The playwright Wendy Wasserstein once remarked “I think there is in the arts an envy of sports”. But were the 2016 Bulldogs a movie, would it have received good reviews? The on-the-road win against the Eagles? The Tom Boyd redemption sub-plot? Luke Beveridge placing his grand final medal around his injured skipper’s neck? No, the Bulldogs movie seems contrived and a little mawkish.
A further rebuttal to Wasserstein is a letter in Viz magazine in 2014: “I’m sick of sports commentators saying ‘you couldn’t write a script like this’. If people can write scripts about dystopian futures in which life is in fact a simulation made by sentient machines to harness humans’ heat and electricity as an energy source, they can probably write ones about Gary Taylor-Fletcher scoring a last-minute equaliser against Stoke.”
So, Guardian Australia asked three authors and two screenwriters how they’d pen a finale befitting an already random 2017.
Peter Mattessi, a lifelong Dee who writes for EastEnders and Neighbours, is tempted by the opportunity to win a flag for the first time in more than 50 years.
“First I look for a compelling protagonist,” he says. “We don’t have to like them, but we have to be invested in their journey. Who can I discard? Anyone who’s won it in the last 20 years is gone. GWS are the City Hall franchise so potentially useful as a slimy, sleazy, hair-slicked-back villain type. But as a hero? No thanks.”
Mattessi says if he were honest, he’d flirt with the Tigers. “But in the end, like a Douglas Sirk heroine, they suffer so exquisitely that to remove that suffering would be to remove the very thing that gives their life meaning. No, for their own good, it can’t be Richmond.”
So the Dees are his plucky hero. “They’re not a bad choice,” he says. “The longest premiership drought in the competition and coming out of 10 years of the most abject, baroque misery. They have young, plucky players that any aspiring A-list actor would dying to play, a fresh coach with a compelling vision, and even a wise old sage in Paul Roos; an Obi-Wan Kenobi-esque mentor to appear as a glorious vision on grand final day, floating amid his shimmering golden aura.”
But what of the temptation to avoid the bunch-of-misfits-wins-it-all story in favour of something a little less saccharine?
“If they weren’t my team, I might be tempted to write the Dees stringing together an unlikely run to the grand final and giving their absolute all on the day only to fall agonisingly, heartbreakingly short but for the players and the fans to know that the defeat would be the making of one of the greatest teams we’ve ever seen. If they weren’t my team, maybe I’d write the journey not of a team becoming great, but of a team becoming ready to be great.
“But they’re my team, so stuff it. The Dees win it.”
YA novelist and member of the ABC’s Outer Sanctum Nicole Hayes isn’t convinced the Dees are the story. “You want a fairy tale ending? To quote Ross Lyon’s only 2016 tweet: strap yourselves in,” says Hayes.
“I was one of those girls not allowed to play footy, forced to watch less talented boys fumble and jostle a Sherrin that should’ve been mine. I found some measure of peace this year witnessing the shattering of a seemingly impenetrable ceiling as the dreams of girls like me come true. But even in victory, there were those who missed out.”
While it may seem a cliché – and a long shot – to argue for another Bulldogs flag, Hayes says, “deep down, we all want one for Bob”. But there’s another Bulldog whose dream fell a little short this year.
“In my impossible, most perfect ending, Luke Beveridge would call on Katie Brennan to pull on the red, white and blue to guide the Bulldogs, alongside Bob, to back-to-back flags,” says Hayes. “She doesn’t have to kick the match-winning goal – Bob, or better, Lin Jong can do that – but at that climactic break-into-three moment, as the camera slows to half-speed, and the violins crescendo, Katie and Bob will hoist that enormous cup towards the sky, while the ever-coiffed Dr Susan Alberti will sing Sons And Daughters Of The West. And from high above, Mr Football will smile down on them all.”
Somebody’s smiling down on the Swans as they continued their recovery from a 0-6 start with a three-point win over Adelaide. So how to make a Sydney flag more compelling? Sarah Walker is a passionate Swans member and TV scriptwriter, with credits including The Wrong Girl and Wentworth.
