No one is quite saying it out in public, but the euphemism of lack of “preparation” that the Adelaide Crows are using to explain the club suspension of their star defender Graham “Stiffy” Johncock may have a hidden explanation: the players have gotten sick of his chain smoking. Have the players laid down the law to Stiffy: either the fags or the Crows?
I love this time of year in the National Football League because it’s draft camp, and that means stories of dumbarse footballers getting up to all sorts of stupid shenanigans. Some of it is fueled by alcohol and/or drugs, to be sure, but in other cases you have to question the sanity of these millionaire twentysomethings who put their body in all kinds of uninsured danger. Who could forget Ben Roethlisberger’s motorcycle accident sans helmet, for instance, or the countless charges brought down on the Cincinnati Bengals last season.
Primary among these stories, in my opinion, is that of Najeh Davenport: current Steeler, former Packer and drafted from the University of Miami (a.k.a. The U). While playing for the U in 2002, Davenport was accused by police of breaking into a female student’s dorm and defecating into her clothes hamper. To my mind, this is the pinnacle of American football misbehaviour. Forget your drive-by shootings and domestic disturbances, nothing is so symbolic of the complete disregard for societal norms as what Najeh did to that poor girl’s wardrobe. Thus, I judge all such incidents - and they are legion, believe me - by ranking them on the official Hamper-Dumper scale, expressed as a percentage of how bad it is compared to laying a borrie amongst an innocent woman’s summer collection, steaming gently next to her dainties.
So, what of this year’s crop so far? Let’s go through them.
Tune in for more Hamper-Dumper action the next time an NFL player acts up… should be in about two hours!
Nathan Brown - just to be clear, the one who is coach of the St George-Illawarra Dragons - has stoked an ever-smouldering fire by yet again whinging about the Melbourne Storm and their tackling techniques. Ever since the Storm have started dominating the NRL in the past few years, around semi finals time there is a groundswell of discontent from the Sydney press with the egregious lack of local talent at the top of the ladder, which is then fed and nurtured by coaches of Sydney teams who are vying for finals spots. The Dragons, who are coming off a good string of wins during the Origin period when a lot of their opponents were weakened for numbers by their players resting on Origin duty, are starting to struggle now that the playing field has been leveled, and sure enough after getting a 26-0 walloping by the Storm on Monday, Brown has tipped his bucket on the Dragons video site.
All of the pre-competition hype about this year’s Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest was around Takeru Kobayashi, the six-time champion who was knocked off last year by Californian nobody Joey Chestnut. Kobayashi suffered jaw problems - so-called “jaw-thritis” - in the lead up to the 2007 contest and was only defeated narrowly, leading many commentators to conclude that it was a formality for the Tsunami to reclaim what is rightfully his: the Mustard Belt for the world’s premier competitive eater.
What ensued in the 2008 Nathan’s competition was an epic sporting story, which may have only spanned 15 or so minutes of action but arced a complete storyline of master and challenger, hard-won respect, constant plot twists, and the closest of finishes.
In the wake of Queensland’s hat-trick of rugby league State of Origin wins, the media consensus seems to be that Origin is in good health. While you’d expect the Daily Telegraph to run the corporate line as part of its role as News’s propaganda arm, and Fairfax usually plays the parochial tune for the Sydney faithful as well, the normally independently scathing Crikey ran a puff piece from Jeff Wall stating “Origin again showed itself to be the pinnacle of rugby league in every repsect” [sic].
Rugby league officialdom must surely be counting the days until the 2009 State of Origin series, with last night’s 2008 decider confirming Origin’s premier place in the rugby league calendar in the areas where it really counts — ratings, crowds, and saturation media coverage.
What’s that, crowds? But wasn’t there a big kerfuffle pre-game about how ANZ Stadium wasn’t sold out for the decider, in what should be the most anticipated, watched, talked about and attended game of rugby league for the year in the entire world? This after a previous head-hanging about only 67,620 turning up to Origin 1 at the same venue, which hosts 83,500 at full capacity. Ah yes, here’s the Telly story about it: Unsold tickets an Origin insult. 76,000 of those 83,500 tickets had been sold on the morning of the match, and the published attendance was 78,751. Steve Mortimer told the Sydney football-going public that he and the players would feel insulted and embarrassed if a full house didn’t turn up.
What did the fans have to say about it? Over 250 comments by Telly readers in the reply section for that story, giving a huge laundry list of complaints. To save you the trouble of reading that long, long catalogue of whinges and criticisms, let me itemise them for you in order of popularity, with my own comments informed by having lived in Sydney for five years.
This is one of my favourite times of year in the sporting calendar: the build up to the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest on the fourth of July. As blogged previously, Takeru Kobayashi is trying to wrest back his title, and the world record, from Joey Chestnut in the Independence Day dog-off. To assist him in this endeavour, the Tsunami has enlisted the help of a hairdresser named Katsuji Fukimura, whose blog now carries a picture of the newly coiffed competitive eating legend. Exhorting the champ to “Swallow, rooting for you!”, Fukimura explains the new do thusly: “Today’s hair, color of mustard and ketchup and so on the ground YARUKI! This MACHIGAINASHI win!”
As a Victorian writing a general sports blog, I feel like I’m going to be seen as picking unmercifully on football codes more popular in the northern states… but if they didn’t have so many deep-seated problems then I wouldn’t be able to write these articles, now would I? John O’Neill, former and once again saviour of Antipodean rugby union, has been getting a lot of press lately for gobbing off about many of the problems he is facing, hoping to get a little bit of help from other stakeholders via bully pulpit. Admiring puff pieces like this one in the Australian only go so far in papering over the cracks in union, however.
As an AFL fan, how can we reconcile the fact that North Melbourne put away Hawthorn a week ago as only one of two teams to do so this season, have been the only team to defeat the Western Bulldogs, beat the Pies, ran Geelong to a kick, drew with Sydney in a game they were robbed of through technical shenanigans… yet they have also lost to Fremantle, Essendon and now St Kilda?
Takeru Kobayashi is under pressure. Beaten into second place in last year’s Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest by a Californian upstart named Joey Chestnut, breaking the Tsunami’s run of six consecutive titles, the International Federation of Competitive Eating has Kobayashi ranked third going into late-stage preparations for the 2008 edition of the annual July 4 contest. Like Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, Kobayashi has reached the rarified heights of sport where he takes himself above the rough and tumble of regular competitions, concentrating on pacing himself for the big events and working on his place in the annals of history. He now faces his greatest challenge yet.
The Fairfax media carried an AAP report yesterday entitled Origin to remain a midweek affair - I only mention the source because it’s necessary when discussing rugby league political stories, as the bias by both Murdoch and Fairfax outlets makes their stories rather stretched at times. The headline is the first thing that is wrong about this article, in that the Origin non-decision should not be the most important element of the story, but it’s a sad commentary on the priorities placed by the media on what parts of rugby league that the fans actually care about.
Thu, Jul 24, 2008