There are five cinemas within 20 minutes’ walk, but on Saturday night, only the Adelaide Oval is featuring Showdown XLI. Under the stadium’s lights, Eddie Betts dips and turns. At times he appears to outrun his own feet. In a split-second he gets a metre on four people wanting to jump on his head. He makes people leap from their seat a time zone away. That he has been doing this for 250 games over 12 years is enough not to confuse him with talent’s idiot cousin, luck. Eddie Betts is “box office”.
Back in 2005, Carlton took Betts with the third pick in the pre-season draft, stuck him under Brendan Fevola, and left him there. For five seasons, those Carlton teams were a circus. But watching Betts towards the end of his last season at Carlton – a year after he was the club’s leading goal kicker and runner-up in the best and fairest – was like watching an actor with a brilliant range of expression going through the motions in a movie directed by a superannuated coach and a script written with a paint-roller.
But when Betts made the decision to leave Carlton, he went home and cried for three hours. The day he left, thousands dropped their heads and sighed. Eight-year-olds with posters on their walls sobbed for days. Betts was 26 years old. In his nine seasons he had kicked 290 goals, which was good enough for Carlton to decide that they couldn’t afford to keep him.
At 5ft 8in, if you piled up Betts’ Adelaide contract in cash he could probably hide behind it. But there would be no need, as there is barely a Carlton (or football) supporter that would begrudge him what he has. Betts’ manager and his Under-18 coach at Templestowe, Tom Petroro, has said that when he first met Betts, he had “virtually no money or clothes or anything”. It is a sad echo of the story of Jeff Garlett, who lived in his car for a year while playing with Swan Districts. Nothing has come easy.
You could also mount an argument that he is underpaid, given it is shy of the dollars Carlton sent up in thick white smoke on a footballer whose time at the club has been both not terrible and, in the context of his contract, not completely credible. While Dale Thomas may be the antithesis of a young and optimistic era at Carlton, Betts is the name in bold at the top of the poster for the thrill-a-minute Crows. “Every time I go near the ball, they cheer my name,” Betts told SEN on Friday.
On Saturday, Betts kicked five goals in Adelaide’s crucial 15-point win over Port Adelaide, and set up a few more. As much as a wave needs water, his want to score is elemental – as is his want to entertain. Betts is considered one of the greatest small forwards in the modern era. When you account for artistic expression, he surely must be the greatest. He is a footballer, an entertainer and a role model. And while many footballers shrink from this responsibility, Betts embraces it. Once you are aware of his backstory on the mean streets of Kalgoorlie, his is an example that is relevant and inspiring for so many. “It’s not just being a role model for Indigenous players, it’s non-Indigenous players and young kids that look up to you,” Betts told the Herald Sun in 2010.
Betts’ 250th game provided the ideal opportunity to celebrate a brilliant footballer that captures all we love about our game. But moments after Betts kicked his fifth goal, an ignorant, tightly wound ball of hate threw a banana. That somebody would take a celebration and ignite it with the accelerant of racism should come as no surprise to those of us who watched the AFL play to the old guard of the Political Correctness Revolution last year with its disingenuous response to Adam Goodes’ vilification.
If the response sent a message it was that football continues to help less committed racists scratch their itch. And all this two years after Eddie McGuire saw fit to make his King Kong joke on his morning commercial radio show. That the banana thrower also allegedly mouthed “monkey” means only those who take their cues from a Sam Newman set piece will not see this for what it is. The signal could not be louder – this is no dog-whistle. Throwing bananas at black players has been a notorious racist attack in European football for nearly 50 years.
John Barnes, the former English international who endured racial abuse throughout his career, believes that football reflects a society taking time to shed its ingrained prejudices. In 2011, he told the Daily Telegraph that he had endured thrown bananas and monkey chants for years.
As mentioned in the introduction to The Biggest Game in Town: An Analysis of the AFL’s Vilification Policy, the photograph of Barnes kicking bananas off the pitch at Everton in 1987 has come to represent race issues in English football, as much as Wayne Ludbey’s image of Nicky Winmar famously raising his jumper at Victoria Park in 1993 has for the AFL.
Betts didn’t leave the Carlton circus to play at a zoo. The AFL has a rare opportunity in Australian public life to be an agent for social change. Along with Port Adelaide they must ensure the person responsible for this act is punished in a way that it sends a message even the most mindless can comprehend.
Adelaide’s potential to go deep into September – and even into October – gives us the opportunity to see Betts on the game’s biggest stage. We are the beneficiaries of his greatness. This is what we should be celebrating.
The kids who cried when Betts left Carlton, cried because their hero left. That their hero was Indigenous should be feted in the same way that Betts celebrates his talents, with a joie de vivre.
The same joie de vivre that was on show on Saturday night at the Adelaide Oval, when dipping and turning and kicking goals and outrunning his own feet and making people leap from their seats a time zone away, Betts proved once again he is “box office”.
