resented for their pushiness. “The black sheep within the flock,” he says. The idea of withdrawing from the Solomon Islands and going it alone isn’t dead. “My private view is that when you look at the resources in Malaita, [it] can become a very rich country if we have our independence,” he says. But a huge improvement in infrastructure would be needed first.

If the Pacific Games conclude successfully, Sogavare still faces the challenge of a severely stretched government budget and looming national elections, which have been postponed six months until next April. At sixty-eight, he is in his fourth period as prime minister and said to be anxious to finish his career with big achievements in infrastructure to bind the islands together.

The son of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor, Sogavare is admired for his discipline and focus. His main problem, says Wickham, is that his parliamentary supporters have little understanding of economics. “That’s his biggest downfall: he’s surrounded by politicians who just want to get rich out of the system.”

Like elections in surrounding Melanesian countries, next year’s vote  will be a contest of personalities and patronage networks. Formation of government will start only after results are declared in the country’s fifty electorates (fourteen of them in Malaita, where Suidani is forming a ticket) and MPs arrive in Honiara.

As for the geopolitics, voters will no doubt be swayed by the projects they see being built in their provinces and electorates. A good Chinese-built project would overcome the widespread antipathy this highly Christianised population feels towards China, says Wickham. “It’s like throwing a coconut into the sea — it will roll with the waves. That’s how we are reacting now.” •

The post Rolling with the waves appeared first on Inside Story.

At one stage in the early 1990s Murdoch even considered selling News Limited Australia to Cowley. A few years earlier, with the blessing of prime minister Bob Hawke and treasurer Paul Keating, News had acquired the Herald and Weekly Times, expanding his newspapers’ reach to around two-thirds of daily metropolitan circulation.

Now he wanted to be allowed to take over the major remaining proprietor, Fairfax, by creating the fiction that a Crowley-owned News Limited would be an independent, vigorous competitor. Even prime minister Paul Keating couldn’t countenance a ruse so transparently designed to feed Murdoch’s endless appetite for expansion. That Murdoch thought the government might agree to the arrangement is revealing in itself.

Cowley’s death brought a series of tributes. Murdoch described him as “one of Australia’s most outstanding executives,” and Lachlan Murdoch was equally generous: “I will always deeply appreciate his mostly calm and always sage advice to me while I was learning the ropes under him thirty years ago.”

Lachlan was clearly not referring to one legendary incident. When he arrived for work after Christmas one year sporting a Mohawk, Cowley sent him home to get a more respectable haircut. Four months later the twenty-five-year-old replaced Cowley as Australian chief executive. As the great Murdoch-watcher Neil Chenoweth reported in his biography of Murdoch, insiders joked that Cowley had “ruffled the hair apparent.”

Murdoch senior staged a mammoth farewell on Hayman Island for Cowley, with almost 300 guests. He was appointed to the News board and given other work by Murdoch, including a stint as chairman of the ill-fated Ansett airline, which News part-owned. Although Cowley was still well within the Murdoch fold, the decision to move him on was almost certainly prompted by the disastrous fate of Super League, a failed News Limited attempt to establish a rival rugby league competition in Australia.

The Nine network, part of the rival Packer empire, had a grip on the lucrative free-to-air TV rights for rugby league extending almost a decade into the future. Packer was aligned with Optus, meanwhile, and Murdoch with Telstra in a struggle to establish a viable presence in the infant pay TV market. Both were keen to buy major sporting rights to attract new customers, and to do that they needed to form alliances with the free-to-air networks that held the broadcast rights for the major sports.

Seeing the road blocked by existing contracts, and seeking to exploit discontent among rugby league clubs, News set out to start its own competition. With great secrecy, using large sign-on fees and the prospect of much higher pay, Cowley, Lachlan and their team signed up many players and coaches.

Bad blood and legal challenges were inevitable. In court in early 1996, Packer won the first round on nearly every count. Justice James Burchett found that Murdoch and his executives “were using the financial power of News Limited to corrupt targeted individuals.” But then, with a nice symmetry, the appeal judges found overwhelmingly in favour of Murdoch, upholding his appeal on sixty of sixty-one points. He had won the legal battle but was destined to lose the war.

When two rival leagues took to the field in 1997, the crowds and the TV audiences were small and excitement lacking. Financial reality forced Murdoch to negotiate a deal with Packer: Nine would retain free-to-air rights and the two media groups would found a single competition. At least as expensively for Murdoch, Packer was given the right to buy half of News’s stake in Foxtel at cost price — an important step in the emergence of an Australian pay TV monopoly.

By the time of its surrender, News had lost around $550 million, according to Chenoweth’s estimate, not to mention the continuing cost of having Packer share Foxtel. This failure, probably Murdoch’s worst in Australia, was a result of News’s belief that its financial strength could overwhelm competitors and sweep away existing agreements.

In its usual manner, News Limited had made enemies along the way. Australian Rugby League’s John Quayle thought “the propaganda [their papers] churned out against us day after day was unparalleled in its bias and its disregard for truth and reality.”

Key figures in the company had also expanded their lists of enemies. When one of the most historically important clubs, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, was excluded from the new league, its supporters rebelled. The club staged a march of 80,000 fans, the biggest gathering in Sydney since the end of the Vietnam war, which Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph reported on page sixty-five.

One of the South Sydney leaders was popular TV personality Andrew Denton. Years later, after the Australian’s Saturday magazine editor Bruce Guthrie ran a feature on Denton, editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell told Guthrie Lachlan had called from New York, “very pissed off” that Denton had received favourable publicity.

After his departure as Australian head of News, Cowley dropped out of the media spotlight, only to dramatically reappear in 2014 in the pages of Fairfax’s Australian Financial Review.

Journalist Anne Hyland had contacted Cowley about the collapse of what had purported to be the world’s largest carbon farm. Cowley was chair of the major shareholder in the scheme, R.M. Williams Agricultural Holdings, which also faced bankruptcy. The interview, taped by Hyland, was to be on the record.

After talking about the problems at R.M. Williams, Hyland says that Cowley, unprompted, gave his views on several other subjects. One of those subjects led to her main story, on Saturday 31 May, under the headline “Elisabeth Should Be Running Murdoch Empire, Says Cowley.”

Lachlan’s sister Elisabeth is the smartest of Rupert’s offspring, Cowley said, and should succeed Rupert. “Both James and Elisabeth are much smarter than [Lachlan] is,” according to Cowley. “I like Lachlan. He’s a nice man, but he’s not a great businessman. He’s not a big and good decision-maker.”

There was more: “The problem is now Rupert doesn’t have many people around him [who] tell him the things he doesn’t want to hear” — an implicit criticism of the recent replacement of Kim Williams as Australian chief executive with Julian Clark. Cowley also described the Australian as “pathetic.”

Cowley’s retreat and News Corp’s retribution were immediate. On the day after Hyland’s article appeared Cowley said he had been misled and misquoted. He denied calling the Australian pathetic and declared it to be the best newspaper in the country. Another day later, a front-page article by the Australian’s media editor, Sharri Markson, began by saying Cowley was seeking legal advice. He had told her he didn’t recall making some of the reported comments and that others had been taken out of context.

Rupert and Lachlan both refused to comment, but others in their camp were happy to leap into the breach. The most strident was former News Limited chief executive John Hartigan, who concluded by saying, “I’m sure my many former colleagues share with me in offering sympathy to someone so gripped by delusion.”

Cowley’s humiliation was not yet complete. Inside the same edition of the Australian an “exclusive” by media reporter Darren Davidson revealed that Cowley had asked the Murdochs for money for his struggling venture and that Lachlan had said no. Davidson also noted that Hyland had omitted Cowley’s role as the “architect of News’s disastrous attempt to create a rugby super league in the 1990s, a mess Mr [Lachlan] Murdoch cleared up.”

This corporate history is a little too neat. Lachlan was not the driver of Super League, but he was present at nearly all the key meetings, and Cowley would never have pursued the plan without first getting Rupert’s blessing. But the reaction to Hyland’s article had served as a stern lesson for any other employee thinking of publicly questioning Rupert’s wisdom or Lachlan’s ability.

Six weeks later, the Australian celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a gala dinner. Apart from Rupert himself, Cowley was the person most involved in getting that venture off the ground. Despite reportedly receiving an invitation, he was absent. •

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For example: Leigh tells of the Australian middle-distance runner Peter Norman, who once stood on the Olympic podium with two Black American placegetters as they raised their fists in protest against their country’s racism. Norman, white, a devout member of the Salvation Army, and wearing the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, was in full support.

This was in 1968, when the White Australia policy still hadn’t been fully dismantled. On his return to Australia Norman copped sometimes vicious criticism, in the midst of which he was invited by a Methodist minister in suburban Melbourne to preach from his pulpit. The minister was Leigh’s grandfather. More than four decades on, in 2012, the minister’s grandson moved a parliamentary motion in posthumous apology to Peter Norman for the obloquy he had endured. The motion was carried, unanimously.

Along with a fluent pen, a family tradition of Christian socialism and gilt-edged training in economics, Leigh owes a debt to organised sport. He’s a self-confessed sports tragic who competes in triathlons, marathons and the like, and his latest book Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society & a Stronger Economy pursues the nice idea that if Australian “business” were as well organised and competitive as Australian sport, the economy would be as productive as the field of dreams.

Where hyper-competitive and well-regulated sporting Australia has gone from one success to another, corporate Australia has been given an easy ride and grown fat, not very competitive, not very innovative, not very good at lifting productivity or wages, and very, very profitable. In other words, Australian capital has enjoyed a thirty-year romp on the back of a disempowered working class.

Leigh doesn’t use such dirty language, of course, and he refrains from mentioning that the romp really got going under a government led by a Labor prime minister trained in economics and a treasurer surrounded by staffers and financial journalists dazzled by the newly fashionable neoliberal version of economics. Leigh is constrained by his day job, and he is limited by his discipline, particularly when he uses its lens to examine things other than the economy. Education, for example.

Schooling was a particular interest of Leigh’s when he was a professor of economics at the ANU. His work found, among other things, that the productivity of schooling has been falling since the 1960s (more spending, worse outcomes), and that declining “teacher quality” (ie. lower entry standards) is associated with lower “teacher effectiveness” (ie. student scores in standardised tests). From there it is but a short distance to conclude that if we fix teacher quality, up will go effectiveness along with the productivity of schooling. In sport, he says, great coaching makes all the difference; so too teaching in schools. He even suggests that “attracting and retaining great teachers is perhaps the best single thing that we could do to create a more affluent and equitable society.”

How come? Well, careful studies by economists have shown that with more schooling comes increased self-control, reduced crime, more civic engagement, better health and higher incomes. So, QED, more great teachers make more happy, healthy, wealthy and wise citizens, and hence a more affluent and equitable society.

Well, it might look like that to economics, but it’s not necessarily like that at all. Coaching can change who wins, but it doesn’t make more medals. Income, health, civic-mindedness (and the lack of them) are less products of schooling than properties of the destinations, the lots in life to which schooling allocates. If we look inside the box of schooling, which economics doesn’t, we can see the workings of the machine made visible by ATAR, the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, a tyranny of merit of just the kind Leigh admires in sport and, quite rightly,wants for business, but not what will provide twelve worthwhile years of schooling for all comers. More great teachers won’t change that game. •

Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society & a Stronger Economy
By Andrew Leigh | Monash University Publishing | $19.95 | 96 pages

Comment to: dean.ashenden@unimelb.edu.au

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Several decades and many books and awards later, contemplating his own experience of “the changes wrought by ageing,” Dyer has returned to the topic he thinks has been his theme all along: giving up. A passionate follower of tennis, it seemed important to finish his new book, The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings, before the retirement of “Roger.” Dyer has never met Roger Federer but it’s still just Roger, “always and only Roger.” Then, a year into the writing, Covid struck and much of the book “ended up being written while life as we know it came to an end.”

Dyer is an endlessly original writer, the author of books with arresting titles about music, art, travel and much more: But Beautiful, about jazz; Out of Sheer Rage, about D.H. Lawrence; a collection of essays, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, about almost everything except yoga. In The Last Days, he marshals testimony from these passions to explore “things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out.” It’s not “a comprehensive study of last things, or of lastness generally,” more “a congeries of experiences, things, and cultural artefacts that, for various reasons, have come to group themselves around me in a rough constellation during a phase of my life.”

A clutch of book and movie titles illustrates the pull of “The Last…”: of the Mohicans, Tycoon, Picture Show, Emperor, Year at Marienbad, Tango in Paris. Coupling The Last with Summer seems especially beguiling. There are subcategories of endings and striking examples. “We love a crook’s last heist, ‘After-this-one-I’m-out.’” Armies and artists can meet perversely quick ends after “catastrophic early success.” Some experiences, like reading Edith Wharton, are more blissful because they have been deferred, savoured nearer the end than the start of a reading life. The temple built and destroyed each year at Burning Man acquires spiritual power at speed, in part because those who come to each temporary Black Rock City know and accept that the temple is about to burn.

One way to end is to quit. That can take guts, a kind of “self-discipline normally associated with persistence.” You quit on a book that is giving you no pleasure: “Just because something’s a classic doesn’t mean it’s any good.” You quit on a film, that “unforgiving medium” where there is “not even the possibility of redemption after the first botched minutes.” You long to quit on a poetry reading, even one you are enjoying, grateful for the wind-up words: “I’ll read two more poems.”

Having quit, extra endings can be generated by Coming Back. Artists do this — Jean Rhys and Duke Ellington are among Dyer’s exemplars who did it while still alive. J.S. Bach, Nietsche and van Gogh outdid them by rejuvenating from the grave. But it’s sport that’s the home of comebacks. Tennis seems tailored to produce them. The winner must win the last point. There is no end until then, no lead that cannot be run down. Every champion has come back from the clifftop of “match point,” that single point their opponent might have won but didn’t, an ending deferred then turned around.

Without being able to read or play a note of music, Dyer has written superbly about it. Tennis he plays, twice a week, on courts beside the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica. “The glow of those four hours suffuses the whole week,” he says. It exhausts him now, leaves him unable to do much else for the rest of the day. He is constantly injured. The book must not become “an injury diary or sprain journal,” but these pains are worrying. It’s “not just tennis elbow, it’s elbow elbow.” He stockpiles tennis balls, overgrip, shoes, racquets, hoping to “goad the poor corpus into eking out some kind of on-court existence even as it announces a daily increasing reluctance to do so.”

The endings and post-retirement lives of Roger’s predecessors at the top of the men’s game get special analysis. John McEnroe wrote not one but two memoirs, Serious and But Seriously, the second “focusing on the years he’d spent reminiscing about the period covered by the previous volume.” The champion he dethroned, Bjorn Borg, seemed “heir to some non-specific Scandinavian malaise: an all-court jumble of Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Strindberg, held in check during the course of his career by a sweaty headband (or, conceivably, caused by the headband?).” Pete Sampras, whose record of fourteen Grand Slam victories Federer overtook, is “one of the most contented spirits in sport. He played a lot of tennis and then stopped playing tennis.”

It is still not clear if The Last Days made it to publication before Federer’s last day. He has not played a tournament since losing in straight sets in the quarter-finals at Wimbledon last year and has no ATP ranking for the first time in twenty-five years. Few really imagine he could win another major tournament. He has already staged his comeback, that astounding twelve months in 2017 and 2018 when, having failed to win a major since 2012, he won the Australian Open, then Wimbledon, then the Australian Open again.

He is supposed to be playing the Laver Cup in London in late September, an exhibition event where he will make up an old guard Team Europe with Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, followed by the Swiss Indoors in his hometown Basel. Attending but not playing Wimbledon two months ago, he talked about coming back “one more time,” a last summer on the lawns. Dyer would love it, but he knows it’s over. Roger Federer might get back on a court, even a centre court, but the era when “aesthetics and victory could go hand in hand” is ending.

A writer is naturally interested in how endings creep up in his chosen craft. Dyer’s poorly paid relatives looked forward to their retirements. “It was a form of promotion, practically an ambition.” Writers, he thinks, are more likely to keep to themselves their declining ability to form useful sentences or convince publishers to publish them. And “If part of the job is sitting in a chair at home with your feet up, reading, then the difference between work and retirement is imperceptible.” Retirement, for Dyer, will be “the phase of life in which I will do nothing but watch tennis.”

One of the many blurb writers who have tried to encapsulate Geoff Dyer called him “insouciant.” It is true but not wholly true. “Wouldn’t it be marvellous if it were possible to be a serious writer without taking oneself at all seriously?” he muses. “Not just socially, that’s easy…; I mean while actually doing the work.” Having published eleven books of non-fiction and four novels, Dyer has lived with the daily effort of finishing projects while fearing each might be the end of his writing life. The words wind up insouciant; the work that produces them is insistent.

Dyer writes absorbingly about Beethoven’s and Turner’s “late” periods. He contemplates adding a writer to complete the analytical triangle with the German composer and English painter, but rethinks the device when he realises he has one already.

At the US Open in 2021, like everyone else, Dyer was stunned by Emma Raducanu’s victory. In only her fourth tour-level tournament, the eighteen-year-old won her way through three qualifying rounds to make the main draw, then seven matches in a row without dropping a set. No qualifier had ever made the final, the last match, of a Grand Slam. Even more startling: Geoff Dyer found he was “starting to forget about Roger.”

A year on, the players are back at Flushing Meadow for the 2022 Open and Raducanu has been knocked out in the first round. Dyer might be in New York, or watching on television. As likely, he’ll be out in California, on the Ocean View courts, his “long limbs flailing away,” chasing down every ball he can. “I’m not going anywhere but if I were I’d be going out on my shield even if the shield, in my case, is a desk.” •

The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings
By Geoff Dyer | Canongate | $39.99 | 283 pages

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A Hungarian player, Ervin Zádor, was punched off the ball by a Soviet opponent, and left the pool with blood streaming down his face. The Hungarians claimed they had been instructed to avoid physical confrontation, and that the Soviets had made offensive remarks during the match. “We were told we must win, but don’t fight, don’t box and don’t play rough,” Hungarian captain Dezső Gyarmati said afterwards. The crowd at the Olympic pool quickly identified who they thought were the sinners and the sinned against, cheering the Hungarians and booing the Soviets when they left the pool at the end of the game.

Those who weren’t at the pool but had access to a television would have seen for themselves what was going on. All three networks — the ABC, HSV-7 and GTV-9 — were there to record the match, but only GTV-9 had compelling footage of what was happening under the water. “We had put all our cameras in the hands of our fledgling producers and one of the most enterprising of them discovered there were glass portholes on the sides of the Olympic swimming pool,” the station’s managing director, Colin Bednall, explained. “We secretly put a camera lens to one of the portholes.”

The lens revealed just how hard the Hungarians worked to provoke their Soviet opponents. “Those parts of the body the Hungarians worked on were well below the surface of the water,” Bednall pointed out. Hungary went on to win the gold medal, and the team was roundly cheered at an emotional medal ceremony.

Before the Soviets had cracked down in Budapest, the Hungarian capital had been in the grip of rising anti-Soviet feeling, driven by a suspicion that Moscow was taking advantage of its smaller ally, especially by paying bargain prices for the country’s uranium. A poor harvest and shortages of fuel were driving discontent and disillusionment, and the presence of Soviet troops was a constant reminder of Russian oppression. In neighbouring Poland a new leader, Władysław Gomułka, was promising to distance his country from Soviet control. Some Hungarians hoped their nation would take a similar path.

Students had gathered in Budapest in October and endorsed a sixteen-point plan that demanded major economic reforms, restoration of free speech, free multi-party elections, total equality in relations between Hungary and the Soviet Union, and the removal of all Soviet troops. On 23 October more than 200,000 protesters marched on the parliament, and later in the evening toppled the huge bronze statue of Stalin that had been erected in 1951.

How the Canberra Times reported the polo match in its 7 December 1956 edition. Trove

An attempt by the insurgents to capture the radio station so that it would broadcast the sixteen points turned ugly, and as night became dawn a battle between the secret police and the revolutionaries left twenty-one people dead. The government fell, and a new administration under the liberal Imre Nagy emerged. For several days, comparative calm prevailed, with initial agreement from Moscow for this new regime to exist within the Soviet orbit. But reality was about to show otherwise.

Some members of the Hungarian Olympic team in Budapest were alarmed and profoundly moved by what had happened. The uprising’s practical consequence for the Olympic team was that the two French planes chartered to take them to Australia could not land at the Soviet-controlled airfield in the capital. The planes went to Prague instead, and the team members had to find their way there. The Hungarians climbed aboard five buses that took them to Bratislava; from there they took a train to Nymburk, not far from Prague.

Once there, they held a team meeting to discuss what they should do. Some of the athletes thought the revolutionaries had finally seen off the Soviet troops, and they should go to Melbourne under the new Hungarian flag that the students had carried in Budapest. There was no doubt, the team decided after a vote, that they should continue on to Melbourne. But in the five days it took the two French planes to get to Melbourne, the situation in Budapest deteriorated.

By the time the Hungarian Olympic team arrived in Australia, the Soviet army had re-established bloody control of the city. The Nagy government had been overthrown, and 200,000 Soviet troops had swept into Hungary. The death toll was a grim reminder of Moscow’s determination to snuff out any signs of resistance.

Four Dutch athletes, an official and a coach were already in Melbourne when their country’s national Olympic committee sent a telegram: “At extraordinary meeting the Dutch Olympic participation to withdraw due to Hungary. Leave Olympic Village. Find other place to stay. Wear civilian clothes — if impossible remove [national Olympic] badge… Cancel all hotel reservations but reserve Hotel Windsor… Sorry all the best.” It was a sudden end to the Dutch athletes’ dreams. Some were in tears, but there was no doubt about their nation’s motives for their withdrawal: to emphasise the point, it donated 100,000 guilders to the victims of the violence in Hungary.

The Swiss, legendarily neutral, had a harder time reaching a decision. To send its team to Melbourne, the country’s Olympic committee required unanimous support from its national sports federations, but that wasn’t forthcoming after the events in Hungary, so the Swiss decided not to attend. The country’s most senior Olympic official, Otto Mayer, was the International Olympic Committee chancellor; he called the withdrawal a “disgrace.” Although the Swiss changed their minds, it was too late to send the whole team.

Five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — prevaricated, eventually agreeing to compete nine days before the opening. A “new” team was also on its way — a united German team, which meant both East and West Germany would compete under a common flag and uniform. Spain pulled out in solidarity with Hungary, implying that it didn’t relish the prospect of fraternising with communists.

The world was watching: international photographers capturing the Games. Keystone Press/Alamy

Then came the big one: Communist China pulled out too, because the Republic of China — known at one time as Formosa, and now generally known as Taiwan — was competing. The official government mouthpiece in Beijing stated: “This artificial splitting of China cannot be tolerated.” It had stressed that only one China could be recognised at Olympic level, and it was not Chiang Kai-shek’s little domain. Formosa, according to Beijing, was no more than a province of China. And the circumstances on the ground revealed how a low-level mistake could feed into a high-level diplomatic stand-off.

At the official opening of the Olympic Village the Australian army corporal in charge of the national flags was approached by a Chinese journalist and told that he was preparing the wrong flag for the Republic of China. Taking this in good faith, the corporal went off and returned with another Chinese flag — that of Communist China. When it was hoisted on the flagpole allocated to Formosa, all kinds of hell broke loose within the Formosan team. “It’s inexcusable,” exclaimed one member. “We will protest.” The contrite corporal admitted his ignorance: “I didn’t know the difference in the flags, but I certainly do now.”

The correct flag was reinstated, but not without offending a mainland Chinese journalist, who confronted organising committee chairman Wilfrid Kent Hughes because he was insulted by his country’s flag being taken down. Kent Hughes had just finished apologising to the Republic of China representative and now found himself trying to placate the other China. He told the journalist that the Communist China flag would be raised when the team arrived in the village. When the discussion continued, Kent Hughes told the journalist he was too busy to continue the discussion but was happy to resume it the next day.

“This is a free country and I am entitled to talk to you,” the Chinese journalist said.

“Yes, it’s so free I don’t have to listen to you,” Kent Hughes replied, and walked off.

The next day Communist China announced it would not be taking part in the Melbourne Olympics.

That made seven nations no longer coming to Melbourne. None of it had anything to do with how far away Australia was from Europe or Asia. It had little to do with the calibre of the competition, the weather, the time of year the Games were held, or the cost. It was about the cold war and international sensitivities. Melbourne became the first Olympic Games affected by international boycotts.

How Melbourne would respond to the Soviet Union’s participation was set well before Suez or Hungary, when the Melbourne organising committee made it clear that no Iron Curtain countries would be given special protection. The committee’s chief executive, William Bridgeford, told the international press that Australia had made it clear to the Russians that they would be treated just like everyone else in Melbourne. “We couldn’t segregate them if we wanted to,” he said. “The Olympic Village is the only place where we can house and feed the athletes.”

The statement was a sensible and practical response to the anxiety surrounding the biggest bear in the cold war woods. No one had the time or inclination to do the Russians any favours. The events in Hungary only confirmed that treating the Russian athletes like every other athlete was the best policy.

That wouldn’t prevent one arm of the Australian government having special plans for them. ASIO had been preparing for the Games for more than twelve months. It was well aware of the potential dangers of having so many communists in the country at the one time. The fallout from Suez and Hungary, although never part of ASIO’s original planning, added another layer of complexity to the task.

ASIO believed it needed to monitor for three possibilities. One was that communist agents might use the Games as cover for their own intelligence operations. Another was the potential assassination threat to former diplomats Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov in retaliation for their defection to Australia two years earlier. The couple were moved to a safe house in Queensland for the duration of the Games, just to make sure they were out of the way. And the third concern was the possibility of athletes and officials seeking political asylum, a likelihood that increased in the aftermath of the Hungarian uprising.

After liaising with the Department of External Affairs and several others, ASIO got cabinet approval to establish a process for dealing with potential defectors or “refugees.” A safe house and flat were set up in Victoria — other states were told to have a similar arrangement in place in case it were needed — and ASIO officers were put on rosters to ensure there was always someone available to activate the plans.

The Hungarian community in Melbourne had been following the events back home closely, and turned out in force at Melbourne’s Essendon airport to meet the team when it arrived on the evening of 12 November. Joseph Csonka, the head of the local Hungarian Association, declared that he and others would ask every Hungarian on the team if they intended to stay in Australia. If they said yes, he would submit their names to the government to be considered for political asylum.

The Argus didn’t care for such messages at all, declaring in an editorial that Csonka had “dismayed” Melbourne. “It is dangerous impertinence for Dr Csonka — speaking for people who themselves are guests of Australia — to provoke a political explosion that could so deeply embarrass us,” thundered the paper. “It’s plain bad manners for him to try to set friend against friend in the Hungarian team — and incite angry hostility against other competitors who are also our guests… SO STAY AWAY FROM OUR VISITORS, DR CSONKA AND FRIENDS.”

The message revealed a superficial understanding of what exactly had happened in Hungary, and underlined a naive view that overseas politics was something you declared at Australian immigration control and surrendered at the gate. At Olympic Village, the communist flag of Hungary had been replaced by a new flag, one ordered by the Nagy government. At the airport the gathered Hungarians sang the old national anthem that had existed before the communists, and tears were shed. In Canberra the prime minister pledged Australia would take 3000 Hungarian refugees.

When the planes carrying Hungarian refugees landed three weeks later, the ninety men, women and children on board were just the first of those whom Australia was committed to housing — and there was growing evidence that 3000 would not be enough. The United States announced it was boosting its original figure of 5500 refugees to 21,500. The new Soviet-backed Hungarian government was vigilant at its border with Austria, and reports emerged of between 1800 and 2000 people being caught at the border every day and taken to Hungarian camps.

The members of the group that landed at Mascot airport on the morning of 3 December all had stories to tell. One couple was reunited after having been separated for eight years — the man had stayed in Budapest getting ready to join his wife in Melbourne, but it took the uprising to sweep away all the barriers to their reunion. A diminutive resistance fighter named Ferenc Ritter, who was married to a double-bass player in a Hungarian orchestra, hid in his double-bass case to ensure they crossed the border into Austria safely.

For Professor Islvan Pavlovitz, there was also the incentive of coming to a country where barracking at a football match was allowed. The professor of bacteriology at Budapest Technical University had been arrested, put in jail, and dismissed from his university post for barracking too loudly in support of a Hungarian soccer team playing a visiting Soviet side. When he was talking to Australian immigration officials in Vienna, the professor asked the question: “Is barracking at football matches banned or restricted in Australia?” When he was told that barracking was fine, Pavlovitz decided Australia was for him.

The United Nations deputy high commissioner for refugees, John Read, outlined the extent of the humanitarian challenge: 92,000 Hungarians had arriv-ed in Austria after the uprising, but as of the start of December, only 22,000 could be accommodated in new homes around the world. What was to become of the other 70,000? Two days after the first group of Hungarians arrived in Australia, the government announced it would take another 2000 under assisted passage agreements. More would need to follow them.

Just as ASIO director-general Charles Spry had anticipated, a sizeable number of Hungarian athletes didn’t want to go home. Hungarian officials had been coy in the build-up to the Games about whether there would be any defections, but it became clear as the Games went on that discussions were taking place among the team members and with local supporters who were prepared to help some athletes stay. In line with Spry’s advice, the Hungarians received no encouragement from Australian officials or government representatives to defect. The entreaties fell on deaf ears.

At the end of the Games, sixty-one athletes and officials, including forty-eight Hungarians, refused to return home. Many of the Hungarians travelled to the United States on what was billed “the Freedom Tour,” underwritten by magazine Sports Illustrated, which was owned by the fervent anti-communist Henry Luce. Only six Hungarian team members — including steeplechase silver medallist Sándor Rozsnyói, wrestler Bálint Galántai, kayaker Zoltán Szigeti, and sprinter Géza Varasdi — stayed in Melbourne. •

This is an edited extract from Nick Richardson’s 1956: The Year Australia Welcomed the World, published by Scribe.

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In 1984 the high-profile businessman and Liberal Party identity John Elliott, president of the Carlton Football Club, led an initiative to form a breakaway league. The VFL responded by changing its governance structure and redoubling its efforts to corporatise the sport. Pressure mounted to close grounds and merge clubs, or to move some clubs interstate to tap into new “‘markets.” Fitzroy — a team based in an old but now gentrifying inner suburb — was still enjoying fair success on the field in the mid 1980s but only narrowly averted an attempt to move it to Brisbane in 1986 (a move that would eventually be forced in 1996).

Efforts to merge or move clubs provoked lively grassroots resistance on the part of supporters for whom the Saturday afternoon ritual was a link not only with a loved place — the home ground — but also with a way of life pursued by their parents and grandparents. The defiant and successful movement in late 1989 to save the struggling western suburban Footscray from a merger with Fitzroy drew on loyalties to class, club and community, a sense that others looked down on the western suburbs, a feeling that malign forces were trying to destroy something precious and loved.

For those who fought to save Footscray, one of the problems was the VFL’s obsession with creating a national league, one that would extend the code — or “product” — to Sydney and Brisbane as well as encompass the major football-playing states of South Australia and Western Australia. By 1991 what was now called the Australian Football League included clubs from all five mainland states.

For a time it seemed that rich men would become not merely the presidents but also the owners of teams. The major experiment of this kind involved the Sydney Swans, a club that emerged from the northward relocation of the declining South Melbourne team in 1981. The effort to place the Swans on a secure financial base and promote the game to a Sydney audience flushed out “medical entrepreneur” Dr Geoffrey Edelsten, then unfamiliar to most members of the public but better known to the Australian Taxation Office.

Since graduating in medicine from Melbourne University, Edelsten had enjoyed a colourful if rather chequered career as a medico, businessman and playboy. He had produced pop records, owned a nightclub, established his own flying doctor service, run health studios, set up a high-tech pathology laboratory in the United States, and offered a Family Health Plan in Sydney — which looked to police rather like a medical insurance business minus the necessary licence. He had even sponsored the Bluebirds, a troupe of dancing girls whose presence at Carlton home games was intended to add an American-style razzamatazz and sexiness.

By the mid 1980s — now grey-haired but still with an eye for female talent — he had married a professional model, Leanne, more than twenty years his junior. Edelsten was now best known for operating a chain of Sydney surgeries that, in their decor and design, had more in common with brothels than most people’s image of a humble general practitioner’s rooms. But then Edelsten was no humble general practitioner, even if all his patients needed to do to enjoy the luxurious facilities provided by “the Hugh Hefner of medicine” was to flash their green and gold Medicare card.

“His surgeries are decked out in gold, with salmon pink velvet couches, enormous chandeliers and mink-covered examination tables,” reported one journalist. “Gold-clad hostesses and a small robot offer refreshments and educational advice to patients, who are told that if they wait more than ten minutes to be attended to they are entitled to a free Instant Lottery ticket.” The surgeries also came with white baby grand pianos; a pianist was sometimes paid to entertain patients while they waited.

The glitz of the surgeries was matched by the Edelstens’ private life. There was the $6 million home in Dural and luxury cars with numberplates that said “Macho,” “Spunky” and “Groovy.” And there were Edelsten’s gifts to Leanne, which supposedly included a pink helicopter — that it was pink Edelsten always denied, but many people swear that they saw it — and, the Daily Telegraph reported, “a $100,000 pink Italian sports car lined with white mink.”

In late July 1985 the VFL agreed to award the licence for the Swans to Edelsten in preference to the bid of another businessman, Basil Sellers (a man “of much more conservative bearing,” according to the Canberra Times). The league needed to get the Swans noticed in a tough market, and Edelsten appeared to be just the kind of showman capable of helping it out. Indeed, the syndicate to which he belonged played up the glamour as a means of distinguishing itself from the other bidders. It promoted the Edelstens as embodying Sydney’s colour, playfulness and hedonism in contrast with the sober restraint of Melbourne. Edelsten exuded flamboyance, wealth and success, and Leanne — present when her husband learned that his Swans bid had been successful and wearing, according to one report, “a sequined white jumper, red leather pants and wet-look white thigh-length boots” — was central to his image.

Media reports said the price was $6.3 million, a figure that casual observers assumed had been carved out of a much greater fortune, but it soon became clear that the deal was a rather more tangled one. Edelsten eventually handed over about $3 million, mainly other people’s money. It looked increasingly as if he was really a frontman for other interests, but there was no denying his ability to attract notice. He was helped by a spectacular, long-maned, blond full-forward named Warwick Capper, who wore striking white boots and shorts even tighter and more revealing than the usual skimpy kind. He, too, briefly became an image of Sydney spunkiness and flamboyance.

Edelsten’s association with the Swans gave his surgeries publicity that allowed him to evade the prohibition on doctors advertising their services, but it was the doctor’s business interests outside football that caused him problems soon after the award of the licence. A Labor senator, George Georges, alleged under parliamentary privilege that Edelsten was the “Dr X” named in a parliamentary committee report as being investigated for medical fraud. Edelsten took out a full-page advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald declaring his innocence. An exposé of Edelsten’s business methods in the satirical magazine Matilda, which imputed various forms of lurid criminality, added further damage and provoked a lawsuit.

Worse followed: Edelsten soon stood accused of having hired the notorious hit man Christopher Dale Flannery to assault a patient who had given him trouble. He had already stood aside as Swans chairman but still had a long way to fall. He subsequently became bankrupt, divorced, and was struck off the medical register and sent to prison. And as the 1980s passed into mythology, his and Leanne’s lifestyle was seen to epitomise the era’s excesses. •

This article draws on The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (Black Inc., 2015).

The post Dr X meets his end appeared first on Inside Story.

Prior to its encounter with North Macedonia on 31 March, Germany had won eighteen World Cup qualifiers in a row. Just days earlier, it had beaten Iceland at home and Romania, the most highly rated team in its group, in Bucharest. “The most important question is not who will win this game,” read one pre-match assessment, “but by how much the winner of the 2014 World Cup will prevail.” After all, Germany had triumphed in the World Cup four times and in the European championship thrice, whereas North Macedonia had never even qualified for either tournament.

The teams played in an empty stadium, but that could hardly count as an excuse for the German loss. At least the lack of a crowd saved the home team the humiliation of being booed by its fans while North Macedonia proceeded to its well-deserved win. Germany’s only goal came courtesy of a questionable penalty decision. German coach Joachim “Jogi” Löw’s team was outfoxed, outplayed and outclassed by a disciplined but by no means outstanding opponent.

This was not the first time Löw and his men have stumbled badly. In a first for Germany, they were eliminated in the first round of the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Then, in November 2020, they went down by six goals to Spain. As the calls for Löw to be sacked became louder, he announced in early March that he would retire right after Euro 2020, the European championship postponed until June this year by the pandemic.

Löw has been Germany’s head coach since July 2006. His contract was extended for another four years in 2018, well before Germany’s dismal performance in Russia, and it seemed at the time as if he was going to be around forever. The youngest player in the current German side, Jamal Musiala of Bayern Munich, wouldn’t be able to remember a time when Löw was not in charge of Germany’s national team.

Depending on whom you ask, managing the national side is either the most important job on offer in Germany, or a close second behind the task of running Germany’s government. Angela Merkel has been in office even longer than Löw, since November 2005. Her contract was last renewed in 2017. She too is on her way out, and the parallels don’t end there.

Lately, most Germans have been as dismayed by Merkel’s team as they have been by Löw’s. That’s mostly to do with Germany’s response to Covid-19.

Germany did well in the first wave of the pandemic during last year’s northern spring. The rate of infections and the number of fatalities were much lower than in most other European countries, let alone the United States and South America. But the authorities reacted too late and not decisively enough when the second wave began building in October, even though the expert calls for a hard lockdown were hard to ignore. After shops and schools eventually had to close, the country got through that wave as well, but the price — in terms of deaths from Covid-19 — was much higher than in spring.

Early this year, virologists predicted that Germany’s caseload would once more go up because of the mutations that had emerged in Britain, South Africa and Brazil. From mid February, case numbers began climbing as the prevalence of the so-called British variant, also known as B.1.1.7, grew. On Monday, the rate of new infections per 100,000 over seven days reached 136, the highest incidence in twelve weeks. It keeps rising. The virologists’ predictions were proving accurate, but the federal and state governments still couldn’t agree on measures to stop this third wave of the pandemic, or at least flatten the curve.

Not only did the incidence figures keep rising, so did the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care wards: from about 2800 in mid March to more than 4600 on Monday. Soon, more Covid-19 patients are likely to be in intensive care than at the height of the second wave. Because most people aged seventy-five and over have been vaccinated, hospitals are increasingly treating young people. Their chance of survival is better than that of octogenarians, but many of them will suffer what is popularly called Long Covid and referred to by scientists as post-acute Covid-19.

Meanwhile, the number of people who have been fully immunised is still too small to make a real difference. As of 11 April, about 6 per cent of the population had received both doses of any of the three available vaccines, and only about 16 per cent have been given at least one.

Behind the sluggish immunisation campaign is a shortage of vaccines. That can’t be blamed on the German authorities, because the European Commission, rather than the Merkel government, was responsible for their procurement. It’s true that Merkel lobbied her European colleagues to agree to a concerted approach rather than let each EU country buy its own supplies, but that was the right call. If the poorer EU countries had missed out, the recriminations would have damaged the European Union beyond repair. Countries such as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary and Slovenia have already suffered disproportionate human losses because their hospitals are not as well equipped as those of Germany, Denmark, Austria or the Netherlands.

But the German government could be blamed for sowing confusion about the AstraZeneca vaccine. First it deemed the vaccine unsuitable for those aged sixty-five or more; now it considers the vaccine too dangerous for the under-sixties. The message that the benefits of this vaccine far outweigh its risks didn’t get through, and now a considerable number of those due to be immunised are frightened to receive one of only three vaccines available in Germany.

Strictly speaking, Merkel and her ministers aren’t responsible for the dilatory response to the spread of the virus either. It’s up to Germany’s local and state governments to impose curfews and shutdowns of schools, childcare centres, shops and restaurants. Throughout the pandemic, the federal government has tried to convince the states to agree to uniform measures. Merkel has met regularly with the sixteen state premiers, although such heads-of-government consultations are not a formal feature of German federalism.

Usually lasting many hours, the meetings have sought to bridge the divide between Merkel, the trained scientist who tends to argue for more measures to halt the spread of the virus, and some of the state premiers, who want fewer restrictions. While these meetings have usually concluded with an agreement, individual premiers have often been quick to distance themselves from decisions and deal with the pandemic as they see fit, oblivious to expert advice and seemingly unconcerned about the consequences.

The last such consultation began on the afternoon of 22 March and lasted until 2.30 the next morning. Its only significant result was the declaration of additional public holidays on the Thursday and Saturday before Easter, thereby creating a five-day “rest period” during which schools and businesses would be closed and the pandemic, it was hoped, slowed down. Only a day later, though, Merkel had to concede that the plan wasn’t feasible. She then apologised — uncharacteristically — for announcing and then cancelling the measure. But she had no plan B. Each state has continued to prescribe its own measures, and it’s become impossible to keep abreast of the myriad different rules and sanctions.

The patchwork approach is partly explained by electoral pressures. Armin Laschet, the Christian Democrat in charge of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Markus Söder, the premier of Bavaria and head of the Christian Democrats’ Bavarian sister party, are both vying to lead the conservatives in September’s federal election campaign and then succeed Merkel as chancellor. They have used the pandemic to sharpen their public profiles: Laschet by arguing against lockdowns and other restrictions, Söder by endorsing Merkel’s hard line. With five state elections this year, other premiers have also sought to impress voters first and deal with the pandemic second.

States with comparatively low infection rates refuse to agree to measures designed to flatten the curve in high-incidence states. And then there are the usual differences of opinion between states led by Social Democrats and those led by Christian Democrats, and between East German and West German state governments. That some premiers seem to find it difficult to understand how the virus spreads hasn’t helped.

To say that Merkel isn’t to blame for any of this would not be entirely correct. For one, her decision to relinquish the leadership of her party a few months before the end of her last term in office has undermined the authority she needs to make the state premiers act in unison. And when it became clear that individual states weren’t doing enough to contain the disease, the federal government should have stepped in.

It will try to do so, belatedly, this week. Merkel cancelled the heads-of-government meeting that had been scheduled for Monday. Parliament will debate a bill that would give the federal government the power to impose lockdowns and curfews. But such an initiative should have come much earlier.

A fortnight ago, Merkel took the unusual step of participating in a live one-hour interview with Anne Will, whose eponymous program on Sunday evenings, immediately after the latest episode of the popular crime drama Tatort, is the most-watched talk show on German television. In the interview, she reprimanded the premiers (singling out two who belong to her own party) and threatened a federal move to take control of Germany’s response to the pandemic. At last, things seemed to be moving in the right direction. But then she waited for almost two weeks. Perhaps she was hoping that such a move would prove unnecessary, or perhaps she was just dithering.

And then there was the federal health authorities’ decision to remove Spain’s Balearic Islands from the list of risk areas just in time for the Easter holidays. Maybe they thought nobody would book a trip — and it’s true that the airlines were offering hardly any flights to Mallorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands, which is Germans’ favourite holiday destination (sometimes called Germany’s seventeenth state). But around 45,000 holiday-makers descended on Mallorca over Easter, proving that the laws of supply and demand also work during a pandemic. Because of the time lag between infections and symptoms, it remains to be seen what impact this mass gathering will have.

Meanwhile, the reputation of the ruling Christian Democrats has suffered a further blow after several of its members of parliament were accused of corruption. In some cases, the politicians concerned had received large amounts of money — €660,000 in one instance — for putting the suppliers of medical masks in touch with the federal health ministry when it was desperately seeking large quantities of masks last year.

Looming above all of this is the question of why on earth the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party have been unable to nominate a successor for Merkel. It’s been more than fourteen months since her designated successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, fell on her sword after she failed to prevent collusion between her party and the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD) in the East German state of Thuringia. Since then the speculation has been endless: first about who would succeed her, and then about whether her successor Armin Laschet would be the conservatives’ candidate for chancellor. The conflict between Laschet and the Bavarian premier Markus Söder entered an extra round on Monday, with both receiving a ringing endorsement by their respective parties.

Germans, regardless of their political persuasion, age or class, are exasperated. A majority is in favour of tougher restrictions to curb the spread of the virus. A vocal minority, represented in parliament by the AfD, refuses to believe that the virus is dangerous and wants no restrictions at all. I suspect the only reason why few outside the AfD are calling for Merkel’s resignation is that there is no one in her party who would be able to replace her.

On Saturday, the front page of Hamburg tabloid Morgenpost featured just one word in lieu of the usual article: Nichts* (nothing*). The asterisk explained: “This is what the chancellor and the state premiers have implemented to alleviate the state of emergency in the hospitals.”

The bungled response to Covid-19 didn’t come as a total surprise. Germans know that the country’s bureaucracy is slow to swing into action at the best of times. The fact that crucial technological developments seem to have bypassed the public service didn’t help. It’s no secret, for example, that federal, state and local governments have only slowly come to terms with the digital revolution. German health departments still report the number of infections by fax, rather than digitally. When schools were told that students needed to be taught remotely, some teachers took that to mean that they would simply post photocopied worksheets to their students once a week. And don’t even mention German Rail and the coverage of the mobile phone network.

But now, as Covid-19’s global reach prompts comparisons not just of infection numbers, vaccination rates and fatalities but also of government responses, German inefficiency is no longer a well-kept secret. Germans can’t keep complaining that their trains are always late but then find solace in the idea that others believe Germans are naturally more efficient. It’s the realisation that German stuff-ups are now regularly reported in the New York Times that has come as a shock.

Similarly, the millions of Germans who are convinced they would do a better job than Jogi Löw have long known about the weaknesses of Germany’s national side. Löw and his team just haven’t been that good since their triumph in Brazil seven years ago. But nobody else seemed to take much notice of the slide. That’s changed: now that Germany has succumbed to North Macedonia it is no longer possible to pretend that this was the same side that beat Brazil by six goals in the 2014 semifinal and went on to win the cup.

Germans feel that they not only need to get on top of the pandemic, they also need to restore their reputation as world champions of efficiency and innovation. They need not just to win their next qualifier — given that their opponent will be Liechtenstein, that’s perhaps not such a big challenge — but also to convince others that they are still one of the heavyweights of world football.

When it comes to football, there’s a short-term remedy. Germany just ought to field its best side — which means that Jogi Löw must admit it was a terrible mistake to tell Thomas Müller, the star performer of Champions League winner Bayern Munich, that his services were no longer required. Having Müller in the side might at least prevent the embarrassment of exiting Euro 2020 at the group stage.

