Craig Foster v Ange Postecoglou – 2006
Should it really have come as any great surprise that under the direction of Ange Postecoglou the Socceroos – travelling to the 2014 World Cup on an entirely hopeless mission – should unite Australia in joy? No, the signs were there a decade ago when Postecoglou lived out the fantasy of every Australian football fan and verbally battered Craig Foster on live TV.
Back then our Ange was the struggling national youth coach, fresh from failing to qualify Australia’s Under-20s for the 2007 Youth World Cup and so facing the music from Foster and Les Murray on SBS. Foster’s theory: Postecoglou’s performance was dismal and he should fall on his sword. Postecoglou’s response in summary: Foster should shut his big dumb face.
The real highlight here is how personal Postecoglou gets on the issues of friendship and respect. “OK you’re not attacking me personally, that’s great,” he snaps at one point. “I feel much better because you’re a really close mate. I don’t care what you think of me personally, Fozzy.”
To be entirely fair to Foster, at the end of 13 minutes of car crash TV there were no winners out of this one but it was gloriously chaotic TV, civil discourse going to seed amid a rapid exchange of petty snipes and sledges. Three months later and Postecoglou had lost his job but on the balance of things you’d say it all worked out OK in the end.
Allan Jeans v Peter McKenna – World of Sport, 1985
Ah, when Yabby went Crabby. What a compelling and unlikely fact it is to consider that it was the unfailingly polite and inoffensive Peter McKenna who drew from legendary Hawthorn coach Allan Jeans his most notable public outburst.
The time: a day after Hawthorn and Geelong’s infamous and spiteful 1985 meeting had ended in blood-curdling screams of indignation when Hawks legend Leigh Matthews ironed out Cats hard man Neville Bruns, breaking his opponent’s jaw in the process. The place: Seven’s World of Sport studio, where McKenna was tasked with drawing some interesting responses out of the two coaches, Jeans and Geelong’s Tommy Hafey. McKenna soon had more than he’d bargained for.
The prelude was impeccable. As was possibly written into the Australian constitution at the time, a gruff and vaguely irritated Hafey appeared in one of his patented Adidas t-shirts, this one apparently sprayed onto his torso with one of Howard Arkley’s air-brushes. Not much love for McKenna from t-shirt Tommy, especially once the shallow depths of the interviewer’s preparation had been exposed.
“I can’t say too much about [the Geelong reports out of the game] of course but I just feel that a man can only take so much and that’s as far as I’m prepared to go,” started Hafey. Should he have dragged fiery spearhead Mark Jackson as the Geelong full-forward teetered close to the abyss of another brain explosion? Well, playing with 17 men wouldn’t have been ideal thought the supercoach, adding the timeless rejoinde “as you’re probably aware” rather than, say, “I could bench press your entire family at once McKenna, do some bloody research.”
McKenna pushed Jeans a little harder. “Have you got any comment to make about the fact that two of your players this year have been involved in king hits behind the play?” The softly-spoken Hawk legend first simmered on the suggestion a moment before the red mist descended. “Peter, if you want to continue with this discussion… you wanted to go back and dig skeletons out of the cupboard… If you want to go back it’s just as embarrassing for your club. I can recite incidents against the club that you played for, the same against Geelong… Now just leave it at that at this particular stage.”
It was all about the delivery though; no ranting, no swearing, just a deeply offended and probably embarrassed legend of the game sounding as though he was about to go postal, all bulging eyes and barely-concealed hurt. What this incident also showed is that there’s only one faultless way of diffusing such a tense argument on live TV and that’s to get an old man – Jack Dyer in this case – to step in between the combatants with a Bertocchi ham, some cleaning products and a bucket of honey. That, my friends, is how lasting world peace could be obtained.
Molly Meldrum v Peter Jess – 1993
It’s getting harder by the year to remember a time in which the comings and goings of Australian sports stars weren’t strategised, scripted and slimily administered by player agents, but as recently as the early 90s they were barely a presence and particularly not in AFL football.
Before the thundering, Jerry McGuire-esque arrival of Ricky Nixon and Craig Kelly’s player-management stables of that decade, players either fended for themselves in contract negotiations with clubs or at best, got an accountant or lawyer involved. A major overhaul of this system had been on the cards since the 70s, when Brian Ward and Isaac Apel saw unexploited money-making opportunities and aligned themselves with star players. Ward’s part in the 1975 John Pitura trade was a tabloid frenzy.
In the 80s came lawyers Jeff Browne and Peter Jess, feared figures in the boardrooms of clubs and men who were often seen as parasites by supporters, men who’d funnel money out of club coffers and sell their favourite players to the highest bidders. In the end they were also of instrumental importance in getting a fairer deal for all players, not just the superstars, but with so many clubs in dire financial straight through the 80s and 90s there was a general resentment of this new presence.
But Peter Jess? Hoo boy. You couldn’t really say that the abrasive lawyer divided opinion. The media caned him at every opportunity. Fans hated him. Molly Meldrum hated him even more, especially when under Jess’s instruction St Kilda champ Nicky Winmar sat out three weeks of the 1993 season as Jess tried to lever out of Saints administrators an improved contract for his man.
