Petero Civoniceva was once known as ''Petrol Seventy-cents-a-litre'', while a certain well-known NRL prop who retired 15 years ago was unkindly referred to as ''King Prawn'' - all meat from the neck down and shit for brains. Can off-field misdemeanours ever be redeemed on the field?Īfter TFF's item last week decrying the paucity of current sporting nicknames when Phil Waugh is reduced to being known as Waughy, I have been besieged by examples of teams that have done much better. Tiger, Nick D'Arcy and Melbourne Storm come to mind. This year we will be asked to consider many possible redemptions. The SMH today again raises the issue of Tiger Woods and 'redemption' in the same headline. A clearly injured Elsom gets the captaincy of the Waratahs and (through no fault of his own) has played pretty close to zero minutes of rugby this season, watching the rudderless Waratahs flip and flop their way around the paddock to two wins from five." They don't call Trent ''Meany'' for nothing, but it's a fair point. At that stage, Mowen had played 42 consecutive matches for the Tahs, while Elsom had played one consecutive game for the Brumbies.Īnd what's happened since? "Mowen gets the captaincy of the Brumbies, has played pretty close to 400 minutes of rugby, leading a young outfit of relative unknowns to the top of the Australian conference.
Fitzphile Trent Meany makes a point about the decision to let Ben Mowen go at the end of last year to sign up Elsom. It is about the wisdom of the Waratahs signing him for this season. Yes, we all like Rocky Elsom, but this is not about him personally per se.
They are good men, with interesting backgrounds, and their triumphs would be much more inspiring than surly Tiger coming good after being bad for so long. Come on, Jason Day and Rory McIlroy from Northern Ireland. Sports adulation is, most of all, about the narrative of sporting theatre, and I, for one, don't want the Woods narrative to be: "He had it all, behaved like a dickhead in every area of his life, and, still behaving like a dickhead, clawed his way back to have it all again." It is a much better narrative, for me, that "he had it all, behaved like a dickhead across the board, and lost it all, to much better men, who had much better stories to tell." Come on, Adam Scott. It was like, say, a famous Tour de France winner, constantly speaking out against drugs, while actually taking them himself, on an industrial scale, on the sly. But in the case of Woods, it wasn't just adultery, it was adultery on an industrial scale, while selling to the world that he was Mr Wholesome. I agree, if you knocked out sports stars who have committed adultery from your list of ones to follow, you'd likely lose half of them. And who, dinkum, could like or admire Woods? What care I that a humourless automaton can hit a golf ball brilliantly? That fact remains, that at his height, Woods was a preening, pompous, arrogant dickhead, who appeared to view the unwashed masses of golf supporters as a necessary evil he occasionally had to brush up against, on his way to glory. Many moons ago, Kick Too Farr Jones noted to me what I think is a great insight: that sports followers don't follow teams, they follow people they don't follow golfers etc, they follow individuals they like and admire. And within reason, we love these champions no matter how they conduct themselves away from the sporting arena." Nuh. In short, we just love seeing the biggest names in any sport crush the opposition and underline just what makes them so great.
His theme was that while most Australians want to go for Australians or the underdogs, "the exception to this two-pronged rule applies to true champions. THERE was an interesting column written by journalist Anthony Sharwood this week, noting that he couldn't give a stuff how many cocktail waitresses have participated in swinging practice with Tiger Woods as he, and most sports fans he knows, just want him to win this year's US Masters.
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