Then there is the pressing question of who will be Germany’s new coach. Four of the eight clubs currently competing for this year’s title in the Champions League are coached by Germans, and their names naturally came up when Löw announced his resignation. But that’s not how the German Football Association works. It won’t appoint a Thomas Tuchel (the head coach of Chelsea) or Jürgen Klopp (who’s in charge of Liverpool); they are too independent or too flamboyant. (Not that either of them would want to give up their current gig in Britain.)

Löw’s job is more likely to go to an understudy, in the same way that Sepp Herberger’s assistant Helmut Schön became head coach in 1964, Jupp Derwall followed Schön in 1978, and Löw got the job when his immediate boss, Jürgen Klinsmann, resigned. Perhaps Germans should simply transfer their attachment from the men’s to the women’s side, which has won thirteen of its last fourteen games, including, most recently, a friendly against Australia.

Unlike Jogi Löw, Angela Merkel can’t draft somebody for her cabinet whom she had previously sent packing (although there would be no shortage of potential candidates). And, to stay with the analogy, while the Christian Democratic Union might be as conservative as the German Football Association and pick an uninspiring understudy as Merkel’s designated successor, it won’t be up to the party to appoint the next chancellor.

Germany could well do with a Jürgen Klopp of politics: somebody to motivate and inspire them as they face their next big task, curbing the emission of greenhouse gases. They also need somebody to remind them that their glasses are half full rather than half empty; after all, despite the chaos surrounding the government’s handling of the pandemic, so far proportionately fewer people have died of the virus than in eight of Germany’s nine neighbouring countries. (Only Denmark has done better.)

On 19 April, the Greens will announce who will run as their candidate for the chancellorship in September. As the Christian Democrats are only five percentage points ahead of the Greens in the latest polls, Merkel’s successor might be either of the two Green contenders, Annalena Baerbock or Robert Habeck. While neither has the charisma of a Jürgen Klopp, both would be keenly aware of the need for Germany to arrive at last in the twenty-first century. Both would lead a government intent on changing the country rather than administering the status quo. Both would know that the challenge of climate change will eventually dwarf that of Covid-19.

Germans’ concern with how their country is perceived has led them to believe that their government’s lack of action is a very recent phenomenon. But when was the last time the Merkel government did what was necessary without backtracking afterwards? Some would say that this was in 2015, during the so-called refugee crisis, but it should be remembered that the image of Merkel as an activist relies on a simple narrative: she decided that Germany should open its borders. Germany didn’t do that; it just didn’t close them. When the Merkel government swung into action, it helped negotiate a deal with Turkey to halt the flow of refugees while simultaneously tightening the asylum laws. In fact, Merkel last acted decisively in 2011, following the Fukushima accident in Japan, when her government decided to phase out Germany’s nuclear reactors.

Preoccupied as Germans are with appearances and perceptions, they tend to believe that the decline of Germany’s fortunes on the football field began after the 2014 World Cup. But the team that won the cup that year was arguably not as good — and certainly not as exciting — as the team that competed in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Germany won in 2014 because the competition was not as strong as four years earlier. In other words, the defeat at the hands of North Macedonia and the government’s ponderous response to the pandemic came after a long period of wasted opportunities. The summer of welcome in 2015 and the World Cup in 2014 just felt like moments when Germans were champions of the world. •

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Sport, of the type that so many of us consume as spectators, is also nothing if not big business. Retailers, like elite sporting organisations, used to be wary of controversies in case they alienated a swathe of their customers. Modern businesses, however, are often keen to position their brands, adapt to new demographics, or promote issues dear to their owners or chief executives. Think of Qantas and marriage equality. Or Ben and Jerry’s and just about any progressive cause.

Between the brands and the fans, what about the stars of the show? How are the players and coaches who actually “do” the sport implicated in this branding, and do they have any freedom to express their own views? What whips and reins do those who control sport — the club managers and league officials — wield?

Take the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in the United States but has evolved and spread to many countries, Australia included. One of its powerful early tokens in the United States involved NFL players “taking a knee” when the national anthem was played before major games. For his troubles, the leader of this protest, Colin Kaepernick, was pilloried by none other than the US president, and hung out to dry by his sport.

Yet the tide has turned. Kaepernick is now a heroic figure and even President Trump says he should be welcomed back. Police at BLM demonstrations are now “taking a knee” in fellowship with demonstrators. When football restarted in Australia recently, both Australian rules and rugby league teams followed suit, in solidarity with the movement.

The most prominent Australian case of a speaking-out sportsperson has been that of Israel Folau. Folau used his personal Twitter account to condemn gay people in particular, and those he sees as sinners in general. His persistence with such inflammatory remarks led to his sacking from rugby union. Rugby Australia said he had breached its code of conduct on respectful and non-discriminatory behaviour. Folau’s lawyers said his right to religious expression was being stifled. The case settled.

The formal elements of Folau’s case are familiar. An employer-imposed code of conduct is tacitly agreed to by the employee on hiring. But the employee uses his or her social media presence to make out-there comments. Rather than treat the remarks as the inane emanations of someone paid to run fast or jump high, the wider public piles on and the sport’s custodians react with disciplinary force.

Lawyers then parse distinctions like “was the employer trying to suppress the political or religious content of the speech, or was it driven only to protect its image and the values of its code?” Put this way, there is an intractable clash between an individual’s freedom of expression and the freedom of a club or league to dissociate itself from such expression.

Although Folau’s case involved speech outside work hours and workspace, some people will still sympathise with the club or the league. Not only may the sport pay young athletes handsomely, it also gives them leverage into lucrative sponsorships and a platform to speak out from. If the sport pays the piper, these people believe, it should call the tune. But even the most managerialist among us must admit that employers cannot rule over every aspect of our lives. The law must find an accommodation of sorts.

When it comes to speech on the field or at events run by a sport, however, there is little doubt where the law lies. Employers can control virtually all expressive acts on such occasions. To do so they don’t even need binding codes of conduct. They can rely on their general power of control, through the “obedience,” “loyalty” and “proper conduct” owed by employees.

These ancient duties are implied in every employment relationship by judge-made law. So a club can direct players as to how to behave and appear, at games and promotional appearances alike. The leagues themselves, which negotiate and distribute the spoils of broadcasting rights, wield similar control via the clubs and by nailing down codes of conduct.

So far, so-so, you might think. A league may be obliged by its broadcasters to keep games free of gratuitous symbols and expression. If not, what starts as a piquant sideline can quickly become commonplace and annoying. Remember streaking — those nude dashes by spectators across fields, sometimes carrying flags or with slogans emblazoned on their bodies? When streaking began in the 1970s, it felt liberating. But familiarity bred contempt, and broadcasters eventually banned the images. Today, draconian fines apply to any spectator encroaching on the sacred field.

The problem is that nothing really requires sports to wield their power consistently. Consider two instances, illustrated here. They happened some time apart, but they demonstrate the inconsistency point neatly. Each involves a player from the same famous English soccer club, Liverpool FC.

Laurence Griffiths/PA Images/Alamy

Matteo Ciambelli/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The first image shows Robbie Fowler, a Liverpool striker who now coaches in Australia. After scoring in a high-profile match in Europe in 1997, he raised his team jersey to reveal a t-shirt emblazoned with a message supporting dock workers in a long-running industrial dispute. Fowler was publicly disciplined and fined 2000 swiss francs — not for cheekily riffing off the CK (Calvin Klein) trademark but for breaching the European football association’s policy against any political logos or messages.

Contrast the second illustration, which features Liverpool’s current goalkeeper, Alisson Becker. At the end of the most celebrated match in the 2019 calendar, just as his side was raising the European Champions trophy before an audience of hundreds of millions, Becker lifted his jersey to reveal a bespoke t-shirt. His featured a cross and a heart joined by an equals sign. Read it as “Christ is love.” For his religious expression, Becker faced no sanction.

Before sporting contests it is common to see players from different creeds cross themselves, look skywards or kiss the grass. You might say, well, faith is a personal matter and superstition to quell nerves is rife in sport. But Becker’s was no private ritual; he was deliberately capturing the public stage in an identical way to Fowler. Sanctioning political but not religious expression seems an arbitrary distinction. Religion is no less divisive than politics.

The spectre of the lone star seizing centrestage is actually a fair way from the archetypal examples of sport engaging with sociopolitical expression. The more typical case involves clubs and leagues themselves coordinating the expression and requiring players to take part. Exhibit 1 in Australia is the military presence and the bugler at Anzac Day football rounds. Exhibit 2 is the singing of “Advance Australia Fair” at the start of matches. Each of these formal rituals is an expression of a certain strain of nationalism or view of history.

Not everyone in the stands takes part. The charitable view of these rituals is that they are not enforced patriotism but attempts to transcend club-versus-club tribalism by invoking a unifying theme. But critics see Exhibit 1 as a cynical co-option of veterans or, worse, of militarism. Making hay while the sun shines on the sporting field, as if it were a battlefield.

Other expressive branding exercises are more benign. Australia’s best-known rugby league club, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, long had a logo of a white rabbit on the run. More than a decade ago, it adopted a black rabbit as a variant for its home jerseys. This was not just a tweak to sell more merchandise. The club’s traditional home is Redfern and its teams have fielded many of the finest Indigenous players.

Many will say that sport is tribal enough without adding political or religious divisions to the mix. Others will say that sport is ineluctably mixed up with politics and religion. From governments targeting sporting grants at marginal seats through to Olympian-level bribery and corruption, sport is enmeshed with politics, ethno-nationalism and big finance.

From the more sublime aspects of anti-racist causes to the more ridiculous, sport easily merges into current affairs. For an example of the ridiculous, former Collingwood football coach Mick Malthouse recently made headlines accusing the AFL of selling its soul by staging a game annually in China. Malthouse called for the game to be cancelled as some kind of retribution for Covid-19. In turn, in an off-field version of an on-field brawl, he was mocked by at least one current coach and club chief executive.

Sport seems to be a kind of everyperson’s seasoning for political discourse. In return, sociopolitical controversies within sport allow its tendrils to spread from the back page to the front. At the level of the individual player or event, sports want to manage their brand. But whatever the passing effects of any expressive controversy, in the end it is all a form of profile. Oscar Wilde may have said that the only good thing about sport was that it involved special clothing. But as he also said, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” •

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Cheery patriotism, benign internationalism, girl talent, radiant humour, sheer pizzazz: it’s all here. Lines from a world away ping in my ear: “The vale of tears is powerless before you… / Monsters of the year / go blank, are scattered back.”

That was back in January 2019, at a small railway station north of Tokyo. Local primary school students’ classroom posters for the city’s 2020 Olympics, fifty in all, had — for a few days only, it turned out — taken the place of advertising boards. Pure chance had put me there, and no doubt the discovery’s random and fleeting nature was part of the delight. Now, thirteen months on, as the Olympics inch towards the finishing line — warily eyeing the coronavirus’s spurt in the outside lane — that Miyahara hour feels as distant as the moon.

In part, that’s because a year ago the Olympics (here, the term embraces the Paralympics) were still more background hum than daily buzz. The transition to a new imperial era and the detention of Nissan-Renault executive Carlos Ghosn led the news, while the big sporting fixture on the horizon was rugby’s world cup. Even broadcaster NHK’s latest year-long Sunday night historical drama, Idaten, lacked sparkle. With the ageless Takeshi Kitano as a comic-monologue rakugoka, the series told Japan’s Olympics story from 1908 to Tokyo’s hosting in 1964. Artistic flaws, premature scheduling and the chilly media landscape for national broadcasters may have contributed, but lowish ratings also hinted that the public would catch up with the Olympics at its own pace.

With this new year’s diary switch, the Games of the XXXII Olympiad (24 July–9 August) and the XVI Paralympic Games (25 August–6 September) appeared in plain sight. A wealth of trimmings — days-to-go countdowns, transport ads, hi-tech promotions, festivals, merchandise, books — was making them inescapable. A December poll asking “Is it good for Japan to host the Olympics?” found 86 per cent said yes, 12 per cent no. The most popular reason was “a good opportunity to show Japanese culture to the world.” Tokyo 2020 was nearing the last lap in some comfort.

At that very point came a pebble in the shoe. The circulating respiratory disease 2019-nCoV, at first a down-page story, hit home on 20 January, when the imminent (and routinely welcome) arrival of thousands of Chinese tourists on their new year holiday became mixed with alarm that some high-spenders might prove virus-spreaders. A Japanese coach driver and guide tested positive, as did scores of international cruise-ship passengers quarantined at Yokohama, three elderly Japanese among them dying after disembarkation. Face masks and hand sanitisers sold out. Inevitably, the Olympics entered the frame. Yoshirō Mori, octogenarian head of Japan’s Olympics Committee, gave faltering assurances that the games would go ahead, but virology professor Hitoshi Oshitani and other Japanese specialists are wary.

The first Japanese death, of a posthumously diagnosed woman in her eighties east of Tokyo, came on 13 February. It had no obvious link to Wuhan. This was a second turning point. A recent vogue word, feizu (phase) — as in atarashii (new) feizu or feizu ga kawatta (the phase has changed) — was much used, soon followed by kurasutā (cluster). The mainland incidence of the renamed Covid-19 grew daily, reaching 146 on 25 February (with another 691 on the stricken ship).

Nerves, rightly, are jangling at the prospect of Tokyo 2020 being overtaken on the home stretch. But brains are also in overdrive managing the parallel tests of containing the virus and keeping the Olympics show on the road. Japan’s spring rituals are cutting back: the Emperor’s open day on 23 February, the annual Tokyo marathon on 1 March, school graduations, companies’ welcome to fresh recruits. And more dates are crowding in.

The torch relay of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures starts on 26 March in Fukushima, site of the nuclear meltdown on 11 March 2011 (or “3.11”). Public commemorations of that day’s triple disaster in the Tōhoku region (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear), which took 18,000 lives, will also shrink, as will remembrances of Tokyo’s sarin gas attack on 20 March 1995, which killed thirteen people. Pre-Olympic training and publicity events are thinning (or, for volunteers, going online) and the sense of diminishment is widespread. Abreast of the Olympics, yes, but primarily alert to the lung-attacking illness, Japan’s public is in a very different situation from even a month ago.

For as long as the virus flourishes, the games’ destiny is on hold. Turning back, even scaling down, looks unthinkable given the funds, deals, careers and reputations at stake. It would not be Japan’s decision alone, or even mainly. Covid-19 is mandating big transnational call-offs too: flights, conventions, Formula One. If the Olympics must go because of a worldwide health emergency, they will.

In aggregate, the incipient pandemic and sporting extravaganza presage a global moment. Covid-19 already serves as another topical lesson in the current human system’s fragility, and in the Olympics’ habit of crystallising global uncertainties even as they seek to dissolve them. Even that might not earn the International Olympic Committee, or IOC, overdue scrutiny. But Tokyo 2020 and Japan’s authorities, which own the Olympics’ share of Covid-19’s fallout, can’t long avoid the glare.

At the time of writing, the official Olympics line is unchanged. News and sports bulletins still hug their own track. A Japanese cabinet office poll on 17 February found 36 per cent saying the government is handling the crisis well, 52 per cent not. The government’s latest draft policy, announced on 25 February, focuses on keeping serious cases to a minimum, reducing social mixing and then, as needed, “asking the public to stay indoors.”

Covid-19 aside, insofar as that is possible, a just-completed stay in and around Tokyo has given me an insight into the efficacy of the plans made and messages honed since the 2013 bid was won. That bid, in turn, drew inspiration from Tokyo 1964. Tokyo 2020’s use of these two legacies is also in play now — and even perhaps its link to a third, 1940’s phantom games. That said, the supremely ambitious “recovery Olympics,” its motto “united by emotion,” will not easily be given up. The rest of this article touches on four of the many local aspects of this approaching world story: Tokyo 2020’s concept, locations, hazards and 1964 prototype.

Until Covid-19 hit, Tokyo 2020 had come almost unscathed through its seven-year gestation. There had been bumps on the road, and to say these didn’t deflect progress would only be half true. The other half is that the project raced ahead of them, its eyes on a prize outranking even the games themselves: Japan’s regeneration. The twin affective levers of this strategic purpose were the host city’s magnetism and that clever promotional tag on the 2013 bid: the “recovery and reconstruction Olympics” (soon, the first term was deemed to be enough).

Embedded in the notion was a subtle linkage of domestic and international audiences. The 3.11 tragedy, two years before, was still prominent in the nation’s psyche, while in many international minds it was recalled less for its dreadful images and heartbreaking stories than for the well-reported fortitude and dignity of survivors.

In this context, “recovery” gave Tokyo’s impressive sales pitch — and then its delivery plans — a quintuple kick. It deployed global admiration for Japanese kizuna (solidarity) and energetic voluntarism in the 3.11 aftermath. It positioned the Olympics as a means both to enhance Japan’s global standing and to inject prosperity — largely via tourism — into the country’s less favoured regions, notably Tōhoku itself. It mustered to the cause the omotenashi (hospitality) awaiting visitors. It readied Japan’s domestic sectors, and citizens for the challenges to come.

And the fifth ingredient: it displayed Japan as, in effect, twice over a phoenix nation. Just as Tokyo 1964 was intended to mark a turn from post-1945 pains towards modernisation and international respectability, Tokyo 2020 would be a route from 3.11’s destruction towards a more dynamic economy and a confident, outward-looking country. A parable of redemption from ruination thus bound the two events and eras.

That uplifting story looks most credible in two parts of Tokyo: the Kasumigaoka area of Shinjuku, where a new national stadium designed by architect Kengo Kuma has replaced the 1964 one on the same site, and the giant stepping stones of reclaimed land towards Odaiba, where athletics, tennis and swimming complexes are levers of an even more comprehensive project set to pull this vast city’s centre of gravity to the southeast.

Walking from Sendagaya station in mid January, an early glimpse of Kuma’s feat is the unobtrusive fit of his bowl with its environment. Closer up, a tiered mesh of walkways, timber pillars and greenery brings home his “living tree” designation. Across the road, a new Olympics museum bustles with active seniors and junior high students on school trips. More gather for group photos in the landscaped area outside, whose installations — a popular replica of the Olympic rings, the 1964 cauldron, and statues of the educator-athlete Kanō Jigorō, an Idaten hero, and Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic movement — are a model of spatial-social awareness.

Kanō Jigorō watching over Kengo Kuma’s Olympic stadium. David Hayes

The stadium area is rich in associations with the Meiji era (1868–1912), and nearby gardens, galleries and shrines give it a stately air. By contrast, to walk from glitzy Ginza over the Sumida River’s Kachidoki Bridge and onto Harumi Island — with its construction sites and towering new blocks, huge trucks thundering past on the gaping expressway — is to touch the future (ten minutes after the phrase hit, I disquietingly spotted it on a come-to-buy sign). An immense sky, rare from ground level inside Tokyo’s urban maze, enhances the sense of virgin territory, as does the surrounding water. Ginza, thirty minutes to the north, is already way past.

On Toyosu Island a hi-tech wholesale food market, relocated from creaking Tsukiji in late 2018 after a bitter wrangle, now keeps the tourist and business clocks in more equable sync. Ariake brings the Olympics into fuller view, its gleaming hotels, shopping malls, parks and railway stations as much a showcase as its sports facilities. Tokyo’s southeast flatlands were (like Ginza itself, and Asakusa and Taitō) once synonymous with the pungent culture of the shitamachi (low-lying tenement districts) that made the city’s wares, saw to its daily needs and kept it entertained. That phase in the city’s history is over, its legacy now most palpable in booming nostalgia for the Shōwa era (1926–89).

This airport-strip-like series of artificial islands ends at Odaiba, once fortified to deter any foreign incursion after Commodore Perry’s “black ships” probed Edo (later Tokyo) Bay in 1853–54. An observation deck is well placed to scan the official Olympic rings, which were hauled offshore by a barge on 17 January, as well as the athletes’ village on Toyosu (destined to become apartments), Tokyo’s glittering night skyline and, in the early morning — a kindly guard assures me on a grey afternoon — a beautiful view of Fujisan.

Throngs of amiable international tourists, mostly Chinese, were busily recording the sights, particularly Gundam, a giant humanoid robot. It was a foretaste of peak Tokyo during the northern hemisphere’s high summer. Two days later the Asahi Shimbun was reporting that an “old-fashioned confectionery shop” in the mountain resort of Hakone had already banned Chinese nationals from entering.

That day, the breathtaking scale and detail of Tokyo’s groundwork exuded promise of a mega-event that could well equal Sydney’s and London’s instant acclaim. Yet there was never, on either side of Covid-19, any guarantee of a smooth Olympics landing.

For one thing, the trek has been bumpy, even by host cities’ usual standards. The late architect Zaha Hadid’s florid stadium proposal was annulled in favour of local hero Kuma, to a many-sided uproar in the profession. (“The government is skilfully manipulating the public’s xenophobia,” said Arata Isozaki, who had nonetheless called Hadid’s design “a turtle waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away.”) An emblem design was replaced after plagiarism charges. Japan’s previous Olympic Committee president resigned over vote-buying. The ticket lottery and volunteer systems were skewed. Mounting costs fuelled regional ire over Japan’s Tokyo-centricity.

Tokyo’s Odaiba precinct. David Hayes

The IOC, like FIFA and other sporting hegemons an unaccountable nexus of commercial and political power, floats above all this: secure in its lucrative commercial deals, outsourcing of costs to the host, exclusion of local businesses from the jamboree, and covetous ticket allocations to members, family and cronies. On the big picture, the University of Lausanne’s Emmanuel Bayle, writing in 2019, is lethally restrained:

[There] are still no real international checks and balances on the governance of the IOC or the [International Sports Federations] within an Olympic System that now includes numerous stakeholders. Given the growing financial importance of the Olympic phenomenon and the Olympic Games, improper conduct, including poor governance, corruption, worship of mammon, doping and the use of sport to further geopolitical or economic aims, has the potential to severely damage the reputations of the IOC and organisations belonging to the Olympic System.

For another thing, these base mishaps and lockdowns join a high gambit shared by the IOC and Japan long before Covid-19 was heard of: the very decision to hold the Olympics and Paralympics in the country’s hot and humid summer, which is also its usual typhoon season. The 1964 games took place in October, safely beyond (as it happened) a torrid summer of water shortages. Today, American NBA and European soccer schedules, holy to sponsors and broadcasters, make such a diary shift unthinkable.

One peril of the wager is a repeat of October’s immense Reiwa 1 East Japan Typhoon, or Hagibis, the fourth such calamity in Japan since July 2018. Such typhoons’ increasing frequency and power is leading to “a major shift in Japan’s disaster policy,” says Koji Ikeuchi, Tokyo University professor of civil engineering and expert in water-related disasters. Hagibis forced the cancellation of three matches in rugby’s world cup, which pales against the ninety-eight deaths it inflicted, although the competition, spread nationwide to droves of enthused niwaka (overnight fans), absorbed the damage with an uplifting mix of brio and respect for the victims.

The same university’s Earthquake Research Institute works on the basis of a 70 to 80 per cent probability of a mega-quake by 2050 in the Nankai Trough, a Pacific Ocean trench under much of southern Japan. Tokyo itself may be more resilient than in 1923, its plans to cope elaborate, but its vulnerabilities — including its below-sea-level southeast’s exposure to storm surges — are a fact. The inner earth sends frequent reminders. The effects even of Ibaraki’s magnitude 4.8 quake at 2am on 1 February shook this non-tyro foreigner. “The ground is adjusting,” said one of my Japanese family, lightly, in the morning.

A dispute over health pressures on endurance athletes pushed the IOC, to its credit, to transfer marathon and race-walking events to Sapporo, the main city of Hokkaido on Japan’s northern island. There, July temperatures are on average five to six degrees cooler than Tokyo’s. “A painful decision, not an agreement,” protested Yuriko Koike, Tokyo’s mayor. This climate-related concession leaves the outdoor program more than usually exposed to extreme heat and humidity.

Japan’s national tourist association expects forty million visitors in Tokyo’s greater metropolitan area during the events. Measures to alleviate any discomfort include free ice cream, artificial snow (the real thing is getting scarcer), heat-blocking road surfaces, and shade trees. The IOC entourage might not need those: its Tokyo base is — where else? — Ginza’s Imperial Hotel.

For all these hurdles and pitfalls, opposition has been relatively muted. A spate of books in 2013–16 assailed the choice of Tokyo, and anti-Olympics pressure groups such as Hangorin no Kai (No Olympics 2020) sprang into life. Resisting the inevitable became harder as the post-Rio juggernaut got into gear and prime minister Shinzō Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party cruised towards its third landslide in five years. But critics such as the indefatigable sports journalist Gentaro Taniguchi — whose new book says the Olympics “are at the mercy of commercialism and nationalism” — and the tabloid Nikkan Gendai newspaper continue to carry a dissident torch.

Tokyo 2020’s confidence, meanwhile, grew with each passing hitch. At its core is that parable of rebirth from rubble, a chain that goes beyond 3.11 to Tokyo 1964 — a future-oriented event that was only later seen in cyclical relation to Tokyo 1945 and the terrible fire-bombing that razed it and dozens more Japanese cities.

From the start, Japan’s second summer games have drawn heavily on the moral capital and potent symbolism of the first. The latter’s five-year run-up was politically febrile, but Tokyo 1964 turned out to be a landmark in the nation’s history. What made it so, above all, was that an unrepeatable psychic and experiential mix brought Japanese people, collectively and in their individual millions, to an (albeit complex) emotional release.

Such is the kernel of a tremendous NHK documentary, the fifteenth in its A Century in Moving Images series. Its archive footage of Tokyo’s pre-Olympics mania of demolition and construction depicts the capital as reeking, jammed, litter-strewn — and parched. Four months before the games, only 2.2 per cent of Tokyoites named them as a top priority, while 59.2 per cent said other issues (above all, a water shortage) were more important. With two days to go, the heavens burst: a cleansing typhoon.

Optimism took flight with sporting success, Japan’s sixteen golds earning third place in the medals table. Further buoyancy came from displays of popular enthusiasm, from avid crowds on the torch and marathon routes to the finale’s unexpected happy chaos. Athletes mingled and hearts melted to a mass chorus of the school graduation tear-jerker “Hotaru no Hikari” (“Light of Fireflies”), Japan’s emperor doffing his hat when a Kiwi athlete blew him a kiss.

The imprint of Japan’s 1937–45 wars is everywhere in the NHK series, as a marker of closeness and distance alike. Yoshinori Sakai, born in Hiroshima prefecture ninety minutes after the atomic bombing, lit the Olympic flame in 1964. Tadashi Matsudaira, engineer on the Tokyo–Osaka (Tōkaidō) Shinkansen, launched days before the games began, had worked on the navy’s wartime Zero attack planes. The novelist Sonoko Sugimoto, aged eighteen, heard prime minister Hideki Tojo address a mass rally of conscripted students on the same stadium site in 1943. (“Today is also connected to the past. I feel fearful of that fact.”) Hirobumi Daimatsu, oni (demon) coach of the women’s volleyballers who won gold against the Soviet Union, had survived the 1944 battle of Kohima; he played driving father to the textile factory team, several of whom had grown up without one, and later go-between.

Many intellectuals, including Yukio Mishima and Yasushi Inoue, were moved by the Olympics experience. (Kodansha’s instant collection of writers’ responses was republished in 2014.) The novelist Hitomi Yamaguchi, who saw in the marathon a spirit of human fellowship, had another epiphany when the hinomaru (national flag) was hoisted after Japan’s great hope Kōkichi Tsuburaya took bronze in the race. “For the first time since the war I could see the flag raised without any dejection. With no hesitation, a good feeling. Tsuburaya-kun, arigato!”

But Tokyo’s frenzied makeover, with its many ravages, led Akiyukii Nosaka and Takeshi Kaikō (Kaikō Ken) to ambiguous self-reflection. Only now that old neighbourhoods are gone, and links to a discreditable past broken — wrote Nosaka, with a hint here of his own — is it possible to look back without shame: a “half improvement.” Kaikō’s year-long reports for Asahi Weekly, often featuring the low-paid, insecure workers sweating to finish behemoths on time, concluded with one titled “Sayonara, Tokyo.” A fragmented city had become a mirror of his own anguish: “Walking around Tokyo, the more I knew the less I could understand. Just asking continually is the only answer — that’s all I can say.”

Tokyo 1964’s great dramas and intense emotions, understandably shorn of complexity, define its place in public memory. For 3.11, the agony of human loss and destruction does the same. Tokyo 2020 seeks to honour the two moments, in the latter case with gestures of symbolic inclusion at every stage during the games and by delivering promised reconstruction afterwards.

Astute as the prospectus is, its tone can’t help but imply that Tokyo 2020, even before it has happened, transcends these unique and dreadful precedents (and not only because it comes later). Its driving aim sounds assimilative, its wreckage-to-riches tale prescriptive, its insistent amity cloying. Its very seamlessness recalls the critic Jun Etō’s take on postwar censorship under American occupation: “a closed linguistic space.” There is a lack of humility. In the apt Irish phrase, Tokyo 2020 has lost the run of itself.

Tokyo 2020’s slick fusion of utility and piety has always left room for a scepticism that — like the many waterways buried in concrete by the first Olympics — runs deeper than mere opposition. In Kōtō-ku library, above a room lovingly devoted to film director (and local boy) Yasujirō Ozu, I came across a rich photographic record of 1964 in Tokyo, published in December by the Japan Press Research Institute and Kyodo News. The editor’s then-and-now reflection is pointed, even moving (and the last word, having come to it independently days earlier, was stunning to read):

The Japanese people [in 1964] were overwhelmed by the competition from foreign athletes. They had a feeling of yearning and a renewed sense of patriotism, while suffering from an inferiority complex about their backwardness… [Japan on the eve of 2020] is becoming more confident of its national power and sports. But Japan has lost a sense of freshness, dedication and humility.

More sweeping is the verdict of an acquaintance, a civil engineer in his fifties, who in lucidly cynical English cites a litany of reasons why Japan “has no need” for the Olympics now. As we talk in Ōmiya’s beautiful new public library, across the border in Saitama prefecture, T-san holds responsible a government with “no strategy, direction, vision,” and an “anachronistic” education system that holds young people back. The accursed games are, in this view, the epitome of a wider national and civic malaise.

Such bleakness could turn out to be justified without being vindicated. John Rennie Short skewers the IOC cohort’s fourfold “event capture” (infrastructural, financial, legal, political) that traps hosts even as they promise their citizens a new dawn. The post-Olympics backlash tends to take hold a year later, as debts mount, scams leak and memories fade. Its own passing can, in some cases, rekindle the original glow. Tokyo 1964’s homegrown hangover included a spate of bankruptcies, political imbroglios and environmental scandals. Yet its reputation soars above them. Tokyo 2020 could, assuming it delivers the initial goods, extend the pattern. The Olympic dream machine grinds facts, and critics to dust.

More immediately for Tokyo 2020, everything depends on Covid-19’s course. Nothing is foreordained — or foreclosed. The soon-to-be-pandemic, expanding in Iran, Italy and South Korea, continues to reset plans and minds in Japan. One plausible scenario is that a call-off becomes imperative as grim diagnostics rally an international bandwagon of competitors. Another, were a path to the games to be cleared, is that Tokyo 2020 audaciously enfolds the virus’s retreat into the “recovery Olympics” tale. A third, darker vista was seeded prior to the infection’s surge, in a tech store I visited where licensed Olympics merchandise adjoined disaster prevention goods. If they were to overlap during the games, Tokyo 2020’s mighty edifice would not escape the damage.

If it is to be the first, quick is best. If the third, preparing and praying will have to do. For everyone’s sake, sportspeople and worldwide niwaka foremost, the second must be devoutly hoped for. Let it be a great Olympics — and the last in this form. Neither Japan nor anyone else should indulge the IOC and its kind any longer. Once, under the station rafters, Miyahara’s elementary school students “put paid to fate, it abdicates.” Now, monsters of the year are regrouping. Those who would be on the angels’ side need seriously to raise their own game. •

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From my perspective — having been a new arrival from the United States back around that time — this was no mere cliché. I was taken aback by just about everything here, and especially the weekends, when even the petrol stations were closed from noon on Saturday till Monday morning. “But what if you run out of petrol?” I asked my publican father-in-law, to which he blithely replied, “If you can’t see to it that you have enough of it on Saturday, you shouldn’t be driving a car.” I was stunned by the way people dressed, the women decked out in hats and gloves for a trip to the shops, and don’t get me started on the food.

But there’s always a but. I began to realise that under that cloak of dullness beat a heart of ferocious resistance. You would think that a girl who had just blown in from Hollywood wouldn’t have been shocked by the easy sexuality I saw, but I was. I had never even seen a bikini until I spent an afternoon on a Sydney beach. And my father-in-law’s pub was an education itself: it was called a hotel but no one outside the staff ever stayed there; the rooms were a fiction, designed to accommodate the licensing laws. As for the drinking, I’d never witnessed anything like it, or the hosing down of the walls after every session. By the time I arrived, the infamous “six o’clock swill” had been modified in New South Wales but not Victoria, which is where Richardson’s history is mainly set.

Nineteen fifty-six is his focus, but Richardson begins by taking us back to 1949, when Melbourne surprised everyone by winning the bid to host the ’56 Olympics. It was a terrific victory for Australia, a nation with sport coursing through its veins and a slew of athletes excelling on the postwar world stage (tennis players Lew Hoad and Ken Rosewall, and runner John Landy, to name just a few). At the same time, it was further away from the centre of the action than any previous host nation and, being in the southern hemisphere, meant that the majority of international participants would be competing in the wrong season.

In the six years following the successful bid, the organisers were beset with these and other maddening logistical problems. But underlying it all was Melbourne’s status as a provincial city in a young nation with a population of fewer than ten million and a dubious reputation bestowed by its racist immigration policy.

Richardson’s approach to his subject is both thematic and chronological. The resulting narrative is deftly woven and, surprisingly given all the detail, sweetly paced. Engaging too is the fascinating cast of characters, from the Soviet Pact participants and the spies keeping a watch on them, to the runners who carried the Olympic torch from Darwin and the photographer who took the shot of Ron Clarke using it to light the cauldron in the stadium.

Even those who come across as having been nightmares to deal with at the time make interesting reading. Take Wilfred Kent Hughes, an old-fashioned curmudgeon who ended up chairing the Victorian Olympic Committee almost against his will, or the foul-mouthed Avery Brundage, the United States representative on the International Olympic Committee, who never forgave the Australians for winning the bid, or let them forget what inept provincials they were when it came to putting on a show.

Then there’s Barry Humphries, whose Edna Everage had leapt onto the stage in 1956, and Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Yet arguably it’s Robert Menzies, Australia’s prime minister between 1949 and 1966, who strides above them all. Menzies, embroiled in the Suez Crisis, had little to do with the Olympics, and there on full display was his devotion to all things British, at a key moment of Britain’s humiliating decline as a world power.

In late July, in a sequence of events in some ways foreshadowing today’s contretemps with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, threatening British and French oil supplies. Nasser was implacable in the face of Western moves to undermine his control of the canal. A committee was formed with Menzies as its head, with the aim of persuading Nasser to come to his senses. He didn’t. Israel staged an attack, and the British and French swiftly joined in on the pretext of protecting Israel. But the United States felt the scheme had gone too far and refused its vital support. The British and French were defeated, with Menzies’s uncritical support for Britain having proved an undoubted failure.

Richardson portrays the fifties as marking a significant transition. Australia was moving away from Britain and into the arms of America. Television’s arrival in time for the Games accelerated the process, but even before then Australian teens had been electrified by American rock and roll, and Sydney’s bodgies and their female counterparts, like the currency lads of the previous century, thumbed their noses at their super-starched elders and rebelled. For all that, they were as relentlessly sexist as the rest of society, a feature that Richardson deals with as well.

Britain’s hold on Australia may have been loosening but it was still strong. I was still in America when my Australian husband and I happened to pass a newsstand and saw the headlines about nuclear bombs being tested in Woomera. My husband pointed to them with pride and said, “See, we may be a little country, but have our own bombs.”

They weren’t Australia’s bombs, but the land they exploded on was, and it had been turned over to Britain without a qualm. Secretly, too. The government went through the motions of ensuring that none of the Indigenous people in the test areas would be harmed, and lied about that as well. Aside from the arrogance and racism, the problem was the breadth of the territory involved, and the insufficient resources allocated to protecting local people.

The same can be said of the difficulties encountered in preparing for the Olympics, with one cock-up after another arising from a curious lack of knowledge on the part of white city dwellers about the country they inhabited. On that score, it seems little has changed. Yet the Games were, on most accounts, a resounding success. Even their most vociferous critics at the time eventually allowed that, although some of the compliments seem backhanded. Richardson cites Red Smith, who covered the Games for US Sports Illustrated: “The Australian’s enthusiasm for sport is a consuming passion and it gives him high marks for intelligence. He is smart enough to prefer playing to working: he is jealous of his leisure and he makes use of it.”

Never mind the pronoun “he.” The fifties were openly sexist and racist, and few thought much about it then. But it was also a time when more Australians played sport than watched it, and the country prided itself on being “a workers’ paradise.” As we were sailing across the Pacific towards my new home, my husband told me that I would never see a “fat” person here and, believe it or not, it was true. From my perspective as an Australian today, it seems pretty clear the American influence has done a good job of changing all that, and quite a good deal more. •

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That was a forerunner of Maradona’s great goal against England in the World Cup quarter final in 1986. It’s a goal that had a veteran Argentine football commentator down on his knees weeping and thanking God, and it’s caught in all its glory in the new documentary Diego Maradona, along with the notorious “hand of God” goal that preceded it. Only years later did Maradona admit his hand touched that ball. At the time he attributed it to the almighty.

Football is tribal. Football is warfare by other means. And so, naturally enough, the crowd plays a big role in this documentary, now in cinemas, and another new football documentary, Ian Darling’s The Final Quarter, streaming on Ten, which documents the racist persecution of Adam Goodes. Commentators appear, often post hoc, and fan the flames of opinion, but the crowd is there. It is always there, whether it’s silent, murmuring, singing, shouting, hissing, booing. When does it become a mob?

Asif Kapadia’s film gives us Maradona as both angel and devil. The kid from the Buenos Aires slum who supported his family from the age of fifteen and married his childhood sweetheart. The kid who used his remarkable skill to give grief to the powerful. The kid who cheated, lied, used cocaine and women supplied by the Camorra, and denied paternity of a son born to a girlfriend in Naples just before he married his Argentine fiancée.

Kapadia is an excellent dramatist. As with his previous documentaries — about the Formula One driver Ayrton Senna and the British singer Amy Winehouse — he uses mostly found footage. His tragic trilogy, he calls the three films. This time he has a living subject, and there are a few passages of material gleaned from interviews.

By focusing on Maradona’s six years in Naples, Kapadia cranks up the drama. Maradona and Naples seemed made for each other. When it bought Maradona, in 1984, SSC Napoli was barely clinging to a slot in Serie A, which was dominated by Juventus and Milan from the wealthy north. In Italy, as in Argentina, class and race prejudice are intertwined. The north spurns the south. Northern fans regularly denigrate Napoli players and supporters as unwashed, cholera-carrying peasants.

The small, wily Maradona, who had copped a few racist slurs in Argentina and Barcelona — “the shitty little black kid from the slums” was one, from an admirer — was given a hero’s welcome in the San Paolo stadium in Naples by 75,000 fans. From the start, it is the ebullience, the surging emotions of the crowd, that lifts this film.

Kapadia’s focus is the divided persona of the tragic hero. The seesaw between Maradona the angel and Maradona the devil serves his narrative well. But there is a third actor in the drama.

The turning point was the 1990 World Cup match between Argentina and Italy, in which Maradona played for his home country. Italy was hosting the cup, and most games were played in Rome. Trainer Fernando Signorini points to FIFA’s stupidity in placing this match in Naples. Asked whom the local fans should support, Maradona prevaricated, then said that Neapolitans “weren’t really Italians.”

The reaction was sullen, but when Argentina beat Italy on a penalty shootout goal taken by Maradona, the mob turned. That night, someone heaved a brick through the window of his house.

For six years, Maradona had been a kind of luxury status symbol for a Camorra clan, the Giulianos, who controlled the Naples district of Forcella. Now he became an embarrassment. Without their protection the law moved in. He was wire-tapped, arrested, disgraced.

His bloated decline is well known. Kapadia shows us sad footage of him coaching children. He may still be admired and supported in Argentina, but he was never able to rebuild his career.

Like Kapadia’s much more substantial film, The Final Quarter is a compilation of existing footage. It drew repeat screenings and became a talking point in June at the Sydney Film Festival. (Stan Grant has drawn on the same footage and coupled it with an interview with Goodes and Grant’s own “Australian Dream” speech for a documentary that opened the Melbourne International Film Festival last week.)

Darling’s seventy-five-minute film doesn’t have quite the dramatic sweep of the Maradona movie, but the unbridled racism in some of the footage makes one want to rise from one’s seat and retch.

It is worth seeing, and thinking about, particularly for those who aren’t regular viewers of Sky News or The Footy Show. We may have read about the persecution of Goodes, but newspaper reports really don’t have the emotional force of footage of a gormless Eddie McGuire letting himself be bullied into endorsing an egregious set of remarks about Goodes and King Kong. Or puce-faced commentator Sam Newman proclaiming himself a proud white heterosexual male.

Goodes himself emerges from all this as a thoughtful, determined man who decided to use his Australian of the Year status in 2014 to speak out about Australia’s history of racial oppression: not in a spirit of recrimination but as a necessary step to reconciliation.

It is a psychological process many of us are finding painful. The predictable pile-on by the usual Sky commentariat followed his remarks. It’s all here in Darling’s documentary, compressed in a way that may indeed magnify the impact — though it may also downplay the slow seethe that poisons the mind and spirit.

The repeated collective booing from some AFL fans, which finally drove Goodes from the football field, is here and is ugly indeed. I would like to have seen some interrogation, by reporters on the spot, of individuals who joined this mass. Did they feel uplifted, exhilarated, justified? I guess many in the crowds at Nuremberg, or rallying for Mussolini must have gone home feeling uplifted — somehow vindicated joining their voices to others.

(If you think that comparison is far-fetched, consider this: one of the Fascists’ main propaganda posters at around the time American troops landed in Italy featured black American servicemen drawn as apes. Like the blood libel of the anti-Semites, the simian metaphor has a long history of attraction for white racists.)

On camera, Goodes comes out of this experience far better than Maradona did when he was forsaken by the crowd. Goodes is a thoughtful man and I am hopeful these scarring experiences have not broken him.

Now we all have work to do. But if there is a moment of grace in this film — though not quite a parallel to Maradona’s magic second goal in Mexico City — it is Goodes as he dances along one side of the field and mimes throwing a spear. It’s landed, Adam. It’s landed. •

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Nellie and Louisa Gregory were the cricketing daughters of Ellen Mainwaring, who had emigrated from England with her family in 1857, and Edward Gregory, whose English grandparents had come to New South Wales when his grandmother was transported for possession of a forged banknote. Ned, as he was known, was the son of a school teaching husband-and-wife team.

Ned and his younger brother David were part of the first official Australian test team to play against England, in Melbourne, with Dave captaining the side. Five male Gregory siblings played for New South Wales and two of their sons, Syd and Jack, featured prominently in the national team. Louisa and Nellie were genealogically sandwiched between the pioneers of test cricket and the players of the golden era. Astonishingly, their influence on the women’s game is no longer widely recognised.

Born in Caledonia Street, Paddington, on 10 December 1863, Helen was the eldest of the Gregory children, and was almost always known as “Nellie.” At least a third-generation cricketer, she had five siblings to play with, a cricket fanatic for a father and no mean backyard to practise in, for she lived most of her childhood at the Sydney Cricket Ground, which was then known as the Association Ground.

Louisa Gregory, sometimes called “Louie,” was born in Bathurst on 30 April 1865. The circumstances of her birth were slightly unusual: Ned’s wife and elder daughter had accompanied him to the rural NSW town so he could play cricket there as a professional, which was quite novel in the colony at that time. The family returned to Sydney sometime before 1868 and settled once more in Paddington, Ned becoming the first curator of what is now the Sydney Cricket Ground.

The proximity of the ground no doubt fuelled the aptitude and ambition of all the Gregory offspring. Nellie and Louisa not only featured in the first recognised “ladies” game at the SCG in March 1886, but they were also the respective team captains of the “Siroccos” and the “Fernleas.” Their sister Alice (1867–1935) played as well, also becoming an exceptional bowler. A month later, in April 1886, a women’s match attracted wide publicity and gave fresh impetus to the movement. In the following year the youngest Gregory daughter, Gertrude (1875–1947), joined her sisters. The takings from these early matches went to worthy charities, including the Bulli Widows and Orphans Fund, set up following a devastating explosion at the Bulli Colliery south of Sydney.

Nellie Gregory (top row, fourth from left) captained the Siriccos in a women’s cricket match in aid of the charities of Sydney, reported by the Illustrated Sydney News on 15 May 1886.

The foundations were laid for hotly contested, if sporadic, women’s games in Sydney over the next twenty-five years. The early matches also led to the first women’s representative intercolonial match, when the NSW team travelled to Victoria in 1910. Nellie, Alice and Gertrude were selected to tour, as was Nellie’s daughter Irene and Louisa’s daughter Muriel. Even Irene’s husband, James Farr, was involved, as team manager. Victoria, with its wider player base, won the series, but the northern challengers performed impressively enough to take one of the three matches, though Nellie injured her calf in the process.

With cricket in Sydney very much a male preserve, teams had only a limited pool of women from which to draw. The Gregory sisters therefore couldn’t afford to specialise too much, so Nellie and Louisa were both all-rounders. Some accounts have Nellie batting right-handed, while others say she batted left. Both women bowled overarm, a comparatively recent innovation.

Louisa added wicket-keeping to her accomplishments and was reckoned by many publications of the day to be highly efficient behind the stumps. The Daily Telegraph declared her keeping “sharp, clean and decisive, few balls being allowed to pass her.” She was also instrumental in the development of women’s cricket in New South Wales. In 1886, not quite twenty-one, she shouldered the role of captain of the Fernleas at the inaugural ladies’ cricket match at the SCG and retained the captaincy the following year. She was also the secretary of the Sydney Ladies’ Cricket Club.

Nellie was a natural captain and led various teams against all comers. There were matches for organisations supporting the disadvantaged, matches against school teams, matches raising money for the building of pavilions, and even matches against men’s sides.