“I know the Swans are the heroes of the piece, but the jury’s out on the final antagonist. Will it be cocky younger brother from the West, GWS, leading to an historic all-Sydney grand final? Will underdogs Richmond pull off a berth on spirit alone, like the Doggies last year? Or will it be the quietly determined Crows?”
While Walker may not know who will play against Sydney on the last Saturday in September she knows the genre. It’s a kinky sex movie. “Before you take offence, thinking I’m objectifying the hardened bodies of the Swans’ elite athletes, or eroticising Buddy Franklin’s loping pirouette outside fifty on an angle, it’s none of that,” says Walker.
“My choice of genre is based on how Sydney’s made an art of autoerotic asphyxiation. For those of you who need this explained, it’s when someone’s choked during the act of copulation until they’re almost – almost, but not quite – dead. Right at the dying moment, the pressure on the throat is released and… ahhhhh! There’s an ecstatic release like no other.”
Walker says the trouble with fetishes, as any psychologist will tell you, is they become addictive.
“Boring old foreplay won’t do anymore. So the Swans treat their fans time after time to this dangerous but oh-so-satisfying dice with death. Whether it’s the Nick Davis goal in the last 10 seconds in a knock-out final; a Leo Barry mark to save the flag; or coming from 19 points down with 4.58 on the clock, this is what makes Sydney fans swoon. And unlike in 2014, when it went horribly wrong and we got throttled, the Sydney faithful will be swooning again when the credits roll at the end of my 2017 script.”
Asking a Fremantle fan to write on the post-season may be sadistic, but for novelist David Whish-Wilson, who also teaches creative writing at Curtin University, what’s left of 2017 is about the new 60,000-seat Perth stadium coming in 2018.
“It’s been such a weird season I couldn’t go all Rabelaisian like I normally might,” says Whish-Wilson. “But every season has its own narrative arc and for the sake of the fans every season needs to finish on a high note. The Eagles will roll the dice and see where they land in September, while Freo have chosen to play the kids and now Harley Bennell as a hint towards the future.
“But as the wrecking ball looms over the concrete stands of Subi Oval, and with genuine finals success nothing but a fantasy, diehard WA fans such as myself will be dreaming up a finals team made of the ghosts of players past, such as the Scotty ‘Prince of Pockets’ Chisholm, ‘mercurial’ Clive Waterhouse, Jeff ‘The Wizz’ Farmer and countless others, in the hope that their spectral selves can take out the flag before hitching a ride crosstown to bless the new digs and help fill up some of that space.”
An upset loss to Carlton on Saturday night means Hawthorn won’t be taking up any space in the finals, and as a result Anson Cameron – an author of six critically acclaimed novels – may need to do a re-write of the story he pitched last week. Or not. In defiance of Commissar Gillon’s decree on 3AW that broadcasters of false stories should be stripped of their AFL accreditation, we’re sticking with the original.
“The killjoys and copyright lawyers all agree plagiarism is a drag. But even Shakespeare stole plots. So if I could plagiarize a little happiness for the 2017 finals, if I could replicate one high year, I’d pen a take on 1963,” says Cameron. “Remember ’63? Camelot, with JFK on the throne, and The Cats bush-whacking The Hawks for The Flag?
“Yeah. Let The Hawks squeak into the finals. Then let them kryptonize the Superteams by beating Sydney, Adelaide and GWS, while the Cats go angel-mugging on the Dees and Tiges and Port,” says Cameron.
“Grand final week, and the press are on the Hawks now, turd-striped David to a host of Goliaths. And do they do it for Hodgey? They so fucking don’t. Danger kicks 15 playing with a King George whiting down his shorts and feigning a massive case of brewer’s droop. And it’s ’63 redux, remember? So The Donald is only seven weeks out of Dallas.”
Our accreditation is in the post, Gillon.
