When Sport Crosses The Boundaries

The Age

Wednesday December 31, 2008

JAKE NIALL - Jake Niall is a senior sportswriter

Fascination with the Ben Cousins saga dominated sports news in 2008.

THE biggest sporting stories aren't really about sport. They're about the choices athletes make: to sleep with a teammate's wife, to take drugs, to bet on a game, to conscientiously object to military service, to boycott an Olympics, to stand on the dais, or in front of a hostile crowd, and make a defiant gesture.

They're about the choices sporting organisations make: to spurn the champion who sleeps with his teammate's wife, to strip the boxer of his titles when he refuses to enter the draft, to ban the athletes who make a stand against racism, or to stand by them.

The measure of the public's interest in a sporting drama is whether it finds an audience that wouldn't otherwise be interested in that particular sport. The biggest story, like a popular book, film or politician, finds crossover appeal.

For a sports journalist, it's easy to gauge the stories that captivate the public: They're the ones you're forever quizzed about, ad nauseam, especially by those with zero interest in sport.

In 2008, one story dominated public discourse in the AFL-centric parts of this country. This story was robust enough to successfully defend its title, having been the heavyweight sporting topic of 2007, too.

Ben Cousins received more attention, was subject to more inquiry, investigation, talkback hot air and innuendo than any other Australian sportsman. "What's going on with Ben Cousins?" was the barbecue-stopper that became, yes, a public and media addiction.

On the fourth estate's Richter scale, Cousins has eclipsed even what is quite accurately described as "the Wayne Carey affair".

Actually, the Carey affair registered a more violent single eruption at the moment, on the eve of the 2002 season, when we learned, simultaneously, that Carey had been carrying on with Anthony Stevens' wife and that he would, consequently, leave the club he'd led to two premierships.

But the Carey story was self-contained, inside a footy club and a few shattered families, and there were fewer aftershocks. It was more lurid and thus invited distasteful jokes, but it didn't metastasise across the AFL, its administrators and clubs in the manner of Cousins.

The Carey story was about mateship, and the betrayal of it. But shocking as it was, the act of sleeping with a mate's missus borders on cliche. As one sage club official observed at the time, "it's been going on since Moses played in the back pocket for Mount Sinai".

The Cousins drama, its impact sustained over a longer time, is a saga tantamount to the Star Wars series: at different stages he's been portrayed both as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, wearing both public opprobrium and sympathy. Few stories, indeed, demonstrate the public's propensity for mood swings, its irrational flakiness.

For the journalist, the big-picture question is why did this story of a drug-afflicted footballer become so compelling to so many? What is it about Ben that forced him to live on the front pages?

Obviously, drugs are the starting point. While he isn't the first footballer to have a drug problem, or even the first to be publicly identified as such, he's perhaps the first active iconic footballer we've watched in Truman Show-style, while he self-destructs due to a drug habit (alcohol, obviously, not included).

Other significant co-factors: Cousins has good looks to complement his talent and a Rolodex brimming with Underbelly characters. His propensity for not wearing a shirt, showing off that "Such is Life" tattoo on his washboard stomach (itself an unfortunate advertisement for drugs), gave him the outlaw's mystique and furthered his rock star sex appeal.

That mystique was enhanced by the fact that Cousins wasn't terribly forthcoming, at least in public forums, about his ordeal. His mea culpas were cursory, his agonies private. He did not provide the nitty-gritty that the media and public craved.

Paradoxically, Cousins also drew attention to himself and, at some level (perhaps subconscious), he appeared to enjoy the infamy. For much of 2008 he was derided by the punters as "a bad role model" for youth - giving the risk-averse clubs another reason to reject him.

But when it reached the point that no one was going to pick him, he became an underdog - a man suffering from an illness - and the recipient of a hitherto latent "fair go" ethos.

This unstoppable wave of public sympathy was, finally, instrumental in Richmond's U-turn.

Predictably, the story has followed the usual pattern of supply and demand wherein insatiable media chase the stuff they've been denied. Lacking the salacious details about Cousins, newspapers, television and radio outlets have been in frenzied pursuit of every news morsel about him.

One question to ponder is whether we, the media, have created public interest in Cousins via obsessive coverage, or whether we're just reflecting the general curiosity. My guess is that it's a combination of media chicken and public egg.

Maybe, the appeal of an individual's story ultimately rests on its familiarity, not its novelty, in the sense that the best stories are redolent of the Bible or Greek mythology.

Carey was about mateship, sex and betrayal. Cousins, perhaps, has outdone Carey because the plotline is older than Adam, that of the fallen angel.

© 2008 The Age

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