The end result was this fiery exchange on Nine’s Sunday Footy Show, then hosted by Max Walker and so delightfully loose that a lengthy, unmediated slanging match between a player agent and a celebrity fan presented as the ideal addition to the running sheet. It wasn’t just Meldrum, either. Sam Newman took a swipe, Mal Brown had a bash and Lou Richards stepped in like a disapproving grandparent. Dermott Brereton couldn’t even get a word in. Panel show magic, in other words.
Mal Brown v the entire umpiring fraternity…again – 1976
A bit of sporting success and a reputation for randomly punching people in the head can take a man a long way in Australian television, as was the case of Mal Brown’s lengthy and scandal-filled career on the small screen.
If you were a television producer in need of a piping hot take on Western Australian football matters in 1976, one has to assume that Brown’s was the first name and number was the first you cracked open the Rolodex for. Before he was telling current affairs reporters to go forth and multiply or bringing the entire Open Mike franchise into disrepute with his bone-headedness, Brown was just a bloke constantly down on his luck. The cause of this? Well, umpires of course. Brown never met one he particularly liked, as this mid-70s appearance alongside Ken “KG” Cunnigham shows.
“Some umpires do cheat,” claimed the infamous hard man before turning on Cunningham. “You’ve been an imposter all your life,” said Brown, sitting there in a denim cowboy shirt. I digress here, but in keeping with the Anchorman aesthetic you also haven’t lived until you’ve watched KG and Neil Kerley going to town on a punching bag on the same show. Did any TV ideas even get knocked back in the 1970s?
The “highlight” of this debate was probably when Brown decided to use gender relations as the prism through which we could understand football officials: “I’d give the umpires no control because I reckon most umpires, the only responsibility they’ve ever had is when they tick the items off their wife’s shopping list and they’re not men. And that’s the trouble with the blokes today.”
And why should umpires turn a blind eye to thuggery? “People basically like blood,” started Ron Burgundy Brown, drawing upon a sample size of one in his research. “It’s a proven fact, you know, you go to Spain and you see them stab to death bulls and here we like the gladiator sport.”
I’m not really sure which violent incident they’re actually discussing in this clip but Cunningham’s first question does at least give us a quite poignant glimpse into the future. “Would you encourage your son to do that?” asks the former umpire. Brown doesn’t flinch. “I’d be telling him to hit them first.”
Rex Hunt v Sam Newman – 2005
Across to the wireless now where another blokey, lifelong friendship is about to disintegrate for the benefit of our entertainment. In the genre of Australian sports identities attempting to destroy each other’s reputations via talkback radio, this incident involving Footy Show jester Sam Newman and his former Geelong team-mate Rex Hunt is a gem.
The premise doesn’t really matter all that much but safe to say that Rex had recently lost his TV gig at Channel Seven and was spoiling for an argument with his old mucker. When the late Sports Today host Clinton Grybas threw to Newman, his opening salvo sounded ominous. “I’m going to ask you once,” Hunt was warned, “do you want to take this call from me? Would you like me to go on with this or would you rather me not because you know what will happen, Rex?”
“You will be out of business if I go on with this phone call. Would you like me to tell people exactly the conversations I’ve had with you in the last month to show people exactly the person you are?” It was pull over to the side of the road stuff. Hunt was a liar, a manipulator and a two-faced fraud, thought Newman, who added immeasurably to the awkward mise-en-scene by delivering this evisceration of Hunt’s character at the rapidly escalating, breathless pitch favoured by all good elderly talk-back callers.
“This is an absolutely pitiful phone call from a man who is 60 this year,” replied Hunt, seizing quite perceptively upon the tenor of Newman’s tirade with a subtle sledge about his age. This argument has just about everything; name-dropping, broken confidences and most crucially of all, the phrase “he wouldn’t have you back at Seven while you had a hole in your bum, Rex.” Here’s to bitter reprisals.
Peter Caven v Tony Lockett’s likeness – 1994
Of the many moments of Australian sporting TV that really ought to be more famous than they are, Peter Caven’s 1994 decimation of a Tony Lockett dummy in front of Andrew Denton’s “Live and Sweaty” studio audience should rank right up there.
It doesn’t strictly qualify as an argument I suppose because Lockett – who’d infamously rearranged Caven’s face during a wild and memorable game at the SCG when the Saints came from nowhere to snatch a 1-point win – wasn’t actually present. By then the St Kilda star was serving the eight-week suspension he copped once the tribunal had viewed the gruesome footage and assessed the damage to the Sydney defender’s face.
Enter Denton, the dummy and an offer for retribution via whichever weapon Caven desired; hockey stick, cricket bat or baseball bat. Soldiering on with life and wearing an eye-catching facial splint, Caven opted for the baseball bat, gleefully clocking ‘Lockett’s’ head clean off his shoulders and then pulverising what was left. Barely a year later the pair were team-mates. I’m sure that wasn’t awkward at all.
