A Good Man
For fifty-two years, I never liked Australian Rules Football, AFL. Never watched it on TV. Never watched it at the ground. Even with a free ticket to a match at the Sydney Cricket Ground, I didn’t bother to watch the game.
I was more interested in enjoying the catering that came with my seat in a corporate box.
Two more beers, please, Adrian.
AFL was a Victorian game and of no interest to the likes of me, a kid from Campbelltown in the southwestern suburbs of Sydney. I was raised on Rugby League. Had my team, the mighty Western Suburbs Magpies.
Joe Dorahy, you legend.
I collected footy cards. Had posters on my walls. Loved playing it. Loved watching it. Loved talking about it.
It was my game until…
There was no rugby league in Japan. The closest I could get to my game was rugby union, so I switched football codes.
Weekends were spent following the local rugby competitions that came with my cable TV subscription on J-Sports One.
Come March, spring time in Tokyo, there was no better time to go to the rugby. Warm weather. Cold beer. A good day out with friends to watch some of the best rugby players in the world up close, lured by healthy paydays to play in Japan.
By the end of May, though, it was over. The approaching wet season and spikes in humidity said it was time lads to pack the rugby balls and mouthguards away for the next six months.
Summer was going to be long and hot. Climate change and a change in sports would see to that. Everything from now on was to be baseball. It’s an obsession in Japan and dominates the sporting agenda until the end of October.
But not for me. I just can’t get into Japanese baseball. I’ve tried. Been to the games. It just doesn’t hold my attention.
A friend, a displaced Illawarra Steelers tragic, suggested I check out an American betting website. It was free to join and broadcast Australian rugby league games live.
Cool.
It could have been a difference in spelling between British and American English… centre versus center… that sort of thing. Because, when I searched for NRL games, the only Australian sport playing on that particular Saturday afternoon was AFL.
Deflated, I clicked on a link to watch two teams I knew nothing about playing a game that was as foreign to me as milking a cow. I kind of knew what’s going on, but don’t ask me to explain it.
I figured I’d give the game ten minutes then dump it for a documentary on killer whales about to start on the National Geographic channel.
Ten minutes? I don’t know what happened to me, but I was locked in until the final siren.
A day later, I had my reservations. Maybe the game wasn’t as good as I thought. I probably overcompensated on the enjoyment, because I wasn’t expecting to like it.
I needed another look. A second opinion. I found Watch AFL.com, a streaming service for the AFL.
The first question asked before filling in my details was what team I followed. Did it matter? I was only paying for a week’s subscription.
What the hell… I was from Sydney… The Sydney Swans.
A smart choice. A very good choice, indeed. The Swans were having a stellar year.
Supporting a winning team was addictive. I changed my subscription to renew monthly. I learned the finer points of the game. The names of the players in my team. Started calling them by their nicknames. Teddy. Hanners. Goodsie.
It was 2012. They won the premiership and me as a Swans Global Member.
It was also the year I discovered the person behind the name Adam Goodes. At thirty-two, in his thirteenth year with the Swans, he had done it all on and off the field.
Australian of the Year in 2007. An honour bestowed upon only 65 people since its inception in 1960. A dual Brownlow Medalist, something only seventeen players have achieved in their playing careers.
He was about to become a dual premiership winning player in 2005 and 2012.
An articulate, proud, and determined indigenous Australian, he was regarded as one of the best to have ever played the game by his peers and those connected to the game.
On the other side of the fence in the cheap seats, however, they saw him differently. Adam was a black man with a big mouth.
He needed to keep his ideas about race in Australia to himself, as was expected of the indigenous players who went before him.
Not Adam Goodes. He spoke up. Called out racist taunts. Exposed an ugly side of the game.
It came to a head in 2013 during a round of footy dedicated to celebrate indigenous players and their communities.
Adam chased a player to the boundary, glancing the fence as he slowed down. A young girl in the front row called him an ape.
It was the indigenous round for God’s sake!
Adam, rightly so, pointed her out to security and had her removed from the ground.
There was more to it than a kid saying a dumb thing. It was the fact that her section of the footy-going community had educated her in way that it was okay to racial vilify a player, a champion of the game, at that, to his face.
It showed a total lack of respect for a player, a fellow Australian, another human, under the guise of supporting a footy team.
Blinded by ignorance, the meathead contingents just saw a star player picking on a young girl. They let him know about it, too. Whenever Adam came near the ball in a game, he was booed.
This wasn’t just the theatre of going to the footy, booing to put a star player off his game. It had racist undertones.
Then things got worse.
Making good on a commitment to a group of teenage indigenous players completely blew things out of proportion.
Adam promised that if he scored a goal in the next game, he would do a war dance they had taught him to celebrate.
He scored. Performed the war cry. Appropriate, you would think, for another indigenous round of football.
Most AFL players celebrate scoring a goal with some kind of gesture. Some have even taken an imaginary arrow from a quiver on their back and fired it into the crowd.
It looked like Adam was throwing a spear at a section of the opposing team’s fans. It needed explaining, which he did during a postgame interview for everyone at the ground and watching on TV to hear.
End of story.
Not quite. It was raised, as expected, and discussed in the media. Many commentators hinted that the war dance was something more sinister.
They refused to take a two-time Brownlow Medal winner and Australian of the Year at his word. Apparently, the colour of Adam’s skin robbed him of integrity and credibility.
Taking a stand against racism as an indigenous sportsperson made the final stanza of Adam’s playing career untenable.
The relentless booing by an ignorant football public hounded him out of the game he loved.
It was disgraceful and turned me, a newly recruited convert, off watching my team play away games in front of hostile crowds.
I was on the verge of cancelling my membership which included the AFL’s streaming service.
I wanted nothing to do with a game that was coopted by the knuckle-dragging neanderthals, male and female, who would cowardly attack a champion because he didn’t apologise for being himself, a proud indigenous Australian.
I had never seen anything like this in rugby league or rugby competitions. If AFL was supposed to be Australia’s game, it wasn’t including all Australians.
Only an outpouring from past and present players and good people in support of Adam kept me in.
#IstandwithAdam
Indigenous players throughout the competition performed Aboriginal dances to celebrate goals.
Hate one of us is to the hate all of us.
The game’s champions displayed the Number 37, Adam’s number.
The crowds at the Sydney Cricket Ground, the Swans’ home ground, stood at the seventh minute of the third quarter and applauded.
It was a shot back at a racist mentality, a collective of boneheads who called themselves football fans.
Just recently, the premiership winning team of 2005 gathered at the Sydney Cricket Ground to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of their win.
The loveliest moment of the day was to see Adam Goodes taking a lap of honour with the team. Since retiring in 2015 after seventeen years in the game, he had declined offers from the AFL administration to be recognised for his contribution to the game.
He even passed on being inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame.
This time at the footy, all you heard were cheers for a champion, for a good man.