Too Much Is Never Enough

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday January 21, 2006

JOHN HUXLEY

Australians have an almost insatiable appetite for sport, and live television has turned us into gluttons. But with so much on offer, we are also becoming more discerning in our tastes. Now only the best will do, writes JOHN HUXLEY.

For world champion freestyler Jodie Henry, the swimmer with the biggest smile in sport, this year's highlight will come at the Commonwealth Games, starting in Melbourne in less than two months' time. Big.

"That's the target, that's what all the hard work is building towards," she says from the team's altitude camp at Thredbo, where the Queenslander recently had her first glimpse of snow.

"What I am most excited about, if I get selected, [is] swimming in front of a big crowd willing us Aussies to win. I'm looking forward to the girls' team hopefully continuing our dominance of swimming. There's nothing better than standing on the dais with your own teammates."

For axed Test batsman Michael Clarke, described recently by the Herald's Peter Roebuck as "a millionaire before he was a man, a celebrity before he was a cricketer", the highlight should be the next Ashes campaign, beginning in November. Bigger.

"I'm looking forward to the challenge and I'm willing to give it all I've got," he pledges as he heads to the nets, to the NSW Blues and to grade cricket, to regain the prodigious form that made him one of the game's most exciting players.

And if all goes according to plan, and especially if he can avoid injury, for Liverpool and Socceroos forward Harry Kewell the highlight will be Australia's first appearance for more than 30 years in the World Cup football finals in Germany. Biggest.

The Socceroos play their opening match, against Japan, on June 12. Smithfield-born Kewell, who played in the English Premier League and has won a Champions League final, can hardly wait.

"It means everything for me to play in the World Cup," he explains.

"It's the biggest buzz you can get. I get jealous of teammates who have played at the World Cup. When it's on, I've usually been on holiday, but sitting by a swimming pool is no consolation. I've seen enough of it on television. Next [northern] summer I want the world to be watching me and Australia."

BIG NAMES, big events, big Australian sport. As H.G. Nelson and "Rampaging" Roy Slaven - the alter egos of multimedia commentators Greig Pickhaver and John Doyle - put it almost 20 years ago, Australia is a nation for which too much sport is never enough.

No sooner had the First Fleeters stepped ashore than they were chopping down trees, partying and playing games. Though not necessarily in that order.

Over more than two centuries of riding, racing and betting on pretty much everything that moves, and kicking, hitting or throwing everything that doesn't, Australians have become comfortable with the notion that sport is their glorious national obsession.

That, unlike almost anywhere else in the world, sport is the principal activity that defines, develops, even advertises Australia's nationhood, Australia's cultural identity.

As historian Richard Cashman, of the University of Technology, Sydney, explains in Sport in the National Imagination, it's a notion that still sits uneasily with those Australians alarmed to see aspirations of being a clever, culturally rich nation sacrificed on the altar of something as ephemeral, as expensive, as sporting success.

Like the arts co-ordinator at a leading Sydney school who complained, in a letter to the Herald, that "the whole ethos in this country is sport, sport, sport", with academic achievement fourth and artistic accomplishment a distant fifth.

Like the Australia Council, which with an eye on the competitive corporate sponsorship market, has been fond of pointing out that many more people use libraries, or visit museums and art galleries, than go to the footy.

And like the late Donald Horne, author, editor and, briefly, golf reporter, who complained in his much-misquoted book The Lucky Country that "sport to many Australians is life and the rest a shadow".

He believed that sport had expanded - and would continue to expand - virtually by default, to fill the gap in national affairs left by the failure of political leadership. "Increasingly, it seems to be the one thing that people can believe in," he wrote.

Seeing the alacrity with which politicians past and present have leapt upon sporting bandwagons to win popularity, there may be something in this theory that sport has become, to adapt Karl Marx, the new opiate of the masses. In the space of a few days last month, John Howard was featured phoning home from Korea to discuss the Socceroos' World Cup success, bowling to troops in Afghanistan and, controversially, hosting the Prime Minister's XI match against the West Indies the day Van Tuong Nguyen was executed in Singapore.

Like most of us, perhaps, he can't help himself. For there are other, less cynical, more compelling reasons to explain why sport is so big, and why it has become, in the words of social commentator Brian Stoddart, the nation's sacred cow.

For one thing, it seems an almost inevitable consequence of a good climate, bigger disposable incomes, increased leisure time (except for those who have succumbed to workaholism) and healthier lifestyles (except for those who have grown obese watching too much Test cricket from their couches).

For another, bigger and better sport is, well, just so bloody exciting.

