Every other week, it seems, Sam Newman rolls out boorish bon mots with the same toxicity with which Benson & Hedges once churned out cigarettes. If he has a talent, it is that everything he says sticks to your skin. Newman was always going to be one of those people who hurried to help Eddie McGuire to his feet, as if he had been the victim of something other than his own dull wit.
There was no way this wasn’t going to end badly.
Newman prefaced his raging against the dying of the light by saying “people want a little bit of logic and a little bit of fairness”, reminding us that he has too large an ego to look into the mirror and accept his reflection. He accused people of searching for a “cause to fit a narrative”. Fortunately, when it comes to Newman and the cowards who reside in the suburbs of his self-esteem, the narrative is not hard to find.
That narrative is as thick as an an unabridged copy of a Russian novel – or the whooping Footy Show audience who look forward to the day when they can throw D batteries at the “excrement” and “second-tier media outlets” that have weighed into this. It was almost enough to make you wish Newman was still butchering show tunes, listing to port.
Last night was another reminder (and there’s a long list of them) that the AFL Footy Show is television’s mausoleum. Newman buries himself in the part. It’s a dismal, yet somehow profitable carnival of retrograde clichés that appear to have been pre-tested and pre-sold at a nightclub urinal at two in the morning.
The show’s recruitment of Rebecca Maddern to co-hosting duties at the start of this season was widely praised, and has at least given the show a female voice, but has it merely forced the producer’s hand to double-down on the cheap and the crass? Or perhaps it is as simple as the old adage that nobody went broke underestimating the intelligence of people. And if you buy into Newman’s premise that this is “a vendetta against personalities”, as opposed to say the view of the state’s top female police officer, then your intelligence should at the very least be called in for questioning.
What is sad is that despite the protestations from the “PC gone mad” crowd (cheer-led by Rita Panahi in today’s Herald Sun) the AFL has such a hold over our culture that it has an important role to play in promoting basic decency and respect. This is not in pushing “left-wing dogma”, it is simply promoting a game that is for everyone.
There is not much that can stand in the way of such an ideal – not even a move on City Hall by Newman, no doubt inspired by his fellow disdainer of the diverse, Donald Trump.
Last week the AFL launched a women’s competition and next month it will stage its first gay pride match. It is at least trying to fulfil the promise that the answer to the intolerant man is further promotion of diversity. This is what sport should stand for. Sam Newman and his brass band of acolytes and apologists are really just nihilists – against everything and for nothing. Soon enough, their world of blackface, mankinis and misogyny will be left behind for good, and it won’t be a moment too soon.