Of particular interest are the matches against “the actors,” the first of which was played at the SCG in 1898. Another, in 1903, pitted the women against a costumed theatrical team from J.C. Williamson’s company. A good cause was invariably involved. The Gregory women organised and played in several other fancy dress games; although the matches always had a strong festive element, the women practised meticulously in preparation.

The diligence and athletic skill displayed by Nellie and Louisa placed them in direct opposition to the social norms of the time. Vigorous activity, especially in public, was not encouraged in women, and male views of their performance tended to be condescending or to focus on their appearance. Some journalists assessed the playing on its merits, but many couldn’t quite hide their surprise at the women’s ability, and often credited it to the influence of the male Gregorys, the national stars of their day.

Whatever the newspapers made of women in sport, Nellie, Louisa and their teammates took both cricket and competition seriously, training twice daily in the lead-up to a major match. They displayed commitment and zeal in tackling both pitch and prejudice.

The constant procession of NSW and Australian representatives through their home brought the Gregory girls into contact with the top male players of the era. Up-and-coming right-
hander Harry Donnan clearly made an impression on Nellie; they were married in April 1890 at St David’s Church, Sydney. They welcomed their only child, Irene, in 1891. Domesticity didn’t curtail either of their sporting careers; Harry went on to represent Australia, while Nellie continued playing at intercolonial and local level until at least 1912, when she was nearly fifty.

Louisa married fellow cricketer James Varley in 1887. Their son Reginald was born the following year, and daughters Muriel and Vera arrived in 1891 and 1895. James pursued a career with the Post Office and was also an alderman at Rookwood. Sadly, Louisa’s mental health deteriorated through the 1890s, and she died of tuberculosis in 1903 in the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane.

Louisa’s daughters sustained their mother’s sporting legacy, competing in local and interstate cricket matches under the watchful eye of their captain and aunt, Nellie, and accompanied by her daughter Irene. Along with Alice and Gertrude, as many as five Gregory women could be playing on a team at once, an accomplishment never matched by any other family of cricketers at that level, the closest perhaps being their own father and uncles.

As for Nellie, her success on the field was translated into administration. Like her grandparents, she embarked on a teaching career and was noted for her promotion of cricket at Sydney Girls’ High School, where she proved an enthusiastic and exacting instructor. In 1927 she accepted the position of president of the newly minted New South Wales Women’s Cricket Association. She was executive, promoter, selector, captain, coach, manager and mentor to a generation of young female cricketers. Survived by Harry and son-in-law James Farr, she died of heart failure at her home in Bexley in 1950. •

Further reading

Wicket Women: Cricket & Women in Australia, by Richard Cashman and Amanda Weaver, with research assistance by Sandra Glass, NSW University Press, 1991

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Born Sarah Elizabeth MacCambridge on 25 March 1899 at Alexandria in Sydney, Sadie was the only child of James MacCambridge, a railway labourer from Glasgow, Scotland, and Elizabeth nee Lyons of Sydney. She attended Fort Street Girls’ High School, and at fifteen represented her state in the women’s swimming championships of Australia under the auspices of the NSW Ladies’ Swimming Association. But her real love was ice skating. Even when she practised her edges as a schoolgirl, and later aspired to a spiral or two, people used to remark on what a fearless skater she was.

Her skating instructor at Sydney Glaciarium, Melbourne-born Albert Enders, recognised a potential champion in Cambridge after one season. By the time they were in their early twenties he and Sadie were performing skating exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne, showcasing adagio neck spins, death spirals and other advanced skating skills of the time.

Enders suggested she should take her talents abroad, and the pair left for England under engagement to the newly opened London Ice Club. One successful season later, they were a couple. In 1929, Cambridge achieved the National Skating Association Gold Medal skating standard; not yet thirty, she was among the elite few to have reached Britain’s highest level of skating.

Based in London for many years, Cambridge regularly returned home to teach and perform with Enders, and was often called on by the local press for skating fashion tips. The pair popularised the side-by-side Jackson Haines spin in the twenties, and followed the development of ice ballet and ice dancing in Europe with enthusiasm.

Sadie Cambridge and Albert Enders photographed in Melbourne, c. 1920s. Skate Canada Archives

Skating was very fashionable among the London aristocracy. Cambridge’s students included the glamorous heiress Edwina Ashley, who would marry Louis Mountbatten; and historian Frederick Smith and his sister Eleanor, many of whose romance novels were adapted for the screen. In 1930, Cambridge performed at the St Regis Hotel in New York, where renowned skating coach Gustave Lussi directed and choreographed shows.

In the seven years after their wedding in London in June 1931, Cambridge and Enders won the Open Professional Championship of Great Britain no fewer than seven times, and were declared world professional champions in British pair skating. They taught and produced ice ballets at the Queen’s Arena before returning briefly to Sydney, where Cambridge’s mother had fallen ill. Accompanied by their young pupil, Daphne Walker, they gave a gala performance at Sydney Glaciarium that was filmed by Fox Movietone News.

In 1936, they again performed at the famed Palais de Sport in Paris and played ice hockey before 15,000 people. Later, they invited ice hockey player and speed skater Ken Kennedy, Australia’s first winter Olympian, to join their travelling troupe. On the move again, they spent time in Johannesburg, working from early morning until after midnight, managing, teaching and performing, until they turned Empire Exhibition ice rink from “a hopeless proposition” — as Sadie later said — into “an unqualified success both financially and socially.”

Cambridge’s students at the Queen’s Arena, London, included Pamela Davis MBE and Mollie Phillips, the first woman to carry the flag and lead out her national team at an Olympic Games. Both later became International Skating Union judges, and Phillips was the first woman to referee a World Championship.

In 1938, Cambridge and Enders performed in Tom Arnold’s “Switzerland Musical Extravaganza on Ice” at the Liverpool Empire. The following year they returned to Melbourne with Walker, who was by then a gold medallist of Great Britain and fourth-placed in the British open championship. Walker went on to become the 1939 World women’s figure-skating bronze medallist, the 1947 silver medallist, and the 1939 and 1947 European bronze medallist.

When Cambridge and Enders finally settled in Canada in 1940, they chose the Winter Club, the most prestigious private sports club in the city, as their base. Their Montreal students included Dwight and Libby Parkinson, who both enjoyed distinguished careers as amateur skaters and judges, and Norman Gregory, a key developer of figure skating in Canada.

Over the years that followed, Cambridge’s students won most of the pairs and fours in Western Canadian Championships, as well as many other dance championships. Suzanne Morrow and Wallace Diestelmeyer developed the current one-handed version of the death spiral in the 1940s, and went on to win Canada’s first-ever Winter Olympic medal in the pairs event — a bronze, at St Moritz in 1948. Her pupils Frances Dafoe and Norris Bowden later won the silver medal at the Cortina d’Ampezzo Olympics in Italy. All four students produced World Championship titles in pairs skating, some competed in the singles events at the Olympics, and some served as figure-skating judges.

Among Cambridge’s pupils were the first pair skaters to do the twist lift, throw jump, “leap of faith” and overhead lasso. Some of the rules in pairs skating changed because of Cambridge’s work with such skaters as Dafoe and Bowden, now an honoured member of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame and the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame.

Cambridge and her husband were good at the business side of the sport and worked hard. They travelled with ice shows in Australia, Europe, Britain and South Africa, and presented shows all over British Columbia between 1947 and 1960. A former student once remarked that most people involved in skating at that time would agree Enders and Cambridge really brought skating to Western Canada.

Sadie Cambridge died peacefully at the age of sixty-nine in Vancouver, Canada, on 1 September 1968, survived by her husband. The couple had no children. A coaching pioneer in singles, ice dance, and particularly pairs, Cambridge was a fearless competitor who saw her sport as an art akin to ballet, to be perfected over a lifetime. She show-skated into her sixties, and trained some of the top young skaters of her time in Australia, England and Canada. •

Further reading

Historical Dictionary of Figure Skating, by James R. Hines, Scarecrow Press, 2011

The post Fearless on ice appeared first on Inside Story.

George Megalogenis is another rational man with an irrational obsession. His football team, the Richmond Tigers, once one of Australia’s most successful clubs, went thirty-seven miserable years without an AFL premiership before last year’s drought-breaker. So cruel were some of its failures that the club earned the nickname “Ninthmond” for its uncanny ability to narrowly miss out on the AFL finals. But despite the relentless on-field disappointment, Richmond’s supporters remained as passionate as ever. For the “Tiger Army,” the 2017 grand final victory felt like some kind of cosmic reward for decades of loyalty.

Amid the euphoria of his team’s triumph, Megalogenis found himself wondering: what makes a successful football club? Can history tell us something about who wins, who watches, and why? And might the carefully managed nature of Richmond’s most recent success have some deeper meaning, perhaps even a “lesson for leadership in Australia”?

The resulting book, dramatically titled The Football Solution: How Richmond’s Premiership Can Save Australia, is more social history and fan memoir than political analysis, and its lessons for Canberra, wedged into the last ten pages, seem like an afterthought. For the most part it is a story about a suburb and the incredibly popular football team it spawned, and a passionate (if Melbourne-centric) historical account of the rise of the sporting club as a social institution. It attempts, in the tradition of the best sports literature, to go beyond the boundary, to weave the game into the social, political and economic history of the city and the nation, and to find the historical roots of this not-quite-national obsession.

These roots, it turns out, are in colonial Victoria. It is there that we meet Tom Wills, grandson of a convict, child of the squattocracy and founding father of Australian Rules. The tale of the game’s invention, and Wills’s role in it, is ground zero in football’s history war.

In 1840, Wills’s father claimed 200,000 acres of land in Victoria’s Western District. Young Tom was the only white child in the area and — according to some contemporary accounts — grew up playing improvised ball sports with the local Indigenous children. As a teenager he was dispatched to the mother country to receive an education, and he returned to Melbourne in 1856 with a very British belief in the character-building benefits of organised sport.

In 1859, worried that without a sport to play over the winter, the young men of Melbourne would become idle, Wills suggested they “form a football club” and “draw up some laws.” Victoria’s hard paddocks were thought to be too dangerous for rugby, and soccer’s rules were not codified until 1863. Instead, the men of Victoria invented a game of their own. How much they borrowed from marngrook, the Indigenous version of football, is hard to say, though recent evidence seems to suggest it was quite a bit. Megalogenis sits on the fence: for his part, Australian Rules is a combination of the games Wills played with the Indigenous children and the games he learned in England. This Australian hybrid is both white and black.

For some reason, colonial Victorians went wild for this new game. To make sense of their enthusiasm, Megalogenis rolls out his tried and true explanatory weapons: economic statistics. Relative to almost anywhere else in the world, Victorians had higher GDP per capita, bigger houses and higher wages. They lived in less densely populated cities and towns, they were better fed and, supposedly, they read more books. When Tom Wills returned from England in 1856, the Victorian settlers were allegedly “ready for a sport that reflected their free spirit.”

I am willing to concede that Australian Rules football might have “suited the egalitarian personality of the migrants,” in contrast with the “class-conscious codes… imported from the old world.” But only a rusted-on AFL partisan could truly believe it was “the greatest expression of the Australian faith in human nature.”

To the perpetual dismay of the Victorians, the game failed to excite the northern states, whose loyalties remained with the “English” rugby codes, league and union. When those codes declared war on each other in the early twentieth century, the southerners sensed an opportunity and exported several Australian Rules matches to the northern states. As always, the game failed to take hold. We are offered several explanations for this, one of which was that Sydneysiders no longer “respected” Melbourne. Megalogenis even allows that rugby league was a “more enlightened game” at the time, reflecting New South Wales’s “openness” at a time when “football’s gaze had narrowed to the suburb.”

But for this economic historian, the deciding factor was money. By allowing player payments, rugby league captured the best talent, and thus the interest of Sydney’s working classes. It is hard not to suspect a sense of betrayal in this very Melburnian explanation: the Anglophile northern elite stifling the one true Australian game with a brown paper bag full of cash.

Megalogenis is on more solid ground explaining why Australian Rules captivated the southern colony towards the end of the nineteenth century. Crucial to this was its cosmopolitanism: Victoria’s population exploded in the gold rush years, and the flood of migrants, “too diverse to worship in the same church,” turned Melbourne into an antipodean social laboratory. The invention of the eight-hour day provided unprecedented leisure time, and this, combined with sustained wage growth, made football popular with both the working and middle classes. Football became a source of entertainment that crossed class divides — a “glue” to bind the “disparate tribes.”

As the depressions of the 1890s took hold, footballing loyalties became more vociferous and entrenched. Economic and social shocks turned “a once-confident people inward.” The football clubs that had formed around the city’s neighbourhoods took on distinct tribal identities, often along “the fault lines of class and sectarianism.” One-in-ten Melburnians had fled the inner city for the leafier outer suburbs between 1891 and 1893. Richmond, the central character in our story, lost almost two-in-ten. Those increasingly working-class neighbourhoods became “literal representatives of their people, raising their spirits in a way that politics could not,” a trend that contributed to the massive growth of the battler clubs during the dismal 1920s and 30s.

Once the economy recovered, “football’s balance of power” shifted, and working-class clubs like Richmond and Collingwood lost their advantage. Megalogenis crunches the numbers in his favourite data set — migration statistics — to explain how a club’s success was usually tied to its racial and ethnic homogeneity. Richmond’s decline in the postwar period coincided with an increase in the suburb’s ethnic diversity, while the most successful clubs (Melbourne and Essendon) were predominantly “middle class, Anglo and Protestant.” He recalls that his father, a Greek migrant, was more interested in the South Melbourne Hellas soccer club than Australian Rules.

Strangely, as a cheerleader for his chosen sport, Megalogenis ignores its perpetual anxiety about soccer, the clear sport of choice for successive waves of European migrants. Instead he repeats — surely unintentionally — that familiar dog whistle of the Melbourne AFL media: that only Aussie Rules can “unite” the “warring tribes from the old world.”

Megalogenis is a confessed “data nerd,” and he is at his statistical best explaining how class, family and geography determined the patterns of football-team loyalty in Victoria. The interwar period, for example, was the last time a person’s choice of football team was mostly determined by where he or she lived and worked. After the second world war, as populations continued to pour into the tribally blurred outer suburbs, the decisive factor was not where you were raised but whom your parents supported.

Later, as Melbourne’s demographics changed yet again, so did football crowds. Compared to the “joyful swarm of young faces” who went to games during Australia’s baby boom, football today is more like “a Midnight Oil reunion concert.” Whether by history, heredity, geography or just “collective madness,” football fans remain deeply attached to their teams. It is the tie that binds.

Running somewhat awkwardly alongside this history is the extended argument of the book: that the Richmond Football Club is a national bellwether, and the lesson of its fall and rise is a remedy for Canberra’s instability. The club’s success in the 1960s and 70s was built on the competing ideals of a win-at-all-costs ruthlessness and, if things went sour, a blameless victimhood. The Tigers’ tradition of hiring and firing coaches in pursuit of short-term success finally sent them into premiership exile at a time when sport was moving into the modern, fully professional era.

But eventually Richmond changed tack, adopted the voguish “values” and “culture” rhetoric of corporate Australia and — crucially — stopped punting coaches after one bad season. This was Richmond’s “new way to win.” No points for guessing the “lessons for politics.”

The Football Solution is in sync with Megalogenis’s previous arguments about national leadership. In 2012’s The Australian Moment, he celebrated the sensible “reforming” governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. In 2015’s Australia’s Second Chance, he demonstrated that Australia’s historical booms and busts were closely tied to its openness, especially to migration. When things went bad, Australian leaders usually made it worse by turning inward. These lessons, he warns, have not been heeded by our major political parties.

But the dilemmas of modern politics — leadership instability, short-term policy-making, a declining faith in basic political institutions — won’t be solved by this nostalgic yearning for the heroes of the 1980s (even if it has been cloaked in a modern sporting analogy). As Megalogenis himself admits, the current crop of politicians — and indeed the rest of us — are “sick of being told that Australia was once governed by grown-ups.” The political goalposts have shifted, as they are always prone to do, and the new circumstances demand new solutions. Social media and “presidential style” campaigning might diminish our politics, but they are now the rules of the game; politicians must get on with it.

If we did require a simple political lesson from sport, we might instead look to AFL’s unique response to the structural inequalities of uncontrolled capitalism. In other parts of the world, professional sport has become a monotonous battle between haves and have-nots. But as Dean Ashenden has suggested, the AFL’s equalisation measures — a salary cap, a player draft and redistributed television revenue — have managed to lift (just about) all boats. Any club can win. The code’s spectacular growth in recent years has partly been the result of these social democratic policies.

The problem with such analogies, of course, is that they inevitably break down. Reality is complicated. Neither sport nor politics will submit to such simple explanations. As Megalogenis’s own historical narrative makes clear, one era’s formula for success is another’s recipe for failure. There is no solution. Nothing works twice. Richmond fans, riding the sugar high of sporting success, should remember the comedian David Mitchell’s immortal aphorism: “It will never be finally decided who has won the football.” ●

The post Collective madness appeared first on Inside Story.

The hashtag is an initiative of Ali Can, an activist whose parents came to Germany as Kurdish refugees in 1995. Can runs seminars about cultural diversity and was one of the founders, in 2016, of an association called Interkultureller Frieden, or Intercultural Peace. The same year he set up the Hotline für besorgte Bürger for people to express their concerns about migrants, asylum seekers or Muslims, or ask questions about integration and multiculturalism. The hotline encourages calls from who vote for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

#MeTwo was inspired by #MeToo; the “two” aims to draw attention to the fact that migrants can have two identities, such as German and Turkish, or German and Kurdish. When Can posted a video message on 27 July asking people to share their experience of racism by using the hashtag, his inspiration was German footballer Mesut Özil’s announcement that he would never again play for Germany.

Özil’s declaration — made in a long English-language statement posted on Twitter and Facebook in three instalments, three hours apart — has prompted fiery debate and lots of soul searching. Much of the latter was the result of Özil’s claim to have been the target of racist slurs. Among those he identified as racists was none other than Reinhard Grindel, the head of the German Football Federation, the world’s largest sports association.

In an earlier life, Grindel was a member of parliament for the Christian Democrats; at the time, he attracted attention on account of his hardline opposition to cultural diversity. Under the #MeTwo hashtag, a Die Linke member of parliament, Sevim Dagdelen, reported that Grindel had once told her that she was an example of failed integration.

In order to explain Özil’s resignation from the German football team and the extraordinary response to it, we need to go back to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Few expected the young and relatively inexperienced German team to be in the running for the title, but they defied expectations by reaching the semi-final (which they lost to Spain). Football aficionados were surprised not only by the decisiveness of the German wins in the first two knockout rounds (first against England, then against Argentina) but also by the speed, elegance and intelligence of the football they played. Five of the players singled out for praise had come of age since the previous World Cup: defender Jérôme Boateng, forward Thomas Müller and midfielders Toni Kroos, Sami Khedira and Mesut Özil. Between them, they had previously played only twenty-six international level matches.

The team for the 2010 World Cup stood out for two reasons. At the time, all played in the Bundesliga, Germany’s premier league, which suggested that this was a home-grown German team rather than a team of international stars with German passports. Three of the four shooting stars had a migrant background: Boateng is the son of a German mother and a Ghanaian father, Khedira has a German mother and a Tunisian father, and Özil’s paternal grandparents migrated to Germany from Turkey when his father was two years old. And all three were born in Germany: in Berlin (Boateng), Stuttgart (Khedira) and Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr Valley. Only Khedira has two passports, but the others too could have opted to make themselves available for their fathers’ (or, in Özil’s case, grandfather’s) countries. (In fact, Boateng’s half-brother Kevin-Prince once played for Ghana’s national team.)

Later in 2010, in Berlin, Germany played Turkey in a qualifier for the European Championship. Supporters of the Turkish team, many of them German-born or long-term German residents, abused Özil for choosing to play for the German side rather than for Turkey. The booing didn’t seem to faze him; his performance was one of the reasons for the German team’s three–nil victory. After the match, German chancellor (and football tragic) Angela Merkel congratulated Özil in the team’s dressing room. The encounter resulted in the first of a series of photos showing the German chancellor with Özil — hugging him, shaking his hand, and often beaming in his company. The following month, Özil won a prestigious Bambi award in the “integration” category.

Sociologists Andreas Zick, Andreas Hövermann and Michael Müller of the University of Bielefeld found that diversity in Germany had become more widely accepted during the 2010 World Cup, and that racist attitudes had declined. They titled their study “The Özil Effect,” highlighting the role Mesut Özil had played as the personification of a new, more tolerant, less nationalistic, multicultural Germany.

Singled out: German chancellor Angela Merkel congratulates Mesut Özil after Germany’s win over Argentina at the 2014 World Cup finals in Rio de Janeiro. Jean Catuffe/Getty Images

I suspect the Özil effect could also be observed during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The German team, which included a core of players who had come onto the scene four years earlier, defeated the host team seven–one in a dazzling semi-final and then won the tournament by defeating Argentina. One of the iconic images of Germany’s victory in Brazil shows Angela Merkel in the team’s dressing room, surrounded by the players, including a bare-chested Özil draped in the German flag.

Unlike in 2010 and 2014, Germany was one of the favourites to win this year’s World Cup, but the team bowed out ignominiously after the group phase. The losses against Mexico and South Korea, and the narrow and unconvincing victory over Sweden, stand for Germany’s worst performance in the history of the World Cup. Never before had the country been eliminated that early.

Özil, who had been singled out as a key contributor to the win in 2014 and the German team’s impressive performance four years earlier, was now held responsible for Germany’s early exit. While it’s true that he played in both games that Germany lost but not in its win against Sweden, the criticism has been unfair. He was not playing more poorly than the rest of the team; in fact, it has been shown that he was more effective than his teammates. But those blaming Özil for Germany’s poor showing in Russia didn’t have only his performance on the football pitch in mind.

For Özil’s detractors, the origins of Germany’s disastrous performance can be traced back to a photo published on 14 May. It shows Özil, together with Emre Can and Ilkay Gündogan, two other footballers of Turkish cultural background who have played for Germany, in the company of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The trio, all of whom make their living in the English Premier League, had met Erdoğan at his request in London. It was less than six weeks from the Turkish presidential and parliamentary elections, and Erdoğan was on the campaign trail (which took him also to European countries with a large Turkish diaspora).

At the meeting, Gündogan presented Erdoğan with a football jersey with the handwritten inscription, in Turkish, “For my revered president, sincerely.” Erdoğan’s AKP party later published four photos of the encounter on Twitter. Suddenly, something Özil had posted the day before made sense: he had tweeted a photo showing just him and the two other footballers, titled “In good company this evening…,” with a winking face emoji and the German and Turkish flags.

The next day, Reinhard Grindel released a statement in which he criticised the players, saying that the Football Federation “of course respects the special situation of our players with a migratory background” but that it also “stands for values which are not sufficiently recognised by Mr Erdogan.” In the German media, Özil in particular was lambasted for allowing the Turkish autocrat to pose with him, and thereby indirectly supporting Erdoğan’s bid for re-election. Some commentators and far-right politicians demanded that the offending players be excluded from the German team, but on 15 May, German coach Joachim Löw nominated both Özil and Gündogan for the World Cup in Russia.

Five days after the publication of the photos, the Football Federation brokered a meeting between Özil, Gündogan and German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Photos of the three men were published in all major German newspapers, as if they were an antidote for the Erdoğan pictures.

The Football Federation had clearly hoped that the meeting and photo opportunity with Steinmeier would be the end of the matter, but the controversy over the photo with Erdoğan didn’t die down. While Gündogan tried to explain himself in interviews and on social media, Özil remained silent. This wasn’t surprising; even at the best of times, Özil is reluctant to talk to journalists. During friendly matches against Austria and Saudi Arabia, some German fans booed the two players.

For her part, Angela Merkel spoke out in support of Özil and Gündogan; ever the pragmatist, she pointed out on 10 June that “we need them so that we can do well [in Russia].” Not long after, she visited the German team’s training camp in Austria, and met in private with Özil and Gündogan.

In early July, ten days after the German team was eliminated from the World Cup, Grindel said in an interview that he expected Özil to explain himself. Both Grindel and the team’s manager, former German player Oliver Bierhoff, made statements that could be interpreted as blaming Özil for Germany’s poor showing in Russia. Others were more direct; Bayern Munich boss Uli Hoeneß said that Özil was hiding his unsatisfactory performance behind the Erdoğan picture and that “for years he has played only rubbish.”

By that stage, editorialists and other commentators largely agreed that Özil was at best naïve when he posed for a photo with the Turkish president. Even people who otherwise supported him have been baffled by his decision to meet with Erdoğan during the Turkish election campaign. Ali Can, for example, suggested that Özil lacked “diplomatic awareness.” But public opinion was divided over whether Özil was entitled to meet whomever he wanted to. Public opinion was also divided over the question of who was to blame for the German performance in Russia, and for the fact that the controversy over the photo overshadowed the team’s preparations, if not the World Cup itself.

The Football Federation’s hope that the controversy would die down, remained unfulfilled. It again dominated headlines after Özil informed his 23.2 million Twitter followers and 30.9 million Facebook fans that he had decided not to play again for Germany. Seemingly confirming the views of those who had argued he was naïve, Özil defended meeting Erdoğan: “For me, having a picture with President Erdogan wasn’t about politics or elections, it was about me respecting the highest office of my family’s country. My job is a football player and not a politician, and our meeting was not an endorsement of any policies.”

Özil also wrote in detail about the racist abuse he had suffered as a result of the Erdoğan photo. He reserved his strongest criticism for Grindel: “I will no longer stand for being a scapegoat for [Grindel’s] incompetence and ability to do his job properly… In the eyes of Grindel and his supporters, I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose. This is because despite paying taxes in Germany, donating facilities to German schools and winning the World Cup with Germany in 2014, I am still not accepted into society. I am treated as being ‘different.’”

Footballers who supposedly don’t look German have long been the targets of racism in German. In his wonderful book Heimaterde, which recounts his travels through a culturally diverse contemporary Germany, Lucas Vogelsang tells the story of Jimmy Hartwig, the son of an Afro-American GI and a German woman. Hartwig played in the Bundesliga, and twice for the German national team, in the 1970s and 1980s, and endured much abuse. Things have improved since those days, and most clubs now take a tough line if supporters racially abuse players.

In the public arena, too, racist slurs are seemingly less readily tolerated than they used to be. In 2016, Alexander Gauland, then deputy chair of AfD, said that “the people” like Jérôme Boateng “as a football player. But they don’t want to have a Boateng as their neighbour.” The remarks were roundly condemned — even by then AfD leader Frauke Petry, who apologised on behalf of her party — and for a short time they even affected the AfD’s showing in the polls. It seemed that Gauland had crossed a red line.

But shortly afterwards, Petry herself continued Gauland’s general line of attack. She told journalists that it was “a shame” that Mesut Özil never sang the national anthem when it was played ahead of international matches. She also objected to his posting photos on social media that showed him making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and wondered whether this “publicly celebrated trip” was also intended to be a political statement.

And when the German team failed to win the 2016 European Championship, having been the clear favourite, another prominent AfD politician, Beatrix von Storch, suggested that the team’s performance was due to the fact that not all its players were German.

While Gauland’s initial comment drew lots of criticism, subsequent similar statements have not prompted as much outrage. The more often players like Özil and Boateng were publicly attacked on account of their cultural background, colour of skin or religion, the more difficult it seemed to become to show solidarity, and the more acceptable such attacks then appeared.

Insinuations that Germany was eliminated from the tournament in Russia because of Özil should have been as scandalous as Gauland’s remarks about Boateng two years earlier, but they seemed to have become part of a new normality.

The response to Özil’s resignation from the national team dominated Germany’s media for more than a week. Angela Merkel has so far not commented on Özil’s claims of endemic German racism, but at least she had the grace to say that she regards him highly, that he is a great footballer and that she respects his decision to resign from the national team.

Özil’s former teammates have been less generous. Only Jérôme Boateng has spoken out in support of his abi, or brother, Mesut. Thomas Müller has demanded that the matter be put to rest, because “there is no racism in the German national team,” as if anybody had made such a claim.

A week ago, the team’s captain, goalkeeper Manuel Neuer said that he had not previously commented on the issue because he hadn’t been asked for his opinion and because he did not want to pass value judgements — only to do just that. He suggested that the German team must include only players “who are really proud to play for the national team, and who give everything for the opportunity to play for their country,” thereby not so subtly implying that Özil, who was notorious for not joining in when the national anthem was sung before matches, should have been excluded.

German coach Joachim Löw has kept his job despite the German team’s embarrassing performance in Russia. He is known to have long believed that Özil is a footballing genius, and had been one of his most loyal supporters, even when Özil didn’t play well. In 2012, when Germany failed to make the final of the European Championship, Löw angrily responded to critics who suggested that the failure of Özil and others to sing the national anthem was symptomatic of a lack of commitment. “It’s nice to sing the anthem,” Löw said. “But doing so is not evidence of quality, and [not singing it] does not prove that somebody is unwilling to fight.” But this time, Löw too has remained silent.

For Özil, the matter now seems to be closed. He has said what he felt needed to be said. He will continue to play football — not for Germany, but for his English club Arsenal. In a recent match against Paris Saint-Germain, Arsenal’s new manager Unai Emery appointed Özil the team’s captain. This is an indication that in England Özil has the public support that Löw and most of his former German teammates are denying him.

Özil will also remain German — after all, Germany is the country where he was born and grew up, the country that he represented ninety-two times as a player, and the only country of which he is a citizen. He will remain Turkish, because Turkey is the country of his parents and grandparents. But Özil’s identity cannot be divided between two neat categories, “German” and “Turkish.” One of his recent tweets is titled “Welcome to my city” and includes video clips that show him walking through London. He is a global citizen with a global following: worldwide, only four other footballers have a larger social media following than his.

In Germany, the debate about what Özil did and didn’t do has been overtaken by necessary, long overdue discussions about racism, about integration and about German identity. These discussions were prompted by Özil’s decision to talk publicly about his experiences, but they focus on everyday racism rather than the racism experienced by celebrities or the racism of leading AfD politicians. Racism is not a uniquely German problem, but it is a problem of Germany — rather than of a few obnoxious far-right figures.

The fact that the AfD, whose representatives are often openly racist, have the support of about 15 per cent of the electorate is only one facet of that problem. Another is that people who could not be accused of being racist — Thomas Müller and Joachim Löw, for example — don’t speak up when somebody close to them is vilified. And perhaps the biggest problem is that the 85 per cent of Germans who don’t vote for the AfD have done too little to stop racist attitudes and xenophobic sentiments from becoming more respectable.

The German team’s next match, against World Cup–holder France, takes place on 6 September. That will be an opportunity to once again talk football. Enough has been said about Özil’s lack of judgement in May, and about his more recent disappointment and anger, but much remains to be said about Özil as one of the most talented footballers of his generation. What better opportunity to reminisce about Özil’s magic when watching a German team that no longer includes him. Much might also be said then about the joy of watching a talented and culturally diverse national team. From a German point of view, it is unfortunate that that team will be France’s Les Bleus rather than the German Nationalmannschaft. ●

The post “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose” appeared first on Inside Story.

The minister wasn’t the only fearful one. The long-established free-to-air operators — always hostile to any new competition — worried that the new pay TV operators would siphon off the most popular films and series, and especially the best live sport. And so, when pay TV finally began in Australia in 1995, anti-siphoning provisions were built into the law to keep popular sport on free-to-air.

The stakes were just as high for the new operators. Sporting events were seen as the best way to build subscriber numbers fast — as had been dramatically illustrated when Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB made a successful bid for the rights to English Premier League football in 1992. It’s no exaggeration to say that this move saved Murdoch’s empire. Just a couple of years earlier, his cumulative debts had become so crushing that he had been forced to accept a bank rescue package with very strict conditions. His move into satellite TV in Britain was costing him an enormous amount, and there was little sign that revenues would improve. With the Premier League breaking away from the old Football Association, and its TV rights not yet settled, BSkyB pounced. Soon, football fans could no longer watch their sport on free-to-air TV, and BSkyB subscriptions rose dramatically.

Perhaps it was the scale of this triumph that led Murdoch to try to sabotage Australia’s anti-siphoning laws. In 1993, Kerry Packer’s Nine network had bought the free-to-air rights to rugby league until 2000 for $80 million, and the matches were included in the anti-siphoning list. Rather than meekly submit, News Ltd tried to circumvent the law by creating its own competition, Super League, with twelve privately owned teams.

A court ruling prevented Super League from starting in 1996, but it got under way the following year, splitting potential rugby crowds and dividing TV audiences. A peace agreement was eventually reached, but bad blood persisted among many clubs and players. For News Ltd, the immediate costs were huge and, more importantly, it had to split all the future fruits of pay TV with Packer, who now became part of the emerging Foxtel pay TV monopoly. Murdoch also suffered a rare political humiliation, with both Labor and the Coalition committing to ensure that the best rugby league games would continue on free-to-air. Howard’s battlers couldn’t be deprived of their free sport; pay TV had been put in its place.

The anti-siphoning laws have clearly benefited the free-to-air industry, but they have also had a public interest rationale. As SBS argued when the policy was under review in 2009, the anti-siphoning list is about preserving access to key sporting events for the Australian public as a whole.

But the stakes were high for both old and new TV players. The Sport on Television report, prepared as part of the review, found that the ten most popular programs on free-to-air TV during the previous year were sports programs, as were nine of the ten most popular programs on pay TV. (Australia’s Next Top Model came in at number nine.) The ten most popular programs on free-to-air had audiences ranging from 2.824 million (the Olympic Games opening ceremony) down to 2.131 million, and the ten most popular on pay TV ranged from 350,000 down to 314,000. These free-to-air audiences were around eight times the size of the pay TV audiences.

Over the years, smaller battles erupted, for example over whether the free-to-air channels were using the rights they had purchased to broadcast live (rather than delayed) and complete (rather than partial) coverage of the events for which they owned the rights. Charges of “hoarding” led to the introduction of “use it or lose it” rules. But once the existing networks gained the capacity to multichannel during the protracted migration of Australian television from analog to digital — giving them much more airtime for screening sport — that argument disappeared.

If the underlying logic of anti-siphoning debate remained constant, the attitudes of the sports associations were more volatile. Some sports felt that free-to-air broadcasters had neglected them because they drew insufficient audiences to be commercially attractive; for them, a deal with pay TV had strong appeal. Others felt that broadcasting rights should be theirs to dispense wherever they want, and that government should play no role. Three of Australia’s football codes argued to the 2009 anti-siphoning inquiry that it was their sole right to decide who televises their games.

For most sports, the primary motivator is financial. Being restricted to dealing with free-to-air TV, they argue, has limited the amount they can earn for their sport. Football Federation Australia felt this strongly, and Cricket Australia mounted a similar argument. The relative bargaining power of pay and free-to-air is affected by different financial logics: free-to-air broadcasters need an event to pay for itself in its own right; pay TV operators see the rights as part of a larger marketing strategy to attract more subscribers, and are willing to pay a premium.

For major sports this is a Faustian deal. Do they take the extra money or do they maintain faith with their supporters and preserve their free access? In Britain, test cricket was available on both free-to-air and pay TV until 2005, but after that it was restricted to pay. In 2005 the average free-to-air audience for live test cricket was just under two million per day; for pay TV the figure was around 200,000. Over the next three years, the pay TV–only audience was a little more than 300,000 per day. Cricket was presumably getting more money but its viewing audience had fallen to around an eighth of what it had been. Fairfax sports journalist Greg Baum argues that the result was “a decrease in participation and a general dampening of enthusiasm” for the sport.

A similar logic underlies FIFA’s attitude to what Fairfax journalist Malcolm Knox calls “the most-watched tournament in global sports,” the World Cup. The world is still transfixed by this premier footballing spectacle, but it’s likely that TV audiences are considerably smaller than in the past. As Knox comments, “the filleting and restriction of viewership by subscription television means the World Cup is no longer a freely shared, truly common global experience.” In Mediterranean Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, he goes on, “FIFA has leased its property to a fragmentary flotilla of ambitious but often obscure pay-television networks. They are not available in most homes or hotel rooms.”

The anti-siphoning debate has been given extra urgency by the emergence of increasingly sophisticated streaming technologies. At the 2009 inquiry, Telstra and Optus both argued that the anti-siphoning list should not extend to the new media platforms. (The technology still has some way to go, though. After Optus won the rights to broadcast this year’s World Cup but found itself unable to deliver an uninterrupted stream, Australian night owls were able to watch all the matches free on SBS courtesy of the embarrassed telecommunications company.) These emerging services probably offer a more direct threat to Foxtel than to free-to-air TV.

The other change has been in the government’s attitude. This first became evident in May last year when communications minister Mitch Fifield announced a substantial liberalisation of the anti-siphoning list as part of the government’s media reform package. Gone were these sports: FIFA World Cup matches that didn’t involve Australia, other than the final; the English FA Cup Final; the quarter, semi and final rounds of the Wimbledon and US Open tennis tournaments; the Australian Open; and the Masters golf tournaments. Unlike previous liberalisations, most had regularly been covered live on free-to-air TV.

As part of the package, Fifield — who seems to see his ministerial role as harassing the ABC and propping up Foxtel — gave Foxtel a $30 million grant to build up community sports, without calling for tenders. It’s hard to see why, if such a grant was to be made, it didn’t go to one of the five free-to-air networks that are available to 100 per cent of the Australian population, rather than to an operator reaching just 30 per cent.

With 1300 events on the anti-siphoning list, Fifield sees no problem in proposing to remove one hundred as part of wider reforms. But the 1300 are not quite what they might seem. AFL rights, for example, comprise 207 events (twenty-two rounds of nine matches, plus finals) and the Australian Open is also made up of a substantial number of individual events.

All of this brings us to my query to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and the ACMA’s decision — “in the public interest” — not to pursue it.

In April this year Cricket Australia announced a new agreement with the Seven network and Foxtel, worth nearly $1.2 billion over six years. The Financial Review reported that Foxtel would be paying around $100 million a year compared with Seven’s $80 million. Foxtel will simulcast the test matches and some other fixtures, and will have all streaming rights to Australian cricket.

For the first time, however, not all of the fifty-over and twenty-over matches played by Australia in Australia will be available on free-to-air TV. Yet these events are on the anti-siphoning list. This important precedent received only passing attention in the media.

It seems like a prima facie breach of the law, so on 10 May I wrote to ACMA:

I request that ACMA investigate whether the agreement between Cricket Australia and Foxtel breaches the anti-siphoning laws.

The salient facts are:

1. Until now Australian one day games appeared on free-to-air TV, and are included in the list of anti-siphoning events.
2. There were free-to-air bidders willing to televise those events, although their bid was not as high as the Seven-Foxtel one.

The relative amounts bid are irrelevant to the law, and prima facie it would seem the law is being breached and should be enforced.

In its reply, which I received in late June, ACMA declined to make an adjudication. It justified its decision in similar terms to those used by Mitch Fifeld and Tim Worner, the Seven West Media boss. Worner told the Sydney Morning Herald that public criticism comes down to a misunderstanding of the list. Seven has the rights to broadcast the games, he said, but has chosen to allow Foxtel to show them exclusively on pay TV as part of the deal. This doesn’t contravene the rules.

Fifield told a sympathetic interviewer on 2GB that the anti-siphoning list “does not mandate that free-to-air broadcasters have to purchase events. It does not mandate that if they do purchase, that they have to show them. And it does not mandate that if they do purchase events that they can’t then on-sell them to other platforms. The list… is there to increase the likelihood some of these significant events are on free TV.”

This is calculated obfuscation. Free-to-air broadcasters don’t have to purchase events, and often don’t, but on this occasion all three had bid. The Worner–Fifield argument means that a free-to-air network acting in concert with Foxtel can move any event to subscriber-only viewing at any time, and always could.

The old battleline of free-to-air versus pay has given way to a new phenomenon: a free-to-air network teaming up with Fox Sports and then dividing up the rights. According to the Fifield doctrine, events can be removed from free-to-air whenever these two corporations agree, and any other sense of public interest just disappears.

If the government, sports associations and TV networks want to change the law, they should do so openly. Cricket Australia could argue that cricket is declining in popularity and no longer deserves to be on the anti-siphoning list. The government could amend the legislation, see whether it could pass it in the Senate, and then face any electoral consequences. Instead, it is seeking to make the whole list irrelevant through administrative sleight of hand. ●

The post It’s not (just) cricket appeared first on Inside Story.

There were plenty of great matches in both the men’s and women’s draws. The crowd has always wanted Roger Federer to win the big one, and he did. Caroline Wozniacki was another popular winner when she broke through to win her first major. (Federer, by contrast, won his twentieth.) For Australia, Nick Kyrgios and Ashleigh Barty had some gritty wins. The eccentric Taiwanese player Su-Wei Hsieh, with her double-handed ping-pong shots and unreadable winners, knocked out two top players and almost made the quarterfinals. And another Asian, Korea’s Hyeon Chung, emerged as a star of the future, along with Australia’s Alex de Minaur, America’s Mackenzie McDonald, Canada’s Denis Shapovalov and (if only umpires could make her shut up) the screaming Belarusian nineteen-year-old Aryna Sabalenka — the first player to rival Sharapova on the decibel meter.

The tournament’s organisers view spectator numbers as only one metric among many. Apart from the 12.25 million who saw it on Seven — where Kyrgios’s match with third seed Grigor Dimitrov easily outrated any of Federer’s matches, including the final — the Open smashed its previous record audiences in Korea (thanks to Chung), Denmark (Wozniacki), and Romania (the unlucky runner-up, Simona Halep). Its mobile phone app was downloaded by 1.2 million people worldwide, and its total social media audience on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube hit 4.5 million, with YouTube alone recording 26.3 million viewings.

Pardon me for not researching how those numbers compare with those of Wimbledon, Roland-Garros and the US Open — and not reviewing the entertainment, retailing and wining and dining that have become such an important part of the Open’s focus. As Pat Cash remarked, this now seems to be a tennis tournament run as part of a festival. So far as this ageing tennis nut could see, the extras have not got in the way of the tennis.

You could argue that the Australian Open today is not only the biggest of the Grand Slams, but also the best. It will never have the prestige of Wimbledon, but it has the world’s best tennis venue. Player surveys have repeatedly found that it’s the tournament the players like best, largely because it is well-run and looks after them so well. And no other Grand Slam tournament takes over its city as the Australian Open dominates Melbourne for those two weeks.

The growth of the Open since it moved to Melbourne Park in 1988 is astonishing. It has been a triumph on an international scale by a country that often struggles in global competition. Its success has many parents — Tennis Australia, successive Victorian governments, successive tournament directors and officials, the staff, the volunteers, the public, and even the sponsors — who have made it what it is today.

For those who remember the past, it is hard to believe. The last Australian Open at Kooyong in the 1980s attracted just 140,000 spectators, and almost half of them were on freebies. The TV rights paid less than $1 million. Further back, in the 1960s, when I was a Kooyong ball boy and Australia dominated world tennis, the crowds most days were in the hundreds. Even one very notable final — in which Roy Emerson downed Rod Laver in four sets — played to mostly empty stands, with only 2000 there to see it.

If you’d suggested then that the Australian Open would one day be an equal of Wimbledon or New York, you would have been rubbished mercilessly. And in 1985, when the Victorian government and the Lawn Tennis Association of Australia (the LTAA, now Tennis Australia) launched their visionary plan to move the tournament to a new stadium at Melbourne Park — the single most crucial step in the Open’s rise — the debate was dominated by its opponents.

At the time, I investigated the issues for the Age and concluded that it was a gamble with taxpayers’ money — but a gamble worth taking. Yet I remember reading the consultants’ projections of rapid growth in spectator numbers with deep disbelief. I was wrong — and so were the consultants. The growth in spectators soon far exceeded their forecasts.

No one saw it coming, not on this scale. It’s worth asking why it has succeeded so well — and where it still has room to improve.

For while Australia’s place in tennis history is secure, its hold on one of the world’s four great tournaments is not. Melbourne is not Paris, London or New York.

In some ways, the Open has fulfilled former tournament director Paul McNamee’s vision of “the Grand Slam of Asia-Pacific.” It allocates one wildcard in each singles event to an Asian player (which now goes to the winners at a tournament held in China). Many Asians visit Melbourne to see it; far more watch it at home. And while Australian players often struggle to play their best at home, many Asian players have had their best Grand Slam tournaments here: this year, including Chung (who beat Zverev and Djokovic), Hsieh (who beat Muguruza and Radwanska), and the Taiwanese and Chinese girls who dominated the junior events. An extraordinary little-known fact: since 2006, Asian players have been involved in more than half the doubles finals (men’s, women’s and mixed) at Melbourne Park. And Li Na’s emotional victory in the 2014 women’s singles remains the only singles major ever won by an Asian player.

Yet to the north is a far bigger neighbour that sees itself as the natural capital of our region. It is able and willing to spend a lot of money to attract tournaments. In the first week of the Open, we learnt that the end-of-year WTA women’s finals will move from Singapore to Shenzhen next year — with twice the prize money.

The Australian Open would be a much harder catch for the Chinese — after all, we own it — and an impossible one if it continues to be the pacesetter among the Grand Slam tournaments, as it has been for decades. Let’s see how it happened.

The history

In the age of amateur tennis, Australia’s championships had no home. In line with our egalitarian ethos, they were rotated around the larger state capitals in turn. Usually, though not always, they were played in the second half of January, at the end of a long summer of tennis dominated by the various state championships, sometimes “test matches” against foreign teams — and, in the 1950s and 60s, the Davis Cup challenge round, played between Christmas and New Year to huge crowds.

The fields were often entirely Australian. Foreign players were a treat, lured here by special invitation in the 1920s and 30s — when the LTAA brought out some of the world’s best and their compatriots to play test matches against Australia’s best, rewarding them with generous expenses and side deals (such as ghost-written newspaper columns, which make interesting reading today) — and to play Davis Cup in the 1950s and 60s.

In 1937–38 one of these was the legendary Don Budge, the world’s top player. In Adelaide that January he clubbed his way through arguably the best field of any tournament that year to win the men’s singles. As the year went on, he then did the same to win the championships of the other three great tennis nations — France, Britain and the United States. By taking all four titles, wrote New York Times tennis writer Allison Danzig, Budge had won “the Grand Slam” of tennis. The nickname stuck.

The golden era of Australian tennis in the 1950s and 60s cemented the idea that the Australian championships were one of the world’s four great tournaments. But the reality was that this Slam was a homeless orphan, rotated around four cities, and usually losing money. When tennis went pro in 1968, even the top Australians could no longer play unless their whole pro troupe came — and that cost a fortune. To afford the demands of the men, the LTAA paid the women peanuts. In 1970, when Margaret Court won her Grand Slam, her prize for winning the Australian Open was A$700. (This year’s winner took home A$4 million.)