"It's the greatest thing," celebrity PR man Max Markson once explained, screaming maniacally from a taxi as it sped from Tullamarine Airport to Melbourne, the self-styled epicentre of the sporting cosmos.

"Sport is ... like a burst of serotonin," says Markson, whose clients include Olympians such as diver Chantelle Newbery, shooter Suzy Balogh and swimmer Jess Schipper, whose success is the briefest and least bankable.

"It's a buzz. It's terrific. It's positive. It's harmless. It's the biggest feelgood there is. It's the next best thing to sex ... nah, forget that, it's better than sex."

Whatever the reasons, Australian sport seems unstoppable. Listen to the language: it is has been infiltrated by sporting idioms, such as "level playing fields", "hard yards", even the "distant fifth" of the disgruntled arts co-ordinator quoted earlier.

Consult the television guides, especially for weekends: "wall to wall sport", as David Rowe of Newcastle University describes it, and more and more choice, much of it in minority sports (from Gaelic football to topless darts), on the pay TV channels.

Check the lists of top Christmas books: not only is Steve Waugh's latest, Out of My Comfort Zone, outselling almost everything in sight, it weighs in at a massive 800-plus pages. Whatever happened to laconic, monosyllabic cricketers? Or ghost writers?

Read the newspapers: recent figures show the space devoted to sport has more than doubled in the past decade. Once, sports journalism was like working in "the toy department of life", as one American practitioner put it. Now it is the main event.

Once, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, anxious to defuse national politics, could joke that he wished to see sport on the front pages of newspapers. Now it is rarely off them - or those of finance sections - as sport colonises all corners of activity.

Today, sport is not just about who won, who lost, who has been dropped from the team for Saturday, who is nursing a groin injury.

It's about law (court cases brought by injured footballers); scandal (alleged rape, proven drink-driving, Shane Warne's latest text messages); international politics (touring Zimbabwe); technology (rule changes for formula one racing, at best a pseudo sport); and, of course, big business.

Just how big is best illustrated, perhaps, by the signing of seven-year-old football players, by the Russian takeover of English club "Chelski" and - closer to home - by the bitter $1.1 billion court case over Australian Football League television rights involving the Seven, Nine and Ten networks and pay-TV operator Foxtel.

Like it or not, globalised sport, its teams and its players have become a product to be bought and sold, promoted and repackaged, hyped and hijacked, increasingly, by the money men and women - the accountants, the agents and the marketing types.

It's a development that promises huge rewards, but also poses huge challenges for sports now battling to consolidate grassroots support, win sponsorship dollars, attract supporters and - the key to achieving long-term sustainability - secure free-to-air television coverage.

Significantly, sport accounted for the top six - seven if Lleyton Hewitt's Australian Open showdown with Marat Safin, which was screened outside the ratings period, is included - most-watched television programs by the five-state metro audiences last year.

That they outstripped other such carnal delights as Dancing with the Stars, Desperate Housewives and Big Brother suggests Markson may be right about sport being better than sex.

But, as several sports have discovered to their cost, that doesn't necessarily mean it sells in a television and sponsorship market described by Martin Hirons, director of research consultants Sweeney Sports, as "really tough and competitive".

And that was even before the Socceroos completed football's so-called trifecta of credibility by dramatically adding World Cup qualification to its new national league and its transfer into the more competitive, more lucrative Asian region.

SPEAKING only hours after John Aloisi converted his historic, matchwinning penalty - appropriately from a spot later dug up, framed and set for auction - Football Federation Australia chief executive John O'Neill could not resist poking fun at rival officials.

"Supposedly, the chairman of the leading code in this country ... said every time the Socceroos failed to qualify for the World Cup they opened up a good bottle of French champagne.

"Last night, they would have been trying to work out how to put a cork back in the bottle," said O'Neill, who was recruited from rugby union to rouse the "sleeping giant of Australian sport" from its shoestring slumbers. A realist, he might have been joking, but he had a point.

While the FFA reportedly receives only $1 million from Foxtel for A-League television rights - against the $48 million paid to the National Rugby League by free and pay TV, and the $100 million the AFL might expect - it is now tapping into the true world game. This year's World Cup finals are likely to be watched by a total worldwide television audience of about 40 billion, three times that for the 2000 Sydney Olympics and 10 times that for the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

However, recent talk of a radical reshaping of the national sporting psyche and landscape is ill-founded, Hirons suggests. For one thing, as Sweeney's latest report confirms, Australians' interest, both as participants and spectators, in sport - especially non-major sports - continues to grow. So, too, do the potential media outlets, such as mobile phones and other hand-held devices, to cater for that interest.

