Well once again NRL news fans, it’s Friday and the Fuckwits abound. After another week of controversy, disaster and anticipation, your Old Mate from NRL Live has tallied up the votes to reveal the winner of this weeks Friday Fuckwit.
And as happens in those weeks where footy and sport barely leave the front pages, the nominations of fuckwittery are both plenty and not even confined to our beloved NRL.
But before we get into the nominations proper, your Old Mate feels the need to send out a little message to Mother Nature: Enough Already. For while you are no fuckwit, you’ve gone way too far this year. It’s Ok to show off and let your hair down, give humanity a kick in the nuts for polluting oceans, chopping down rainforests and the like, but surely we’ve had our fill. To all Old Mate’s friends, and indeed everybody, in Christchurch, keep your chins up and the collective thoughts of many are with you.
There were so many possible nominations this week that it was very difficult to choose a prestigious winner. The Manly Sea Eagles were stung in an NRL inspired facebook honey trap. The Knights drama remains open ended. But surprisingly the strongest nominations didn’t come from rugby league. Ricky Nixon, Brendan Fevola and St Kilda have been everywhere in the past week and pressed hard for earning the golden ‘up yours’. Righteo Old Mate, I hear you shout, keep on topic you old bastard. This is an NRL blog, not a bloody aerial ping pong one.
True, my friends, very true. But Old Mate, while slapping away on the pokies at Melbourne’s Crown Casino has come to ask himself whether or not what’s going on now down in Mexico (South of Sydney) is any different to the numerous scandals that have erupted in the NRL over the past few years?
The fact is it isn’t.
And that’s why this weeks Friday Fuckwit goes to the whole Australian sporting culture. Yep, sport as a unit (even though in a perverse way it’s entertaining to see how stupid some people can be). Because for all the goodwill and good work sport does (the coaching clinics, the mateship, the fundraising, the emotional connections to fans), the propensity for professional arrogance is always there. In some sports (read high paying, high profile ones) it seems to be endemic. And unfortunately it’s the turds in the sporting community punchbowl that attract the attention. Players come out of school and straight into often well paid careers where male bonding is a mutant form of the managerial term used by CEO’s the world over. The behaviour gets handed down from larrakin to scallywag to superstar
Your Old Mate has gone on before in previous NRL news rants about familiarity breeding contempt. About how if you see something often enough you become desensitized to it. It becomes run of the mill, par for the course, normal.
In 2011, and indeed the last few years also, the outlandish behaviour of our sporting stars has been increasingly in the public sphere. This is very important to recognise because like the regimes being overthrown in the Middle East as I write, the harnessing of social media and technology is proving pivotal. Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones are changing the sporting and social landscape very quickly. And like a healthy dose of crabs from unprotected sex, stars are being exposed and left behind.
When will our sporting clubs understand what they are dealing with? In a culture where scholastic achievements and education are only now filtering into the columns ticked “important”, the lack of knowledge and awareness of wider social norms and not sport centric ones are proving to be career killers. And continually clubs, players, managers and now agents are all being caught short. For proof of the power of social media ask Ricky Nixon if he ever thought he would be outplayed by a 17 year old schoolgirl?
In years gone by, her escapades would have been easily swept under the carpet and denied. Sex scandals too numerous and crass to mention have regularly been wiped in this way by NRL clubs as little as a few years ago. In some cases hush money has been paid. But phones, twitter and facebook now provide the scorned with an instant, worldwide outlet. Players can no longer treat others in an unfit manner whether arguing in a nightclub, in a sexual situation, in a drunken state or making an outburst online.
So where to from here? The NRL has taken the initiative about 5 years too late with it’s social media training but it is better than nothing and may just serve to keep a few players out of the NRL newsheadlines and away from the glory of the Friday Fuckwit award.
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