Then, in 1972, with Australia out of the Davis Cup, Melbourne put on the tournament in the week between Christmas and New Year. And on New Year’s Day, Kooyong overflowed with a sellout crowd of spectators cheering Ken Rosewall on to his first Australian title. The tournament ran an unprecedented profit. The national titles had finally found a home.

But as prize money soared in the United States and Europe, Australia couldn’t keep up. In 1978, the men were paid US$300,000 and the women just US$35,000. Even the top Australian players refused to play in the women’s event, which was won by little-known Chris O’Neil from Newcastle.

The tournament’s future was in danger when an unlikely saviour emerged: Philippe Chatrier, the widely respected president of the International Tennis Federation. Chatrier made it his mission to restore the standing of the two struggling Slams: his own French Open, and its Australian counterpart. He formed a close alliance with LTAA president Brian Tobin, who ultimately succeeded him as ITF president.

They negotiated a deal to get the women back: if the top players committed to play, they would have their own event in November, with US$200,000 prize money. It proved a spectacular success. From 1980 on, the tournament was a real Grand Slam with the best fields it had ever seen; by 1983 its prize money was US$500,000, the same as the men.

Chatrier and Tobin negotiated a similar deal with the men, and from 1983 the Australian Open had a genuine Grand Slam field. But that created a new problem: the more the tournament grew, the more it underlined Kooyong’s limitations as a venue.

Kooyong was owned by a largely hostile private club. It had a great centre court, but its back courts had little space or seating, and its player and media facilities were designed for the 1920s. Court One was so small that when John McEnroe survived a thrilling five-set battle with young Henri Leconte in 1985, barely 1500 spectators could squeeze in to see it.

To survive, this tournament had to innovate. This time its rescuer was Labor premier John Cain and his government. Cain quickly grasped that it would be impossible to stage a full-size 128-player tournament at Kooyong; a new venue was needed, or Melbourne could lose the event. His government selected Flinders Park, then a little-used grassland between Olympic Park and the railway lines, as the new venue.

Storms of protest broke from every interest group: the rail unions, the Melbourne City Council, Jeff Kennett (who vilified the project as “Cain’s cathedral”), conservationists, the Kooyong club, the Olympic Park management. To their great credit, Cain and his ministers stood firm against the confected outrage. The Victorian government became the tournament’s new landlord, and built for it a complex that was, as Chris Evert told us when it opened in 1988, the best in the world.

The Open’s assets were its site, its willingness to innovate, and its focus on player welfare. The retractable roof on Rod Laver Arena (and later, the other two main courts) allowed play to continue in wet weather — and, more controversially, on days of extreme heat. High-quality lighting allowed it to stage separate night sessions. Tunnels to the main courts gave the players security from human pests. And the spaciousness of the complex, once stage two was added in 1996, gave it options that Wimbledon or Roland-Garros could not match.

Paul McNamee, the tournament director from 1994 to 2006, instituted a kaizen culture of continuous innovation, recounted in his autobiography Game Changer. He persuaded Jeff Kennett (a convert once he became premier) to build the 10,000-seat stadium we know as Hisense Arena. After he came up with the “the Grand Slam of Asia-Pacific” brand and the Asian wild card, television coverage in Asia massively increased. Channel Seven was browbeaten into upgrading its B-grade coverage into something that is now world-class.

A ten-point tie breaker was introduced in place of a third set to shorten mixed and junior doubles matches — an innovation that has now spread worldwide. The two main stadiums were named after Rod Laver and Margaret Court. And after bad line calls at crucial points derailed Alicia Molik in 2005 and Jelena Dokic in 2006, Hawk-eye was introduced to become the ultimate line judge in the main arenas — another innovation that has spread worldwide.

There are more innovations that McNamee’s successor Craig Tiley could reel off, although in recent years they seem to have less to do with the tennis than with the sideshows — the off-court entertainment, eating, drinking and shopping designed to attract those with limited interest in tennis.

These days, the trendsetter is a new men’s tournament created by the ATP in Milan in November: its Next Gen finals for the eight best players twenty-one and under (which was won by Hyeon Chung). Designed to speed up tennis to meet the demands of busy people who see the matches as too time-consuming, it has introduced a spate of new rules, including:

• Warm-ups limited to five minutes.

• No service lets: if the serve hits the net on its way in, you play it anyway.

• A shot-clock to limit players to twenty-five seconds between points. (That limit applies now, but is widely ignored, especially by world number one Rafael Nadal.)

• Each set to be first to four games, with a tie breaker at 3–3. (Many of us don’t like that one.)

• At deuce, you play a sudden-death point to decide the game.

• Players can communicate on headphones with their coaches at the end of each set, and have access to match statistics on their tablets.

Some of these innovations will spread into the big tournaments soon. Expect the Australian Open to be one of the early adopters.

But our tournament has two unique problems.

The date — and the heat

Some people gripe about having the Australian Open in January (which to me seems a bit like griping about Australia being all the way down here). By contrast, Roger Federer sees it as an asset, arguing that the start of the year is when players are keenest to make an impact. And if you tried moving it to another month, it would be in serious trouble.

The problem is that the Open comes after a long break in November–December, followed by just two weeks of lead-in tournaments for players to get match fit. Some of the upset results in the first week of the this year’s Open showed that some stars were not yet ready.

Wimbledon used to have the same problem. Only two weeks separated the end of the French Open (on clay) from the start of Wimbledon (on grass). Wimbledon campaigned long and hard, and finally persuaded the ATP and the WTA to adjust their calendars to allow three weeks’ preparation on grass.

We should do the same. A few years ago, Tennis Australia offered to put the tournament back a week to allow three weeks’ preparation. Alas, the tournaments in February refused to change their dates, so the ruling bodies took no action. But it would improve the tournament, and the calendar can make space for it. We should keep pushing for it.

Then there’s the heat. Tennis lives in a year-round summer, but rarely experiences anything like a Melbourne heatwave. Tournament referee Wayne McEwen is authorised to stop play on outside courts when he judges the heat and/or humidity to be excessive, and to close the roofs of the three main stadiums so play continues indoors. Despite grumbling among players and purists, that policy is now generally accepted. But this year McEwen implemented it only on the last day of the tournament.

On the first Thursday and Friday, play went on as the mercury hit forty degrees in the shade, and hotter still on the stadium courts, where the Plexicushion surface traps the heat under the players’ feet. Players visibly wilted on court. Matches were decided not on skill but on how well the players’ bodies could cope with playing in a furnace. Some collapsed and had to forfeit. Some just let the match slip away. And others survived: exhausted, blistered, and wondering why.

Why wasn’t play stopped, or the roofs closed? Tennis Australia says it wasn’t humid enough. It measures player discomfort by a combination of heat and humidity. And this was a dry Australian heatwave, of the kind we’ve experienced at this tournament since it began.

That’s true. Spend two weeks in Melbourne in January, and you are bound to experience a heatwave. We had one when I was a ball boy: Lesley Turner (now Lesley Bowrey) fainted in the heat, and had to be carried off the court. This tournament has always been, in part, a test of players’ physical resilience.

But it’s a tougher test now. The average January maximum in Melbourne this decade has been 1.2 degrees hotter than it was back then; on current trends, it will only get worse. And the players are no longer playing on cool grass, but on hot synthetic courts.

The Open team has set the bar too high. Gaël Monfils and Novak Djokovic were gasping for air on Rod Laver Arena in the merciless heat, while players like Alizé Cornet and Markéta Vondroušová wilted in the cauldron of Hisense Arena. It shouldn’t be like that. Play can continue under the roofs of the show courts. Matches on outside courts can be postponed till evening. It would make the tournament more humane for players and spectators.

There were other controversies. Some demanded that Margaret Court Arena be renamed, apparently because they cannot tolerate her intolerance of them. Tennis Australia is normally very PC, but it wouldn’t buy that one. And then there is the sad story of Bernard Tomic, another prodigy who was enslaved to a tennis career in childhood, and now cannot find a way to enjoy it and accept the self-discipline it requires.

It would be sad for Tomic and for Australian tennis if we lost his magical creativity on court. Davis Cup captain Lleyton Hewitt and Tennis Australia should understand what is behind his troubles, and keep the door open for him, whatever the provocation.

For now, though, Tennis Australia can relax. It has just given us a tournament that was, in most ways, the state of the art.•

The post The tournament that takes over a city appeared first on Inside Story.

It was a clear, sunny day; the cool air tasted of possibility and fear. As the two teams entered the arena and breached their exhortatory banners, the crowd let out a huge sigh of anticipation.

We were called to attention by the national anthem, then the distinctive Australian Rules siren blared. The umpire stepped in for the opening bounce, with 60,000 pairs of eyes following his every move.

All around me anxious-looking men held their breath, teenagers refrained from texting, and small groups of transfixed women stared in wonder. In an instant they would be crossing over into that state that every sports tragic desires: freedom from all other worldly concerns. The ball rose in the air, tumbling above the ruck; the roar of the crowd was deafening.

Three-and-a-half quarters later, Swans fans were leaving early in disappointment. The youthful Giants had run down their more experienced opponents. By the siren they were ahead by thirty-six points. It was a massive upset.

And I didn’t feel a thing. I was an atheist at church; a non-believer among the faithful. I had attended out of curiosity, simply because my friend had asked me. Neither team – nor the sport itself – was of any interest to me. The train home was filled with the agonised and the ecstatic; I was trying to calculate if I’d be back in time for dinner.

Yet just a few weeks earlier I had been sitting in almost identical seats in the same stadium, sweating a thousand pinpricks of blood while watching a different set of teams playing a different sport.

The Wallabies had played New Zealand in the first test of the 2016 Bledisloe Cup. We scored eight hard-won points, but the All Blacks scored forty-two – and with an arrogance and ease that was awe-inspiring and demoralising in equal parts. I won’t go into the sordid details; they are still too painful to recount. But it was like watching a team of clumsy twelve-year-olds playing a team of gods.

Though he was a New Zealander, my father never played Rugby Union. In his poverty-stricken childhood he was moved around Christchurch by my rent-dodging grandmother so many times that he barely had time to learn to read, let alone join a rugby club.

But every year in late summer, race memory would kick in, and Dad would take me and my brother around to our local shops to sign up for winter sport. And every year, just outside Price’s Pharmacy, a row of men would be sitting at card tables. We’d walk past the man at the soccer table, then the League man, and then we’d stop at the Rugby table and put down our names.

I was five when this ritual began. From the very beginning I loved everything about the game, and I went on playing for my local club for the next twenty years. And just as much, I loved watching the Wallabies play – particularly when they competed with the All Blacks for the Bledisloe Cup. But I dreaded the phone call from the New Zealand side of my family after they had beaten us – which they usually did.

Like most Australians, I found my sporting allegiance in childhood and it has never left me. As I got older I began to understand the inviolable nature of this commitment. I remember once trying to engage with a work colleague about an upcoming Bledisloe Test Match.

“Not interested,” she said.

“But they’re your national team,” I countered, appealing to her patriotism.

“I’ve already got a team. They’re called the Cats.”

“Who are the bloody Cats?” I spluttered.

The Melbourne-born writer and journalist James Button can clearly remember when he became a one-eyed Australian Rules football fan. At the age of seven or eight, as he was being driven to school by his father, John Button, who would later serve in Bob Hawke’s Labor government, he leaned over from the back seat and casually asked, “Dad, who do you barrack for?”

Upon Button Senior’s one-word answer hung the nature of the youngster’s winter Saturdays for the next four decades and beyond. Without fully understanding the consequences – and just like my erstwhile colleague – James Button had become a supporter of the Cats, also known as the Geelong Football Club. In an instant, father had passed down to son something that would become both a burden and a joy.

“You can change jobs, cities, teeth, your house, your spouse, your life. You can even change your sex,” Button writes. “But you can’t change your team.”

Coming not long after my brush with Australian Rules at Olympic Park, Comeback: The Fall and Rise of Geelong had the potential to be the most tedious book I’ve ever had to read. No sensible person willingly chews through over 300 pages motivated by another person’s fandom without sharing the obsession. It is a testament to Button’s skills as a journalist and storyteller that this book was read with interest and delight by someone who has never been to Geelong, doesn’t intend ever going to Geelong, and has watched exactly one game of AFL in his life.

How did Button accomplish this?

To begin with, Geelong’s story is almost mythical in shape. It’s a tale that matches Joseph Campbell’s famous “hero’s journey,” the storyline so beloved of Hollywood.

Once upon a time, the narrative might go, there was a country town that felt it was scorned and disparaged by its near neighbour, the great metropolis of Melbourne. “We might be lowly provincials,” the people of the town reasoned, “but at least we engage in the Great Game with balletic skill and grace.” As they sang in their club song: “We play the game as it should be played.”

But in the 1950s the town fell into a deep despair. For a couple of years the only thing Geelong could win was the wooden spoon. The condescending sneers of the big clubs from Melbourne cut, and cut deep. The word “soft” was heard in the land.

But wait, a shining prince came out of the West. Polly Farmer, the great Aboriginal player, the best hand-passer the game has ever seen, the sport’s first real professional, helped Geelong to a grand final place in 1963 – and they won.

Having tasted success, the good people of Geelong craved more of it. They beseeched their gods, “Let the premiership come again.” But it never came. And it never came some more. Decades passed. The year 1963 came to be seen as a cruel anomaly.

Then a new hero arrived, a country boy from Myrtleford. With the great Gary Ablett in the pocket, Geelong thought another premiership was in the bag. But it was not to be. To get so close and yet no closer tormented the good people of Geelong. The pain of not winning led to a revolution in thought and deed.

In 2000, outsiders were brought in – a new CEO and a new board. Old habits died, and died hard. A new coach – Mark “Bomba” Thompson – laid out a seven-year plan to win the flag.

Geelong found new, young players – many of them locals or country boys, the traditional source of club champions. Slowly, sometimes stutteringly, Geelong rose again. By 2007 the young team was older and wiser and battle-hardened. In the grand final that year it crushed Port Adelaide by a record margin of 119 points. Forty-four years of failure came to a glorious end.

When the Cats brought home the cup – what the Jungian Campbell would have called “the return with the elixir” – Geelong went completely nuts; it was a Festival of Bacchanalia by Corio Bay. The streets were filled with honking cars and drunken supporters – but no one was arrested; the town’s tattoo parlours went into overdrive inking commemorations; nine months later came a mini baby boom.

It was a paroxysm of catharsis that Sophocles would have recognised. According to Button, one woman watched the first half of the game at home on TV, and when it became clear Geelong was going to win “she took her portable radio to the cemetery and listened to the second half sitting beside her mother’s grave.”

The residents of Oberammergau may have their Passion Play, but the citizens of Geelong have their footy club. From 2007 to 2011, Geelong made it into four grand finals and won three.

Apart from the story itself, Button has at his disposal a cast of characters so uniquely weird that at times the book reads like a novel about a strange cult.

The intense former North Melbourne champion Malcolm Blight was Geelong’s coach in the early 1990s. He took them to three grand finals in six years but never won a flag. Blight’s attempts to motivate his players could be bizarre.

He would get them to sit in a circle with blankets over their heads, while “Big Chief Malcolm” laid down the law to his “Indians.” He would make them form an honour guard to clap their opponents onto the field. And if that didn’t work, Blight would take his team into a pitch-black room and yell at them while chucking chairs around. The only thing he didn’t try, it seems, was a haka at three-quarter time.

A decade later, when Geelong was on its way to greatness, a player named Max Rooke – a gentle, beloved eccentric who took ballroom dancing lessons but was as hard as a sack of hammers on the field – created a team bonding ritual.

In a secret ceremony Rooke asked the other players to write down on a piece of paper their greatest ambition – “I want to be a premiership player” – then the bits of paper were gathered up, set on fire, and the ashes were stored in an old flask made of cloth and animal hide that Rooke had bought for $20 at a shop that sold African arts and crafts. “Then they dripped wax around the edges of the lid to seal it shut,” reports Button.

The flask – known as The Spirit – was awarded each week by the players to their teammate who showed the most Geelong spirit. It would then stand above the honoured player’s locker at the next game. Is this normal behaviour for young professional football players? Probably not, but they won the premiership that year.

And who has ever pierced the unknowable heart of that flawed hero of Geelong, Gary Ablett senior? Once, when the team was about to run on to Geelong’s home ground at Kardinia Park, someone thought to ask, “Where’s Gary?” According to Button:

He was found on a chest in the boot room eating a pie. At other times he was found in the same place, weeping. There in the boot room were the two Abletts: daffy genius and tormented soul.

Underlying the story of Geelong is the more fundamental story that bubbles beneath the surface of all big-time men’s team sport: the barely contained male hysteria that occurs when you make war, minus the weapons.

Relying on a lifetime of personal observations, and over 200 interviews, Button has managed to get at this story from a variety of angles. He gets inside the locker rooms, and sits among the crowds in the stand; he gives us glimpses of the powerbrokers in their boardroom, and goes out on the pitch with players.

It’s a fascinating portrait of a football club as a human institution: rancorous, magnificent and often absurd. Despite a brief – and no doubt embarrassing – flirtation with Richmond when he was five, Button has been a Cats man all his life. And the Cats are lucky to have him as their unauthorised historian.

When I finished Comeback, I thought, “Maybe I’ll give up my insouciant neutrality and start supporting Geelong, if only to annoy my Swans-loving friends.” But I will never, ever understand why so much raw athletic power and so much life-giving passion is expended on an Aussie Rules team when it could be harnessed to achieve something important: like beating the bloody All Blacks. •

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One of them was Charles William Anton, who was born almost exactly a century ago and died fifty years ago. Having escaped from Nazi persecution in occupied Austria, Anton built up Australia’s largest ski club with enthusiasm and commitment, drawing on ideas he had acquired in Austria’s Alpenverein, or Alpine Club, in the interwar years. Although he set out with the simple aim of establishing an organisation for mountaineers and alpinists in Australia, he soon became one of the driving forces in the promotion of the winter-sport industry and mass winter tourism in general.

The centenary of Anton’s birthday is a chance to show how he took an imported concept and created a successful organisation that differed greatly not only from contemporary Australian ski clubs but also from its Austrian model. And it is also a reminder of the many roles migrants have had in the development of Australia.

Charles William Anton was born Karl Anton Schwarz in Vienna in 1916. The son of Jewish migrants from Poland and Slovakia, he grew up in a liberal, middle-class environment. Like many young Viennese, he discovered the alpine regions around Vienna and developed a passion for ski touring.

Of the several organisations that had already built up skiing and mountaineering infrastructure in the Alps, the largest was the Alpenverein, which operated a dense network of shelter huts. Young Karl made intensive use of that infrastructure. As a friend of his later said, “Charles and his friends, with a pack on their backs, would finish up almost every night in a different alpine Hütte [shelter hut].” This gave him broad insight into the value of offering security and shelter for skiers on extended tours of alpine terrain, and a detailed knowledge of the club’s operations.

He attended the Technologisches Gewerbemuseum in Vienna, an elite technical secondary school known for its high educational standards. After obtaining his leaving certificate in 1935, he worked for a British insurance company, making him one of the very few people in interwar Austria who had the experience of working for a major international company. After the German occupation in 1938, his compulsory military service was cancelled and he was dismissed from the Austrian army. Although he had been baptised a Catholic, he and his family were classified as Jewish by the Nazis and, like about 200,000 other Austrians, subject to a series of discriminatory and later deadly measures defined in the Nuremberg Laws.

Karl Anton, as a friend of his later put it, “saw the writing on the wall” and prepared for his family’s escape to safety. After a short, intensive search, he found himself a job at a Jewish-owned insurance broker in Sydney, thereby managing not only his own but also his parents’ escape from persecution. Despite rigorous restrictions, he managed to bring some of his family’s financial assets to Australia, and he was later able to buy an investment property in Sydney.

Charles Anton and Tony Sponar, another migrant from Central Europe, were the major figures behind the development of the ski resort at Thredbo. They are shown here at the site in summer 1956. Geoffrey Hughes

Soon after his arrival in wartime Australia, he changed his name by deed poll, and he subsequently tried to join the Australian armed forces. “I sincerely hope that you will give me the chance to do my bit in this war which after all is as much our war as it is yours,” he wrote to a recruiting officer in 1940. In March 1942, he was drafted to the 3rd Employment Company in New South Wales, a new, unarmed military body that refugees were eligible to join. In July 1945, a few months after he obtained citizenship, Private Anton was transferred to the Australian Imperial Forces.

In September 1945, as a participant in inter-allied ski races at Charlotte’s Pass in New South Wales, he experienced what he called his first “taste of Australian skiing.” The races reawakened his passion for ski touring. In the following years, he explored the NSW Alps, describing them as “miles upon miles of glorious ski country comparable to the European Alps.”

Skiing in Australia, and especially in New South Wales, was very underdeveloped. There were no more than a couple of hundred skiers in New South Wales and only a handful of state-owned lodges. With accommodation scarce, each of the few existing exclusive ski clubs concentrated on building up a lodge for their members, most of whom were wealthy and well-connected. Membership was expensive and not easy to gain.

Charles Anton sniffed his chance. In Austria, he had learned about a club that was open to everyone interested in mountaineering and able, he said, to “handle the dangers of the mountains.” He had been an active member of an alpine club that developed infrastructure across alpine territory to allow its members to tour through a wider terrain. Australia didn’t have that kind infrastructure, and Anton was going to change that.

In 1950, he convinced “the major figures of New South Wales’s skiing community, as well as high-ranking representatives of the State Park Trust, the Government Tourist Bureau, and the Ski Council of New South Wales,” to support the founding of the Ski Tourers’ Association, STA, with the aim of “establishing a chain of ski lodges across the alps.” His organisation followed the cooperative “concept of the Alpenverein,” as he later described it, whereby autonomous clubhouse projects affiliated to form an association with a common institution. Starting with the first, a Hütte at Lake Albina, STA built up a network of four huts, together with Australia’s highest ski tow, at Mt Northcote, within the first six years of its existence.

With its open-access policy and comparatively low membership fees, STA grew rapidly. By 1956 it was Australia’s largest ski club, with a membership of more than 500 skiers from New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. Anton turned out to be an advertising expert. “No one could match Charlie in these things,” Leon Smith, his successor as president of the Australian Alpine Club, told me earlier this year. His qualities as an insurance broker, a profession he maintained until his death, proved to be essential for his undertakings in the snow business. From gluhwein parties and lederhosen fashion shows to the construction of entire huts as copies of Tyrolean chalets, he did much to promote the opening of new ski lodges. His events became legendary.

In many ways, 1956 was a turning point for Anton and the STA. In that year, his beloved Kunama Hütte, named after an Aboriginal word for snow, was destroyed by an avalanche and the engine hut of the ski tow at Mt Northcote by fire. At the same time, new environmental and safety policies were making the erection of new huts on exposed mountainous terrain more difficult. Skiing in general had also changed dramatically, turning from a leisure activity for a handful of affluent people into a mass industry. Ski tows, hotels and private lodges had mushroomed in the original ski resorts and Australian skiers had higher expectations of ski accommodation. The Australian Alps were no longer underdeveloped terrain, and Anton’s initial idea needed to adapt to the new conditions.

Kunama Hut, under Mt Northcote and Mt Lee, destroyed by an avalanche in 1956. AAC

He had observed international trends and was in close contact with experts in Austria, where skiing had turned into a major branch of the economy and an engine of economic growth. He had learned about the importance of mass winter tourism and become increasingly aware of demand among the emerging middle class for readily accessible ski accommodation. Very soon, he decided to change the direction of his club, adapting the plan to keep opening up the Alps to mountaineers through a network of shelter huts. Instead, he focused, in his own words, on luxurious “accommodation lodges in promising ski resorts,” which he strove to keep open to a broad cross-section of postwar skiers. Inevitably, though, the nature of the STA changed.

Anton dreamed of opening “a ski carousel á la Kitzbühel [a famous ski town in Austria]” and from the late 1950s until his death he immersed himself in the foundation of new ski resorts. He was one of the founders of Thredbo, Australia’s “most international ski resort,” according to the ski historian Peter Southwell-Keely, and developed plans to open up a second ski resort in Victoria. At a tourism conference in Hobart in 1961, he suggested Australia should focus on the estimated ten million American skiers and should “cash in on that trade by providing first-class facilities.”

During his later years, he was intensely focused on the expansion of Australia’s winter sports industry. He unilaterally renamed STA the Australian Club to emphasis its national significance. Along with the new name came an expansion into other states: by the time of his unexpected death in 1966, he had built up two club lodges in Victoria and had developed plans for a second ski resort comparable to Thredbo.

During the entire period, Anton managed to maintain a successful insurance business in Sydney. He married three times and raised three children. Despite his determination to become a “true” Australian, he maintained a fondness for his old home’s cultural paraphernalia. Austrian culture was visible in many areas of his life. He even furnished one of his flats in Sydney as a copy of a Tyrolean peasant’s home.

Patscherkofel Lodge, named after the famous Innsbruck 1964 Winter Olympic ski run, was Anton’s last project. He died of a rare form of meningitis on a ski trip to his very first ski lodge, Lake Albina Hut, on 17 September 1966. “Some of the colour has gone from the Australian snow scene,” reported the Canberra Times. A year after his death, the NSW lands minister, Tom Lewis, announced that an unnamed peak near Mount Kosciuszko would be named Mount Anton “because of the substantial contribution of Mr Anton to advancing Australian skiing.”

Charles William Anton was an example of a successful “cultural agent” who brought ideas into his new homeland and adapted them successfully to meet the new demands. Thanks to his commitment, effort and knowledge, he was able to build up the largest ski club in Australia, and the country’s “most international skiresort”. His successful efforts to publicise skiing secured him a central place among the founders of postwar skiing in Australia. •

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I had just got off the plane from a stint as an aid worker in cyclone-ravaged Fiji and was still unsure what country I was in. But if my mind was still in the Pacific Islands, my feet pushed forward into the streets of West Heidelberg, twelve kilometres from the centre of Melbourne, as if the act of walking would slowly coax my body and brain back together. As I emerged from one mental universe, I found myself in another, an Australia I distantly recognised.

Against a bright blue sky, a model suburb from the 1950s began to emerge, with pale brick houses, sizeable yards and streets lined with immense red gums. Only the small size of the houses and the narrowness of the streets betrayed that they had originally been designed as a scale model for housing athletes rather than as longer-term homes. The buildings themselves had been constructed with bricks from the Housing Commission’s factory in Holmesglen and, in the prim official language of the day, were intended to “present a pleasing contemporary pattern of form and colour.”

If the Olympic village offers a glimpse back in time, its construction – and the conduct of the “Friendly Games” themselves – mirrored the tense international political balancing act of the turbulent year 1956. In the official film of the Olympics, The Melbourne Rendezvous, the opening sequence and narration set a disquieting tone. Images of an enormous steel smelter, set to the doomsday chorus of a mass male choir, accompanied a narrative of industrial alienation in the deepening cold war. A resonant American voice intoned:

Modern man has made his entire world into a monstrous flaming arsenal. To protect himself against the inhuman forces of his own invention, he hides behind a thousand masks and disguises, rudely turning his back on the profound but simple miracle of his own being. He has put his faith in gigantic, complex machines and he cannot live without them. Ignoring his own pure strength, he stares spellbound and frightened at a world he can no longer understand. Is there an opportunity for men to act as men, free and unencumbered by science and their own inventions?

Luckily there is… the Olympic Games.

As the film panned over serried rows of pristine suburban homes, and as the narrator wondered, with obvious incredulity, why a small provincial backwater like Melbourne was the host city, a more frightening and uncertain world was beginning to emerge. In 1956, the first nuclear tests on Australian soil were conducted at Maralinga; the Soviet army invaded Hungary to suppress the anti-Soviet Hungarian Uprising; and British, Israeli and French forces had occupied the Suez Canal. This led to Olympic boycotts by Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon over the Suez Crisis, and Holland, Spain and Switzerland over the Soviet invasion of Budapest. “Red” China (in the language of the day) refused to attend, owing to the presence of official representation from Taiwan.

In the United States, it was the year Elvis Presley released his first album, Elvis Presley Rock ’n’ Roll,featuring “Blue Suede Shoes,” while Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat in the “whites only” section of an Alabama bus, as part of the wider desegregation and Civil Rights movement. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela faced his first trial for treason against the apartheid regime, while anticolonial movements in Algeria and Vietnam reached their bloody apogee in, respectively, the Battle of Algiers and the defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu.

In this global context, the construction of the Olympic village, and the equally constructed epithet that styled the event itself as the “Friendly Games,” suggested that Australia was slowly emerging from Dominion status while navigating the growing tensions of the cold war, radical social change and the end of European empire.

Was the order and conformity, the “pleasing contemporary pattern,” of the West Heidelberg streets an urban planner’s response to a “world he can no longer understand”? The official Olympic film suggests as much. An image of the great Olympian Shirley Strickland as she trimmed a rose bush in her neat, modern suburban home, then turned to the sky as a passenger jet roared past carrying incoming competitors, ended with the narration, “For some reason, Australian women prefer sport to back-fence gossiping.” It was as if the tide of change could be held at bay by javelin throwing, long-distance running and casual sexism.

Gaining confidence now and warmed by the sun, I walk under the Olympic rings that mark the entrance to the village and through the narrow, curling suburban streets dotted on either side by meek bungalows with pitched roofs and cream and yellow bricks. Vast gums line some streets and dominate the intersections, while neat lawns, privet hedges and tall plane trees are a model of Australian suburbia in the late afternoon sun. Some of the houses reflect a modest contentment with life – small but pleasant brick buildings that, in the wealthier surrounding suburbs, are rapidly being demolished to make way for towering McMansions. In West Heidelberg, too, some of the yellow fibro constructions, built as temporary athletes’ accommodation, are noticeably beginning to age and occasionally give way to newer, bigger townhouses.

As I walk, I am struck by the street names. They are a triumphant string of second world war victories where Australian forces were present in the Pacific and the Western Desert of Egypt and Libya. Many of those names are obscure now, but in 1956 they would have been part of recent collective memory. Here, the great battles of Midway, Tarakan, Tobruk, Kokoda, El Alamein, Bardia (in the Libyan desert), Morotai (in Indonesia) and Goodenough Island (off Papua New Guinea) cartographically intersect.

Only Australia’s colonial rule in Papua New Guinea was given greater prominence by local urban planners. The Papuan names of Moresby, Lae, Morobe, Malahang, Ramu and Wewak all feature proudly in the West Heidelberg streetscape. As European empire retreated around the globe, the old order lived on in the cream brick and colonial symmetry of an Olympic village that, with evident uncertainty about the new world, proclaimed an internationalism cloaked in military might and direct rule. In the 1950s, official Australia still saw itself, in Rudyard Kipling’s formulation, as part of the Empire’s “dominion over palm” (if not over pine).

But while West Heidelberg had once been large in the eyes of the world, there were visible signs that not all was right. A sign in a nearby phone box reads “RIP Trudy,” while a fake heritage plaque on a small fibro house, rather than announcing the former presence of a forgotten dignitary, informs passers-by that “Shit Happens.” In the next street, an enormous ute with a row of shooting lamps above the cabin is identified by the numberplate “Agro 0.” On some of the two-storey blocks of flats, a community regeneration program has put up large, locally made signs with words intended to inspire – “Hope” swishes across a wall in lively red and yellow spray paint, “Wish” and “Chance” express a more equivocal sentiment. The last two words are bright but illegible and suggest a disintegration of former optimism.

The Mall, celebrated as Australia’s first drive-in shopping centre, runs alongside the village and is equally suggestive of an antiquated modernism. Here, social planning policies of the era sought a concentration of the poor – ostensibly with the humane rationale of giving people a place to live but with the long-term consequence of producing intergenerational “locational disadvantage.” But if West Heidelberg is one of the most disadvantaged areas in the country, it is also one of the most rapidly changing. Along the Mall, traditional shops like Joe’s Meats and St Vinnies are being supplemented and replaced by those run by Somali migrants, reinvigorating local social life. Maidan Café, Maneeq Fashion Shop, Lebra Perfumes and Fathia Boutique have sprung up alongside the bottle shop, the TAB and various social services, taking advantage of cheap rents and prime positions, and transforming local life. The smell of coffee and freshly ground zaatar mingles with the occasional greasy waft from the fish-and-chip shop.

In an era of unparalleled destruction of Melbourne’s Victorian past, the 1956 Olympic village was an image of cleanliness, order and 1950s modernity that emphasised both national singularity and Empire loyalty. These decaying sentiments are woven into the urban fabric and provide an underlying stratum to subsequent layers of poverty, migration and gradual gentrification.

In its Olympic heyday, West Heidelberg was buzzing. The Victorian Housing Commission had constructed the village in record time for the arrival of 4700 athletes. The involvement of the Housing Commission was crucial, as it enabled the state government of John Cain Snr to respond to critics who argued that the games were a waste of the money that could have been spent on addressing Melbourne’s housing shortage. In a moment of desperation as the games approached, the organising committee hit upon the novel idea of an Olympic village, based on the garden city model of postwar suburban expansion, in place of the segregated barrack-like dormitories that had characterised athletes’ accommodation at previous games. Answering its detractors, the government announced that the Olympic village would become social housing once the games were over.

The village layout meant that teams could be accommodated together in houses, or groups of houses, fostering a spirit of “Olympism.” The practicalities of this sentiment were explained to Geoffrey Ballard, who became the deputy commandant of the Olympic village after responding to an advertisement describing the position’s attractions. “The hours are atrocious and the pay impossible,” he was told. The village commandant, Philip Miskin, a former Japanese POW, described Ballard’s role: “We are to be hosts to the young men and women of about seventy nations without distinction of colour, race, politics or creed… We must make no distinctions between any of them,” a sentiment Miskin took seriously given the horror of his wartime experiences.

While retaining the theme of military victories and colonial possessions in the Pacific, some streets were renamed to avoid reminding participants of wartime confrontations their home countries had lost. Care was taken that teams from countries with current political tensions were kept apart and separate dining facilities were provided so that athletes would eat together according to their “dietetic groups,” with a separate kitchen for the Israeli team and Halal meat “for the Mohammedans.” In response to a South African request to be located in a “white area” so as not to interact with black athletes, an affronted Miskin replied, “It was not you we were thinking of, but other people.”

If politics and food separated the athletes within the Olympic village, it was the first time both male and female athletes were housed within the same facility, although in separate quarters. A high wire mesh surrounded the women’s quarters as “female guests are entitled to complete privacy and protection from embarrassment,” although a legend quickly grew about the antics of a “Greek pole-vaulter” for whom high walls presented no great obstacle to romance. Thoughtfully, the village organisers provided an official chaperone for female athletes in the form of Miss Allison Ramsay, a former international hockey player, whose no doubt irritating presence was officially described as “a far reaching gesture of much merit and… appreciated by the teams concerned.”

Male athletes were looked after by the “housewives” – mainly married women who did the cleaning. Geoffrey Ballard described this arrangement as “a successful move as the boys had mothers and not lovers to care for them.” While some “national habits” were “unpleasant to take,” on the whole the “housewives generally loved their boys” and Philip Miskin’s secretary, Miss Baker, took a shining to some of them. “Marigold had a ‘thing’ about Nigerians,” Miskin later remarked.

At the time, the athletes’ accommodation was noted for its luxuries. All houses had unlimited hot water and there were two beds per room with “thick inner-spring mattresses and collage-weave bedspreads.” Each room had a heater and the women’s quarters were equipped with “washing machines, electric steam irons and sewing machines.” The male competitors, apparently requiring less, were provided with electric razors. Each day, across the village, 20,000 meals were prepared and 6000 beds were made. Food procurement was a vast logistical undertaking: athletes consumed ten tonnes of butter, 45,000 eggs, seventy tonnes of vegetables, twenty tonnes of fish and one hundred tonnes of meat. Eight hundred scouts and sixteen “bilingualists” were recruited to provide ongoing assistance to competitors.

If running the Olympic village was a massive operation, it was also one that had to be flexible enough to accommodate the random and the unexpected. Dame Pattie Menzies, the wife of the prime minister, appeared one day and was spotted playing quoits, while the Duke of Edinburgh, who had the demanding official function of opening the games with a public address that lasted a full ten seconds, was inclined to “shoot off on his own” and had to be closely watched.

All of this was too much for local satirist Barry Humphries, whose incarnation as (the then) Mrs Edna Everage arose partly as a reflection of suburban Australia’s attempt to grapple with the outside world. Mrs Everage, before reaching international stardom, was an “Olympic housewife” who had to come to terms with some of her foreign guests’ strange habits. Her observations were broadcast on the very first day of Australian television, established in readiness for the 1956 Olympics.

I meet Brother Harry Prout, a member of the Catholic Marist Brothers – and Banyule (the local council) Citizen of the Year – in his house in Liberty Parade. “I’m a tea man myself,” Harry confides as, clutching a warm milky brew, we settle down in his living room with its olive-coloured fibro walls and grey polyester sofas. On the coffee table there is a cross made of twigs woven together with red knitting wool. The house is at once public and private – a home that also attests to Harry’s two decades living among the church community he started and has maintained from his living room. The only personal object is a picture of Harry as a young boy in a framed photo over the fireplace; he looks remarkably like the older Harry on the sofa in front of me, holding a mug of tea.

“You can say that after eighteen years we’ve failed,” he declares flatly. He arrived in West Heidelberg believing that his work would be to “build capacity through collaborative leadership” and to help people in poverty develop skills and talents, often overlooked by institutions, that could break intergenerational cycles of disadvantage. “I’m frequently asked if we’ve had any success,” he says, “but it’s not really like that.” The search in the community for “natural leaders” who could take on local organising had not succeeded. “We’re given two ears and one mouth for a reason,” Harry says. “It’s about listening to people and learning to live together well in an area of identified need.”

He has clearly more than achieved this. As state officials from Centrelink, teachers, the local police and church leaders have come and gone, Harry has remained in the Olympic village in the same old athletes’ housing as everyone else. Here he has listened, helped locals to negotiate the social welfare system, and coached people in their interactions with the authorities and, periodically, the courts. For Harry, living in West Heidelberg is about being a constant in the lives of people who have had few, if any, figures to rely on – lives characterised by the intergenerational costs of family break-ups, substance abuse and instability. I don’t detect a hint of regret or despondency in his tone.

“You might get to the end if you’re lucky,” he says, “or you might not. It’s not just an economic thing – it’s about being there and appreciating the gifts they have, it’s about being with people and not trying to change them.”

I ask Harry what these gifts are. He thinks for a second before answering. “For the middle class, ownership is the most important thing, and for the upper class it’s connections – but people here are tribal. They stick together and fight together and there is always someone to turn to.” He goes on to say that “there’s so much damage and brokenness” and recounts how, in a men’s group meeting he once held, ten out of twelve attendees said they had been sexually abused as children by members of their own family. “The essential building blocks of personal development are missing and what they’ve experienced is abandonment. They have no answer to the question who belongs to me?” The members of the community, he says, “feel imprisoned and have no choices. They don’t have any money and the homes they have are given to them. They are controlled and powerless and consequently are often restless.”

Harry tells me that the absence of stable institutions or family relationships has meant an almost excessive openness, with few boundaries set about what may or may not be appropriate in different contexts. There is limited concept of personal property or ownership. Shoplifting is an issue, and then there is the early sexualisation of young people. The main view, he says, is that “if it works, use it.” He has observed that adult emotional needs are frequently met by children, as the adults themselves are often without other adult friends. In some cases, children haven’t gone to school because parents would have felt too lonely at home without them. If there is a shortage of money, the currency has become gossip and “stuff,” which Harry does not see as just accumulated clutter. “There’s sometimes little more than a path between the kitchen, bedroom and the TV because of all the stuff.” This is a psychological reaction to the absence of stability and security. According to Harry, there is a fundamental level of brokenness and “the whole household structure needs reordering.”

But for all this absence of rules, conventions and moral compasses, he tells me, there is a strongly developed sense of “justice and a fair go.” This is more than hypothetical. The local court has moved to the centre of Melbourne’s CBD and social services have become increasingly centralised, leading to culture clashes between the relatively educated administrators, lawyers and housing bureaucrats applying the rules from afar and the social norms, based on survival, that underpin the lived reality of extreme poverty. Strongly held local concepts of justice and fairness are, in part, the reaction to what Harry describes as the “institutional violence” of the state.

These comments are echoed by Jeff Percy, manager of Olympic Adult Education Inc., a private vocational training and community centre. “It’s like a country town here,” he says, and briskly summarises the area’s problems: in the housing estate there are the old, the lonely, and those with drug and alcohol issues. Thirty-three per cent of the local population are people living with disabilities “and they all hate each other.” Their problems and needs are different, and to make matters worse, communal spaces designed to foster a collaborative spirit among athletes half a century ago only antagonise people whose lives and needs are now so different.

He tells me that his role is more than education: it is “living and learning,” and is fundamentally about building connections. Offering literacy and vocational classes is one way of doing this, but turning around postcode discrimination is another. The “3081 Angels” (West Heidelberg’s postcode is 3081) is a local support group that takes pride in the area’s rough image and provides child and maternal support, cups of tea to young mothers, and the important function of “just being there.” There are meetings of knitting clubs, the Women of West Heidelberg, and the Combined Pensioners Association. A social enterprise program runs community gardens where locals learn gardening skills while also learning about collaboration and the expectations of work.

I ask Jeff about the standard of housing. I had read disturbing stories about hot summers and freezing winters, ancient sewer pipes bursting and tardy response times from the housing department. “They’re gulag blocks,” he responds immediately. But the area is slowly changing. Among Olympic Adult Education’s board members are local residents who are members of the middle class – social workers, teachers, a university lecturer. An indication of change is the arrival in West Heidelberg of the “Transition Movement” – loose affiliations of young professionals who are attracted by communitarian ideals of living locally, tending common gardens and attempting to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. West Heidelberg, I learn, has recently seen the highest rise in house prices in Melbourne. “We need to be there for the unwell but support the well,” Jeff says, and starts telling me about his longer-term plans to obtain funding for a $5 million new community centre.

As I leave the building, he points to gleaming beds of flowers all around the carpark. “There’s a Vietnamese lady who lives next door who planted all these. I’m not sure what her name is but I think of her as Mrs Wong.” Standing in the sun, I suggest that Mrs Nguyen might be more appropriate, and he laughs before shaking my hand and correcting my Vietnamese pronunciation. Nearby, a white Mercedes van with no numberplates is piled high with possessions in front of a house whose sign, next to a faded Australian flag, reads “Dead End.”

The adjacent Mall is a lively place – even the bins are painted in rainbow colours with the words “Be you, stay cool, we are 3081WH.” Somali men sit outside smoking, drinking coffee and chatting as the top end of the street buzzes with social activity.

It is here, in the street that has become known informally as Somaliberg, that I have coffee with Dr Hussein Haraco, president of the Somali Australia Council of Victoria. “We don’t really know how many Somalis live here,” he says. “They often don’t register in the census and many are afraid to identify themselves as Somali or Muslim.” Despite this, Hussein estimates that there are about 13,000 Somalis in Victoria, about a third of them living in West Heidelberg, making the Mall a major centre of Somali émigré life.

Hussein is an elegant man with distinguished grey hair, a neatly clipped goatee and professorial rimless glasses, who completed a doctorate in economics in New Delhi before coming to Australia in the early 1990s. While he has been in the area for nearly two decades, in many ways he is the face of the new West Heidelberg. His conversation centres around commerce and urban development; he is on the community advisory board for the Olympia Project – a major urban regeneration program that plans to build more than 800 new homes to replace ageing Olympic-era housing stock. The influence of the local Somali vote means that he has been courted by politicians on both sides at state and federal level.

“My one regret,” he says to me, “is that I did not buy more while there was an opportunity.” Hussein opened one of the first Somali shops on the Mall – a pizza shop with a billiard table. The shop, like most of the others in the Mall, had been empty for many years and the Mall itself had become a centre of local drinking and drug use. The shop’s owners offered a cheap rent that they rarely increased because they were happy that, after nearly a decade, someone was finally doing business from the premises. The Somali community started coming to the pizza shop and the billiard table was a big attraction in the evenings.

Gradually, owing to cheap rents, other shops opened. Hussein rented a second pizza shop and now Somalis are running seven clothes shops, two groceries and five restaurants. A virtuous cycle of economic activity began to spring up. A local hairdresser opened and, Hussein tells me, people would come to the Mall for a haircut, then buy their groceries and stay for lunch. Investment in landscaping and a children’s play area began to attract families back to a shopping strip made more secure by the presence of people, commerce and activity.

But far from being satisfied with the change in which he has been so influential, Hussein sees this as only the first phase of development. The shops, he says, are “too old-fashioned.” Young people prefer the nearby Northland shopping centre and it is time to modernise. For this, he is highly conscious of the area’s Olympic heritage – it is a selling point, something that makes the area unique. He shows me a large poster on the wall of the cafe, depicting the suburb and the Mall in their 1950s heyday when everything was new and bustling. The Olympic rings and flags of many nations fly over Liberty Parade and headlines from contemporary newspapers excitedly proclaim “Melbourne’s first ‘drive-in’ shopping centre.”

It is time, Hussein says, to move to the second stage of business – a return, perhaps, to the glory days. “We have to be ready for change, whether it is remaining commercially viable or the needs of our children as they interact with Australian life, whatever it is – diabetes, mixed marriages.” As I leave, he sees a friendly but very drunk young Somali man who is being greeted by a couple of Caucasian revellers who are clearly high. They move on as Hussein approaches, and forty minutes later, when I return to the Mall to drive home, I see Hussein and the young man still standing, deep in conversation.

The stability brought by the Somali community is frequently noted as one of the major changes to the Mall. “I feel safe leaving work in the evenings – there are always some elderly Somali men around chatting,” says Blanche Wong, the manager of the local co-working space, rented for a “peppercorn lease” from Australia Post. It is a brilliant-white space – attractively clean and open – with meeting rooms, computers and work spaces. A number of startups have settled here, including an accountant, a web developer, and media and publishing services, who have been attracted to what Blanche, a recent accountancy graduate, describes as a “business incubator.” When I tell her I’m writing about the area, she counters that her friend has been recently nominated for a RITA Award. Looking it up on her computer, we find that it is “the highest award of distinction in romance fiction.”