For another, there are no signs yet that soccer, as the unconverted still insist on calling it, is displacing other football codes in the hearts of sports fans. "More like it is an additional interest, another string to their bows," Hirons says.

Similarly, while competition for the sporting "sponsorship dollar" is keenly contested, the early indications are that the Socceroos will tap into additional funds for global clients such as Qantas, Nike, National Australia Bank and Westfield.

Cashman agrees, arguing that "flagship" sports, such as cricket, and prestige events, such as the Olympics and the Melbourne Cup, will continue to prosper because they are perceived by the general public and funding governments as being of national significance.

"Soccer," he says, "is a biggie in terms of its huge participation base, but has not rated in terms of significance. That might change. I'll be interested to see how many people will be watching the rugby league in mid-season when the World Cup finals are on."

Then again, the finals occur only once every four years. As Ray Baartz, who suffered a career-ending injury shortly before the Socceroos' last appearance in the finals, in 1974, recalled recently: "We all thought football would take off then - but, well, nothing happened."

No official can afford to be complacent, though. Whatever the future of football, television has turned sport into a cutthroat business, at the same time democratising it and demeaning it. That is, making it widely available, but reducing it to a commodity, to be stuffed into schedules.

"Some sports will flourish, others will struggle, as they always have," predicts Cashman, casting a backward glance over "boom and bust" sports such as indoor cricket, for which there was a fad in the 1970s and, more significantly, rowing.

A century or so ago it attracted huge crowds. Sculler Ned Trickett became Australia's first international star when he won the world championship on the River Thames in 1876. The funeral in 1889 of Henry Searle, another national hero, attracted 170,000.

By the 1930s it had been supplanted in people's hearts by the football codes. Banjo Paterson reflected on a time when rowers could be told "by their style at three-quarters of a mile distance ... stalking with their trainers through the little town of Gladesville".

More recently, although less dramatically, rugby union has made considerable gains against a divided rugby league since being restructured and de-shamateurised in the 1990s. Over the same period, basketball, golf and athletics have gone backwards.

After a boom so strong that rival sports complained about the "Americanisation" of Australian sport (in 1995, sales of American team merchandise was worth $100 million, recalls former Kings coach Bob Turner), basketball's attendances have slumped, its live coverage relegated to pay TV.

As last November's bitter row over the responsibilities of golf hero Greg Norman served to highlight, the Australasian PGA Tour has lost several tournaments and struggled to attract top players, who prefer to play elsewhere or take a rest over the northern winter. Worse, in the word chosen by Seven's Ian Johnson, golf has become "boring". In the turn on/switch off world of television, there can be no more damning criticism.

Less commercialised, less lucrative, Australian track and field has struggled since the false dawn of the Sydney Olympics, though it has entered a new season with a revamped program and, importantly, a four-year television deal with new boom broadcaster SBS.

In each sport, individual factors were at play. In the case of basketball, Turner, who is working on hospitality marketing at the Commonwealth Games, concedes administrators "took their eyes off the ball and lost touch with their fan base".

In the case of golf, the age-old "tyranny of distance", which makes it difficult for any Australian sport to attract and hold top athletes, or to stage top events, was a powerful factor.

But each supports the theory of Hirons, Cashman and others that to "succeed" - to achieve the critical mass generated by television coverage - a sport needs grassroots support, a compelling domestic competition, an international focus and heroes, winners.

BIG BASE, big events, big names. Little wonder that Australian tennis, starved of stars, welcomes back the prodigal Jelena Dokic; that Australian rugby, starved of success, rushes to replace losing-most coach Eddie Jones; that Australian rugby league, starved of international profile, dreams up exotic overseas excursions.

The danger, of course, is that in rushing to apply the magic formula, big sport ends up eating itself; that local, grade competitions are downgraded in the push to promote the elite; that top performers are burned out; that meaningless encounters are over-sold.

As one English writer complained 20 years ago, the so-called "magic of television" is too often a tacky triumph of style over substance. "You hype the sound up a bit, point the cameras where the crowd is thickest, cut out all the boring rubbish and you've got a Big Match."

Fortunately, the Australian sports-loving public is no longer easily fooled. Such was the disenchantment with the lopsided second Test match against the West Indies, and the failure of Brian Lara to find form, viewers simply switched off. Programs such as M*A*S*H, Murder She Wrote, Ready Steady Cook and Good Morning Australia rated better.

A sign that Australians are falling out of love with sport? No, rather confirmation that, increasingly spoiled for choice, they no longer have to put up with second best. Just like Jodie Henry, Michael Clarke and Harry Kewell.

The Commonwealth Games are on in Melbourne from March 15 to March 26 and will be televised on Channel 9.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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