In recent times, a number of high profile Australian rules footballers, including Mitch Clark, Lance Franklin, Travis Cloke, Alex Fasolo and Tom Boyd, have absented themselves from the game to deal with mental health problems. Each time, the reaction is the same – “Look after yourself son”, “Thanks for starting the conversation.” But each time, there’s an underlying cynicism, a certain snark that reveals itself on footy forums, in safe company and in monumental gaffes.
Every time one these stories comes to light, I ponder those heroes of my childhood, men who played with a certain joy that is conspicuously missing these days. They were the last of the part-timers – granite jawed stars who were indestructible in my eyes and probably theirs as well. Did they simply bury their demons? If so, at what cost?
What has changed, exactly? Is an AFL club the worst possible environment for someone prone to depression and anxiety? And what role does the football industry – the clubs, the media, the keyboard warriors and the fans – play in all this?
Newcomers to a city like Melbourne are often taken aback by the surfeit of football, the gallimaufry of the press and all-encompassing role that footy plays. It’s in half-caught conversations, it’s draped over coffins, it’s on bumper stickers and it’s in birth notices. It’s in a taxi late on a Sunday evening, where some half soused Tigers fan is laying into his team on talkback radio. It’s on the ubiquitous panel shows, where the panelists sit there like morticians. Many don’t seem to actually like the game. Each opinion must be more strident than the last. They go hardest at the coaches. But high draft picks or anyone on a stack of money are also in the firing line. Poor performances are invariably blamed on a lack of effort. If a team or an individual is having a bad patch, the conclusion is always that that they’re not trying hard enough.
In the newspapers, there is still quality sportswriting, columnists who realise they’re writing about human beings, that there’s more to football than stats and contracts and gossip. On the flipside, the language is increasingly hostile. A few years ago, Peter FitzSimons wrote this: “If you called Central Casting and said, ‘Send me over a prime dickhead’, and Buddy Franklin turned up the way he was on the Sunday after the grand final – a tower of swaggering sneer and staggering hubris – you would hardly be inclined to ask for your money back?” Meanwhile, when James Hird booked into a mental health facility earlier this year, Patrick Smith, a columnist at The Australian, wrote: “Hird, sadly, drove himself to the intensive care unit, calling the directions all the way.”
The players are therefore plying their trade in an environment that the stars of yore could never have envisaged. They’re the generation that has grown up with the internet, with smartphones and with social media. At the draft combine, they undertake psychometric testing that provides insight into their personality traits, emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills. Players who are disciplined, team orientated and malleable go straight to the top of the list.
In many ways, of course, they’re incredibly privileged. Though gritted teeth, they probably tell themselves the same thing. They are well compensated. They get constant reassurance, lots of little victories and the crutch of the week-to-week challenge. Elsewhere, young Australians are dealing with their own anxieties and indignities. Many are doing unpaid internships, university courses that go nowhere and mind-numbing jobs. When a millionaire footballer takes time off to deal with depression, the “let’s trade lives for a week pal” response is often the default one.
But modern football, with its petty punishments and its Big Brother scrutiny, throws up unique challenges. The clubs, many of which are propped up by pokies money, hold their players to impossibly high standards. If they shirk a contest, drink on a six-day break, drive a few kilometres over the speed limit or park in the CEO’s car space, they are sanctioned and re-educated. When they bite back at abusive fans, they’re forced to issue tortuous public apologies. This spring, about 10% of them will be tapped on the shoulder and told their services are no longer required. Last year, the sport’s games record holder learnt of his sacking via a press release.
Underpinning everything is the sense that it’s not much fun anymore. A few years ago, Carlton’s Kade Simpson said that going to training felt like going to prison. Meanwhile, over summer, Melbourne’s players had a two-day commando camp, complete with a 20km march and a sleep deprivation exercise. They had bricks in their backpacks. They took turns to stand guard, where they were forbidden to talk and sit down. They completed puzzles under extreme fatigue. I’d always have given my right leg to be an AFL footballer. Now it sounds like a stint in the Marines.
The language in clubland is also telling. Carlton coach Brendan Bolton calls his young players “key stakeholders”. At the ALFPA induction camp, they’re shown how to “build their personal brand via social media.” At Collingwood, fourth year players are “centres of influence”, who focus on their “RFIs.” Columnist and former Hawthorn player Tim Boyle writes: “Football rhetoric is about sacrifice, unification, demonstrating desire and a new deference to statistics, which dissolves personality entirely. The suppression of self is an imperative.”
Indeed, the coaches preach “one in, all in” and “leave your ego on the hook”. Yet in many ways it’s every man for himself. Here’s Boyle again: “An expression that has stuck with me from my first day in the AFL is ‘dog-eat-dog’. This remains the best single sentence description of football I’ve heard.”
Amidst all this, players are encouraged to let it all out, to start the public dialogue, to be brave. Few are as inscrutable and as impervious to outside noise as Luke Hodge. Even Patrick Dangerfield, who cuts a figure of the utmost self-assurance, a man who sat on a throne on live TV days before he debuted with his new club, has sought professional help. In a recent documentary featuring most of the AFL captains, they revealed their self-doubts and their crippling anxieties. The majority of them are natural leaders and some of the finest players of their generation. But they all touched on similar themes – the grind, the criticism, the anxiety, the inability to say what they really feel.
A generation ago, they would have cut very different interviewees. You can see it with the old timers reminiscing about the 60s and 70s on the Foxtel program Open Mike. When the talk turns to the violence that characterised that era, they jut their jaws and they lean back in their seats. But as soon as the interviewer touches on sensitive ground, the drawbridge goes up. Introspection is not their go.
Thankfully, all that is changing. But those commentating on the issue are often former players, men who couldn’t be less suited to the task. Whether opining on how to penetrate a zone defence or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, their opinions apparently carry equal weight.
Likewise, the wider public discourse still sits uneasily. In the week Travis Cloke announced his indefinite break from football, Jeff Kennett wrote an article saying how the onus needs to fall back on the individual. “We must take more responsibility for our condition,” the outgoing chairman of Beyond Blue wrote. “I have often said that we are a complacent society. We seem to expect society to be able to meet our increasing needs, even personal ones.”
But what if it’s not an individual problem but a societal one? And in a footballing sense, what if it’s the football industry itself – its grind, its crushing conformity, its blinding spotlight?
“It’s a brutal game – we’re not playing tiddlywinks,” Ross Lyon says every second week. And therein lies much of its appeal. The game, despite all the efforts to tinker with it, still holds up. But the wider football world needs to soften. It needs to change its tone. It needs to know its place. It needs to accept that the young men who put on the show and who give us so much joy, have never been more at the mercy of the frothing opinions, the snark and the assumption that they’re fair game.
- In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
- In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123.
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In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