“The Games? No, I wasn’t a bit interested,” says Aileen Erikson, aged ninety, who was among the first occupants of the Olympic village after the athletes had left, along with her husband Jim, a milk delivery man. Her sitting room is sprinkled with a dappled light that comes in through the trees in the front garden.

In 1956, with a young child, Aileen and Jim were offered their pick of the houses in West Heidelberg for a £50 deposit and subsequent payment by instalments. She selected this house, “which was all empty when I saw it,” because she took a shine to the cream-coloured bricks. Her street was largely Italian at the time, and her neighbours were a policeman and “a cook married to a French woman.” “It was a bit more classy then,” she says, “but I wouldn’t go back to those days. I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m interested in. Our main role was to get married, have children, and make a home – women had to keep quiet.”

For a while, the environment deteriorated as a result of alcohol, violence and drugs. One time, Aileen “hid behind the door, scared out of my wits” owing to an altercation outside. But there are “many layers of living that have come into this place,” she tells me. Polishing up the Olympic village was important, and now migrants are “coming in with a bit more money, more culture, a bit more refined.” Two of her sons have moved to the more affluent suburbs of Box Hill and Springvale and tend to “look down on the area.” A third son converted to Buddhism and returned to live at home, where he practises silent meditation. “So I’m living with a Buddhist now,” she tells me, “but I’m more interested in experiencing life.”

Pausing one day to reminisce in front of the house of a friend who had died, Aileen met the new occupant, Suad, a young Muslim woman in a headscarf who is studying to be a teacher. The two discussed their experiences and pasts, and the role of women in their societies; and then, “caught up in all these cultures,” Aileen, the ninety-year-old “original,” and Suad, the young Somali teacher, ran off to the bus stop and went together to explore the nearby leafy suburb of Rosanna. “I thought I was her age,” Aileen says, gleaming as she recounts her adventure.

She shows me around the house and the backyard – a spacious block with a prominent Hills Hoist. “There weren’t any fences here when we arrived – it was all open and the children used to run everywhere.” Aileen hops lightly onto the back step and points over the fence at the big blue sky behind the house. “All that space,” she says, “used to be houses – all of this is being knocked down.”

Nearby, some of the athletes’ training facilities have been maintained, and the sporting tradition lives on through the local soccer club, Heidelberg United. John Lioupas has been with the club since he was a boy, and I meet him in Brunswick in the offices of the Greek Australian Welfare Society. Heidelberg United originated as a Greek social club and is still known in the Greek press by its original name, Heidelberg Alexander, a team whose glory days in the 1980s saw it crowned as national champion and host of the first soccer match broadcast by SBS. As Australian soccer began to professionalise, sporting authorities sought to widen the game’s appeal beyond its ethnic base and old teams with names like Alexander, Hellas and Croatia had to change. “It was ethnic cleansing,” John tells me angrily.

In Greek families, the club was a major social centre. “At the start of each week, Greek families’ money would be put on the table and allotted for different purposes – rent or mortgage, groceries, bills and, always, a bit left over for Alexander.” The club lost funding and was disbarred from competition for a period, but was kept alive by its dedicated supporters. “I’ve never been to an A-League game,” says John, despite his evident love of the game and role as a pioneer with United in developing women’s soccer. “They’re all owned in Dubai but my club is here. You can’t put up something that has no heritage – if you lose sight of that, you lose sight of where you want to be.”

In 2015, Heidelberg United reached the quarterfinal of the Football Federation Australia Cup against uber-club Melbourne City, part of the Manchester City franchise. Despite losing 5–0 to City’s hired stars, Heidelberg FC won a moral victory. In a moment of symbolism that would not have been lost on soccer’s authorities, the club contracted Kostas Katsouranis, a former captain of the Greek national team and winner of the European Championship in 2004, to play for one game. Despite the score, the presence of Katsouranis and a crowd that dwarfed most A-League matches meant that “we won the game before it started.” “Although,” he adds ruefully, “it would have been good if we’d scored a goal.”

When he was asked to recall how he felt about the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, prime minister Robert Menzies paused briefly before echoing William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem.” His were “green and pleasant” memories of the “Friendly Games.” In reality, the Olympic village was a hastily built brick-and-fibro “Jerusalem” in what the local Olympic organisers themselves had described as a “desolate tract of land.”

The Olympics are many things – but ultimately they are perhaps least of all a sporting contest. They are described as moments of pride when not just the city, or the country, but more abstract national qualities are on international display; they are frequently seen as a moment of arrival, a coming of age, a process of national maturity. Revived and reinvented in 1894, the modern Olympics are the celebration and encapsulation – along with the commemoration of casualties of war – of the strangest of modern political phenomena: the nation-state. Olympic villages bear passing witness to this compressed moment of nation-building and myth-making, and linger in strange half-lives long after the games themselves have moved on and the athletes have been forgotten. They are the future as represented by the past. •

I would like to thank the many people who gave their time and experiences so generously for this article and who welcomed a complete stranger so openly into their homes and lives. They made this article so much fun to research and I hope it reflects a place they recognise. They are: Robin Grow, Dr George Giuliani, Associate Professor Deb Orr, Dr Hussein Haraco, Ismael Gabow, Blanche Wong, Brother Harry Prout, Jeff Percy, Kerry-Ann Joyce, Brian Joyce and Aileen Erikson.

This essay was first published in Griffith Review 53: Our Sporting Life.

The post Green and pleasant memories appeared first on Inside Story.

One Drum panellist took the view that all this disaster talk was partly a consequence of too many journalists, desperate for a story, milling round the city for a couple of weeks in advance of the games. Some stories do desperately need to be told, though. When human body parts and large quantities of raw sewage are washing up on the beach where some of the aquatic events are to take place, this tells of dire problems for the residents of the city, quite aside from the risk to visiting athletes. A banner greets arrivals at the airport with “Welcome to Hell,” a place where police and firefighters don’t get paid. Yet paramilitary police employed by the government appear in ominous numbers to keep hostile onlookers from extinguishing the Olympic torch on its journey through the city, or otherwise spoiling the party.

If the public mood has swung to the opposite end of the spectrum since that flawless bid in 2009, it is because circumstances have changed for the people of Rio de Janeiro. In a scathing article published last week, Latin American journalist Antonio Castillo described an atmosphere of “corruption and calamity” brought on by hardline government policies under the leadership of interim president Michel Temer, who took power last May in what was effectively a coup against the left-wing government led by Dilma Rousseff. Rousseff was the successor to president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose leadership saw such a dramatic economic recovery that by the time of the bid Brazil had become the world’s fifth-largest economy. Since the coup, this recovery has been dramatically reversed. Two months ago, the acting governor of Rio, Francisco Dornelles, warned of an imminent collapse in public security, health, education, transport and management.

Following the successful opening ceremony on Saturday, the prevailing story in the Australian media is that the negativity has been “swept away.” It’s the conventional pattern, repeated through the games in Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London. The staple ingredients – the spectacular electronics of the floorshow, the celebrity performances, the appearance of legendary Olympic veterans, the entry parade of athletes, the lighting of the torch – amount to a fail-safe formula. “Let the games begin.” Euphoria and celebration will henceforth prevail.

All this is stirring stuff, and it is hardly surprising that it replaces the ugly stories of catastrophic pollution, political corruption and local poverty in the minds of the two billion or more spectators watching on television. So, does the generic structure of the opening ceremony, however brilliantly interpreted, inevitably amount to a sophisticated and prodigiously expensive international propaganda exercise?

Well, that’s not quite how it worked this time around, in spite of the pronouncement by Carlos Nuzman, president of the Rio 2016 Olympic organising committee, that “the Olympic dream is now a wonderful reality.” Nuzman, himself an Olympic veteran, was addressing the assembly of athletes whose entry parade had taken up the preceding two hours, culminating in the arrival of the small refugee team and the huge contingent from Brazil. The collective mood at this point was as high as it gets, and he was riding on it. “This marvellous city is the perfect city,” he continued. “Let’s live the dream together… We stand to deliver history.”

He spoke as if the tide of a darker reality was already in retreat, but it surged back only minutes later when Michel Temer rose to give his welcome. Anticipating a hostile reception, Temer had made his way into the stadium late and unannounced, but ceremony required his involvement, and there was no avoiding the moment. There was subdued booing, some whistling, but more than anything a sense of frigidity in the live audience, as pervasive as the excitement generated by the athletes.

If the Rio Olympics stand to deliver history, it will be the history of a broken dream. But that is exactly how it should be. Perhaps this is a turning point in the modern Olympic tradition, a point at which the wider public may learn to develop a double consciousness about what they are witnessing.

One of the delusions of the Olympics is that they already accommodate the full spectrum of awareness about the human condition, celebrating the peaks of individual achievement and national pride while paying special honour to those who become heroes by winning out against adversity. Following Nuzman’s address, IOC president Thomas Bach presented the Olympic laurel to Kipchoge Keino, the Kenyan track and field athlete who started out as a barefoot runner and went on to win gold medals at the Mexico City and Munich Olympics. Keino now works with orphaned children in a sports training and education centre in Kenya. He arrived in the stadium, running, surrounded by children dressed in white guiding white paper kites like those made by his pupils at home. His acceptance speech, with its call for the basic needs of all children to be met throughout the world, was a model of directness and simplicity. “We come into the world with nothing,” he said. “We leave the world with nothing.”

Keino’s work is real and enduring, but such moments of sentimental engagement with a mass public are not. The projected scenes from his school in Kenya were soon forgotten as scores of carnival figures took over the floor of the stadium. Will all those spectators who wiped the tears from their eyes at the entry of ten athletes from the refugee team remember that there are hundreds of thousands more where they came from, or be concerned about where these few individuals are going back to when all this is over? And what about those competitors from the “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea”? Do they have sleepless nights in the athletes’ village, tormented by fears of what may happen on their return home if they fail to make the medal tally?

Dual consciousness involves holding two contradictory orders of reality in sustained relationship. If Fernando Meirelles, director of the Rio opening ceremony, didn’t quite achieve this, he at least went some way. In his 2002 film City of God, Meirelles undertook a graphic portrayal of life in the favelas of Rio, where drug trafficking triggers a cycle of poverty and violence. Recognising the financial stress of the ceremony on a population gripped by severe economic recession, he made it widely known that his budget would be minimal – about a tenth of what was spent for the London Olympics. Five thousand local people were among the performers, and twelve groups of samba drummers were drawn from schools around the country.

Ecology was a central theme, and Meirelles did not fight shy of some strong polemic, with projections of inundated shorelines around the globe, and a reading by Judi Dench of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poem “A Flor e a Náusea.” The poem evokes an image of a single flower, growing from a crack in the asphalt, as a counterforce to the encroaching concrete jungle of the city. Brazil’s other jungle, the Amazon rainforest, one of the great ecological assets of the globe, has been brutally eroded in recent decades. Over four million square kilometres of it has been cleared since 1970. Climate change in Brazil is not a future threat, but a current emergency. In one of the strangest pieces of binary symbolism in the ceremony, the Olympic flag was raised by members of Rio’s environmental police, dressed in combat fatigues, while on the other side of the stadium, the anthem was sung by a group of children in white.

Children in white were a recurring presence, an ironic but determined tribute to the survival of some kind of innocence in a city where so many children are drafted into the ranks of assassins, addicts and prostitutes. Twelve-year-old rapper MC Soffia, whose lyrics celebrate her African heritage in songs about slavery and ongoing racial division, appeared in two outfits, one all white, and the other a carnival-punk extravaganza.

Artistically, the ceremony was a mixed bag. Some of the singers were underwhelming, and the choreographed routines were not generally performed with any real panache. This was disappointing. Human talent is one of the least expensive components of these massive ceremonies. If the idea was to use semi-professionals or community performers, that’s all to the good, but rehearsal time is of the essence. Transitions between one scene and the next were often confusing. The first half of the show seemed too rapidly paced, and the scenes lacked dramatic build. Remember the “Awakening” segment of the Sydney Olympics, with the lone chant of Djakapurra Munyarrun calling up the dreamtime?

It takes theatrical skill to move the attention of an audience to deeper levels, but extravagant spectacle is not required. I had been hoping to see in the Rio ceremony something of the legacy of Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, who bequeathed a model for extraordinarily powerful community drama in his Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal was elected as a city councillor in Rio in the 1990s, and used his office to develop a form of participatory theatre aimed at involving citizens in law reform. Now that Brazil appears to be going backwards in democratic terms, this opening ceremony might have been an opportunity to reignite Boal’s influence and make some more potent dramatic impact.

Meirelles, though, is not a theatre director. His first discipline was architecture, and there were strokes of real genius in the way he combined cinematic and architectural features with human performance. We had the rainforest, conjured in a hail of green light with weaving bird shadows. Then the illusion of a concrete city rising from the floor in an array of miscellaneous blocks, with the performers leaping across the different heights and appearing to climb the vertical surfaces of high-rise apartment buildings, , silhouetted by the fluorescent pinks, greens and yellows of the city lights. It was an inspired touch to repeat these cubist forms as hand-held canvas structures built into an aeroplane, commemorating Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont. As the plane rose through the roof of the stadium to fly around the city, we witnessed a tour de force of contemporary inventiveness.

Clearly it is time to change the culture of the Olympics so that the opening and closing ceremonies showcase inventiveness and economy rather than reckless extravagance. This would sit well with the reform agenda already published by the IOC for 2020 and beyond. Costs of bidding are to be reduced, and competing cities will be asked to present a project with long-term social, economic and environmental benefits for the home population.

Fiercer critics of the IOC might be happier to see the whole thing packed up. After all the corruption, the scandals, the wanton extravagance and the wilful delusions, can we really say that the benefits of the modern Olympics outweigh the costs? Why do we need to watch humans trying to turn themselves into superhumans? And who cares about these golden heroes and heroines a decade later when, like Grant Hackett or Ian Thorpe, they are battling with a divide in their own sense of identity that sends them into a spiral of depression?

Chair of the IOC Thomas Bach puts the case for the defence: “We are living in a world of crisis and mistrust and uncertainty. Here is our answer. Athletes living peacefully together in one Olympic village… In this Olympic world we are all equal.” That declaration is already belied by the image of athletes standing at their different levels on the podium. The challenge is perhaps for us to remain in two minds, to keep the contradictions in play and try to learn from them. •

The post Making history in Rio appeared first on Inside Story.

The attention the news attracted says as much about the changing dynamics of television and video consumption as it does about the prospects of the football codes. This particular future has been arriving for some time. Google purchased YouTube almost a decade ago and has been slowly but surely professionalising and commercialising the content on this online video-sharing platform. Netflix might be new to Australia, but it launched as a DVD hire service in the United States nearly two decades ago and made a concerted push into streamed online content between 2007 and 2010. A year later, the then CEO of the online television streaming service Hulu, Jason Kilar, provoked industry controversy when he laid out a vision for television’s future in a company blog post: more online consumption, fewer advertisements, multiple screens, lower margins and rapid innovation all feature.

So far, the almost unrivalled value of live television sport to major advertisers has protected commercial free-to-air and pay television networks from significant disruption. But as advertising revenues shift towards online and mobile platforms globally, so too do growing portions of sport content. Viable technology and revenue models for streaming sport and monetising online video have been in development for several years.

Red Bull Media House is an international pioneer in the creation and distribution of online video featuring action sports such as surfing, skateboarding and motocross. It uploaded its first video to YouTube in 2006 and now operates the Red Bull TV platform. YouTube streamed the Indian Premier League cricket tournament live in 2009, and in 2011 streamed the Copa America football championship to over fifty countries. Live streaming of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, accessed via rights-holder sites and apps owned by ESPN, Univision and ITV, set new traffic records around the world.

The US National Football League, or NFL, has recently teamed with YouTube to create an official channel featuring daily content, including game previews, in-game highlights and clips. The NFL has also signed a revenue-sharing deal with Twitter encompassing in-game highlights and clips, which resembles a similar deal with NASCAR motor racing. The spectacularly violent Ultimate Fighting Championship has given fans free access to selected fights on Facebook. Even the Australian Football League, or AFL, has made noises about selling games direct to fans online once its current coverage rights deal expires in 2016. Viewed in this light, the notion that Facebook or Google might one day own the coverage rights to the footy is less than novel.

What might turn out to have been a landmark moment in the history of online sports coverage occurred less then a month ago. On 3 June, Yahoo! announced it had secured the exclusive rights to stream an NFL game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars, to be played in October at Wembley Stadium in London, paying a reported US$20 million for the privilege. This will be the first time a regular season game is streamed free to online viewers around the globe. A fascinating feature of this announcement was the intense competition involved in securing the rights to the game, with Yahoo! successfully outbidding Twitter. The London event represents a concerted attempt to expand the NFL’s international audience. It is also a test-bed for the development of an international online viewing model that, initially at least, sits alongside existing domestic broadcast coverage arrangements.

Despite the codes’ blunt negotiating tactics, Australia’s limited market size works against the stimulation of competitive tension, particularly given Telstra’s overwhelming dominance of the telecommunications sector. The last round of coverage deals saw Telstra pay approximately $153 million (to the AFL) and $100 million (to the National Rugby League, or NRL) over five years for digital and mobile rights packages. With perhaps the exception of Optus, no other Australian telecommunications carrier is in a position to deliver these amounts, suggesting that Telstra has limited incentive to significantly lift its offer in the next round. The introduction of Google, Facebook, Netflix and Fetch TV to the negotiating table expands the range of potential bidders.

These negotiations also reflect the fact that there are limits on how much the free-to-air networks and Foxtel can pay for future broadcast rights. Men’s professional sport is as popular as ever, but the story of the television industry as a whole is one of uneven audience numbers and stagnating advertising revenue. From the perspective of the AFL and NRL, marked revenue growth is far more likely to be found in the digital and mobile world, as the deal between Yahoo! and the NFL indicates.

The events of the past week signal the moment the future arrived for followers of this country’s two biggest football leagues. Multiple screens, mobile and tablet devices, live streaming and digital delivery platforms are increasingly integral features of sport and media. In contemplating how this realisation finally dawned in Australia, it is worth recalling an aphorism attributed to science fiction writer William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” •

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No one ever called Glasgow the “second city of the Commonwealth.” The operative word was always “Empire,” even if the accolade, during the Victorian period when it took hold, was contested with Liverpool, that other great port city in England’s northwest. Two centuries on, visible interest in Glasgow’s role in Britain’s empire is mostly limited to exhibitions or the local-history trails that wind around Jamaica Street and the mansions of the “tobacco lords.” But Glasgow was always good at shedding old layers and adorning itself with new, and its hosting of the Commonwealth Games, launched with an exuberant opening ceremony on 23 July, shows it has kept the knack.

The gusto of its embrace is evident in the ubiquitous flags of the seventy-one competing states and territories, the advertising posters and information brochures, the climax of the worldwide “queen’s baton relay,” the spin-off conferences and art projects, the welcome from friendly guides (who, as in Sydney’s Olympics, can do so much to shape perceptions of an event and its home city.) The pre-tournament norovirus health scare, and controversy over Team Scotland’s garish uniform – more suitable for a Brigadoon theme park, say critics – provided newspapers with plenty of stories before the competition began. All this, plus the work invested in building or upgrading facilities since Glasgow was awarded the games in 2007, gives the organisers reason to hope that by the finale on 3 August, it will have done the best possible “brand awareness” job.

As for the legacy, measuring it will, as ever, keep researchers busy for years. The running cost, currently at £560 million, is a third over initial estimates but not excessive by the scandalous standards of recent big projects in Britain. There is visible investment in parts of Glasgow’s poorer east end where the events are taking place, such as Dalmarnock, Bridgeton and Rutherglen: fresh transport upgrades and links, construction work around the athletes’ village (which will be converted into 700 new homes). But a longer-term jobs boost in these areas, where call centres and retail outlets are the lead employment options, is at present still mist over the Clyde.

The sport and the legacy aside, of more immediate concern to many is the extraordinary political psychodrama that surrounds the games. When Scotland’s largest city outvoted Abuja to win the games, no one could have foreseen that they would be held seven weeks before a plebiscite on the country’s independence. As things turned out, the combination of location and timing adds a spicy ingredient to an already overheated meal, where every cryptic celebrity morsel – David Bowie’s “Scotland, stay with us,” J.K. Rowling’s “Death Eaterish” open letter, Billy Connolly’s “the Scots will get what they deserve” – is devoured in an instant by the referendum maw.

Clearly, a ten-day spectacle where Scottish and English athletes compete under “their own” flag (unlike in the Olympics, which is all Union Jack-ery), and where there are countless other sub-plots, is conducive to a feverish spasm or two. The Telegraph speculates that home crowds will boo the English, a suggestion pooh-poohed by the paper’s own columnist Allan Massie. Scotland’s minister in the London government, Alistair Carmichael (a Liberal Democrat), warns the leader of the Scottish National Party, or SNP, Alex Salmond, not to use the games as a campaign tool. (Salmond’s flourishing of a Saltire flag in Wimbledon’s royal box when Andy Murray won the men’s final in 2013 won him more ridicule than acclaim.) A pre-emptive call for dignity is a cannier flag for a politician to wave.

The refovirus, though, won’t be easily contained. Joan McAlpine, the SNP member of the Scottish parliament – last encountered rewaging the Great War on Scotland’s behalf – says the Commonwealth Games are “[not] just a sporting inspiration” but “a great example of cooperation between people who share some historic ties but are also proud of their distinctiveness and independence.” On the other side Tristram Hunt, a prolific historian who doubles as Labour’s education shadow minister, writes in the Sunday Times that of all Scotland’s cities “outward-looking, trading, multicultural Glasgow reveals the benefits of being in the UK.”

This drumbeating context of high stakes and potent symbolism may ensure the odd kerfuffle. Yet the Scottish public, polls say, will be unforgiving of any effort to exploit the games, not least for the disrespect to everyone involved it would entail. Glaswegians’ instinctive warmth and hospitality might prove the best prophylactic.

The Commonwealth Games are unlikely to swing a single vote. But Glasgow will find its own way to imprint itself on the occasion. In the run-up, many in Scotland’s largest city – at 600,000, a fifth more populous than the capital, its great rival Edinburgh, forty miles to the east – have been reflecting on how the event fits into its history.

One theme is the need to recall the substance of “second city of the Empire” rather than citing the phrase while forgetting its roots. The notion itself can be traced to 1825, though it gained currency from John K. McDowall’s A People’s History of Glasgow, published in 1899 when the city’s industrial prowess was approaching its zenith. John M. MacKenzie, leading historian of the cultures of imperialism, writes that it was “a sort of mantra of pride in place and achievement that elite Glaswegians clung to and successfully disseminated among other classes for more than a century.”

Empire went deep into the city’s life: its trading networks and business interests, architecture and civic institutions, its newspapers and entertainments, its class divides and ethnic components. In a fine essay, “‘The Second City of the Empire’: Glasgow – Imperial Municipality,” MacKenzie also notes C.A. Oakley’s argument in his 1946 book The Second City (“a truncated reference that everyone was expected to understand immediately”) that Glasgow held the informal title from 1800 until at least 1914, in the process holding off competition from Birmingham, Sydney, Montreal, Toronto and Calcutta.

But the reputational overlap with Liverpool also makes sense, for it reflects how similar the cities’ modern journey has been. Each experienced rapid growth to becoming mercantile hub and industrial powerhouse; each accumulated vast wealth founded on trade in slaves, sugar and tobacco, alongside great poverty; each received a huge inflow of rural migrants (Irish in both cases, Gaelic and Welsh from respective hinterlands, but also sailors-turned-settlers of black Caribbean and Chinese origin); each incubated many political ideologies, by turn Unionist and Liberal, radical and socialist. No wonder that a certain affinity between the people of the two cities arose, even as their masters vied for status in an imperial league table where, of course, London was the undisputed champion.

The legacy of that epic period was painful, both in the depressed inter-war years and again since the 1970s. Empire’s long withdrawing roar, and strategic failures to adapt, left multiple problems: loss of industry and skills, low investment, global competition, high unemployment, educational failings and poor health, all compounded by short-sighted (or worse) governance. In places like Glasgow and Liverpool, the memory of former grandeur – however hard actual conditions had been for many at its height – can make the sociologists’ “cycle of deprivation” seem all the more intolerable. In face of it, the only realistic option has been substantial adjustment (“regeneration,” the boosters would say) with the long-term aim of economic viability in a healthy social environment.

For such proud but diminished cities (Glasgow’s population, over a million in 1961, fell a third by 1991), this latest stage is strewn with rocks: akin to reversing in mid-ocean the great liners they were once famous for building. The story of regeneration is routinely told by the winners and flattened into an easy “before” and “after” marketing-speak that falsifies both. (I vividly recall a Glasgow friend looking back from the 1990s to the 1960s and saying of the urban fabric and public life of the city: “Things were neither so bad before, nor are they so good now.”) The wasteful projects, false trails, bad decisions, scandals and pork-barrel politics also need to be registered – and Glasgow has had many of those.

Amnesia is fuelled by other Glasgow impulses: make it new, build it big, show it off, knock it down and start again. A case in point was a plan to blow up five of the six remaining Red Road public housing tower blocks, also in Glasgow’s east end, as part of the Commonwealth Games’ opening spectacle. Built between 1964 and 1969, and the highest in Europe at the time, the flats were a symbol of that era’s municipal modernism, but had long suffered from neglect, disrepair, and abandonment. Many ex-residents, including asylum seekers, nonetheless saw the public demolition of their former homes as a sort of desecration. Their protest forced the whizz to be abandoned. The words “insensitive” and “trampling on our history” were much used, to a discordant murmur from a million of the city’s ghosts.

Ill-judged, yes, but the “blow-down” – announced as “an unforgettable statement of how Glasgow is confidently embracing the future and changing for the better” – also went with the grain of much of Glasgow’s history. The spirit of the planners and architects who smashed a maze of motorways through the city centre in the 1960s still rules. Along the way they pulverised the tenements of the huge, working-class, multifarious Gorbals district – once routinely seen as “notorious,” now as a ripe source of fond if standardised memoir. (So powerful is this imaginative shift that it reframes even postwar social-realist depictions, such as A.L. Lloyd and Bert Hardy’s shaping Picture Post feature, published in January 1948, or David MacKane’s film The Gorbals Story, released in 1950, which adapted Robert McLeish’s 1946 play.) In Glasgow even more than elsewhere in Britain, it can seem (to adapt August Bebel) that regeneration is the socialism of the victors, nostalgia the socialism of the losers, and that both are wrong answers to a real conundrum.

If Red Road was one case study in how Glasgow works, another was visible in its council leader’s decision to countermand the result of an open architectural competition for the redesign of its traduced civic heart, George Square, in time for the games. This had been won in January 2013 by John McAslan, a son of Dunoon in the Clyde estuary, who found early inspiration in the “implacable, superfunctional forms of American nuclear submarines” stationed there. His history-respecting modernism is embodied in his company’s majestic renovation of London’s Kings Cross railway station.

McAslan brought the same vision-in-place approach to George Square, but the judges’ verdict was instantly overturned by Gordon Matheson, the Labour chief of Glasgow’s city council, an act that prompted a formal complaint from the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and a police investigation. Both ran aground. On the eve of the games, Matheson warns against Scottish independence in the Labour-loyal Daily Record and boasts, “We were the second city of the empire and are set to become the first city of the Commonwealth.”

The cycles of destruction and remaking of Glasgow’s civic landscape mirror the great changes in its economic life, which today make public services, finance, tourism, the creative sector and broadcasting more important than industry as a source of employment and wealth. (Shipbuilding and engineering do survive on the Clyde, if much reduced, and its industrial past is at the core of the city’s identity.) The city, like every other in Britain, also floats on a sea of intoxication – the sociologist Dick Hobbs calls it the “alcohol economy” or “night-time economy” – whose social and personal costs are notably high. A brave psycho-social assessment, Carol Craig’s The Tears that Made the Clyde: Well-Being in Glasgow, connects people’s problems of ill health, poverty, addiction and male aggression to the city’s industrial experience.

The milestones of regeneration have often been instances of “cultural urbanism”: the opening of the Burrell collection, the refined trove of a shipping magnate, in 1983; a garden festival in 1988; designation as European city of culture in 1990 and as the UK’s city of architecture and design in 1999. The “Glasgow’s Miles Better” advertising campaign, also launched in 1983, is often credited as image-changing, helped by its not-so-coded dig at reputedly snooty Edinburgh. (Robert Crawford’s rich, literary study On Glasgow and Edinburgh maps this strange relationship, into which all brought up in its shadow are acculturated. Once, in England, when I answered a query about my origins to a new acquaintance from the multicultural area of Maryhill, north of Glasgow’s city centre, his instant reply was: “You mean you’re English?!” Nothing in my upbringing in Edinburgh – entirely Glasgowphile, as it happens – had prepared me for that.)

The most ambitious current project is the government-funded Clyde Gateway, begun in December 2007 with a twenty-year remit to reclaim (and decontaminate) derelict land and transform those poorer neighbourhoods along the lower Clyde to the city’s east. The long-term figures sound impressive, as they always do: a prospective £1.5 billion of private investment (with £200 million already committed), 20,000 more people moving into the area, with the same number of jobs and half as many houses provided. Phil Jones and James Evans, in their Urban Regeneration in the UK: Boom, Bust and Recovery, published in 2013, are cautiously positive, but say quality of local services and a healthy social texture are important in attracting potential incomers. Otherwise, they warn, “the development runs the risk of becoming a car-based commuter settlement, with all the resultant implications for sustainability.”

This latest phase, as with its predecessors, has prompted efforts to ensure that processes are transparent and benefits shared, often fought by Glasgow’s vigorous activist and community networks, or by a periodically lively left (that is, when not misled by the macho demagogues who are its curse). Some are using the opportunity of the games to make regeneration their own. In Dalmarnock, for example, pressure from a group including Labour councillor Yvonne Kucuk secured substantial funding for the Dalmarnock Legacy Hub, which will build a new multipurpose centre offering medical services and a nursery school.

The Commonwealth Games’ critics include the Glasgow Games Monitor, which questions the proclaimed economic and social benefits, and Restore George Square, which currently denounces the “civic vandalism” represented by a huge merchandising tent in the square’s midst. In addition, the veteran rights activist Peter Tatchell – pointing out that homosexuality is a criminal offence in forty-two of the fifty-three Commonwealth states, with severe penalties, up to life imprisonment, in at least seven – calls for the British and Scottish governments to press for adherence to Article 7 of the Commonwealth Games Federation’s constitution. The Article states that “there shall be no discrimination against any country or person on any grounds whatsoever, including race, colour, gender, religion or politics.”

Another timely initiative during the games seeks to connect Glasgow both to the world and to its own past. This is a series of events exploring the city’s and Scotland’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonial slave plantations, and their relationship to empire more generally. The program, convened by the novelist Louise Welsh and the architect Jude Barber under the rubric of Collective Architecture, takes place at the impromptu Empire Café, the Glasgow Women’s Library, and in walks around the city. It builds on a growing body of valuable work on a neglected subject, including Stephen Mullen’s It Wisnae Us: The Truth about Glasgow and Slavery, published in 2009.

In the Commonwealth Games’ opening ceremony, amid the quirky charade of Scottish emblems, there were touching references to more noble Glasgow and Scottish connections: Nelson Mandela’s memorable visit to the city that had twice honoured him during his prison years, including an address to cheering crowds in a drenched George Square, and his compatriot Pumeza Matshikiza‘s rendition of the folklorist Hamish Henderson’s renowned Scots-language hymn to cross-racial solidarity, The Freedom Come All Ye. The spectrum from here to the world evoked by the Empire Café sets a ground of debate which will continue irrespective of the result in Scotland’s independence referendum on 18 September.

The inclusive enthusiasm of both crowd and participants at the launch event underlines the therapeutic attractions of a brief suspension of political hostilities. Whatever happens during the jamboree, they will resume the instant it’s over. So too will Glasgow’s restless search for a future that lives up to the best of the humanity within. •

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On 20 April 2005, the German tabloid Bild splashed three words across its front page: “Wir sind Papst!” The headline – which literally means “We are Pope!” – celebrated the election of a Bavarian cardinal as successor of Pope John Paul II. Bild readers were expected to pride themselves on the fact that “our Joseph Ratzinger” had been chosen to head the world’s one billion or more Catholics. But the headline also subtly reminded them of what “we” were not: Weltmeister (world champions). By then it had been fifteen long years since a German team had lifted the only trophy that truly matters to Bild readers and Bild haters alike, the football world cup.

Nine years later, at last, the collective sense of underachievement was put to rest. On Sunday 13 July 2014, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the most earnest and proper of all German broadsheets, announced in its online edition, “Argentinien ist Papst – aber Deutschland ist Weltmeister.” The first person plural and the exclamation mark would have been beneath the Frankfurter Allgemeine, but in this instance it was happy to pay homage to Bild’s 2005 headline.

The global media had been unanimous in its response to Brazil’s 1–7 loss in the semi-final. The result was said to be a terrible blow to a nation that was football-mad like no other, and whose past exploits on the field symbolised all that was admirable about the game. There was broad agreement that the loss against Germany was worse than the 0–1 defeat at the hands of neighbouring Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final. The result of the game on 8 July left an entire nation in tears, headlines around the world suggested.

Brazil’s players feared that they would be scarred for life, that nothing could ever quite take away the shame they felt after their lacklustre performance at the Estádio Mineirão. Analysts predicted that the national team’s defeat would have dire consequences for the country’s economy and would lead to an immediate slump on the São Paulo stock exchange. When the share market rallied instead, observers assumed that it was because stockbrokers had anticipated another fallout, the end of left-leaning Dilma Rousseff’s presidency. And it’s true that pundits around the world, irrespective of the extent of their knowledge of Brazilian politics, had been quick to point out that the semi-final loss might well cost Rousseff the elections scheduled for October.

Long before the 2014 World Cup began, commentators had conjured the spectre of the Maracanazo, the tragedy of 1950, when Brazil lost in the final. Anything but a win for the host nation would have grave consequences, sports writers and political analysts forecast. And ideally that win would be against arch-rival Argentina.

By contrast, little attention was paid outside Germany to the possibility that the Nationalmannschaft would exit at the group stage, or not progress at least to the semi-finals. That wasn’t because the national team was expected to win – it was considered a strong contender, but by no means the favourite – but rather because the experts assumed that Germany would cope well with another failed tilt at football’s highest reward, as it had in 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2010.

Yet I suspect that Germany has been just as fixated on football, and particularly on the performance of its national team, as South American nations. It is difficult to imagine what would have happened if Germany had lost its opening match to Portugal by the same margin, 0–4, by which Cristiano Ronaldo’s team succumbed to the Germans. Or, worse still, if Brazil had thumped Germany 7–1. Joachim “Jogi” Löw, the German coach who led the national team to the final of Euro 2008, and to the semi-finals of the 2010 World Cup and the 2012 European championship, would have almost certainly lost his job if Germany had had to play once more for third place.

If his team had lost the game against Brazil by a big margin, Löw would not have been the only one to be held responsible and sent packing. The consequences would also have been dire for Angela Merkel who, after some initial reluctance, has happily assumed the role of the current team’s mascot. Her fortunes have been at least as entwined with those of the German national side as Rousseff’s have been with the success, or lack thereof, of the Seleção Brasileira. And unlike the Brazilian share market, the DAX index of leading shares at the Frankfurt stock exchange would not have easily recovered following a defeat in the semi-final. Predictably, the DAX rose after Germany’s win in the final.

Ever since the birth of the German Federal Republic in 1949, the nation and its football team have evolved (and regressed) in tandem. The team has reflected not just the national mood, but even the state of the economy. Conversely, success on the football field has inspired Germans with confidence, and poor performances by the Nationalmannschaft have sometimes been the harbingers of more profound social and economic woes.

West Germany played no part in the first World Cup after the war, the 1950 tournament in Brazil. Its representatives had been expelled from the world football federation, FIFA, in 1945, and its team had not been eligible to play in the qualifiers.

By 1954, the Federal Republic’s football federation had rejoined FIFA and qualified for the finals of the world cup in Switzerland. In the group stage, it was drawn to play against the tournament’s favourite, Hungary. It didn’t just lose to Hungary, but suffered an 8–3 shellacking, although it needs to be said that the German coach had decided to rest some of his key players, including goalkeeper Toni Turek. In the quarter finals, the German team faced Yugoslavia, which expected to account for the Germans easily and thereby progress to the next round. But Germany took the lead 1–0 after only ten minutes, thanks to an own goal by Ivica Horvat (who later in life became a successful Bundesliga coach). For the remaining eighty minutes, the German team defended doggedly and, with the final score 2–0 in its favour, successfully.

In the semi-final, Germany played highly fancied Austria. Again the Germans won against the odds. The final score of 6–1 suggested that the win was the work of its strikers and midfielders; however, Germany retained the upper hand not least thanks to the heroics of Turek, who had already starred in the win against Yugoslavia. The defeat of Austria set up a final between the German team and that of Hungary, which had last lost a game in 1950.

The 1954 World Cup final in Bern began in even a worse fashion than had been expected by German supporters. After only eight minutes, Germany was down by two goals. Turek was partly to blame, but in the opening phase he was only one member of a hapless team that looked destined for another drubbing by the world-class Hungarians. Yet in the end the Germans won 3–2, with two goals scored by the man they called “The Boss,” Helmut Rahn. The second of them fell six minutes before full time.

The game, which became known as the “miracle of Bern,”, was called for German radio by Herbert Zimmermann. The words he used to call for and celebrate the winning goal became the most famous piece of radio sound in German history. “Schäfer nach innen geflankt. Kopfball. Abgewehrt. Aus dem Hintergrund müßte Rahn schießen. Rahn schießt! Toooor! Toooor! Toooor! Toooor!” (Schäfer puts in the cross. Header. Cleared. Rahn should shoot from deep. Rahn shoots! Goal! Goal! Goal! Goal!)

Zimmermann’s call also included an infamous moment. In the second half, while the scores were level, Turek denied the Hungarians a seemingly certain goal. Zimmermann was ecstatic: “Turek, du bist ein Teufelskerl! Turek, du bist ein Fussballgott” (Turek, you are a hell of a guy! Turek you are a football god!) He instantly realised he had crossed a line, and apologised to his listeners for being overly enthusiastic. But he nearly lost his job over the “Fussballgott” reference and had to issue a public apology. The station broadcasting the game asked Zimmermann to re-record part of his call; the offending words, “du bist ein Fussballgott,” were replaced by “du bist Gold wert” (you are worth gold). For many years it was assumed that the edited version in the broadcaster’s archive was authentic; it was not until much later that another copy of the original recording resurfaced.

There were other instances of public embarrassment. After the game, a brass band played the German national anthem. Many of the Germans among the crowd sang along, but using the words of the banned first verse (Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles) rather than the officially sanctioned third verse (Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit), which prompted Swiss radio to abruptly cut its live broadcast.

All three verses of Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s “Song of the Germans” had been Germany’s national anthem during the Weimar Republic. Under the Nazis, only the first verse was sung; the Nazi Party’s “Horst Wessels Lied” became the unofficial national anthem. While the latter was banned after 1945, the “Song of the Germans” was simply not used. Most of West Germany’s political elite thought it was too compromised. In 1950, West Germany’s president, the Free Democrat Theodor Heuss, commissioned a new national anthem, but failed to have it adopted. In the meantime, a host of other songs were used at official functions as substitutes. During a football game between Germany and Belgium, for instance, the Belgians played “Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien,” a song composed for the 1948 carnival in Cologne. It was not until 1952 that Heuss reluctantly agreed to the proposal to reinstall the Weimar Republic’s anthem, but to use only its third verse.

Two weeks after the final in Bern, Heuss welcomed the German team at the Olympic stadium in Berlin. He read out the words of the anthem’s remaining verse to the 80,000 strong crowd, then invited them to sing it. He also chided Peco Bauwens, the president of the (West) German Football Federation, for jingoistic comments he had made when Germany won the cup. West Germany’s political elites were anxious that the miracle of Bern not be misunderstood at home – and they were even more concerned that the victory would not be seen as an attempt to reassert German superiority.

The miracle of Bern didn’t end with the final whistle on 4 July 1954. It marked the beginning of West Germany’s economic miracle and the de facto emergence of the Federal Republic as a political entity. For the first time since the end of the war, West Germans felt they were entitled to identify proudly as Germans. The statements, “Wir sind Weltmeister”, which the 2005 Bild headline referenced, and “Wir sind wieder wer” (We are someone once more) encapsulated that pride.

The final on 4 July 1954 and the return home of the victorious team became the most significant mass events in Germany’s postwar history, larger in size and with a more enduring legacy than those in November 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. From the town of Spiez in the Bernese Oberland, where the Germans had been accommodated during the tournament, a special diesel train, the Weltmeisterzug, took the team back to Germany. Perhaps a million people cheered the players in the small southern German towns the train passed on its way to Munich. Individual players were feted in their home towns. In Essen, 100,000 people greeted Rahn at the train station and then in front of the town hall. Düsseldorf organised a parade for Turek, physio Erich Deuser and team doctor Franz Loogen; almost 200,000 locals welcomed them home.

The enthusiasm was spontaneous rather than (as many patriotic demonstrations had been between 1933 and 1945) orchestrated. It was as if the win allowed Germans to release long-repressed emotions. As Paul Legg observed in a recent article, the Berlin correspondent of the Manchester Guardian was among the few contemporary outside observers who was able to make empathetic sense of what was happening in Germany in 1954. His assessment has stood the test of time: “One must remember both the giant load of bewilderment beneath which this nation has been staggering since one type of German pride came to its catastrophic fall nine years ago and also the zeal for an emotional release to lift minds out of the ever-present spectacle of surrounding ruin.”

The German media mostly avoided gloating over Hungary’s loss; newspaper editors tried to emphasise to their readers that the win was, after all, only something that had happened on a football field. That didn’t stop their colleagues in France and Britain warning of a new German arrogance and grab for power. In the interest of European rapprochement, it was probably fortunate that the West German team lost most of its matches in the two years following the miracle of Bern.

Although 1954 marked a new beginning, it was one burdened by the recent past. Sepp Herberger, the coach of the West German team, had been in charge of a regional West German team in 1932 and 1933, and then assistant to Germany’s coach Otto Nerz. He joined the Nazi party in May 1933. In 1938, he was appointed Reichstrainer (national coach). When West Germany fielded a national team again in 1950, its first outing was a friendly match against Switzerland in November, which Germany won in front of 115,000 people. The former Reichstrainer was once more in charge – only his title, now Bundestrainer, had changed.

In hindsight, Herberger’s decision to entrust Turek to keep goal was inspired. By 1954, Turek was the oldest player in the German team; he had fought in the second world war, had been wounded, and still had a splinter from a shell lodged in his skull. He had also been a prisoner of war. Thus he represented a generation of German men who were desperate for recognition and rehabilitation.

Turek was also an excellent goalkeeper. But many sports writers at the time thought that he was not the best German goalie of his generation. Arguably, that was Bernd Trautmann. He too had fought in the war. The British took him prisoner in 1945, and he ended up in England. After his release from a POW camp, he declined to be repatriated, working first as a farm labourer and then with a bomb disposal unit. Besides, he played for a local football club, and married the daughter of its secretary. In 1949, Manchester City recruited Trautmann, who by then was known as Bert and attracted attention for his skills as a goalkeeper. He became one of the best of his era, but was not called on in 1954 because Herberger and the German football federation insisted that no German playing outside Germany would be nominated for the national team.

Herberger’s team was known for virtues that had been celebrated as supposedly distinctly German by the Nazis: endurance, tenacity, strategic nous and physical strength. They did not play elegant football (as the Hungarians did). They were defensively strong, and able to exploit their opponents’ weaknesses when launching counter attacks. They were popular because they won and because they were ordinary men rather than aloof stars. They did not charm fans with their technical finesse. Herbert Rahn was no German Pelé or Messi. And while Rahn may have been the boss on the field, the players in all other respects obeyed Herberger, who was a stern, if not authoritarian, father figure.

After the miracle of Bern, other tournaments and individual games shaped postwar German history. And German history continued to shape German football. This isn’t the place to provide a detailed account of the past sixty years of German (footballing) history, but a few snippets will suffice to illustrate my proposition that what happens on the football field is relevant to broader social and political developments, and vice versa.

Germany’s next major win had to wait until the European championship in 1972, long after Herberger’s day. Playing with flair, the 1972 Nationalmannschaft was perhaps the best ever to represent West Germany in a tournament. Günter Netzer, Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller and twenty-year old Paul Breitner defied the stereotype of the hard-working, tenacious and methodical, but somewhat boring, technically deficient and unimaginative, German player. Headstrong young men with long hair, one of them a Maoist, they symbolised the era of Willy Brandt, the socially progressive chancellor who made peace with Poland and, having emigrated between 1933 and 1945, could claim to represent a Germany that made a genuine effort to break with its Nazi past.

Then there was the 1974 World Cup in Germany, which West Germany won despite Holland fielding the better team and playing more attractive football. Unlike the Dutch, the West Germans actually lost a game in the group phase – against none other than the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Jürgen Sparwasser kicked the winning goal in what was the only match ever played between the two national teams. How could West Germans after that most painful loss in the history of the Nationalmannschaft warmly welcome their long-lost relatives from the other side of the iron curtain twenty-five years later? But that’s another story. The immediate consequences, however, favoured West Germany: during the so-called Night of Malente (named after the Institute of Sport where the team traditionally had its training camp), captain Franz Beckenbauer took command of a disparate group of opinionated individuals and thereby ensured that the team won the cup. The East Germans, having topped the group, faced the Dutch in the next round and were eliminated.

Eight years later, at the World Cup in Spain, Germany made the final but lost to Italy. But few Germans cared, because the road to the final had been too embarrassing. First there was the Schande von Gijón (“disgrace of Gijón”), when the German and Austrian teams conspired to effect a 1–0 win for West Germany, which allowed both teams to progress to the next round at the expense of Algeria, which had earlier beaten Germany. Then came the semi-final against France. Arguably, this was one of the most thrilling World Cup games ever, but it was tainted by German goalkeeper Toni Schumacher’s collision with a French player, Patrick Battiston. The latter was knocked out cold and lost two teeth. Schumacher may not have committed a foul (none was given at the time), but he was clearly guilty of showing a lack of compassion for Battiston. Many Germans swore off the national team and claimed that from now on loyalty had to be earned.

Loyalty was also in short supply a few months later when the Free Democrats left the coalition with Helmut Schmidt’s SPD, bringing the conservative Helmut Kohl to power. He won the subsequent elections in 1983, but failed to win most Germans’ respect, thus sharing the fate of the national team that made the final in 1982 but could not make Germans forget their inadequacies.

