As a player Nathan Buckley had a reputation for being elitist and above his peers from day one of his career, but the first time I interviewed him some 20 years ago I quickly learned he was one of the brightest, and most openly honest, players in the game.
He’s still the same two decades later, and that scares sportspeople.
One day Tom Lynch is “greatly angered” by Buckley revealing the two had spoken about a possible move, the next day it’s revealed Lynch had one-to-one conversations with Buckley, Alastair Clarkson and Damien Hardwick while in Melbourne for medical treatment paid for by Gold Coast.
Not that we didn’t know it already.
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How precious, how entitled, how immature are AFL footballers that they think they can run around behind their club’s back, trying to line up a massive deal while feigning interest in possibly re-signing, and then when someone reveals their activities they cry ‘unfair’?
Buckley’s honesty was refreshing, but he knew immediately he’d broken the unwritten law about never saying something that might actually be interesting, and tried to hose down his comments.
Why bother?
What we need in the AFL – in sports in general – is a monumental shift in standards. We need for it to become acceptable to be transparent, to say the truth, or what’s on your mind or even just something that you think the public might be interested in hearing.
Even years after retiring sportsmen and women keep ‘mum’ on anything that may have been of interest in their careers, which is why their autobiographies are about as exciting to read as train timetables.
That is unless you like personality-challenged cricketers blowing the lid on what their teammates did with the breakfast sausages in a five-star Bangalore hotel.
Or footballers reminiscing over that time in their rookie season when the gnarly club veteran put curry powder in their jockstrap at training.
Wowee!
If you do try to lift the lid on what goes on behind the curtain, everyone else involved in the sport forms a circle and denies such things could be true, like when Australian Olympian Werner Reiterer spoke openly of his own and others’ drug use in international competitions in his book ‘Positive’ .
“Lies”, “fiction”, “he’s just saying these things to try and sell his book!”
And totally destroy his reputation in the meantime.
Poor old Werner was quickly blacklisted and has never been heard from since.
It’s time to grow up AFL.
It’s time to be honest.
Tell us if you’re thinking about moving rather than calling journalists liars, then a month later doing what we said you were going to do but pretending the idea only just popped into your head.
I’m looking at you Luke Hodge.
Tell us if you’re being investigated by authorities for doing things you shouldn’t have done rather than calling journalists muckrakers, then holding a presser three months later because ‘there’s a burden you want to get off your chest’.
I’m looking at you Ross Lyon.
Tell your supporters - the people who pay your wages - what’s going on so they can feel a little more invested in the club they support, a little more included in the place they’ve committed themselves to for life, even if you’ve got no commitment beyond the final game of the season.
The fans own this sport, as they do all sports, and they deserve to know what’s going on.
