One of football’s emerging rituals is done and dusted for another year. We have peeled ourselves away from TV screens after 12 months of saying we absolutely won’t watch the Australian football hall of fame presentation, absolutely won’t get upset about those who continue to be unfairly omitted, and absolutely won’t do the whole thing again next year.
Of course, we will. Why pass up an opportunity to let some of the league’s arbitrary, effortlessly irritating rules wind you up? It’s all there on the AFL hall of fame web page: “[Inductee] identities are always a hotly debated topic and a fiercely protected secret.” Prepare to be mad, prepare to be trolled.
This madness is surely avoidable. On Tuesday night a number of very worthy contributors took a deserved bow for their decades of excellence. There are no dud players in the hall of fame, and plenty of administrators and identities who have made the game greater deserve meaningful recognition. But a hall of fame that features 14 umpires and none of Nicky Winmar, Brent Crosswell, Trevor Barker and Garry Lyon verges on outright farce.
A big problem here rests not with those who do the selecting but the criteria they work with. The most baffling of them: every year the panel must induct two new members who have retired from the game in the 10 years prior. Why on earth this is the case nobody can actually say, but it creates a situation where genuine champions of the game – contributors who actually fulfil the “fame” part of the job title – are pointlessly neglected for years on end.
The issue of umpires is a tricky one. We need them. Kids should be encouraged to give it a go. For the most part, the best ones do an extremely difficult job exceptionally well. Whether they require a parade is another question. You find yourself falling back on the old cliché: the best umpires are the ones you don’t notice. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it would be a rare child whose love of the game was sparked by watching someone blow a whistle.
As it stands, one non-playing identity needs to be inducted into the hall of fame every two years, with umpires joining dozens of media identities and administrators. Surely such elevations should be discretionary.
As for those excluded, opinions will always vary but it was the incandescent (and justified) rage of Western Australians and South Australians over the last decade that led to a less myopic focus on legends of the Victorian game. So perhaps it is time fans got a little more vocal about the maddening focus on recently-retired players who’ve barely left the spotlight, while undisputed champions of decades past sit scratching their heads.
Indigenous Australian hero Winmar is a glaring example – a player whose dignified stand against the racist abuse that stained the game for generations gave the AFL its Smith-Carlos moment and enshrined him in the game’s iconography. Somehow it hasn’t afforded him actual icon status. On playing achievements alone Winmar should be there, because his brilliance was undeniable and sustained, filling the hearts of fans with hope and joy. Given his central role in driving societal change – which the league itself loves taking credit for – his continued omission is a disgrace.
It would be a bit rude to ask, but the likes of Ben Hart, Barry Hall and Simon Goodwin surely would not have minded men like Winmar or Tiger Crosswell getting their dues first. Crosswell was a dominant performer in four premiership teams at two clubs. His team-mate Vin Catoggio once told me that if he’d trained like Chris Judd, Tiger would have won six Brownlow medals. Those who played against him wouldn’t scoff at the suggestion. He could do it all.
Yet somehow, having been elevated to “icon” status in the Tasmanian football hall of fame, Crosswell continues to be ignored on the mainland, where he was a superstar talent of truly unique specifications. He was said to have inspired the central character in footy’s only decent movie, David Williamson’s The Club, and there can’t have been many more charismatic stars in the game’s history.
On it goes, brave and brilliant players like Trevor Barker and Garry Lyon continually snubbed in favour of needless recency bias. And on we’ll go, watching it regardless, arguing amongst ourselves, wondering when common sense will prevail.