But the Nationalmannschaft’s worst performance was yet to come. At the European championship in 2000, Germany came last in the group phase. The Nationalmannschaft lacked cohesion and was as uninspiring as Gerhard Schröder’s coalition government of Social Democrats and Greens. Reunification had turned out to be more costly than anticipated, and many Germans wished, eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the barrier had never gone.

The disastrous end to Euro 2000 was a wake-up call. Huge investments were made, particularly in youth development, to help German football catch up. The better-than-expected result at the 2006 World Cup in Germany (when the team lost its semi-final against Italy, which went on to win the tournament), and an impressive performance at the World Cup in South Africa (when Germany once again lost its semi-final against the eventual winner, Spain), were the direct result of these investments. So was the win this month.

The 2014 Nationalmannschaft represents a country that has come a long way since the doldrums of Euro 2000: one that is open to the world, innovative and, with the exception of parts of former East Germany, multicultural.

In 1954, Bernd Trautmann was not German enough because he played for Manchester City. Sepp Herberger, if he were still alive, would no doubt be scandalised about the composition of the current German team. It includes a Berlin-born defender, Jérôme Boateng, whose brother, also born in Berlin, plays for Ghana. Another defender, Shkodran Mustafi, also born in Germany, long wanted to play for Albania, the country his family hails from, and as late as January 2014 was said to be on call for Albania’s next friendly (Albania did not qualify for the World Cup). Like Mustafi, Lukas Podolski plays his club football outside Germany, which would have made him ineligible for selection in 1954. He was baptised Łukasz, and, like veteran striker Miroslav Klose, comes originally from Poland. Real Madrid midfielder Sami Khedira grew up in Germany but has a Tunesian as well as a German passport.

No German players represent the essence of the current German team as much as midfielders-cum-strikers Mesut Özil and Thomas Müller do. The former is a third generation Turkish German who grew up in Gelsenkirchen, home of the legendary Schalke 04 football club. He is a truly international footballer, having played for several German clubs, for Real Madrid and now for Arsenal. Müller, by contrast, is as rooted in his native soil as can be: he was born and grew up in Bavaria and has played for Bayern Munich since the age of ten.

Their style of football bears no resemblance to that of the German players who engineered the miracle of Bern. Twenty-five year old Özil is a genius on and off the ball, and like many a genius he is a capricious contributor. In Brazil, he performed well below expectations throughout the tournament, but was never in danger of losing his place in the starting line-up because of his ability to turn around a match single-handedly when he is on song. Müller, a year younger than Özil, is a more reliable performer. Like Özil, though, he is unpredictable. For Özil, the ball often seems to be an organic part of his body; he stuns opponents with his elegant moves. Müller, on the other hand, befuddles them with his unorthodox and seemingly nonsensical play and body language. “Shambling, angular, shaggy-haired forward Müller,” the Guardian’s Barney Ronay enthused about the recent Portugal–Germany game, at times resembled “a pitch-invading dentist out for a job who has somehow strayed in among all those sleekly groomed professional athletes.”

They call him “Radio Müller” because he likes to talk. He doesn’t babble, mind you. In an interview in 2011, Müller created a neologism to describe what he does on the football field. He said that he is a Raumdeuter, an interpreter (Deuter) of space (Raum). The term is reminiscent of, and rhymes with, a well-established compound noun, Traumdeuter, an analyst of dreams. But not only was Müller able – at the age of twenty-one – to articulate intelligently what is innovative about his preferred style, he has also been able to dazzle observers by being exactly where his opponents aren’t looking for him. His play is not nearly as stylish as Özil’s, but it is at least as effective. While Özil was the leading goal scorer during the world cup qualifiers, Müller netted a total of ten goals in only two world cups.

Özil and Müller were the most eye-catching German players in South Africa in 2010. The football exhibited by the Nationalmannschaft on that occasion was a sight to behold, but it lacked the rigour and pragmatism that is necessary to win the World Cup. Exceptions aside (the first half of the game against Portugal and the first half of the thrashing of Brazil), in 2014 the German team did not play as beautifully as it had done four years earlier. That is not to say, however, that there is much danger of Germany reverting any time soon to a style of play that won them the Cup sixty years earlier.

The win in 1954 was a miracle; it was unexpected and it wasn’t followed up by a series of further wins. In 1966, West Germany should have won (and perhaps would have, had it not been for the referee and that goal), but didn’t dare to think that it could beat England at Wembley. In 1974, the West German team won not least because it played at home. The 1990 World Cup, in which West Germany played Argentina in the final and won 1–0, is not remembered for the quality of its teams or matches. The German win in 2014 differs from those in 1954, 1974 and 1990 because it was more deserved, more convincing and more likely to be the beginning of a new era in world football.

In 1954, Germany’s economic performance was miraculous – not because it outshone its competitors but simply because of the speed with which it was recovering after the war. By the time of the 1974 World Cup, Willy Brandt had been replaced by Helmut Schmidt, the reformist energy of 1972 had largely dissipated, and Germany no longer appeared likely to drive a European agenda for social change. In 1990, reunification seemed a logical and desirable outcome, but even then it was obvious that its costs would be huge and that it would set (West) Germany back for years. In 2014, there is no doubt that Germany is calling the shots in Europe, and that it is likely to do so for some time yet. It no longer sees itself as a vassal of the United States (the Merkel government recently expelled a high ranking CIA official, much to the irritation of Barack Obama). It has come of age.

In 2006 and 2010, non-German audiences found it easy to admire the Nationalmannschaft because it played an attractive – yet ultimately unsuccessful – brand of football. Few teams in the history of the World Cup have been as ruthless as Germany was in the 2014 semi-final, when it scored five times within the space of eighteen minutes. Yet the players wanted to be liked rather than feared. Their celebrations after the 7–1 win appeared subdued because they seemed to be so intent on consoling their opponents.

On and off the field, Germans are now confident of their ability to win. They worry, though, that they will be liked less for it. “Gauchogate,” some German newspapers cried when, in front of 400,000 fans at the victory party in Berlin, six players performed a dance that poked fun at their Argentinian opponents. Was it a harmless joke? Or was it disrespectful, and an indication of an unhealthy nationalism? The opinions have been divided, but just to be on the safe side the president of the German Football Federation sent off a letter of apology to his Argentinian counterpart.

As far as I know, Angela Merkel didn’t comment on “Gauchogate.” I imagine she wasn’t impressed by the players’ behaviour, if only because it reflects on her. Now that Germany has won the World Cup, she is safer in her job than ever before. There are rumours, though, that she will resign in order to inherit Ban Ki-moon’s job. For that to become a reality, she would need to be seen internationally the way many Germans see her: as Mutti, the nation’s rather harmless and inoffensive mum, rather than as a ruthless leader (who belittles her opponents, to boot).

The 2014 win has reignited German debates about national identity and its symbols. Not that long ago, in West Germany at least, the waving of the national flag and the singing of the national anthem were considered to be dubious relics of the old (Nazi) Germany. Gustav Heinemann, West German president from 1969 to 1974, once famously spoke for many when he said: “I don’t love nation states, I love my wife.” It wasn’t until the 1980s that the flag and the national anthem lost the odour of Nazi Germany. That was in no small part due to Franz Beckenbauer who, having taken over as manager of the German team after the disgraceful performance in 1984, told his players that he expected them to sing along when the anthem was played before games. Once again, football led the way.

In 2014 it would still be unthinkable for a large crowd to celebrate a win of the German team by singing the anthem’s old first verse, as had happened in Bern sixty years ago. In fact, many Germans might feel more comfortable with something as silly as “Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien” than with the pathos of the “Song of the Germans.” The flag is a different matter: it now adorns everybody and everything – including toilet brushes in the colours black, red and gold.

Patriotism might have become respectable, but nationalism is still frowned on, as if the latter could be easily divorced from the former. In 2001, another German president, the Social Democrat Johannes Rau, explained the difference thus: “A patriot loves his country. A nationalist despises the countries of others.” Germans’ ambivalent feelings for their country are exemplified by the popularity of the word “Schland”, which supporters of the German team have been chanting since the World Cup in 2006. But does the use of the – in itself meaningless – term “Schland” (instead of “Deutschland”) mean that the feelings aroused in 2014 are very different from those of 1954?

This question is difficult to answer partly because many Germans, from the chancellor down, are reluctant to talk in any detail about their emotions, their relationship with the nation, and the aspirations they have for Germany. Do Germans want their country to be a leader in a global economy no longer reliant on fossil fuels and driven by innovation primarily because they want Germany to excel and perhaps even dominate others, or because they are concerned about the effects of climate change?

I must admit that I can’t shake off my suspicions. Are Germans really as adverse to jingoism as election results, opinion polls, public discourse and their behaviour after 13 July suggest? Or are the somewhat strained attempts to be scrupulously multicultural and tolerant and to be an exemplary global citizen indicative of something lurking beneath the veneer of the new Germany? Maybe the next game will tell us more. •

The post Germany on song appeared first on Inside Story.

England’s genius for ritual comes into its own with football’s World Cup. So ingrained are the pattern of events and the emotional cycle that dominate these high-summer weeks, one year in four, that they seem almost scripted. The very familiarity of the experience, the ever-repeated confirmation of what was already known – that, in the end, England is not quite good enough to win – is at the heart of their agonising pleasure. By the moment of exit, the on-field dramas have become woven into an intense, concentrated national journey.

The journey, always variable in its precise details, goes roughly as follows. A nervous qualification round ends on a high note, leaving a residue of expectation that, as the tournament nears, bubbles, simmers, and then – on the day of the opening match – overflows. At every point along the way, past glories (above all, a triumph as the host country in 1966), disasters and epic contests are lovingly replayed, reinforcing the sense of history’s cage yet secreting the dream of escape. (“I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand!” as Michael Frayn has one of his most English characters say.)

The group stage is difficult. A bad display provokes media scorn, rumours of dissension within the camp, changes of personnel and tactics. A defiant performance in the third game saves the day; England is through. The effect is cathartic. In an instant, everyone is onside: manager, team, media, travelling and stay-at-home fans. A wider public wakes to the story; politicians jump on the caravan; the drama, with its endless tributaries, expands to the news and feature pages.

An invisible hand delivers the national flag – the red-and-white cross of St George – to windows, lamp-posts, statues, trees and car aerials throughout the land. This is the ping! moment for columnists and intellectuals. Thanks to the national team, England’s submerged pride, buried loyalty and apologetic nationhood are released from their confines. Should we be moved, inspired, alarmed?

This demotic pageant is a symbolic expression of England’s desire for fair treatment vis-à-vis its neighbours, Scotland and Wales. Or else of protest at the Westminster (and European) elite’s patronising disdain for a forgotten country. Or of a raw ethnic nationalism that spells danger to minorities. Or of a progressive civic nationalism that heralds post-imperial renewal.

The Scots, feeling left out – their team didn’t qualify, again – can’t forbear getting in on the act. Their vocal, visible support for England’s opponents is evidence of decaying British bonds. Or else of protest against the biased pro-England media coverage beamed into defenceless Scottish homes. Or of the petty resentments of a deformed nationalism. Or of a lingering inferiorism whose remedy is to back the English team in a show of maturity.

From newspaper letters pages to radio shout-ins, the national cacophony grows. The headlines get larger, the references more martial. Every stray morsel is disgorged: the taxi firm that denies its driver the right to show the flag, the leftist bloviators who equate Englishness with racism, the far-right activists who burn the adversaries’ flag, the politician who denounces football mania as moral evasion of society’s problems.

The team reaches its fateful tryst with a traditional enemy: Germany, say, or Argentina. An epic match turns on a single, cruel incident: a red card, an injury, a missed penalty. A heroic effort ends in narrow, inconsolable defeat. Within an hour, the first editions are out with their pre-prepared, recycled headlines (“End of the world” is a perennial).

At home, the flags vanish overnight. The feature articles (“How I learned to love football”... “Half-time snacks – your quick guide to footie heaven”... “Who was St George anyway?”) are filed away. The squad returns to an appreciative welcome, trophyless but with honour upheld. By then, the inquest is in full swing. England’s failure is owed to inferior technique, the legacy of decades of neglect of sporting education. Or to the global success of a super-rich domestic league containing a surplus of non-English players. Or to poor diet, lazy lifestyles and the diversions of technology. Or to a sense of entitlement born of enduring colonial arrogance.

The mood deflates and with it interest in the rest of the tournament. A diminished audience pins its sympathy to whatever underdog, romantic or golden team is left standing. The short-lived inquest gives way to a blame game, fuelled by pumped-up campaign exclusives from inside the squad. Soon, the whole experience is tidied into a rapid-fire TV highlights package, high on emotional gesture. In already faint public memory, England’s latest misfire becomes another episode of descent from the glory of 1966. The long wait for a replay goes on.

A ritual that begins with football has a magnetising force that by its end has become all-consuming. The celebration of England, the sense of belonging and of loyalty to the national team, are never more manifest than during a World Cup (as well as during the biannual European championship, whose exuberant England-hosted 1996 competition began the national flag-fest). No wonder the occasion tends to be invested with wider significance, especially of a political kind. In particular, the travails of England’s football team in the tournament are often read as a barometer of national confidence, of its sense of identity, and even its place – or non-place – within a United Kingdom whose recasting by constitutional reform has seemingly left England without a clear role, or even a clear future.

This process, inaugurated in 1997 by Tony Blair’s New Labour government, included degrees of self-government in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It was a response both to accumulating national discontent at Westminster’s centralising rule (and in the Irish case, part of the end of the thirty-year conflict), and to what Labour’s election manifesto of that year called “a crisis of confidence in our political system.” There was provision, too, for an elected mayor in London and other cities, as well as reform of the electoral system and of the House of Lords (the oldest saga in British politics, and – since no one can agree on what the problem is – ever unfinished). But beyond the vague possibility of a regional assembly or two, there was nothing specifically for England on its own account.

Why was England left out? The obvious answer is that there was no demand for English self-government, or at least none that could easily be codified in institutional terms. The sense of a reawakened nationalism in Scotland and Wales from around the mid 1980s – often articulated in cultural terms, often taking the form of bitter political opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and its local subordinates – was not replicated in England. In the years 1992–97, two reformist political strands in Scotland and Wales – the nationalist and the social-democratic – were able to find common cause on the issue of devolving power from London. In England, they remained separate. Nor was there an equivalent in England to the Scottish National Party or Plaid Cymru: modern, centre-left parties advocating democratic self-government in a language of inclusive nationalism.

England’s absence from the post-1997 process came to be much discussed, and prompted varied explanations. Perhaps Thatcherism itself was a kind of English nationalism, the hurricane force of its new state–market–individual nexus flattening any lesser ones? Could it be that England, with 84 per cent of the United Kingdom’s population, was too big and diverse to be capable of incubating the more solidaristic impulses of its much smaller cousins? Was it that England’s history had enfolded the country’s governance and self-awareness so much inside Britain – and so channelled its popular sentiment upwards to power, monarchy, post-imperial Atlanticism – that its people lacked the ideological resources, including the proto-liberationist sentiment, to develop a campaign for political autonomy in their own name? Or had Britain’s more egalitarian state-forms, its public and welfare services, done a similar job in incorporating social patriotism, leaving Englishness to its classic repose in the rural, the organic, the conservative, the top-down – above all, the past?

The questions were answered in many ways. Many dismissed the idea of an English question (or, not quite the same thing, wished it to go away), and suggested that any democratic flaws could be redressed within Britain’s existing frameworks. Others embraced the notion of England’s singularity, and welcomed the prospect of an enjoyable bout of national introspection.

By the mid 1990s, this was looking harder to avoid. International as well as domestic trends were fuelling the momentum for Scottish and Welsh self-government. The end of the cold war had inscribed a host of newly independent states onto Europe’s map; many were of comparable size to Scotland and Wales (and several much smaller), and all aspired to join the European Union. The nationalist campaigns “joined the dots,” their own pro-European stance contrasting with British governments’ often abrasive relationship with the European Union.

The Conservative government of John Major made the best of a difficult hand. Major had succeeded Thatcher in 1990, won an election (even increasing the Tory vote in Wales and Scotland), and sought to turn his rise from a modest south London background into a template of the congenial society he thought post-Thatcher Britain needed. A speech on the eve of St George’s day (also Shakespeare’s birthday) in 1993 inadvertently voiced the new English difficulty:

Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in school. Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials.

The source of the citation, Orwell’s famous essay of 1940–41 – inspired by observation of his compatriots’ response to the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign – had the subtitle “socialism and the English genius.” And indeed, everything else in this Orwell-soaked passage evokes an English land of loved content. In 1924, when Major’s predecessor Stanley Baldwin tried for the same effect (“The sounds of the corncrake on a dewy morning, the scythe against the whetstone, strike down into the very depths of our nature...”) he felt able to preface the encomium by expressing “profound thankfulness that I may use the word ‘England’ without some fellow at the back of the room shouting out ‘Britain.’” The whirligig of seven decades trapped Major on the other side of the barbed wire, as millions of souls across every border hollered back, “Not Britain – England!”

In the years before the 1997 election, Major and his party preserved their hard line against any form of devolution to Edinburgh and Cardiff. Blair’s victory opened the way to referendums that endorsed the setting up of a parliament and assembly in the respective capitals (as well as an assembly in Belfast following the peace agreement there). The embedding of a new and asymmetrical constitutional landscape inevitably sharpened awareness of the English exception, though in political terms it would long remain the corncrake that did not cry.

Nor did it pipe up after 1997. New Labour had offered “the regions of England” a watery valentine in its election manifesto: “In time we will introduce legislation to allow the people, region by region, to decide in a referendum whether they want directly elected regional government. Only where clear popular consent is established will arrangements be made for elected regional assemblies.” It prefaced this with the caution that “it would be wrong to impose a uniform system” since “[demand] for directly elected regional government so varies across England.”

In context, the offer had faint traces of the notion of “home rule all round,” floated intermittently since the 1870s as a fix for the United Kingdom’s inescapably lopsided governance. But it had no sense of English nationhood and interest as a whole, rather of a toolbox missing a dispensable item. The regional focus had both negative and positive justifications: England was too big to be a natural unit of devolved government, but the strength of the country’s local, including urban, affinities fitted its varied regions for this role. Indeed, the varied size of the United Kingdom’s constituent parts – in 2011, England had 53 million people, Scotland 5.3 million, Wales 3 million, and Northern Ireland 1.8 million – is often cited to argue that some form of federalism, in principle an appropriate model for a multinational state, wouldn’t work.

In time, the contrast between Labour’s desultory (and region-based) treatment of England and its loving (and nation-based) attention to Scotland and Wales – whose urban areas supplied the party with a vital surplus of parliamentary seats – became politically charged. It fuelled a potent narrative of English neglect, which, in a conspiratorial variant, weaved the European Union’s own administrative regionalism into a dark fantasy of deliberate fragmentation and betrayal.

The belief that England is under siege from internal foes aided by hostile foreigners draws on rich precedents. Mark Stoyle’s bold reinterpretation of the wars of the 1640s, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War, published in 2005, is but one example. In the modern era, this story of “encroachment” has been ever replenished. The deep roots of the mentality at work in shaping it are explored in a pioneering work by the cultural historian Patrick Wright, The Village that Died for England, published in 1995.

The story pervades even the more thoughtful discourses of Englishness appearing at the turn of the millennium, with their portraits of a threat to the country’s constitutional and ethical foundations from a menacing array: urban-centric governments disdainful of English history and the British constitution, European empire-building, sentimentalist hysteria (as exhibited in the reaction to Princess Diana’s death), intellectual atrophy and moral decay. Among many others, Simon Heffer’s Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England, Peter Hitchens’s The Abolition of Britain and Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy celebrate England’s virtues while lamenting their passing in face of unwelcome political realities, of which New Labour is the long-term outcome as well as the immediate agent. As the twenty-first century dawned, it seemed, England was at a loss.

England thus began to be felt more sharply as a political conundrum in the early New Labour years. An “English backlash” was much predicted and widely observed. How real was it? Its milder expressions, such as the Campaign for an English Parliament, formed in 1998, made little headway. A pop-cultural efflorescence bestowed politically acceptable versions of Englishness with a patina of coolness. More visceral were the huge mobilisations mounted in 2002 by the Countryside Alliance, or CA, opposing Labour’s plan to outlaw the use of dogs in the hunting of wild mammals, mainly foxes – a custom broadly observed in rural communities (among which Labour had relatively few supporters). Some felt that this revolt from the “shires,” tonally and culturally conservative, was part of a new “politics of the rural” with an English national dimension.

A comparable argument was made a decade later about the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP. Does the fact that it and the CA have Scottish and Welsh support too discredit the case, or merely add nuance to it? More relevant is the fact that the Anglo-Britain inhabited by such groups – and others, on both right and left, seeking to express a political interest with a vital English component – is a landscape of the mind as much as one of territory, which is not coterminous with the country’s physical boundaries or social geography. Perhaps England’s sheer fecundity as an imagined nation gets in the way of its becoming a political one. At any rate, that still awaits.

It would be a long time coming. The English had lived through the Thatcher–Major years with comparably varied experiences to their neighbours to north and west. They had been governed all the while by English prime ministers leading governments mostly composed of English politicians, with whom millions of them felt out of sympathy – but without having the facility (as Scots and Welsh had, if they wished), to include this fact in their indictment.

This minor detail reflected a larger reality. Much political sentiment in England in the 1980s and 90s closely resembled that in Scotland and Wales. There was, for example, widespread opposition to what was felt to be remote and unaccountable power, fuelled by the central government’s legislative purge of local government and the associated privatisation of many services. Such discontent could and did often take “national” form in Scotland and Wales, and even when part of a Britain-wide phenomenon would always have this flavour. Most people in those countries were used to operating with a dual, Scots/Welsh and British, identity, according to circumstance – one reason why they had little difficulty in adding a European one.

Here, England was – as some Scots like to say of themselves – different. (The conceit, and the correction, work both ways. Labour’s former deputy leader Roy Hattersley once recalled a train journey north of the border with John Smith, who led the party from 1992 to 1994. The voluble Yorkshireman, impressed by what he was seeing, observed: “Scotland really is different.” The lawyerly Smith glinted: “No, no. You mean England is different!” Both, of course, are half-right.)

Different in this case, for in expressing their social discontent or democratic claims the English had no easy recourse to a distinctly national (meaning English) frame of argument with a political edge or as part of a strategy for institutional redress. Most English people had had no pressing reason to develop a dual, English and British, identity, at least in the political sphere; they tended to make no such distinction, without intending offence to others’ sensibilities. In new political circumstances, they were increasingly obliged to.

For example, post-devolution Scotland continued to have seventy-two MPs in Westminster (reduced to fifty-nine in 2005) as well as the 129 members of the new Scottish parliament, or MSPs, in Holyrood. The former are able to vote on all matters before the House of Commons, including those (such as health and education) that in Scotland are now the responsibility of its parliament. The political implications are heightened, and the sense of inequity reinforced, by the fact that most Scottish MPs represent the Labour Party (currently forty-one, to the Conservatives’ one).

This, the “West Lothian question” – please don’t ask – rivals “reform of the House of Lords” in Britain’s antiquity stakes. An official report published in March 2013 recommends one solution: that England-related questions in the Commons should be voted on “only with the consent of a majority of MPs sitting for constituencies in England.” Any movement on the report is now in abeyance at least until the outcome of Scotland’s independence referendum.

Even in terms of its own limited definition of England’s democratic deficit, New Labour made little progress in its decade in office (assuming that Gordon Brown’s inheritance of the prime ministership from Tony Blair in June 2007 was the end of the “New”). In 2004, a referendum was held over the creation of an assembly in England’s northeast, which was seen as the exemplary candidate for the regional experiment. The proposal fell by 22 per cent to 78 per cent, on a 47 per cent turnout. Plans for a sequel in the northwest were abandoned. The proposal for elected mayors in English cities has had a patchy outcome, with most local referendums rejecting the option. In England’s whole devolutionary venture, London – where the elected mayor–assembly model has since 2000 become a secure element of the city’s governance – is, as so often, far ahead.

But the lack of political movement notwithstanding, a sort of English awakening has been evident in the years 1997–2014. Many polls have tracked a rise in people’s sense of English identity and in those believing the post-devolution settlement is unfair to England, though numbers favouring an English parliament show little movement (a British Social Attitudes survey of May 2014 finds 19 per cent in support, almost the same as in 1999). Many academic studies, think-tank reports, novels and artistic projects exploring England’s predicament continue to enrich debate; among the most valuable studies are Robert Colls’s Identity of England, published in 2002, and Michael Kenny’s The Politics of English Nationhood, published in 2013. “England, My England: A Festival of Englishness,” hosted by the Institute of Public Policy Research, or IPPR, was held in London in October 2013; this followed its optimistically titled 2012 report, The Dog that Finally Barked: England as an Emerging Political Community.

The awakening reflects Britain’s political development over two decades, but also the profound impact on England of globalisation and immigration – an impact highly differential across the country, especially between London (and other big cities) and the rest. The effects of these forces on Englishness, too, are far from simple or uniform. In many respects globalisation and immigration have increased the attraction of traditional ideas of Englishness, which flourish more than ever, often tidied or reinvented for global tastes, while also creating space for newer ones to emerge, which in turn often begin with subversive intent before curdling into conformity. That is to say, the “old” as well as the “new” are in flux; there will be no straightforward transition from one to another. England doesn’t work like that.

Except in football-based fantasy. Such is “progressive patriotism,” a cultural-political tendency sparked in the 1990s by honourable efforts to combat the pernicious influence of the racist extreme right on supporters of England’s national team. It extended from football through music to a variant of left-wing politics that sought a contemporary equivalent of the link between Englishness and the left forged in the epic circumstances that produced George Orwell’s landmark essay. Its rhetoric – most prominently from the singer-songwriter Billy Bragg – has focused on the need to “reclaim” the English flag from the far right. (In a lecture on national identity in December 2013, Sunder Katwala, director of the think-tank British Future, has some perceptive reflections on this and related themes.)

The initial context of right-wing infiltration of football gave the tendency a welcome radical aura, as did its offer of a healthy challenge to the default cynicism of the English far left. But in the political field it became a category mistake, suffering from the instrumentalism embodied in its name, which marked the distance from the very affective community it sought to embrace. If “progressive patriotism” had an innovatory element when set against xenophobic expressions in the sporting arena, it was merely alternative in the political one. It is long enfolded safely into the World Cup ritual.

Programmatic conceptions of England, with their mix of didacticism and bad faith, have an eternal appeal on the left. Jon Cruddas, head of the Labour Party’s policy review and champion of its Blue Labour current – which in more doleful moments, resembles another version of “encroachment” – says “Labour has to build a democratic, socialist and republican cross-class alternative to reactionary English nationalism.” But a nation – England, at the risk of too much exceptionalism, least of all – can’t be conscripted to a political project. England is England. People who have such designs on it never even reach the crease.

Football makes nothing happen. But if the English patriotism on display during a World Cup has somewhere to go politically, it will be because the English, in all their complicated multifariousness, find ways to talk and listen to each other and decide together what they want. If that turns out to be a new institution such as a parliament to represent them, they will in turn need movement, agency, leadership and strategic vision to get it. In any event it will be a long haul. The wait goes on. •

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Television programming sometimes produces strange conjunctions. Planners may have an awareness of how a drama series or a generic entertainment program will work as part of an evening’s viewing, but with timeslots devoted to current affairs or documentary, stories can converge in unpredictable ways.

Monday night’s offerings on ABC1 included the first of a two-part Australian Story feature about Kieren Perkins, a Four Corners investigation into the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, and a post-budget session of Q&A with Joe Hockey. Three very different kinds of crisis drama, entirely unrelated, yet watching them in sequence, it’s tempting to look for ways they may throw light on each other, especially as the one thing they have in common is their intractability. They are all cases in which there seems to be no way out.

The Perkins story is introduced by Grant Hackett, wearing a very coached smile. He does the requisite “what a great guy” spiel, and talks of the early rivalry between them. It’s strange to discover that these two prodigies, who fought each other in the international arena for Olympic gold, started out as near neighbours. The competition, it seems, was not entirely friendly. Perkins was “dangerous,” says Hackett, though he means it in a strictly sporting sense. Rivalries at Olympic level are no longer about good chaps shaking hands, as in Chariots of Fire. As Daniel Kowalski puts it, the 1500 metres is an event in which “you go out hard and break the backs of your opponents.”

Perkins and Hackett are great Australian heroes, winners of the toughest event in their sport, but as we now know, the fight of their lives has come back in a new form. Like their fellow superstar Ian Thorpe, they have had to fend off the spectre of a future as broken men. All three have suffered from a sense of lost identity, leading to episodes of severe depression. Perkins’s marriage was a casualty, and both Thorpe and Hackett have endured a second phase of tabloid attention for very public episodes of drug- and alcohol-related breakdown. Heroism, as the cliché goes, entails sacrifices, but the traditional dramas of heroic sacrifice are not of this kind. And as consumers of heroism, what sacrifices are we, the Australian public, really asking of them?

Evidence is mounting that young Olympians are put through a range of experiences that are close to abusive. It’s not just the training – involving the most scientifically exact forms of physical and psychological management – or the unrelenting hours of work and the extremity of physical effort required of them, it’s also the celebrity factor that creates the breaking point. Then, having scarcely heaved a gasp at the end of a race, a microphone is pushed into his or her face. I remember this happening to one of the Australian team at the London Olympics, a gold medal hope who had just failed to get the touch. “I suppose you must be absolutely gutted,” said the reporter. The swimmer in question managed some kind of dignified response, but I practically choked in my seat just watching it. And I don’t recall any protest at the time, or anyone even suggesting that this is simply not okay.

Well, it’s not. Perkins’s story, like those of Hackett and Thorpe, is one that reflects badly on Australia. The cost of our national appetite for heroism is the long-term psychological health of the young adults who carry the burden of our collective dreams and ambitions. It’s not only the performance-enhancing drugs that have taken away the innocence of the Olympics, it’s also the consensual delusions and the greed for myth-making that have become their driving force.

What makes a nation look good – or bad? Malaysia didn’t look good during the early days of critical speculation about the fate of the missing aircraft MH370. Malaysian defence minister Hishammuddin Hussein was working under constant pressure to give the press and the distressed relatives the best available information and maintain a demeanour of responsible concern, but it was all getting messier by the day.

In this meticulous investigation, Four Corners reporters Caro Meldrum-Hanna and Wayne Harley go line-by-line through schedules and log books, and talk to dozens of pilots, air traffic controllers, satellite engineers and, finally, Hishammuddin himself, who grants a private interview and allows himself to be confronted with some embarrassing findings.

The plane went out of contact during the transition between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace, which suggests that the communications systems were disabled at a strategic point. And that implies both expertise and malicious intent on the part of someone on board. According to one of the pilots interviewed, the communications transition from one airspace to the other is routine and seamless, yet it took Ho Chi Minh airport some twenty minutes to call in about the missing signal. Then there were three “stunning errors” in the reporting of how and where the aircraft had been tracked from Kuala Lumpur, directing the search-and-rescue operation to the wrong area. In fact, the plane had dramatically changed course and taken a path directly over the military radar station in Penang, where it could have been on the screens for forty minutes, but no report was made.

Confronting interviews with leading politicians typically produce heat but very little light, and none of the questions put to the minister gained a clear answer. As Kerry O’Brien says in his wrap-up at the end of the program, it’s shaping up as “the perfect crime.” Absolutely fascinating, in that sense, but it leaves a host of unresolved questions.

Most of us would feel we know something about honour and honesty as individuals, but when it comes to being honest about ourselves as a nation, that’s a whole other ballgame. We like to accuse politicians of dishonesty, but are their failures here anything other than a reflection of our own?

I didn’t have much appetite for the Hockey interview, because the questions and answers seemed all too predictable. You could have scripted it in advance from the already repetitive media discussion over the past week. It’s all propaganda, and propaganda contains no surprises. Hockey can be personable enough, when he’s not smoking a big-shot cigar with an unseemly grin on his face, or in company with Christopher Pyne, making remarks of the kind you expect to hear in Summer Heights High. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time and he gave the impression for at least some of the time of at least attempting to be honest.

But at the heart of it, that’s a lost cause. He’s the spokesman for a government hopelessly mortgaged to a propaganda machine, and the inevitable story of the terrible black hole in the country’s budget, bequeathed by their dastardly predecessors, remains the premise that may yet persuade voters back to them, even if the cuts made ultimately cause a recession, as they indeed might. It’s all very well adding up how many $7 bills at the GP might blow a family’s budget, as one questioner earnestly did, but the prospect is much larger than that. If enough people lose their jobs, and more live in fear of losing them, if enough people are cut off benefits and pensions, the retail sector will start to cave in, and after that hospitality, tourism… What price do we want to pay for believing what we want to believe? •

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Thanking her team, she started with “Max. Agent. Make me rich. Thanks a lot.” Then the physio, Alex, the coach, Carlos, the husband, Jiang Shan. “Thanks for him giving up everything, just travelling with me to be my hitting partner, fix the drink, and fix the racquets, so he do a lot of jobs. So thanks a lot, you’re a nice guy. Also you are so lucky, found me.” And last, the Australian Open: “OK, now, I’d like to say thanks for all the sponsors to make fantastic tournament. I have to say again this is my favourite Grand Slam. I was so happy I can win title here.”

One of “game changer” Paul McNamee’s proudest achievements is helping to ensure the place where Li won the Australian Open carries the name of Australia’s greatest tennis player, rather than a commercial moniker like the venues nearby — Hisense, AAMI, Westpac. When Nine Inch Nails, the Rolling Stones and the Arctic Monkeys come to Melbourne in the next few months, they’ll play Rod Laver Arena, finding tennis is “front and centre, enshrined in the name of the stadium used for the sport only two weeks of the year.” Laver calls the tribute “the crowning jewel of my career.”

These three autobiographies cover three tennis generations. Li was born in Wuhan, China in 1982, McNamee in Melbourne in the mid 1950s and Laver in country Queensland in the late 1930s. Among Li’s generation, the top tennis players come from many parts of the world, although they are still rare in Asia. The top ten ranked women in the first week of February were from different countries, but fifteen of the top twenty were European and Li was the only Asian. (Sixteen of the top twenty men were from Europe and Japan’s Kei Nishikori was the only Asian.)

Li became the first Chinese player to win a Grand Slam singles title when she took the French Open in 2011, and she set a lot of other firsts before she got there, including first Chinese player to win a singles title on the Women’s Tennis Association tour and first Chinese player to make a Grand Slam quarter-final. China was strong in badminton and table tennis — but not in tennis, a much more globally significant professional sport, the “biggest of the small balls.”

For Li, unlike Laver and McNamee, the Australian Open has always meant Rod Laver Arena. Her first Grand Slam tournament was the 2005 Open, where she made it to the third round. Drawn to play reigning Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova, the match was scheduled for Rod Laver Arena. It is, narrowly, the smallest centre court at the four Grand Slam tournaments; Li found it “like the Titanic of tennis courts.” She was slaughtered 6–0, 6–2. A year later she came back and drew Serena Williams in the first round, losing again but getting a set off the then six-time, now seventeen-time, Grand Slam tournament winner. Li made the final for the first time in 2011. The following year, husband Jiang Shan was anointed “Best Husband/Boyfriend of the Year” by tournament fans.

When McNamee began life, a large share of the world’s top tennis players came from Australia. Once he was ready to try making a living from the sport, the golden age was over. Australian men won thirteen of the first sixteen Wimbledons after he was born; it was sixteen more years before another of them, McNamee’s great mate Pat Cash, did it again. By then, McNamee’s playing career was almost over and many more countries were producing top tennis players. For a time, he was the Number One doubles player in the world, winning the men’s doubles at Wimbledon and the Australian Open twice each, mainly with Peter McNamara, as the “Super Macs.” Professional tennis was now earning a lot more people a good living than it did in Rod Laver’s day; McNamee earned more than US$1.2 million in prize money.

For most of McNamee’s career, the Australian Open was held on the grass courts at Kooyong in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. He was a member of the Australian teams that won Davis Cups there in 1983 and 1986. His last professional match was in the first Australian Open held on the new hard courts at Melbourne Park in 1988. After Pat Cash knocked him out in the third round, McNamee went straight into a second career as an event manager, setting up the Hopman Cup in Perth with Charlie Fancutt, then becoming tournament director of the Australian Open from 1994 and CEO from 1999 to 2006. That career occupies the second half of his book.

Rod Laver was one of the stars of Australia’s tennis golden era. He won big tournaments from the late 1950s to the early 1970s and two Grand Slams — all four major tournaments — in 1962 and 1969. That set him apart from all other players before and since. “From my earliest tennis memories,” writes Roger Federer in the foreword to this memoir, “Rod Laver stood above all others as the greatest champion our sport has known.” For most of Laver’s career, the Australian Championships moved around the country, before shifting permanently to Kooyong in 1972. He won national singles titles at Milton in Brisbane (twice) and White City in Sydney, but never in Melbourne.

Money presented a huge dilemma for players of that era. Turning professional meant missing the major, amateur-only tournaments. The Rockhampton Rocket — Laver — joined the pro circuit because that was where the best players were, but also because, after tennis, he “didn’t want to be forced to put my name on someone else’s sports store in Rocky, or trade in my reputation by selling life insurance, or run a pub.”

All three of these authors changed tennis. Li Na’s professional status changed after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, when the Chinese Tennis Association allowed her and three other players to “go solo.” Instead of training, playing, touring and competing under the auspices of the national team, they were allowed to manage their own coaches, bonuses, participation schedules and income, although “a required revenue of 8 per cent and a match bonus of 12 per cent” still had to be paid to the state. Li agrees that playing with the national team and sharing resources “could protect a young player’s interests and open up more opportunities for experience,” but for “helping more mature players to compete at a higher level, this arrangement was useless.”

Laver learned to hit the heavy top spin on both the forehand and backhand sides that is now mandatory for good players, and was the first left-hander to really master the top-spin backhand. “Rodney, get under the ball and hit over it! Under and over!” his boyhood coach Charlie Hollis would shout. Decades later, McNamee suggested a late change to the sculpture of Laver at Melbourne Park: he’s now playing that signature top-spin backhand rather than a slice.

McNamee changed his own game first, then helped transform Australia’s big tennis tournaments. Mid-career, he ditched his single-handed backhand, adopting the double-hander that most top players now use. It was risky but eventually successful. His world singles ranking got as high as twenty-four, and he beat John McEnroe in four sets on Court Centrale at the French Open in 1980. McNamee’s liking for slow clay courts made him unusual in Australia. He has never forgotten the destructive pressure he felt to “serve and volley ‘like a true Aussie’” in the 1986 Davis Cup final.

Yet, as an event manager, he made it his mission to “Australianise” the Australian Open, equalising its status with the other three Grand Slam tournaments but giving it a distinctive character. “Every decision we made needed to reflect the essence of Australia — the sights, sounds and smells of our nation.” That meant changing the daily schedule so the crowd at every session got to see both men’s and women’s matches. Night-time matches were broadcast live and the women’s and men’s finals were shifted from afternoons to nights. The cheap “ground pass” was billed as the “best value sports ticket in the world.” Australian tennis legends were remembered in bronze busts around the Garden Square.

And while trying to embody the essence of Australia, the Open staged its own pivot to Asia. McNamee’s team settled on the tag The Grand Slam of Asia/Pacific after being warned off Asia’s Grand Slam by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. “Technically we are not part of Asia, so this may cause some offence.” •

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Lowe’s new book, Fear and Loathing in La Liga, is a detailed historical account of football’s greatest rivalry: Barcelona versus Real Madrid. The two clubs have been bitter enemies for many years and in the last decade have come to dominate not just Spanish but also world football. Ten of the planet’s best-eleven-in-2012 FIFA team came from either of the two clubs, and they have provided the last eight winners of the Ballon d’Or, awarded to the best footballer on the planet.

In this thoroughly researched and elegantly written account, Lowe has a clear mission in mind. He wants to complicate the widely held view that the clubs’ rivalry is a neat battle between Good and Evil, Left and Right or Republican and Royalist. He achieves that objective in fine style, delivering a knock-out punch at the beginning of the book. While Orwell may inadvertently have enshrined Barcelona – and Catalonia more broadly – as the epicentre of the Republican movement during the Spanish Civil War (for the English-speaking world at least), Lowe shows that Madrid, too, was a major stronghold of the Republicans and, for the most part, more central to the struggle. As he writes, “Madrid held Franco, Mussolini and Hitler’s troops at bay: by comparison Barcelona barely saw them.”

Lowe is just as eager to dispute the view that Real Madrid became dominant following the Civil War because they were the regime’s team. He argues convincingly that the reverse was true: the regime became interested in Los Merengues (as the club is known) as a powerful national symbol because it was so successful. Real Madrid won the first five European Cups between 1956 and 1960; and following their fifth success they were given the original cup to keep and a new one was commissioned. Franco and his dictatorship were drawn to the club as a means of improving their image abroad and selling Spain as a strong and successful nation. “Madrid have carried the name of Spain round the world with the greatest decorum,” said Alfredo Sánchez Bella, the Spanish ambassador to Italy between 1962 and 1969. “Their players have acted like veritable ambassadors, bringing prestige to our Fatherland.”

Likewise did Barcelona FC, the self-styled “more than a club,” play a part in Catalan resistance to Franco’s Castilian-based government. Although Lowe argues that “every club necessarily accommodated the regime, even if that accommodation existed on different levels and was undertaken with differing degrees of enthusiasm,” he recognises that by the late 1960s Barcelona became “a focus of resistance and discomfort for the regime, in a way that Madrid never did, albeit usually at a social rather than institutional level.”

My favourite example of Barcelona’s resistance was Dutch legend Johan Cruyff’s insistence that his baby boy, born in Barcelona in early 1973, be named Jordi, the Catalonian name for George and the name of the patron saint of Catalonia. Non-Castilian names were not allowed in Franco’s Spain, but Cruyff insisted: he liked the sound of the name and didn’t like being told what to do. The authorities relented, a victory both for global football and for Dutch obstinacy.

While there is a lot of “big P” politics in this book, there is also a lot of football and footballers. The names are big: “the gloriously grumpy” Alfredo Di Stéfano; “the Galloping Major” (and one time coach of South Melbourne) Ferenc Puskás; “the man who built the Nou Camp,” László Kubala; “the almost impossibly brilliant” Johan Cruyff; along with the two Ronaldos and Leo Messi, a player whose deeds have, at the age of twenty-six, exhausted the global football press corps’ reservoir of superlatives. And then there are the games that have come to be known as El Clásico. Wikipedia lists 225 competitive clashes between the two clubs, with Madrid winning ninety and Barcelona eighty-seven. When the two meet, all of Spain, and increasingly most of the world, watches. Over 60 per cent of Spaniards support one of the two clubs, and Lowe claims almost every Spanish football fan “has an inbuilt, permanent preference and really cares who wins the clásico.” The two have never met in a Champion’s League final but they have contested every other potential trophy. In 2010 they played an astonishing four clásicos in eighteen days.

As a regular reader of, and listener to, Lowe’s increasingly world-weary analysis of Spanish football, I wasn’t as engrossed by the chapters focused on the recent history of the rivalry. Even here, though, I found new details and nuances about this period of almost total domination by the two super clubs of La Liga, an era in which, as Lowe characterises it, “a draw is the new loss.” Last season Barcelona won the league with 100 points (the maximum possible is 114) and the season before that Madrid won with 100. In that year third-placed Valencia was closer to being relegated than they were to being the Champions. The duopoly has shared the last nine titles and twenty-five of the last twenty-nine, and it appears to be strengthening, with undoubted implications for the sustainability of La Liga. This is a problem in leagues across the world but it is exacerbated in Spain by the practice of clubs negotiating their television deals individually. Each of the two clubs earns nearly €100 million per year more than Valencia, the third-highest earner. No doubt I’ll be hearing Sid’s views on this and other issues facing Spanish football in the seasons to come. •

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IT’S MARCH 2013 and tomorrow night’s derby between Sydney FC and the Western Sydney Wanderers is billed as one of the hottest events in town. The stakes are high for both clubs. Having upped their winning streak to ten matches, the Wanderers need just one more victory to clinch the top spot on the league table and a place in next month’s semi-finals. Twice league champions and until this season the only club in town, Sydney FC are determined to teach the upstarts a lesson. Tickets for the clash at Parramatta Stadium sold out weeks ago.

The match will not just be about who plays better football, but – as a Nike advertisement in the stadium proclaims – “who owns this town.” During a previous derby at Sydney FC’s home ground – Allianz Stadium, in the inner east – Wanderers supporters waved banners inscribed with their postcodes, because, explains Eric Berry, a diehard fan and the team’s unofficial photographer, “they’re proud Westies.” The Wanderers call their rivals “Bling FC,” scorning Sydney’s hefty budget, big-name players and “champagne set” image. “They’re latte-sipping Easties,” scoffs Berry. By contrast, the Wanderers, assembled in a hurry last year, consist almost entirely of players rejected by other clubs: a point of pride for their followers, who – in this context, at least – delight in western Sydney’s underdog status.

In Parramatta, red-and-black banners hang from every lamp post, and even festoon the front of the town hall. The ever-helpful Berry has invited me to an eve-of-match training session, where he is warmly greeted by players filing out of the tunnel. The Croatian-born striker, Dino Kresinger, claps him on the back. “How’s it going, mate, great to see you!” “What are you doing here, they let you in?” jests the Lebanese-Australian Tarek Elrich. Germany’s Jérome Polenz is talking to Berry’s seventeen-year-old son, Jake, along with Youssouf Hersi, an Ethiopian-born Dutchman, Aaron Mooy, a Dutch-Australian, and the captain, Sydney-born Michael Beauchamp. “They’re a real League of Nations team,” observes Berry, as the squad – which includes Kosovan-born Labinot Haliti, who came to Australia as a refugee – starts limbering up.

The players, says Berry, “consistently go out of their way to be the nicest bunch of bastards you could hope to meet… These are the superstars in the sport I worship, but they’re real people, with no airs and graces. Even Shinji [Ono, the Wanderers’ marquee player and one of the biggest names in Asian football] always says g’day.” Jake relates: “One of the first training sessions I ever went to with Dad, all of them just crowded around us and started saying hello and talking to us. I was just stunned.”

Before putting the Wanderers together, the Football Federation Australia held a series of community forums in western Sydney, soliciting views on everything from the preferred name for a new club to its colours, home base and even style of play. Berry remembers: “We wanted a team that attacks all the time, a style of football that reflects our area, which is solid, dependable and tenacious, nothing flashy.” The federation not only listened to fans, but also delivered everything they requested, which for Sydney’s west – accustomed to its destiny being determined by outsiders – was an unfamiliar, and empowering, experience. “They’ve had ownership of the club since before it was born,” says the Wanderers’ chief executive, Lyall Gorman.

From the start, too, the club’s supporters’ group – the Red and Black Bloc – has been integral to its success, firing up the atmosphere at matches with their chants, theatrics and sheer exuberance. Until a year ago, the western suburbs only had rugby league, its parochial clubs each representing just one district. The Wanderers have helped to coin a regional identity – an identity based on pride, rather than a shared sense of being excluded and looked down on. “We’re from the streets of western Sydney,” the supporters raucously sing as they spill out of their Parramatta drinking-hole, the Woolpack Hotel, and, in a joyous, disorderly fashion, surge across town and into the stadium.

Between 2006 and 2011, every Australian state and territory – even traditionally monocultural Tasmania – registered a leap in the number of people born in non-Anglo countries, with Victoria (19.6 per cent) just ahead of New South Wales. Sydney, as usual, was the most popular destination for new migrants, although Melbourne was not far behind. Nineteen per cent of Australians (and nearly one in three Sydneysiders) now speak a language other than English at home, most commonly Mandarin, followed by Italian and Arabic.

John Kirkman, executive director of the Parramatta-based community arts organisation ICE (Information & Cultural Exchange), argues that “just as migrants have refined and expanded the Australian palate, they’ve done the same in terms of culture. They’ve refined it, enriched it and made it really unique.” Author and social researcher Hugh Mackay goes further, suggesting that “the cultural lessons we’re learning in western Sydney, and the kind of hybrid that’s being created, will eventually have a wider influence on our cultural identity… Already Australians across the board are realising that if you’re trying to articulate what our defining characteristic is now, it’s diversity.”

At the University of Western Sydney, one-third of students are from non-Anglo backgrounds. For chancellor Peter Shergold, “it’s like the real Australia has moved west… That’s where you’re seeing the multicultural diversity that is Australia today.” Jason Clare, whose federal seat includes Bankstown – like Fairfield and Liverpool, a first port of call for new arrivals – believes, “This is base camp. This is where the new Australia is being made, a cosmopolitan, multicultural Australia… What we’re seeing in western Sydney now is a window into the changes the rest of the country is going to face in the years ahead, and the opportunities too. Because… Australia is going to continue to become more multicultural over the next century… and in western Sydney that’s one of our great assets, and one of our strategic advantages.”

It also presents challenges. Julie Owens’s seat of Parramatta (held by 4.37 per cent) incorporates so many ethnic groups and micro-communities that she has to tackle it street by street, and even family by family. “The other day, I came across two blocks of units which the Nepalese community had got together and bought,” she says. “There’s the Jumma people of Bangladesh, they’re two families, and the Muslim community from Sri Lanka, about fifteen families. We’ve got a lovely community from Bhutan, and the indigenous people from Kuwait, and the Fullah people, a nomadic tribe from West Africa. We’ve got everything, really – groups and sub-groups, layer upon layer, it’s like a lattice of these groupings – and you have to do niche campaigning because you can’t reach them otherwise. We do a lot of English-language work, and I do a lot of one on one. If there’s a large family, I’ll invite them in for morning tea.”

Her knowledge of Parramatta’s multiple places of worship – from the Shia mosque in Granville, converted from an old panelbeater’s shop, to the family homes where little groups of Hindus and Buddhists gather – is equally microscopic. The Bahá’ís are in South Wentworthville, the Ismailis in Northmead, the Pentecostals in Granville. Then there are the myriad sporting and community organisations, including seventeen Sudanese soccer teams who play in a competition called One Sudan, and six Lebanese community groups from six different Lebanese villages, each with a hall in Granville. Owens cautions against preconceptions. “People assume that if you’re African, you’re a refugee, but they represent an enormous percentage of our health professionals. I’ll knock on a large, expensive house and find I’m talking to two African doctors.”

To Owens, her electorate “actually is Australia… This is where you can see us, in these suburbs. We have the refugees who turn up with broken hearts, and the children of migrants going to university for the first time, and people buying their first house without any of the family backing you might have in wealthier areas. People start from the beginning here in a lot of ways. We’re really a community of builders, who set about making a life here, and I think we’re that as a nation as well.”

In the suburb of Merrylands, where I accompany her door-knocking one Sunday morning, mansion-style homes of dizzying flamboyance stand alongside unrenovated fibro cottages. Posters advertise an upcoming festival “celebrating what’s great about western Sydney” and featuring African acrobatic displays and skills clinics by Wanderers footballers. Not for the first time, I wonder if the west isn’t one big country town. Owens, who is assisted by three young volunteers, two Afghan Hazara brothers and a Nepalese woman, meets a Lebanese family who celebrated a wedding the previous day; their front patio is still bedecked with white gauze. A Turkish family, who are preparing for a little girl’s birthday party, have put up a mini bouncy castle in their front yard; an Anglo-Australian in singlet and shorts is washing his ute; and a voluble Italian wants help getting his fig tree trimmed.

A middle-aged Labor voter grumbles that “the types of people coming here are not the same class as before… You’ve got migrants who put their feet on the seats [in trains] and spit on the floor and cut their nails… The trains are filthy now, they’re putrid.” As we leave, Owens recounts how Italian and Greek migrants were denigrated when she was growing up. “They used to say that they painted their houses blue, and concreted their yards, and worked in fish and chip shops.”

Each new community, it appears, must undergo this baptism, before – eventually, sometimes grudgingly – being accepted. Intermarriage helps. “It was the same with the Vietnamese when I was a boy,” says Jason Clare, who grew up in Cabramatta, and in 2012 married Louise Tran, daughter of a Vietnamese boat migrant. “They struggled with the stigma of drug gangs. Now that’s all changed, and the second and third generations have become doctors and lawyers.” Clare is optimistic about the future for Australia’s Muslims (who are far from being one homogenous community). “A guy I met earlier today said to me, ‘My religion is Islam, my nationality is Australian. I’m an Aussie.’ Australia rubs off on you, whether you come from the UK or Lebanon.”

A SHORT drive around Werriwa, once Gough Whitlam’s seat, now held by the Labor left-winger Laurie Ferguson, takes you from Macquarie Links, a gated community built around an eighteen-hole golf course, to Claymore, a public housing estate so bleak it evokes comparisons with some remote Aboriginal communities; and from the brick-and-tile houses and industrial estates of Ingleburn to Denham Court Road, south-west Sydney’s “millionaires’ row,” where mansions set on a ridge have clear views all the way to the city.

Socioeconomic as well as cultural diversity characterises western Sydney. The area has produced millionaires like Mark Bouris, the Punchbowl boy who founded Wizard Home Loans, but – like western Melbourne, Logan City south of Brisbane, and Adelaide’s northern suburbs – it also contains clusters of high unemployment and welfare dependency. In Sydney’s west, manufacturing, symbolic of the “old Australia,” still provides 13 per cent of jobs, but is slowly dwindling. Job security is no longer the norm, and “the closer you are to the basic wage, or the more you’re reliant on a jigsaw of part-time jobs, the more that job insecurity bites,” says Hugh Mackay.

In Chris Hayes’s seat of Fowler – the second-most disadvantaged in Australia, after Lingiari in the Northern Territory – the median weekly income is $375 and unemployment is running at 9.9 per cent, nearly double the national level. The focus on Fowler (which includes Cabramatta) as an Indo-Chinese melting pot tends to mask such statistics. Hayes hosted a jobs expo in Liverpool that drew 5000 people, demonstrating, he believes, “that people in the area want employment, they don’t want to not work… It’s not just about money, it’s about social inclusion.” As for the “high-end” jobs which economists argue the west sorely needs, “what I need in my area here is some more blue-collar employment,” says Hayes.

Phillip O’Neill, director of the University of Western Sydney’s Urban Research Centre, warns that “what you don’t want is a global city renowned for its quality of life put under threat by social division, lack of opportunity and possible growing poverty.” Even for the aspirational voters identified by Mark Latham, the former Labor leader, prosperity may be precarious. In otherwise well-off suburbs, remarks O’Neill, an economic geographer, “you can see the unkempt places with a couple of Falcon station wagons on the lawn… The marriage could have split up and there wasn’t enough wealth for each to continue a reasonable lifestyle.” High-cash incomes of the type earned by so-called “white-collar tradies” are vulnerable to economic downturn. “We did a study of mortgage distress for the Reserve Bank [in 2010], and it just reaffirmed that all housing situations are vulnerable to illness, unemployment or family break-up… [Those areas] that are sometimes described as aspirational, you also find consistently the same places showing up with the highest rates of mortgage default.”

The Melbourne-based demographer Bernard Salt is struck by Sydney’s “more intense concentrations” of multiculturalism and poverty. Contemplating his city’s less troubled relationship with its own western suburbs, Salt notes that no part of Melbourne’s west is more than thirty kilometres from the CBD. “You might be poor, but you can see the CBD from Laverton and Sunshine and Broadmeadows; you’re still part of Melbourne. Go to Penrith [nearly sixty kilometres from the Sydney CBD] or Blacktown, and the only time you see the Opera House or the towers of Sydney is on TV that night. You’re physically removed, and culturally shunned.”

In Penrith, they have a different perspective. “The evening sky is wonderful out here,” says Freda Whitlam. “Such a feeling of space and beauty and clouds and sunsets.” A former teacher and school principal, Whitlam is delighted that the University of Western Sydney is producing doctors from its new medical school in Campbelltown. “When I was doing my education diploma, it struck me that any family could have brilliant children… There are plenty of brilliant people in western Sydney, and now through the university they can take advantage of the opportunities.” About one-quarter of the university’s students – one-third of the western Sydney intake – are from disadvantaged backgrounds; most graduates stay on in the west. The university works with sixty public schools in the region, promoting the benefits of tertiary education and encouraging students, says Peter Shergold, “to realise that university is a real possibility.”

Anoulack Chanthivong is a Sydney University–educated economist whose family came to Australia as refugees in 1984. Chanthivong was dux of his high school, and has been a Campbelltown councillor for nine years, serving a term as mayor. Clean-cut, serious-minded and articulate, he appears the ideal Labor candidate. But when he offered himself for preselection for the state seat of Campbelltown in 2010, there was an awkward silence. Eventually, Labor’s national executive – circumventing Chanthivong’s local branch, which was strongly behind him – endorsed Nick Bleasdale, a self-employed carpenter. According to the Macarthur Advertiser, “strong rumours [had been] circulating that NSW ALP bosses do not believe… local voters would vote for the Laos-born man.”

At the 2011 election, Bleasdale was defeated by the Liberals’ Bryan Doyle. Chanthivong describes Labor’s machinations as “disappointing.” As for the rumours about why he was cold-shouldered, the thirty-six-year-old merely says, “Obviously, if that was the case, it would be abhorrent to me. I’ve been in Campbelltown for twenty-five years now, and I’ve always found it a very open and diverse community.”

Some, including Labor insiders, cite that episode as evidence that Labor has “lost the ethnic plot.” Time was when Labor could rely on the support of migrants, but aspirant, business-minded, entrepreneurial Chinese – and Filipinos, and Indians, and Lebanese, both Christian and Muslim – are switching allegiance. As Salma Khan, a Pakistani-Australian buying land for her daughter and son-in-law at Elizabeth Hills, explained, with charming candour, “Before, we were in Labor because my husband was working in a factory. Now we have two 7-Eleven franchises and Liberals are better for business.”

As of 2012, the cities of Auburn, Liverpool and Parramatta all have Australian-Lebanese Liberal mayors. In Liverpool, a Labor stronghold for two decades, Ned Mannoun, a thirty-year-old progressive Muslim, won nearly 44 per cent of the popular vote. In his youth, the well-spoken, personable Mannoun was, briefly, a Labor Party member. “People said, ‘If you want to have a future in politics in this area, you’ve got to be Labor.’” Nowadays he is sure the Liberal Party works harder to promote ethnic talent.

Labor’s links with migrant communities, painstakingly cultivated over many years, loosened following the 2007 federal election, according to one well-placed MP. While Kevin Rudd “did fantastic stuff with Indigenous communities, and especially the Chinese at a leadership level, genuine engagement with ethnic communities went very steeply down,” says the former Rudd colleague. The Liberal Party, meanwhile – particularly under Barry O’Farrell in New South Wales – has belatedly embraced multiculturalism, and is making an unprecedented effort to woo ethnic voters. For the federal election, it has assembled an impressive cast of candidates with migrant backgrounds, next to whom Labor’s MPs look positively WASP-ish. •

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I’m a long-suffering Melbourne supporter. That’s the AFL team that got thrashed again last weekend. I can’t help my affiliation, of course – or should I say affliction? Barracking is hard-wired; it is like a totem assigned by some mystery of culture; it is imbibed with milk and language. It is a fate to which one is condemned. Choice never had anything to do with it.

Next year it will be fifty years since my team won a premiership. That’s unusual but not unique. But that half-century is a whole lifetime of conscious barracking, and such sustained lack of success, decade after decade, begins to bruise your sensibility. Low expectations, irony, a feigned lack of interest, wry bitterness – these attitudes begin to shape your winter weekend.

There are many compensatory benefits in being an underdog, a good loser, a sad clown, a hilarious cynic, a brave martyr, a loyal fan, a resilient supporter, a denizen of that great temple, the MCG, and – more desperately – a devotee of the oldest club in the league. But Melbourne has always been a little embarrassing to follow, for it was also the club of the well-heeled, those silvertails in jackets who lounge in the Members’ Stand and refuse to join in the Mexican wave at the Boxing Day cricket. At least Melbourne Football Club’s appalling record is proof that money – or establishment money, anyway – can’t buy success in the AFL, whatever the recent Australian Crime Commission report might suggest.

What would success taste like – and could I cope with it now? I don’t think I’ll be tested soon. The last few years have seen a new nadir in the team’s fortunes and I’ve noticed a distinct change in Melbourne’s place in football culture. It is normal and healthy for a losing team (and especially one that loses a lot) to become the butt of jokes. Disdain and contempt are rightly poured from a very great height. I can cope with that. I’m used to it. I have honed my survival strategies over decades. But now there is something new I cannot cope with. It is pity.

It began in Round 19 in 2011 when Melbourne was defeated by Geelong by 186 points in what was described as “the meekest surrender in the game’s history.” People feel sorry for me now, for being a Melbourne supporter. Their concern is genuine and it is combined with a kind of incredulous disbelief. Really? You barrack for Melbourne? You still barrack for Melbourne? Get a life, man!

Surely they understand that one is condemned, that there is no choice? I crave the disdain and contempt. I yearn for the disrespectful badinage served up to an almost-equal. Pity is unbearable.

After last weekend’s debacle, when my team was again booed off the field by its own supporters, the relatively new coach, Mark Neeld, fronted up for yet another depressed and depressing press conference in which he looked and confessed to being “shell-shocked.” “It’s a damn long road and it’s a hard one,” he explained. If that’s how he feels after just one year with the club, what does he think fifty such seasons feel like? All last year, “Neeldy” regretted that his players hadn’t yet got the hang of the “game plan.” Getting goals seemed too complex an idea for them. But now he tells us with a sense of achievement that their theory is exemplary: “if it was an exam, it was 100 per cent correct,” he declared to the press. They now play perfectly correctly at training, he assured us. He was genuinely puzzled that it just doesn’t seem to work on the day of the game – on any day, in fact, when another team is on the field. But at least my team is now stunning at training. Mark says he is trying “to keep an elite mindset going” at the club. He announces that “we believe we train like an AFL team.”

Melbourne trains (even if it doesn’t play) like an AFL team. One could almost think it were one! This is where pity takes you – to a mentality where even the coach cannot help betraying the conviction that he is working in the second division.

THERE was one bright spot in my barracking career. It was 1987. The 1964 premiership was already far back in the mists of time, and Melbourne had laboured through many long, dark years. In the 1980s, the team was graced with the balletic skills of an extraordinary player, Robert Flower. Even his name seemed to capture his delicacy, and it is a wonder that a light, fine-boned man could distinguish himself on such a gladiatorial turf. Robbie Flower swept along the wing of the MCG with a speed and sureness of touch that defied opponents and gravity, but he was a shining star in a losing team. He seemed destined never to play in a final. Then something utterly surprising happened.

In the middle of 1987, Melbourne started winning. Not just squeaking home, but running wild and free to victory for the sheer fun of it. They were “the Cinderella side,” a young team with a new Irish recruit, Jim Stynes. I watched, disbelieving and hardly daring to breathe, as a fairy tale unfolded. Robbie Flower was captain; it was his last season; they were doing it for him. It was one of those moments when joy and chemistry took over and corporatism and “game plans” seemed irrelevant.

Melbourne had come second last the year before and was improving in 1987, but they hardly looked like making the Final Five. The surge began in late July. They won six in a row and just snuck into the finals, achieving an unlikely fulfilment of Flower’s dream. But now it seemed they couldn’t stop. They had a runaway win by 118 points over North Melbourne in the qualifying final. Then they blitzed Sydney by seventy-six points in the semi-final. The preliminary final was against Hawthorn and again the underdogs ran hard and fast and led all day with sheer momentum and exuberance. In the final quarter Hawthorn pegged them back, but still it seemed that Melbourne was home and into their first grand final since 1964.

The final minutes and seconds ticked away and the lead was intact. The gifted Hawthorn forward, Gary Buckenara, was awarded a free kick just beyond the fifty-metre line. Then the siren sounded. The game was over and Melbourne had won. Supporters started celebrating. But the umpire did not hear the siren over the joyous, relieved roar of the Melbourne crowd. The siren blared without stopping but went unheeded by many on the ground. The game continued. Buckenara went back for his kick. Jim Stynes, who had not heard the siren, cut across the ground to pick up a loose man and ran across Buckenara’s mark. The umpire, who still awaited the siren, awarded a fifteen-metre penalty, bringing Buckenara within range. He kicked truly. Hawthorn supporters ran onto the ground. Everyone woke up. The fairy tale was over.

Something inside me died that day. The cruelty was exquisite. I was cradling my daughter, three months old, as the siren sounded and Melbourne’s win turned to ash. I was struck dumb. I handed our precious baby carefully to my wife and went for a long, lonely, bitter walk. Football was never the same again.

Jim Synes died prematurely of cancer at the beginning of 2012. He always said that it was the last seconds of the 1987 preliminary final that gave him the flinty determination to become great, to win the Brownlow Medal, to play a record 244 consecutive games. When he announced his illness to the media he showed them his number 37 jumper, the one he had worn that fateful day on the MCG; it had become a symbol of challenge. As club president, he had rescued Melbourne from debt, and his battle with cancer lifted hearts. But his death depressed the players rather than inspiring them. The 2012 season was, for Melbourne, the most miserable I had experienced. No one could ever quite remember the game plan. The sole highlight had been Melbourne’s failure to lose to an Essendon team disabled by the mid-season regime of their club pharmacist.

By the start of 2013, my customary enthusiasm for the game had withered further. My team had just been found guilty of behaviour “prejudicial to the interests of the AFL” after charges of tanking in 2009, other teams were suspected of injecting their players with illegal drugs in 2012, bookie Tom Waterhouse dominated sports coverage and, in the first game of the season, Essendon’s coach continued to rule the turf on national television as if unaffected by the scandal engulfing his club. As the opening round continued to sprawl over two weeks, I wisely chose not to watch Melbourne get humiliated by Port Adelaide. Instead, I walked to Etihad Stadium with my twenty-five-year-old daughter (who had survived the end of the 1987 preliminary final and does not barrack for Melbourne) and we watched North Melbourne play Collingwood.

It was overcast and raining lightly. The game had begun by the time we arrived and the stadium was booming. The roof at Etihad was closed and the interior glowed and beckoned like a theatre set. As I stepped inside, I felt a familiar awe at the sheer scale and grandeur of this performance, at the bravery of the young men on the sacrificial field and at the passionate decency of their supporters. I joined a mixed group of Magpies and Kangaroos, strangers to one another who were drinking beer as they watched the game. They could not see my demonic heart, so they did not pity me. They honoured me with their churlish respect. Since I was at Etihad, they assumed I barracked for a first-division team. They were unbridled in their support of their own teams but had the capacity to grudgingly admire the other. The game was fast, clean, skilled and close. It was a relief to watch a game between two equally matched teams. The coarse wit of my companions and their robust and friendly rivalry cheered me. I remembered why I like football.

I also knew what was wrong with Melbourne: the players were thinking too much and they didn’t have time for that. They were too worried about getting the coach’s exam 100 per cent right. I wished that exuberance and joy might be allowed to run away with them. And I hoped that, one day, my team would enable me to wear my heart on my sleeve again and join the grown-ups’ conversation once more. •

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Ken Rosewall must have spent more time on Australia’s centre courts this summer than any Australian player. He was at Ken Rosewall Arena in Sydney when Bernard Tomic thanked “Mr Rosewall” for his first ATP Tour tournament trophy. He was at Rod Laver Arena when Andy Murray was too good for Roger Federer in a semi-final of the Australian Open, and he was there two nights later when Novak Djokovic was too good for Murray.

Australians see a lot of this in January. There are many more Australian tennis champions in the stands than on the courts and it has been that way for a long time. Rosewall will turn eighty next year; Rod Laver will turn seventy-five in August, the day after Roger Federer’s birthday; Margaret Court is seventy. Australia’s last winner of an Australian Open singles title was Chris O’Neil in 1978. In six of the ten championships before that win, both the female finalists were Australian.

Australia’s golden age has produced a book bubble lately, with the release of Rosewall’s Muscles: The Story of Ken Rosewall, Australia’s Little Master of the Courts (as told to Richard Naughton), Laver’s The Education of a Tennis Player (with Bud Collins), and Hugh Lunn’s The Great Fletch: The Dazzling Life of Wimbledon Aussie Larrikin Ken Fletcher. These players come from an era when future champions lived with ironic nicknames from their early days on the court: Rosewall became “Muscles” because he didn’t have any; Laver, the “Rocket” because, as a boy, he wasn’t one. The two of them ended up in one of the great rivalries in the history of tennis, its duration, intensity and closeness masked by the invisibility of many of the matches they played as professional one-night stands all over the world, often in makeshift venues, in the 1960s and early 70s.

Laver came from country Queensland, Rockhampton, about 650 kilometres north of Brisbane; Rosewall from Rockdale in Sydney’s south. Neither was tall even by the standards of the time: Laver 1.73 metres (five feet, seven inches); Rosewall, four years older, an inch shorter.

Rosewall and his almost exact contemporary, Balmain boy Lew Hoad, were teenage stars. Chosen for the Davis Cup training squad in 1951 at seventeen, they travelled overseas the following year with an Australian team whose star, Frank Sedgman, won the singles and the men’s and mixed doubles at Wimbledon. In 1953, at nineteen, Rosewall won the Australian singles title at Kooyong and then the French title on clay in Paris. Back at Kooyong between Christmas and New Year, Rosewall and Hoad became national heroes when Australia won the Davis Cup from the United States. Down two matches to one after the doubles, both won their reverse singles, Hoad over just-crowned US singles champion Tony Trabert and Rosewall against reigning Wimbledon champion Vic Seixas.

Davis Cup coach Harry Hopman might not have thought Laver the quickest kid around the court but he saw enough in him to select him as one of two youngsters for the Australians’ overseas tour in 1956. Laver lost the Wimbledon junior final but won the junior US and was at Forest Hills to see Hoad fall one match short of the Grand Slam Laver would win twice – the Australian, French, Wimbledon and US singles championships in the same year. Hoad made the cover of Sports Illustrated and the US final, but his Sydney mate Rosewall got through as well, played better in the windy conditions and won in four sets.

Players now measure their achievements by the number of “slams,” or major tournaments, they win. Margaret Court won twenty-four in singles, the record, including all four, the Grand Slam, in 1970. Roger Federer has seventeen, the most by a man. In three separate years he has won three of the four, but has never won all four. Rod Laver’s two Grand Slams came first as an amateur in 1962, then in 1969 as a professional, the first calendar year professionals were allowed to play in all four major tournaments.

It was the chance of a Grand Slam in 1969 that Boston Globe tennis writer Bud Collins says gave him his book about Laver, first published in 1971 and re-released in 2009 for the fortieth anniversary of the achievement. Laver’s agent had approached Collins about a memoir. Publishers Simon and Schuster were interested but only if Rod won the four tournaments: “No Slam, no book,” though Collins didn’t tell Laver that.

The fact that he won a Grand Slam of mixed doubles with Margaret Court (Margaret Smith at the time) in 1963 is what makes Ken Fletcher’s disappearance from the list of Australian tennis champions of the era so puzzling. Explaining “the dazzling life” of this “Wimbledon Aussie larrikin” is the job former journalist with the Australian, Hugh Lunn, sets himself in The Great Fletch.

With Grand Slams in singles, Rod Laver and Margaret Court have got arenas named after them at Melbourne Park, where the Australian Open gets played each January. With plenty of grand slam singles tournament wins but no Grand Slam, Ken Rosewall’s Arena is in Homebush. Ken Fletcher has a park on the river outside the Pat Rafter Arena in Brisbane.

The authors of these three books have different relationships with their subjects. Lunn was the oldest of old mates with Fletcher, who died in 2006. They were “in the playpen together as babies,” at different schools a few hundred metres apart in the Brisbane suburb of Annerley, young men travelling the world together and, in 1965 and 66, tennis player and cheerleader at Wimbledon.

This is a much more personal story than the other two. Fletch, we learn, didn’t like people who were tight with their money, people with no personality, and skites. “No Australian man was ever more upfront about his feelings for others.” There is plenty of tennis, because that was what Fletcher was best known for – as well as his mixed doubles Grand Slam in 1963, he won another five major mixed doubles titles, won men’s doubles titles at Wimbledon and in the French Open, and made the singles final of the Australian Open in 1963, losing to Roy Emerson, and the Wimbledon or French quarter-finals five times.

But there is just as much of the anguish of falling short in an era when those around him were climbing higher, of the difficulties of piloting his own prodigious talent – “the greatest and purest tennis shot I have seen in my life, and I have seen them all, was Fletcher’s forehand,” says a contemporary, Jim Shepherd. There is a lot about life beyond tennis courts, sometimes rich and raucous, at other times troubled and impecunious. A park by the Brisbane River, just outside the courts, with swings and barbecues and lots of people, seems a much better memorial for Fletch than an arena.

Bud Collins is the voice of Rod Laver in The Education of a Tennis Player, credited as “Rod Laver with Bud Collins.” The reader gets Laver’s story, peppered with wisecracks that sound more Boston than Rockhampton. Cliff Drysdale is “a good-looking South African who could talk a Kruger Park lion into becoming a vegetarian.” On one Laver backhand: “You don’t plan a shot like that, not unless you’re on marijuana, and the only grass I’m partial to is Wimbledon’s.”

But Collins, Laver’s choice of biographer, gives a strong sense of the distance a kid from Rockhampton traversed to become a world champion. He worked out very early what he wanted to do and set about doing it. It meant leaving home, travelling constantly, living everywhere at once, eventually mainly in California, grinding out tennis matches when he was exhausted or injured or just not playing his best, getting himself ready for the ones that really mattered.

Collins doesn’t give us a neat linear tale of Laver’s career or even of his second Grand Slam year. The rough chronology of tournaments and matches is there, but he detours for the backstories and twenty-five “Lessons” on topics like “The Crisp Volley” and “Playing against Familiar Opponents.”

Rosewall’s biographer Richard Naughton – credited “as told to…” – is an academic lawyer and tennis lover, a senior fellow in the law faculty at Monash University and author of Australian Labour Law: Text, Cases and Commentary, as well as a biography of Australia’s first Wimbledon champion, Norman Brookes. His story is relentlessly chronological, but it seems exactly the right way to write about Rosewall’s long quest, match after match, set after set, serves, returns, approaches, passes, handshakes at the net. Rosewall just kept doing it and in a way he still does. You can’t summarise Muscles without diminishing him.

All three books are centrally about the era when becoming a professional tennis player meant not being able to play the four major tournaments. Rosewall turned pro at the start of 1957, aged twenty-two, Laver in 1963, at twenty-four. Fletcher, two years younger than Laver, stayed an amateur. John Newcombe, younger still, won Wimbledon as an amateur in 1967 and turned professional right at the beginning of the Open era.

This was not a split like World Series Cricket or Super League that blew sports apart for a couple of years before they got back together again and lived happily ever after. It went on for decades. Pancho Gonzales turned professional after winning the US championships in 1948 and 1949 aged twenty and twenty-one. He got to play his country’s national championships again at forty. Two-time Wimbledon champion Laver got a letter from the All England Tennis Club after he turned professional advising him he could no longer wear the club tie.

When professionals were finally allowed to play the major championships again, they were called “Opens” but separate playing circuits continued for most of the year. Queensland’s amateur tennis boss Bill Edwards, no supporter of pro tennis, put on an embarrassing Australian Championships in January 1969, apparently heading to the races one afternoon rather than watching the tennis. This was how Queensland welcomed the Rocket back to Milton. The International Lawn Tennis Federation banned Rosewall, Laver and members of the professional World Championship Tennis circuit from the French Open and Wimbledon in 1972 and the professionals boycotted Wimbledon the following year over a different issue. Australia’s professionals could play the Opens from 1968 but weren’t allowed back to play Davis Cup until 1973.

The pro tours were rough and hard, small groups of fine players up against each other over and over again on all kinds of weird, temporary surfaces – canvas stretched over boards or even ice-rinks – and only occasionally getting access to the established tennis venues. They drove themselves from one town to the next each day after treasurer Rosewall had counted the money, set up again, and faced up to the same opponents. If you got injured you played on because if you didn’t there’d be no crowd and no pay next time the troupe came to town.

We know how the story ends now, in an Open Era when professionals got to play in the great championships again, but there was never any certainty about that. The pros were better, and if you wanted to be the best and make decent money without taking a PR job with Dunlop or Slazenger then you had to turn your back on the great trophies and accept it might be forever. When Rosewall turned pro, Pancho Gonzales whipped him, although Rosewall eventually turned that around. When Laver turned pro at the start of 1963, having just won his first Grand Slam against the amateurs, Lew Hoad beat him in their first seven matches and Rosewall in four of their first six. Meanwhile, the next generation of “amateurs” were winning the major championships the pros couldn’t enter.

Laver says Rosewall is the “least appreciated great player in the history of tennis.” He – Rosewall – “was the player we all had most trouble with.” In the French Pro Indoor final in 1963, Laver says he played “the finest tennis I believe I’ve ever produced” and still got beaten by Rosewall. Fred Stolle said he’d “rather play Laver any day than Rosewall. If the Rocket’s hitting his shots there’s no chance for me… But there’s always the chance he’ll be a bit off and then you’re right in the match. Rosewall was never off.”

Harry Hopman said the initially “scrawny and slow” Rocket “worked harder at it than anybody else.” “The dangerous thing about Laver is he hits the impossible shot when he’s out of position – the time you least expect it,” said Pancho Gonzales. Rosewall thought – and Laver doesn’t deny – that Rocket always found something special when there was big money at stake.

One tennis historian scores the many Laver–Rosewall matches 80–67 Laver’s way, another 79–71, also Laver’s way, including 22–7 in the Open era. On his way to his two Grand Slams, Laver met and beat Roy Emerson in five of the eight tournaments, but Rosewall only once, in the French final in Paris in June 1969. They’d met in the final a year earlier, in the ’68 Paris Spring; Rosewall had prevailed. This time at Roland Garros, the Rocket put Muscles down in straight sets. The tennis jury is still out on what happened: some thought it was Laver’s day, Laver’s year; others that it was just Laver.

With two legs of his second Grand Slam secured, Laver won thirty-one straight matches between July and September, including Wimbledon, the US Open and five other tournaments. After winning the four major tournaments in a single year for the second time, he never won another one.

The stories of Fletch, Muscles and Rocket are about the long, hard work required to get to the top of tennis and stay there. But tennis, more than most other sports, is also about moments and these books feast on them.

There’s Rosewall in his first Wimbledon final in 1954, his best chance it turned out, getting a strange soft serve on match point from the Czech Drobný and pushing it into the net. And Laver, match point down against Marty Mulligan in the quarters at Roland Garros in 1962; getting a crucial line call against Tony Roche late in the fifth set of the semi-final at the 1969 Australian Open, the first tournament in his ’69 Slam; hitting a backhand slice across court to pass John Newcombe, who was serving at a set apiece, 4–2, 0–15 in the ’69 Wimbledon final – a point Laver later thought to be “the whole match.”

For Ken Fletcher, it’s a different kind of moment: playing the Hungarian István Gulyás in the 1966 French, unable to put away three smashes in a row, fed another by the scrambling Gulyás, choosing to belt it over the stands and into the Bois de Boulogne, shouting, “Get that one, you Hungarian bastard!” It’s Fletcher’s response to the relentlessness of top tennis – or maybe just a grass court specialist’s frustration at how often the ball comes back on clay.

If you were starting to watch a bit of sport on TV in the early 1970s, after live satellite broadcasts began but before colour, you might have seen the Davis Cup final in Cleveland Ohio in late 1973, when all the pros were finally allowed back. Australia picked the apparently ageless Rosewall (thirty-nine), Mal Anderson (thirty-eight), Laver (thirty-five) and Newcombe (twenty-nine). The younger Geoff Masters and Ross Case, who later won a Wimbledon doubles, were there too, but it was a sign that Australia’s golden tennis era was almost done.

They all had to earn their spots. Laver showed he was ready at the Sydney Indoor tournament, beating Rosewall and recently crowned US Open champion Newcombe. Picked for the semi-final against Czechoslovakia at Kooyong, he beat Jan Kodeš in straight sets, won a marathon doubles with Rosewall, and beat Jiří Hřebec – surprise conqueror of Newcombe on the first day – in five sets.

For the final in Cleveland, the triumphant return of Australia’s greats to the Davis Cup, Newcombe and Laver got all the work. Both won their opening day singles in five sets, Laver coming back from two-sets-to-one down to beat Tom Gorman. Then captain Neale Fraser chose Newcombe ahead of Rosewall to partner Laver in the doubles. They made short work of the Americans and the Cup was Australia’s. Two decades after his and Lew Hoad’s teenage heroics at Kooyong, Rosewall didn’t get the chance to put on his whites.

The next year, astonishingly, the thirty-nine-year-old Rosewall made the finals of Wimbledon – twenty years after his first final there – and the US Open, five years after Laver’s last wins there, but had to play the tough young superstar of the moment, Jimmy Connors, in both. Rosewall won just eight games over six sets in the two finals. Fans came away from Forest Hills, according to Tennis World, wearing “the glazed expression of those caught too near an exploding bomb.” It felt like the cruellest luck that Rosewall had been extraordinary enough to be on the court at all. To be so good for so long, to want it so much… and that was the reward.

Whether or not Connors really demanded that his manager “Get me Laver!” after that 1974 US Open, as was reported, Jimmy got him. The Rocket turned up at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, in February 1975 for a match billed as “$100,000 Winner Take All,” though Laver tells Bud Collins he got $60,000 for it, his biggest ever single payday. The twenty-two-year-old American was too good for the thirty-six-year-old Australian, but Laver did manage to get a set off him.

Laver also hit a shot that has stayed with me, a running forehand from way, way out of court. I didn’t know then what it took to play that shot – the left forearm as big as Rocky Marciano’s and the seven-inch wrist, the legs to get to the ball, the head to believe it was possible, the heart to want it. But something about it stuck. It was a moment and you were so lucky to see it. Jimmy couldn’t reach it, it was in, it was the Rocket. •

The post Fletch, Muscles and the Rocket appeared first on Inside Story.

THIS is a slow country to move. After seven years of preparation, months of publicity, weeks of fractiousness and days of panic, Britain had still not quite adjusted itself to the idea that it was to play host to the 2012 Olympic games. In the end, it took an instant of art to unlock the heart. True, at two hours the opening ceremony on the evening of 27 July in the gleaming new Olympic stadium in east London was, for an instant, on the long side. But the unfolding revelation that a genuine artistic vision of this complicated country was at work – coupled with the evanescence intrinsic to the occasion – sharpened the emotional effect. And, if much of the world was bemused, Britain was duly moved.

The creative director Danny Boyle’s affectionate, people-centred collage of national particularity and inventiveness offered an exuberantly different pantheon from the familiar top-down one – pioneering engineers, toilers of the industrial revolution, suffragettes, musicians, children’s writers, the public health service, youngsters out on the town – while respecting (but thus also repositioning) more established figures already secure within it. A formative inspiration was the work of the modernist–romantic film-maker Humphrey Jennings (1907–50), especially his anthology of lesser-known texts (or “images,” as Jennings preferred) charting Britain’s transformation, Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. The influence of Jennings’s lyrical wartime documentaries – including the soundscape Listen to Britain (1942) and Fires Were Started (1943), whose acute social detail is observed with a surrealist eye – was also evident.

“Isles of Wonder” was spellbinding, humane, witty – and contained elusive multitudes. (In the course of praising the dedication of the 15,000 actor-volunteers, the show’s writer Frank Cottrell Boyce noted the pleasing fact that “wherever you looked, people were doing something different.”) The highlights included Caliban’s lament for his lost island from The Tempest, the most ambiguously fertile of Shakespeare’s plays; Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose great buildings and bridges drew a new social landscape; William Blake’s Jerusalem, whose musical setting by Hubert Parry gives it an emotional charge that makes it England’s unofficial anthem; Mary Poppins vanquishing Voldemort, villain of the Harry Potter stories; J.K. Rowling herself reading from Peter Pan; John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the wellspring of Pandaemonium; a sonic kaleidoscope of modern pop, from The Jam to Dizzee Rascal; and many others, often represented in glancing but pinpoint detail (such as the blink-if-you-missed-it references to eternal romances such as A Matter of Life and Death and Gregory’s Girl).

The animating spirit of a beautiful fantasy was encapsulated in the paean to Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the world wide web: “this is for everyone.” Its propulsive narrative – that the subversive, imaginative spirit of a multifarious land is the source of its achievements, and that it is now confident enough to pass on the torch to those kids – was both intelligent enough to accommodate the sensibilities of the “official version” of national history (including in its post-imperial, “inclusive” variants) and bold enough to claim fresh ground.

Boyle engagingly said that the intention of a ceremony three years in the making was to be “proud and modest.” In the event it wholeheartedly embraced the contradictions implicit in these words, and dramatised a generous, optimistic, democratic (and England-centred) patriotism. As a work of art it “bears within itself its own verification” (to cite a phrase of Solzhenitsyn), and might have been thought hard to unpick without violating its integrity. But it immediately became clear that Britain’s always-on army of partisan activists and pundits knew better.

The politicisation got in early: a Conservative member of parliament questioned the ceremony’s “leftie” bias even as it was taking place, followed within a day by columnists of right (a “social worker’s history of Britain,” wrote the polemicist Peter Hitchens, never one to let a prejudice go to waste, while Stephen Glover called it “strictly Marxist”) and left (“here was our march past,” purred the Labour MP and historian Tristram Hunt, who also – like anti-independence campaigners in Scotland – conscripted the show into the “pro-union” camp). The mythographer Marina Warner read it as a “reproach to the current government,” though the responses of the prime minister David Cameron and London’s mayor Boris Johnson were warm and unembarrassed.

It did not take long, then, for those who know everything already to begin to do the only thing they know, grind diamonds into rust (including via numerous laments about what was “omitted” – from slavery to the Magna Carta). Britain’s left–right orthodoxies are well-protected from the dangers of artistic subversion by their exclusivist memory-packs and endlessly self-referential formulae. This political reductionism ensures that the invigorating effect of “Isles of Wonder” will soon fade – and, worse, be parlayed into cheap point-scoring at party conferences.

It’s understandable that the show presents an irresistible hook for searchers of social hope in tough times, and there is indeed abundant material in it to keep Britain’s perennial culture wars boiling for years to come. The paradox, though, of an instrumentalised and over-political reading is that it asphyxiates whatever potential for change the event may have, which lies precisely in its capaciousness (as much, it might be said, as The Tempest itself, which five centuries after its composition is still open to new readings, including post-colonial).

But if the curse of literalism is unavoidable and an effort at appropriation inevitable, the serious left, instead of claiming the event as “ours,” might be better advised to ask, apropos Antonio Gramsci’s theory: is this, after all, an imaginative guide to how “hegemony” can be made to work?

OF THE millions of words already devoted to “Isles of Wonder,” the most resonant belong to the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, now better known as an outspoken dissident and former detainee than as co-designer of the landmark “bird’s nest” stadium for Beijing’s 2008 Olympics. He described the ceremony as “free, relaxed and touching – a festival of modern citizens.”

Allowing for the fact that everything that Ai Weiwei writes is also “about” China, his comment is both a mirror and a challenge to a host country that in other times and areas of public life would struggle to earn such an accolade. The run-up to the Olympics, a recent period that already seems far distant, is an example, but also works as a prudent illustration of how transient the dominant mood in Britain often turns out to be.

The heatwave had arrived in the third week of July, just in time. An early summer of heavy rainfall across much of Britain had brought minor discomfort to millions and real hardship, in the form of flooded homes and fields, to thousands of householders and farmers. The increasing frequency of such “exceptional weather events” in a traditionally temperate country, and its possible connection to global climate change, was widely discussed, while on an everyday level the vagaries of the weather – that “ever-interesting, even thrilling topic,” in George Mikes’s wry comment on an English obsession – saturated daily conversations and media reports.

The overall tone of public exchanges, taking account of localised disasters and the occasional tragedy precipitated by the monsoon, was lighthearted: a mix of fatalism, adjustment and jocularity that comes close to the default national attitude.

As the temperature soared and the fields dried, the same combination – with an additional shot of cynicism, a potent late addition to the template – was apparent with the approach of the Olympics. The imminence of the global sporting–broadcasting–commercial extravaganza seemed to enter broad public consciousness only in the countdown weeks, and a welcoming tone was hard to find. A strike announced by the union representing passport control workers, even as long delays at leading airports had become routine, made the headlines – “chaos,” “fiasco,” “shambles” – for once look almost accurate. Sarah Lyall, the longstanding New York Times correspondent, was struck by how Londoners were “practicing some of their own favorite sports: complaining, expecting the worst and cursing the authorities... [Many feel] that they are getting the worst parts of the Olympics – the cost, the hassle, the officials telling them not to do things or go places – without any of the benefits.”

The sour atmosphere deepened with an acknowledgment by the private security company charged with (and handsomely paid by government for) recruiting and training personnel to monitor the Olympic sites and visitors that it was proving unable to meet its agreed targets. The deployment of 3500 troops – some returning from a tour of duty in Afghanistan – was hurriedly announced to fill the gap.

Indeed, the issue of security became more dominant as the games drew ever nearer. An underlying fear of terrorist spectacle has been entwined with the timeline of this Olympics from the start, when the announcement (in Singapore) of London’s award on 6 July 2005 – greeted by a joyous crowd in Trafalgar Square – was followed a day later by the coordinated bombing of its transport network by “homegrown” radicals that killed fifty-two passengers. The permanence of the threat (from “dissident” Irish republicans as well as extreme Islamists) underpins a complex and intensive intelligence operation involving 8000 personnel and costing £1 billion. Most of this remains below the radar, though Charles Farr, director-general of the office of security and counter-terrorism, admitted to the BBC’s well-sourced security correspondent Gordon Corera that the authorities’ measure of danger is close to the peak.

The more intrusive precautions, as Geoffrey Barker relates in his trenchant Inside Story article, include the placing of surface-to-air missiles on the rooftop of an apartment block in east London to ensure control of airspace around the Olympics site, which some residents protested against and sought to thwart via a legal injunction. The pre-Olympics security lockdown – which to the everyday resident can appear only a little more irksome than the norm, especially in a year of high-profile events – fuels a critical narrative that sees everywhere an experiment in political intimidation whose real target is less the terrorist enemy (assumedly phantom, or at least wildly exaggerated) than the domestic population.

The argument in turn forms a sub-current of a wider repertoire of charges against the London games tout court, whose insistent themes – the expense of their staging, commercialism (the leading sponsors and their advertising hegemony are much anathematised), elitism (typified by the privileged “Zil” traffic lanes), exclusion (the rigorous fencing-off of the inner zone is imbued with sinister connotations), long-term disruption (of local residents) and expropriation (of public land) – orchestrate the accumulating frustrations of the post-2008 years of financial crisis, austerity and inequality. A neat, self-confirming conclusion follows – that the Olympics, far from being a springboard to regeneration, are a physical embodiment of Britain’s economic, social, political and even moral malaise.

The immediate pre-games period was a high point for this narrative – in part because the G4S company’s recruiting failures fed into more general unhappiness with the Conservative–Liberal Democrat government, in part because a temporary alliance was then possible between the more political critics and Britain’s well-populated army of all-purpose cynics. (The two groups overlap, and fuel each other’s conceits, but they are not identical.)

The “counter-Olympics” trend provides a healthy counterweight to official boosterism and serves the demand for an integrated portrait of confusing times. It is also powerful and malleable enough to survive the games and find new targets when the caravan moves on. But where the games were concerned, after coasting on an imaginary wave of public disaffection, its tide receded at a moment of apparent triumph.

This was the parliamentary inquisition on 17 July of G4S’s hapless chief executive Nick Buckles, which provoked a fierce ridicule (of both the company and the government) that had something of the cathartic about it. It was as if, at last, the people were exacting a price from the authorities for a host of depredations – foisting the event on a reluctant country, turning a large part of east London into a construction site, reordering the capital’s traffic system, messing up a key part of the preparation – but also proffering their belated downpayment for admission (“now we will give this our attention, but as... modern citizens!”).

Even at the time it seemed a turning point – if only because the level of pre-Olympics complaint had gone so far that (in a familiar rebalancing fashion) an auto-corrective was certain. The shift was sudden and palpable. The extended relay of Olympic torchbearers, where the sight of local heroes and celebrities in photogenic locations had drawn immense crowds across the country, finally reached London to be carried through all the city’s thirty-three boroughs. The media as well as the popular reaction was striking, with a rush of columnists renouncing their self-styled “scepticism” and embracing the excitement to come. The athletes and visitors began to arrive, the enthusiastic volunteers began to receive their due, the broadcasters got into gear, even the passport-workers’ strike was called off.

The invisible contract between people and authorities having been signed, both were now ready to settle down to what the British do best: namely (to adapt a phrase once used by the poet and critic Tom Paulin) erect a totem pole and then dance around it. And, in the shape of a model of Glastonbury Tor and “Queen Elizabeth” descending by parachute from a helicopter alongside James Bond, the totem pole duly arrived.

A WEEK into the competition, “Olympomania” has taken hold. The complaints of the run-up, the government’s April–June “omnishambles,” could belong to the last century. Today’s forgetting, though, is tomorrow’s remembering, and they will be back in another guise, just as current euphoria around the games (albeit shadowed by concerns over empty seats, ticket sales, and hotel vacancies) will soon evaporate.

Such constant jolts from one theme, story, controversy, scandal and mood to the next are a feature of the ever-shortening cycles of Britain’s political life. This does nothing to still predictions that the games will be “era-defining” and transform the country’s sense of itself.

The very rapidity and atmosphere of urgency of the media–political waterfall make it addictive. Its dominant features – hyperbole, tribalism, amnesia – are encouraged by commercial pressures and now superglued by social media’s ruthless conformism. It is then all too tempting to embrace the conceit that large-scale social or economic change – real, lasting change – can be won on the same ground. There are, though, other rhythms at work, and it is by understanding and tapping into them that change-making, for good or ill, becomes possible.

The depth of the reaction to “Isles of Wonder” surely reflects widespread longing for political and national uplift, even for a kind of redemption (whether that nation be Britain or England). But the ceremony, or the Olympics in general, won’t be so easily conscripted. After all, there are no short cuts. This is a slow country to move. •

The post An Olympics fantasy appeared first on Inside Story.

THE skies over London are protected by circling jet fighters, stationary ground-to-air missile batteries and cluttering helicopters carrying military snipers. The streets of the city are patrolled by thousands of soldiers, policemen and whatever is meant by “security personnel.” By comparison, the barrage balloons put up to counter the German air force in two world wars were like benign sausages in the sky.

London’s conversion into a national security venue, riding roughshod over the freedoms, comfort and convenience of its inhabitants, is due, of course, to the Olympic Games, the four-yearly global athletics carnival that most countries want to host for the economic benefits that supposedly flow.

Surely it is time the international community abandoned this Olympic nonsense, and not just because of the massive cost and inconvenience of protecting the games, although that is bad enough. London’s preparations have plainly elevated Olympic security to new and dangerous levels of lethality.

It is also because the Olympic Games, while constantly expanding as spectacles, are shrivelling as sporting contests, despite the apparently infinite capacity of competitors to break records and despite the billions of dollars poured in by governments and corporations. Resources devoted to Olympic sport could be put to much better use supporting other human activities with infinitely greater benefits to populations everywhere.

The fact is that every Olympic Games is a massively state-subsidised carnival staged primarily for the economic benefit of global fizzy drink companies and television networks. The drink companies flog their sugary junk direct; TV companies sell commercial time during Olympic broadcasts at massively inflated rates. Mammon, not Mercury, dominates the Olympic Games and there are few substantial and durable benefits for the societies that host and fund them.

Each four-yearly event is debauched by scandals about the use of performance-enhancing drugs. A huge bureaucracy has evolved to stop athletes from using drugs, but pharmacology usually trumps vigilance as athletes pursue the cornucopia of sponsorship “deals” offered to gold medal winners.

Olympic contests also encourage the descent of countries into nationalistic primitivism and conflict, with the medal count seen as evidence of national superiority. (Of course it isn’t: it is merely evidence of how much a country can afford to pay to win a medal.) Australia, it has to be said, is particularly prone to this disease. This is partly due to sports journalism and television commentary that daily invests the pointless gyrations of Olympic athletes with an importance and portentousness that is beyond satire.

It is not just that Australian broadcasters, like all other broadcasters, focus mainly on the performances of their own athletes and teams regardless of the excellence of other performances. It is also that Australian Olympic officials brazenly demand increased Commonwealth funding for the elite Australian Institute of Sport in order to maximise the chance of big medal hauls. The gurus of Olympism (their word, not mine) are already warning that Australians might win fewer medals in London than they have won at other recent Olympic contests. Australians are taught to believe that Olympic loss is a cause for national shame and victory is a cause for national ecstasy. No other emotional response is possible. A more mature nation would reject such simplistic nonsense.

It is sometimes claimed that Olympic sport brings the youth of the world together in amity for friendly competition with beneficial consequences for international relations. Nobody familiar with the events during the Hungary–Soviet Union water polo match in Melbourne in 1956 would believe that sentimental nonsense. Nowadays Olympic athletes are self-seeking professionals who are rewarded only for demonstrating their claimed national superiority by winning at any price. International goodwill does not come into it.

Perhaps the cost and inconvenience of Olympic sport might be justified if athletes were positive role models for young and impressionable Australians (and others). Unhappily, too many are not. Some have engaged in well-publicised violence (and usually have been flogged with a feather in the national interest); others have performed spectacular dummy-spits (sometimes claiming racial bias) when not chosen for teams; others have used alcohol and drugs to excess and with disturbing consequences. There is no evidence that Olympic athletes encourage other young people to aspire to participate in sports.

Not surprisingly the Olympic boosters don’t consider opportunity costs of Olympic competition. What are the forgone alternatives? What benefits could have been received? What would they cost? The massive funding of elite sport and elite sporting infrastructure means that less funding is available for infrastructure that could be used (for example) by those who want to keep fit but who are less than athletic supermen and superwomen. Money taken from Olympics budgets could be used to provide facilities to improve the increasingly threatened physical health of those who now tend to be couch potatoes.

Funding used to support Olympic competition might also be redirected to help growing numbers of morbidly obese people in Western societies. Better dietary advice and health programs could be funded to reduce the diseases like diabetes that are now becoming rampant, partly because so many people over-indulge in the products marketed by Olympic sponsors.

Rather than put so many dollars into the elite sport basket there could be more funding for other elite activities with far greater cultural impact and durability. Mass audiences in sports-mad countries are served an over-rich diet of elite sport but precious little in the way of elite music, literature and other arts performance. Australia would be better served if its young musicians, writers and actors (and scientists, philosophers and others) were given the exposure, encouragement and resources now devoted to elite athletes. Australians might even discover the richness of creative talent in this country.

None of this should unduly impoverish Olympic athletes. They have generous global corporate sponsors who pay them to run and jump and swim and promote their often ephemeral food and fashion products. They have TV channels anxious to broadcast athletics carnivals on their networks. What elite athletes (a tiny minority of those who engage in physical activities) should not benefit from is the public funding now poured into subsidising their lives. Their activities add nothing to national culture and, if anything, diminish the national reputation. Do we really want to be a nation of Jock (and Jill) straps? •

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The furore following the Federal Court’s decision in what has become known as the Optus case reached a climax this week when the Australian Football League president, Andrew Demetriou, called on football fans to boycott Optus services and the company responded with a threat of further legal action.

At the centre of the legal and public relations battle is TV Now, a service that allows Optus customers to record free-to-air television programs and watch them on their computers and certain mobile devices. Customers don’t record directly to their devices; they retrieve the recording from the Optus server when they’re ready to watch.

The action was brought by Optus, which claimed that the AFL and the National Rugby League had made unjustified threats against it by claiming that TV Now infringed their copyright and by foreshadowing steps to restrain Optus from providing the service.

The major beef of the AFL and the NRL relates to the “almost live” nature of recordings made for Apple iPhones and iPads. While recordings can’t be accessed on a personal computer or an android or other 3G device until the show being recorded has finished, a consumer using an Apple iOS device can begin viewing the broadcast after two minutes has elapsed. The AFL and NRL, both of which have sold the internet broadcast rights for their matches to Telstra, argued that this service infringed their copyright interests.

Justice Rares found that TV Now was simply a remote PVR (personal video recorder) service. It was the consumer, not Optus, who made the decision to record a particular program and it was the consumer who decided when and where he or she would view the program. Since the Copyright Amendment Act 2006, it has been legal for consumers to tape television programs and to reproduce such programs in different formats for their personal use.

The response to this decision by various interested parties and commentators has been almost universally shrill. Understandably the AFL and NRL have been keen to vigorously protect their commercial interests. They have been aided and abetted in this mission by a bevy of consultants and commentators who have claimed that the judgement destroys the commercial value of internet rights for bodies such as the AFL and NRL. It does no such thing.

In the case of the AFL, for example, Telstra has the internet broadcast rights for all games. In Melbourne each week, three of those games will be broadcast live on free-to-air television, one game will be broadcast in delay on free-to-air and all nine matches will be televised live on pay TV. The judgement applies only to television programs that all consumers have the right to view free of charge at the time of broadcast and, since 2006, to record and watch later.

TV Now is only available to consumers living in capital cities and consumers can only use it to view the free-to-air television available in their city market. In Melbourne on a Friday or Saturday night it is almost impossible to be more than twenty metres from a television showing (or capable of showing) the football. Meanwhile, less than a third of households have a Foxtel subscription and probably less than one-in-five hotels and fewer restaurants and bars have Foxtel. As a non–Foxtel subscriber, my only interest in Telstra’s online offerings is to be able to access matches that are not shown live (or near live) on free-to-air; the discussions on football chat sites suggest that I’m not the only one.

The prime minister has already been quoted as saying that the government has told the two sporting bodies “that we will urgently consider options here. I think we are all concerned what this can mean for our great sporting codes and it was an unexpected development.” It is a little difficult to decipher what she found unexpected; surely not the fact that Australian consumers are able to watch free-to-air television programs at a time and place of their choosing? Optus clearly wasn’t surprised – it brought the case to court.

Her concern for “our great sporting codes” is also a little difficult to understand. The AFL’s broadcast rights deal is $1.25 billion for 2012–16, with $153 million from Telstra for the internet rights. Telstra uses these rights in two main ways: to deliver content over the internet through their partnership with Foxtel and to deliver via a mobile app. Because the decision only applies to games that are delivered free-to-air, which everybody with a television can access, this decision has no real implication for the first of those services.

Access to Telstra’s mobile football service will be limited to Telstra mobile customers. TV Now is limited to Optus customers. The potential loss to Telstra through the Optus decision would appear to be limited to two sources: first, the potential loss of Optus customers who would otherwise have been attracted to a Telstra mobile service because they wanted to watch football matches that were also being televised free-to-air on a mobile device; secondly, current Telstra customers who decide that now they can watch matches broadcast free-to-air on an Optus mobile device they’re prepared to change carriers. Either way, this doesn’t seem like a major problem for Telstra.

As far as the AFL and NRL are concerned, if you sell your broadcast rights to free-to-air television to be shown live (or near live), then people are going to watch those shows for free, or at least at the expense of being exposed to advertising. For these games, there is not much value left to sell. For those games broadcast exclusively on subscription television, on the other hand, there is a very large market left to sell to internet broadcasters given that less than a third of Australian households have a subscription television service. One possible implication of the Optus decision could be that it may be commercially advantageous to sell more of the two codes’ games to subscription television.

It would be very bad policy to deny remote PVR services such as TV Now to Australian consumers to protect a relatively small revenue stream for our major sporting bodies. Broadcasting rights deals are understandably the centre of the AFL and NRL’s universe, but for the rest of us they are just one small part of an increasingly complex and interdependent media landscape. •

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THE twenty-sixth Southeast Asian Games kick off tomorrow night with what promises to be an impressive opening ceremony in the Indonesian city of Palembang, which is co-hosting the event with Jakarta. As the auspicious opening date (11/11/11) was chosen to imply, the games – involving Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia – are designed to tell an uplifting story of national progress and regional friendship. Indonesia also sees the event as a unique opportunity to reassert its traditional leadership of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – a hope reflected in the games’ slogan, bersatu & bangkit (united and rising) and in the opening ceremony’s evocation of the ancient maritime kingdom of Srivijaya, which was centred in the vicinity of modern-day Palembang.

But in the lead-up to the games – just like in the lead-up to the previous games, two years ago in Laos – these claims of past and future greatness were overwhelmed by tales of woe. As preparations entered their final month, the Hong Kong–based Asia Sentinel summed up the controversies that threatened to derail the event under the unambiguous title “Indonesia’s Games Mess.” “Instead of a source of national pride,” the website reported, “the games have become a national embarrassment riddled with corruption, delays and mismanagement that has nearly wrecked President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party and brought down a host of other officials and politicians.”

At the centre of the controversy has been the Democratic Party treasurer, Muhammad Nazaruddin, who is accused of accepting US$3 million in bribes on tenders for the construction of the athlete’s village in Palembang. Other senior officials, including the secretary of the Ministry of Sports, have also been suspended or arrested. The first prosecutions have already taken place, resulting in prison terms for two business figures. The corruption, alleged and proven, has provoked much anger and embarrassment; but what has made the whole affair so gripping, and so devastating for Indonesians and the games, has been the dramatic and public way in which it has played out.

Nazaruddin not only absconded the day before a travel ban was to come into effect, but during seventy-five days on the run proceeded to make accusations of his own, via Skype and Twitter, against the Corruption Eradication Commission and senior figures in his own party. Then, after being tracked down and arrested in Colombia, he was flown back to Indonesia, at considerable taxpayer expense, by private charter and, predictably perhaps, seemed to lose his memory and stopped talking all together. Having taken flak for giving Nazaruddin preferential treatment, the commission says his case will go to trial soon, and has flagged the possibility of charging another high-profile politician.

The result has been political soap opera of the highest order. The mainstream press, to say nothing of the online world, has loved it. If ordinary people had paid little attention to the SEA Games prior to Nazaruddin’s global jaunt, they certainly knew about them afterwards. Since then, the games have stayed in the news as the preliminary prosecutions in relation to the athlete’s village deal and the drama surrounding Nazaruddin have played out.

Added to this have been more routine problems concerning government funding and the completion of venues. Games funding promised by the central government failed to materialise until it was almost too late, leading to a last-minute dash to finish venues, roads and beautification work in Palembang. Ironically, given the problems associated with the village, the lack of accommodation in Palembang, particularly for athletes, has caused further embarrassment. According to reports, athletes were to bed down in many of Palembang’s hotels, leaving little space for visiting spectators. Last-minute plans to use cruise ships to plug the gap were ridiculed at home and elsewhere in the region.

What does all this mean? Certainly the lead-up to the games has been a mess, but there is also much more to the dramas than this. Just as in Laos two years ago, the controversies reflect the big political issues of the day. In Laos, latent misgivings about booming Chinese investment were brought to life in opposition to a secretive government land deal with Chinese developers building a new national stadium. In Indonesia, the dramas reflect the anxieties and controversies of the post-Suharto political landscape.

Within Indonesia itself, the country is often considered, for reasons of size and history, the “true leader of ASEAN.” These games – the first hosted by Indonesia since 1997, when Suharto was still in charge, and coinciding with Indonesia in the chair of ASEAN – were designed to put Indonesia back on the map as regional leader. With early plans to share the venues among many provinces, this was to be a truly national celebration of the country’s return to form – to use a sporting metaphor – after the calamities of the Asian financial crisis and the upheaval of the transition to democracy.

Instead, the games were restricted to just two cities, inevitably raising the question of why Palembang and Jakarta were chosen over other possible hosts, and the lead-up has been dogged by the athlete’s village imbroglio and delays. Far from rejoicing, Indonesians I have spoken to question the “ability” and “integrity” of the government to host the games successfully. More than simply embarrassed, they are proprietarily concerned that their government will “fail” – not only in the eyes of the region but also in the eyes of Indonesians themselves.

Like the Olympic Games, the SEA Games, particularly the opening and closing ceremonies, are above all an exercise in spectacle – and especially political spectacle. From their conspicuous place in the VIP grandstand, the host country’s national leaders watch over the grand ceremonies and the sporting events that follow. All going to plan – even if the reality is always more complicated – the splendour of spectacle and athleticism reflects back onto them, displaying and augmenting their symbolic power.

Given the scandal, the voracious mainstream media and the booming social media, the theatre of this year’s SEA Games has so far projected a very different political reality: the fragmentary political culture of the post-Suharto era.

Since 1998, as the country has pursued neoliberal economic policies, relations between “patrons” and “clients” – in other words, the key players in government and business – have fragmented and intensified. As ANU political scientist Ed Aspinall argues, one of the key ways in which these “two seemingly irreconcilable forces” come together is in “the proyek” (project), a self-contained, collaborative activity with designated outcomes and, officially at least, a competitive tendering process. As the proyek has become ubiquitous in political and economic life, mencari proyek (hunting projects) has become a chief means of seeking patronage. Corruption scandals have become rife, and the Corruption Eradication Commission has become one of the country’s highest-profile institutions. The SEA Games are one such project, albeit one that is particularly large, unwieldy and riddled with controversy.

The fragmentation of political life, a natural and expected consequence of the transition to democracy, has undermined the leadership and even the moral authority of national leaders. Asia Sentinel quotes a poll by the Indonesia Survey Circle which found that only 12 per cent of voters believe today’s politicians are doing better than those who ran the country under Suharto. For many Indonesians, the problem is one of strength. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, or SBY as he’s known, is regarded as “weak and indecisive” and accused of “thinking too much,” which in turn creates nostalgia for Suharto and his predecessor, Sukarno, the “strong” leaders of the past. According to this view, the former leaders would never have allowed corruption to proliferate in the first place, or at least not as publicly and embarrassingly. For a country seeking to reassert its leadership on the regional stage, this view of national leadership is clearly a problem.

Still, a couple of caveats are in order. First, perceptions in Indonesia and elsewhere in the region may differ significantly. Apart from the Asia Sentinel report, reproduced in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy, the games scandals do not appear to have been prominent in reporting in the Southeast Asian media outside Indonesia. The most important thing for competing countries is simply that the games take place so that their teams can compete and win medals, particularly against erstwhile rivals. The leadership issue appears principally to be a domestic one.

Second, it is too early to judge the success of these games. Football matches began last week in Jakarta, in front of disappointing crowds, but the games open officially only tomorrow night. Two years ago (as in the lead-up to various other Olympic, Commonwealth and Asian games) the Laos games had largely been written off before they began, yet the event came to be widely hailed as a success for the organisers, the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, and the country as a whole. Time will tell, but there may still be a similar turnaround in Indonesia.

Early impressions, based on my first twenty-four hours in Palembang, suggest a different mood from that evoked by the Jakarta-based press coverage. Not surprisingly, given the city’s central role in the event, it is clear that anger over the SEA Games scandals was felt especially acutely here. These emotions have been mixed with criticism of central authorities, particularly over the slow release of games funds. Yet this anger seems recently to have given way to resignation and even, in the final days before the games, a guarded optimism that the SEA Games might just work.

In Palembang, a successful SEA Games would be felt as a success for the city, just as the games’ failure would be construed as the city’s failure. There is little choice, residents admit, other than to do everything possible to ensure a trouble-free event. More fundamentally, however, the lift in the mood reflects the upside of the fragmentation of political life, and especially the impact of decentralisation policies, since the fall of Suharto.

Starting with its hosting of the 2004 National Games, known by their Indonesian acronym of PON (Pekan Olahraga Nasional), Palembang’s post-1998 development has been closely tied to major sports events. It is true that sport is often associated with development, particularly in the postcolonial world. The athlete’s body represents national strength and a modern sensibility, while sporting success is easily construed as representative of national progress. Yet the links between sport and development in Palembang are especially concrete – literally and metaphorically.

Much infrastructure was completed for the Palembang PON, including the Jakabaring Sports Complex (or Sports City as it is now known), new roads, and even an upgraded international airport. That infrastructure was matched by – and also symbolises – a vision of Palembang’s growing role in Indonesian political, cultural and economic life. For officials, the National Games attracted investment, drew tourists, and generally pushed Palembang and South Sumatra up the pecking order of Indonesia’s cities and regions. It is a source of considerable pride that Palembang, once “the most grubby city in Indonesia,” according to an official publication, has now won the country’s award for cleanest city four times.

These images of progress have been ratcheted up several notches in the official rhetoric surrounding Palembang’s role in hosting the SEA Games. Some venues, such as the Jakabaring Aquatic Stadium, are architecturally striking, and the governor, Alex Noerdin, talks about the Jakabaring precinct becoming “the largest sports city in the world.”

Pre-games controversies have obviously threatened to derail Palembang’s grand plans – if they were ever realistic to begin with – just as they have undermined the national narrative of “united and rising.” Some beautification work, such as in the grounds around venues, has not been completed in time for the games (or at least when I visited late this week). Ultimately, though, the key venues and infrastructure have been completed in the last few weeks, and even days, leading up to the opening. For the Palembang residents I’ve spoken to, at least, the concreteness of completed roads, buildings and venues has proved reassuring where the actions of individuals, especially politicians, have proved anything but.

Although it seems unlikely that SBY will turn the messy preparations for the SEA Games into a fillip for his leadership, the event may still prove a success for the people and officials of Palembang. •

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He was too smart for American boxing fans. They hated him for twice defeating their great hero Jack Dempsey, and for being a self-declared reader of books. Boxers read pulp fiction or boxing magazines, not literature. Public suspicions about Tunney were confirmed when a reporter visited his training camp in 1926 and discovered the champ with his nose in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. The great George Bernard Shaw, Tunney told the reporter, regarded it as a masterpiece. Later, Tunney was to become as close as a son to GBS. Meeting Tunney at the Shaws’, Max Beerbohm was to observe that Tunney was an aesthete.

In The Prizefighter and the Playwright, Tunney’s younger son Jay tells the story of an extraordinarily touching relationship that helped to save his parents’ marriage from tragedy, and reveals a side of Shaw that his biographer Michael Holroyd – who describes Tunney’s career as “a Shavian romance” – may not have fully appreciated. •

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Freakonomics and Fever Pitch are called on as examples – bestselling examples – of two recent popular writing genres that Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s book attempts to straddle. The first of these is best described as statistical myth-busting, whereby authors unleash an armoury of statistical tools on perplexing, if at times rather trivial, problems, proving that while people commonly think X, when you look at the data it actually shows Y.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics introduced a broad readership to the genre in 2005. That work was essentially a collection of essays in which the economist, now “celebrity economist,” Steven Levitt played the numbers, while New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner provided the praise. The results were both entertaining and illuminating – so much so that a movie of the same name is now in production. The book spawned a number of imitators who, like Kuper and Szymanski, have incorporated “onomics” into their titles. In 2007 Australia got its very own with Ozonomics: Inside the Myth of Australia’s Economic Superheroes, written by Andrew Charlton, who is now one of Kevin Rudd’s advisers.

The other tradition that Soccernomics draws on is the longer-standing rise and rise of writing exploring the culture of the world game. “New Soccer writing,” for want of a better term, is often traced to the publication of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch in 1992, although the influential fanzine When Saturday Comes predates it, as does Pete Davies’s All Played Out: The Full Story of Italia ’90, which Hornby describes as “the first football book I thought was any good.”

(Hornby’s reference to “football” raises an interesting issue. According to Kuper and Szymanski it is only recently that “soccer” fell into disrepute among British supporters as a nasty American usage. Until the 1970s, when the game took off in the States, soccer was the most popular term for the game in Britain. Armed with this new knowledge I don’t feel provincial calling football “soccer” and will do so throughout this review.)

This surge in writing was an important part of British soccer’s renaissance, its shift from a game associated with hooligans, cramped stadiums and general working-class “oikiness” to a more mainstream entertainment capable of being discussed in polite company. The writing was often nostalgic and suspicious of corporate involvement in the game, but perhaps most importantly it treated football culture seriously and was interested in exploring football’s role in wider cultures.

The authors certainly pay their respects to this genre (in which Simon Kuper himself is a key figure) and Soccernomics includes an excellent bibliography of examples of this writing, including Alex Bellos’s superb Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life. The first chapter of Bellos’s book is perhaps my favourite piece of sports writing, documenting the importation of a job-lot of Brazilians by clubs playing in the Faroe Islands league. Here we have what all economists love, a win–win situation: the Faroe Islanders wanted some Brazilian magic to adorn their competition; the Brazilian players wanted to be able to tell people back home that they played in Europe. The story of these men plying their trade in such an alien environment is engrossing. (I particularly enjoyed the story of Robson, the player who wasn’t good enough to make the team to which he’d been assigned but did manage to get a steady job at the local fish factory, meet and marry a local girl and raise a family.)

The application of Freakonomics-style data analysis to soccer seems an obvious move. Soccer inspires great passion and debate giving rise to many untested views and theories and there is a great deal of data available to test these theories. Soccernomics makes full use of this material and puts forward some terrific analysis. Very much like Freakonomics, the book is a series of essays exploring various topics and issues. The pieces are of varying length and, it must be said, varying quality, at least as far as the statistical analysis goes.

When it works it really works. The chapter exploring whether English soccer discriminates against black people presents work done by one of the co-authors (Szymanski). Having previously established that there is a strong relationship between total player payments and success (though not between transfer fees paid and success) he undertakes regression analysis to isolate the impact of player payments and the number of black players in a team. What he finds is that if you hold player payments constant then the teams with more black players outperformed those with fewer blacks, which implies that the black players are better value than their white counterparts – most likely because of systemic discrimination. Encouragingly, the research demonstrates that as more clubs hired black players the costs of not doing so increased to the point where hold-out clubs were all but forced to fall into line.

Perhaps an even starker example of discrimination in soccer and the corresponding potential for gaming by participants is the Celtic–Rangers rivalry in Scotland. The Rangers didn’t hire a single Catholic player between the end of the second world war and 1989. Yet in the words of Sean Fallon, assistant manager of Celtic from 1965 to 1980, “We could sign Catholics or Protestants, even Coloureds.” Legendary Celtic manager Jock Stein claimed to discriminate in favour of Protestants knowing that their arch-rivals would not take any Catholics left behind. The match results suggest that Celtic did well out of this arrangement.

While overall this book is a diverting romp – it has some great anecdotes and throws up interesting ideas and statistics – the tone of the analysis is at times a little self-important and too quick to yell “myth busted.” The authors are keen to talk up the virtues of the scientific method when it suits them but are sometimes eager to try passing off statistical relationships as causal ones. Too often we get one possible explanation for a phenomenon presented as the only explanation. Take this paragraph early in the book, for example:

Another harbinger of the impending Jamesian takeover of soccer is the Milan Lab. Early on, AC Milan’s in-house medical outfit found that just by studying a player’s jump, it could predict with 70 per cent accuracy whether he would get injured. It then collected millions of data on each of the team’s players on computers, and in the process stumbled upon the secret of eternal youth. (It’s still a secret: no other club has a Milan Lab, and the Lab won’t divulge its finding, which is why players at other clubs are generally finished by their early thirties.)

This is then supported by pointing out that most of Milan’s starting eleven in the 2007 Champion’s League Final were aged thirty-one or over. Now that might be exceptional: I don’t know, because no comparative data is presented. A quick internet search suggests that top Italian teams have higher average ages than the top Spanish and English ones and that Milan has the oldest of these. But one Champion’s League victory isn’t enough evidence to prove the Lab’s efficacy anyway. While later we get lectured on the role of chance in one-off victories, here a one-off is presented as irrefutable evidence of the Lab’s success.

As for the more general claims about Milan Lab, I’m frankly sceptical. Does its claim of a 70 per cent rate in predicting injury mean that the injury will happen in the next five minutes or over the course of a game, a season or a career? We don’t know. And just for good measure this is called the “secret of eternal youth,” a term not usually associated with scientific analysis. Milan Lab marketing is clearly not impressing fans, however, as the age of the squad is seen more as a concern rather than a cause for pride; clearly the club needs the help of the authors to disabuse their fans of outmoded ideas.

In the closing chapter the authors’ thesis that Guus Hiddink introduced Australian players to “European soccer” would have made sense to me if not for the fact that the entire squad had already plied their trade in Europe. Sure, he may have tinkered with match tactics but it’s hard to believe that in the short time he was with the players they learnt much they hadn’t learnt in a decade or more playing in European leagues.

In many places the statistical analysis in the book does cast a new light on an old problem, but sometimes it simply demonstrates that statisticians see the world in a different way from the general population. An example of the latter is contained in the chapter titled “The Economist’s Fear of the Penalty Kick,” which includes a quite bizarre analysis intended to demonstrate that penalty kicks make no difference to the overall pattern of results between home and away teams and between favourites and underdogs. Now there are many issues debated by soccer fans the world over, but in my experience the overall pattern of results and the awarding of penalty kicks is not one of them.

These quibbles aside, Soccernomics is interesting and entertaining. Read it and discover why Australia is destined to become a world soccer power and why hosting a World Cup won’t make you rich but will make you happy. Despite its anachronistic name, the Football Federation of Australia must be licking its lips. •

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AUSTRALIA’s athletes set off for the Olympic Games in Canada in July 1976 in what were, even for the 1970s, horrible uniforms, but with high hopes. We had done well in Munich four years earlier, winning eight gold and seventeen medals overall, placing us sixth on the medal tally.

“Optimistically,” wrote journalist Ron Carter, “our men and women could come home with 29 medals. Of course, if things go badly for us… only a handful will come Australia’s way.” The standard of international competition had risen, so Australians would “do well just to get to the finals in Montreal. But then, who wants to know a finalist? The only Olympians who get a pat on the back are those with a medal.”

This was not how things were supposed to be. “The important thing in the Olympic games is not to win, but to take part,” said the founder of the modern games, Pierre de Coubertin, adding: “The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well. To spread these precepts is to build up a stronger, a more valiant and above all a more scrupulous and more generous humanity.”

The International Olympic Committee pretends to embrace this ideal, posting medal tallies that are “for information only,” as it “does not recognise global ranking per country.” But Ron Carter was merely acknowledging the truth: for most competing nations, winning is everything. And in Montreal, we did not win. The team, almost 200-strong, brought back one silver medal. Even that felt like a loss because it was in the men’s hockey, in which gold and silver are decided in a play-off. There were four bronze medals: two in yachting, one in an equestrian event, and one in swimming.

It was in the pool, where Australia had long been a power, that the disappointment rankled the most. As the tournament unfolded, continual failure led to bitter recriminations. One headline captured the catfight: “Lean day for our ‘fat’ girls.” The sole swimming medal was won by Stephen Holland in the 1500 metres freestyle. Holland swam a personal-best time, but this admirable achievement produced the headline “Gold-less Games?” and this summary of the swimming competition: “One bronze medal and a lot of disappointment.”

Australia finished in thirty-second place on the medal table. First, with forty-nine gold, was the Soviet Union. Third, with thirty-four gold, was the United States. And sandwiched between the two superpowers, with forty gold, twenty-five silver and twenty-five bronze medals, was the GDR. “The what?,” anyone under the age of thirty-five is likely to ask. To explain, it is helpful to look at some old postage stamps.

My daughter recently took up stamp collecting. Helping her sort her collection was like stepping through a time warp. If you don’t think the world has changed much since 1976, try explaining to a seven-year-old what the Soviet Union was. There are all these huge, colourful stamps from communist countries that no longer exist: satellites and cosmonauts, smiling peasants with their new tractors, and lots of Olympic athletes. These were idealised, modernist forms of men and women, with layered slabs of muscle: they hurled discs and hammers and javelins; rode bicycles, rowed, sprinted, swam – they were physically perfect incarnations of a socialist paradise. The Cold War was symbolically fought out in the stadiums of the Olympic Games. Successful athletes were somehow thought to validate the political systems that trained them. And the communists were – there was no denying it – good at sport. The Soviet Union always topped the Olympic medal tally. And right up there with the giants was the oddity “GDR” – the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany.

Of all the nations of the communist bloc, East Germany struggled most for legitimacy. The poor cousin of an artificially divided people, its survival dependent on Soviet tanks, it had to build walls to keep its own people in. It is not hard to see why a shabby little police state with image issues strove for sporting success. Gold medals were an assertion of excellence and efficiency, a claim to genuine nationhood.

The East German system for identifying and training talent in elite sports, the “medal factory,” was astonishing in its effectiveness. From Munich in 1972 to Seoul in 1988, this nation of only seventeen million people won 384 medals. It finished second in the medal tally three times.

They were, of course, cheating a lot of the time. Between 8000 and 9000 East German athletes were given performance-enhancing drugs in the period between 1972 and the collapse of the regime in 1989. The main drug administered was the “blue bean,” Oral-Turinabol, an anabolic steroid containing testosterone. The drug greatly improved an athlete’s recovery time and boosted muscle build-up, but it also had horrific side effects: female infertility, male testicular cancer, breast cancer and heart disease. About one in ten East German athletes was left with a serious illness.

However, the revelations of systematic doping obscured a deeper truth. Some of the coaches involved in the doping said: “We felt legitimised by state policy… our prime task was to achieve international success, notably by winning medals.” The blue bean was just one aspect of this poisonous system. The medal factory took sport and twisted it into a sickly obsession: a grim state religion, to which health and youth were sacrificed.

THE 1976 Montreal Olympic Games were a disaster, not because our athletes performed poorly, but because of how our society responded to the poor performances. There was an unmistakable sense of national shame. The media agonised: “Where did we go wrong?” Montreal caused a “crisis for the government,” and debate raged over how Australia could “regain its lost athletic potency.”

The success of East Germany was particularly galling because its population was similar in size to that of Australia. One journalist declared: “We have hit rock bottom as a swimming nation … and it could take us sixteen years to get back up again with the East Germans.” This prediction was remarkably accurate. By the time the 1992 Barcelona Olympics took place, Australia was again emerging as a swimming power, while East Germany no longer existed.

Until the late 1970s, Australia had managed to combine a tradition of amateur sport with an obsessive desire to win. But Montreal forced a choice. Do we continue to treasure our liberal traditions, our laid-back and democratic temper? Or do we want to win? The answer was consciously to imitate the East German medal factory.

The awkward fact that East Germany was a communist dictatorship caused defensiveness. “If we are to learn from the East Germans,” declared the Sydney Morning Herald, “we need to look at their sports system rather than their political system.” There was a slight hitch in this argument. If poor Australian performances reflected badly on us as a nation, East German sporting success to some extent must have vindicated the culture and political system that produced it. Despite this contradiction and the initial coolness of Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, support for an elite sports training program along East German lines gradually grew.

The 1980 Olympics, held in Moscow, were another debacle for Australia. The government unsuccessfully “encouraged” a boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to a reduced team that was not allowed to carry the Australian flag at the opening ceremony. We performed better than at Montreal but even so, the row over participation was politically embarrassing. Something was needed to bring the sports establishment back on side. On 26 January 1981 – Australia Day – the once-sceptical Fraser officially opened the Australian Institute of Sport, or AIS, in Canberra.

In the decades since, the AIS has expanded massively, supported by successive federal governments. It now has a national network of sports institutes and academies. These centres provide training programs for thousands of athletes in twenty-five sports. The AIS is seen as a tremendous national success. Kevan Gosper, a senior International Olympic Committee official, described it as “a shrine of excellence… one of Australia’s more successful ventures in education and research. You have to have an icon for excellence in sport, and that is the AIS.”

There is a lot of talk of excellence surrounding elite sport. To excel means to be superior to another, to surpass them – to win. And it is presented as an unquestioned virtue. The AIS was soon dubbed the “gold medal factory.” Australia won four gold medals in Los Angeles in 1984; five in Seoul, 1988; seven in Barcelona, 1992; nine in Atlanta, 1996; and sixteen in Sydney, 2000. In its home Olympics, Australia rose to fourth on the medal tally, behind China, Russia and the United States. And in Athens, in 2004, Australia backed up: seventeen gold and again fourth on the medal table.

Australia had become the new East Germany, the great over-performer. We punched above our weight. However, the culture that produced this success had an unpleasant underside.

At an athletics meet at the AIS, a female athlete performed poorly in a heat. A little later, she began training on an outside track. “She’s a very professional athlete,” a coach told ABC Radio, which was covering the event. “She’ll be punishing herself for that performance.” This chilling aside was a small reflection of a wider malaise: a culture of endless striving, the obsessive pursuit of success.

Natalie Cook, who won gold in the beach volleyball in 2000, used Palmolive Gold soap and gold toothpaste, and drove a gold car. She had a gold toaster and a gold-rimmed fish tank, in which goldfish swam among gold trinkets. She sought power from crystals, went firewalking and employed a “success coach” who rejected any mention of failure: “That’s something average people say.”

In the final of the women’s rowing eights in Athens, a member of the Australian team, Sally Robbins, stopped rowing. She later said she had seized up. Other members of the crew accused her of “mental weakness,” and her captain publicly described her as “this niggle.” In Australia’s most successful Olympic Games, the vilification of Sally Robbins was ugly.

Behaviour that in any other field would be seen as a minor personality disorder is actively cultivated in elite sport in order to bring success. As one commentator said of the Robbins affair: “We teach people how to win, but not necessarily how to lose.”

The AIS does have policies in place to help its athletes become well-rounded individuals, but the theme of winning is so dominant that it is hard to take these seriously. “The race for excellence,” the institute’s website declares, “has no finish line.” It does have a bottom line, however, and it is a big number.

The Australian Sports Commission is the federal body that oversees sports funding. In 2007–08, $80 million was spent on “Outcome 1”: community participation in sport. “Outcome 2” is “excellence in sports performances by Australians,” of which the AIS programs are the most important part. It received more than $171 million. In spite of the rhetorical commitment to support sport as part of a healthy lifestyle in the wider community, it is elite sporting programs that consume more than two-thirds of the public money directed to the area.

If there is any self-consciousness among the elite sports about their voracious appetite for funding, it does not show. To the contrary, there is an aggressive culture of entitlement. In 2008 in Beijing, Australia won fourteen gold medals. This meant that we “fell behind” Great Britain on the medal table. The “threat” that in 2012, Australia “may not make its target of a top-five medal tally,” brought fresh demands. “We have to decide up-front whether as a nation we want to be successful,” said the chief executive of Rowing Australia. “If you want to be successful you can’t… spread the funding too thinly. We need a quantum leap forward.”

A presumption underlies the rhetoric. We “have to have” excellence; the elite sports “need” more money. But why?

AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY has been influenced by three main political traditions: conservatism, socialism and liberalism. None lends support to the large-scale use of public funds to nurture elite athletes. To liberals, anyone who wants to compete as an athlete is free to do so, but they will have to find the money themselves. Conservatives agree but honour the values that sport is seen to promote: this might justify a modest subsidy. Socialists are more hostile. Public money is there to meet social needs. One of these needs is community participation in sport, but not expensive elite sports training.

The only justification for programs like those run by the AIS is patriotism, the belief that superiority in sport equates with superiority as a nation.

Before the Montreal Games, one article about Australia’s medal prospects was headlined: “What price gold?” We now know the answer: more than its weight. A study published in 2000 calculated that the twenty-five gold medals won by Australian athletes from the opening of the AIS to 1996 represented about $37 million in public funding each. And, unlike in other factories, the unit cost does not decline with greater production: the fourteen gold medals won in Beijing in 2008 cost roughly $48 million each.

Australian sporting success brings pleasure to many people and generates enthusiasm and national pride. But is this really worth such a large amount of money? And is it ultimately more about shoring up a national ego that is more fragile than we want to admit?

IN 1948, the Olympic Games were held in London. It was a modest event by comparison with most other Olympics – the scars of second world war bombing were still visible, and Britain was still a place of ration cards and shortages. But nonetheless the games were a celebration of the return to normality after the desolation of war. The Australian team performed modestly, winning three gold medals and finishing fourteenth on the medal table, but it made an excellent impression. “We have had many very good teams in England over the years, but we’ve never had a more likeable set of athletes than the ‘Aussies’,” reported the Times. “Their enthusiasm, their willingness to ‘have a go’ at any event and their willingness to advise less finished athletes brought them many friends.”

In the same year, the Australian cricket team, the so-called “Invincibles” captained by Don Bradman, also toured England. The team went undefeated in twenty-three matches and won the Ashes. A few voices were raised, however, about the team’s determination, personified by Bradman, to crush every opponent – even weak county sides. John Arlott, the legendary cricket commentator, dubbed this streak “Australianism,” meaning a “single-minded determination to win – to win within the laws but, if necessary, to the last limit within them.”

Australia’s response to the disappointment of Montreal in 1976 was to forsake the amateur tradition of sportsmanship and take “Australianism” to new heights. The contrast between the attitude of the 1948 Australian Olympic team and this grim culture of “excellence” is a sad one. •

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I don’t mean to suggest that caring whether a football team wins or loses is juvenile. I certainly still do so, although the fortunes of my club don’t mean anything like as much as they used to, or as much as they obviously do to most of the Australian rules fans interviewed in Footy Passions. But a passion for a football club is not the same as a passion for wine, or birdwatching, or jazz. Objectively it is entirely irrational, meaningless and, if taken to extremes, thoroughly anti-social. What could be more divisive than expressing loyalty to a town or suburb, at the expense of denigrating its neighbours? What could be less engaging than the monomaniac with nothing in his (almost invariably his) life but his team’s players, history or injustices? What could be less attractive than the anger, aggression and misery of the fan who cannot deal with losing?

In this sense football passion is childlike. It is a failure to master emotions that adult logic tells us should not matter. The authors believe devotion to a football team “somewhat resembles the way young children attach significance to a special teddy-bear, toy or blanket.” They don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing, and nor do I. But it does suggest football fans, and those who write about them, should cultivate a strong sense of their own absurdity. Footy Passions rather too often does not.

In England, writing about football passions became respectable (sometimes almost obligatory, it seemed) in the 1990s. It began in earnest with Nick Hornby’s first book, Fever Pitch (1992), which traced his emotional development from adolescence through his devotion to Arsenal. It was funny, insightful, self-deprecating and quite unflattering about the author. Arriving in the same watershed year that the Premier League and pay TV began to revolutionise English football, it marked the decisive moment when the public concept of a football fan changed from “hooligan” to “intriguing obsessive.”

Unfortunately, it also inspired a genre of literature that, with few exceptions, was neither funny nor insightful. It inadvertently legitimised the obsessions of a generation of football bores and gave them a licence to put their unoriginal musings between covers. The litany of personal journeys, coming-of-age memoirs and nostalgia for the 1970s and 80s unleashed by Fever Pitch still shows no sign of abating. The Last Game, by the former Observer journalist Jason Cowley (now the editor of the New Statesman, and certainly not a bore), takes a single match as a jumping-off point to discuss the transformation of English football, and a good deal of family history that otherwise would have been hard to justify publishing. It’s engaging and well researched, but you have to wonder how much navel-gazing readers can tolerate before the cry of “too much information” finally goes up. All the more so since “the last game” is the final match of the 1988–89 season, in which Arsenal dramatically snatched the league title from Liverpool in the dying moments, an event central to Hornby’s book nearly twenty years ago. If silence and suppression of emotions characterised a previous generation of fans, we may now be in danger of overbalancing into Oprah-style disclosure – at least in print.

While Australia has very different football cultures from England, there are distinct echoes of the post-Hornby indulgence of obsession in Footy Passions. Based on interviews with about fifty fans of AFL clubs, most in Melbourne, it suffers from a slightly reverential tone and a tendency towards earnest over-analysis of the most banal observations. But there is enough here, mostly in the raw material of the interviewees’ quotes, to provoke hard questions about identity, gender roles and generational conflicts in the shifting landscape of Australian football.

For me, the study of diehard fans is essentially about men. I don’t mean that women’s stories are uninteresting, or that their fandom is any less valid – and Australian rules, for reasons that are sadly not discussed in Footy Passions, has been brilliantly successful at attracting women. But there is a way that men support their clubs that speaks more powerfully to their behaviour in other spheres.

Among the most interesting and poignant reflections in Footy Passions are those in which the subjects talk about their parents. Keith (most of the interviewees’ names are changed) relates how his father, Robert, would sink into dark and terrifying moods after Essendon defeats, which he attributes to a subconscious connection with Robert’s own father and a particular idea of masculinity:

“My father felt as though he could never be the man that my grandfather was... Losses would be felt very, very strongly and personally, possibly too close to home for him. There was a sort of attribution thing. If Essendon was strong, it had to do with his father. If they were weak, we wouldn’t want to think about it.”

Most interpretations of men’s psychological connections to their clubs are more optimistic than that. Perhaps most common is the idea that men who have trouble communicating effectively can do so through football – forming a bond with their children by taking them to the match, or sharing an intimacy about a club that they find it hard to express verbally.

Another interviewee, Richard, says of his trips to watch Geelong with his father: “With males in particular, where the talking is not easy... football provides that way to actually relate through a third thing, which is the game.” I don’t doubt Richard’s interpretation, but I wonder in how many similar cases of quiet men, talking through football is not so much finding a way to communicate, as finding a substitute for communication. Nick Hornby’s father also found going to the football one way of connecting with his son, after leaving the family. Hornby writes, tongue only partly in cheek, of men’s ability to communicate through their shared passion:

“I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they cannot relate to their children, and they die lonely and miserable.”

Women, it seems, have other priorities. In the most complicated family story told by a woman in the book, Cathie explains how she lost her ability to love any team. She stayed with her father (another “solitary man” who “didn’t talk”) after a family split, and had a bond with him through visiting the MCG to watch Essendon. Her own team was Hawthorn, but she could not bear to watch them because of their strong association with an older brother who left the family. Later she became a lukewarm fan of St Kilda, partly because they had no connection with any family member. In her case family ties, good and bad, overrode attachments to the club.

And is that not how it should be? Well, yes, but the loss of a football bond should not be trivialised. Cathie regrets “not really being able to love a football team... It’s not as if you’re partaking in the whole gamut of what it is to follow a team. You don’t expose yourself, so you don’t make yourself vulnerable. You’re sort of standing on the sidelines.”

Many other aspects of being a fan are touched on, though rarely explored in depth. As an outsider, I wanted to know much more about the identity of the Melbourne suburbs that spawned its teams. In the past thirty years the VFL/AFL has successfully transformed itself from a suburban competition to a national one, while admirably retaining many of its traditions. But as the Melbourne teams have come under pressure to desert their old grounds, to merge, to move interstate and to change their names, something must also have been lost. There is one howl of rage in the book about the decision to change Footscray’s name to the Western Bulldogs, but I would have liked more analysis of the loosening bond between the clubs and the areas whose names they bear. In our increasingly fluid and mobile society, what is there to tie young fans to Collingwood rather than Carlton, other than family or pot luck? Surely not actually living in the suburb.

My footy passion ended by mutual consent. When my club became wealthy and arrogant it didn’t need me, and increasingly I felt I didn’t need it much either. Living in Sydney, with its broad but shallow attachment to football of all four codes, does not encourage fanatical loyalty. But Footy Passions made me miss the irrational, childlike hold that a club can have on you. It can be pathetic, but it can also be one of the pillars of your life, as the church or an ethnic community is for others. Like Cathie, I’m sort of standing on the sidelines. •

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