Footy's back, it's time for the real news

IN THE past few years, Ian "Tickets" Thompson has headbutted a homeless man, dressed in burkah and G-string to mock football's most famous Muslim player, grabbed the breast of a crowd controller, been a zoo ambassador for a terminally ill lion, waved rainbow flags to goad the league's first openly gay goal umpire, and boasted on air that he once scored a nun.

For those who remember none of this, you are not helped by the fact that Tickets Thompson does not actually exist. Instead, he's a fictional character - a 52-year-old playboy former footballer, a carefully controlled loose cannon - who dominates the fictional landscape of my satirical novel, Players.

That might have read alarmingly like press release journalism, yet ironically, it was press release journalism, staged stunts and non-football football stories that inspired me to write the book.

Doubly ironically, I may have just misused the word "ironically", a sports journalism habit discussed at length in the book, halfway down page 230.
Think back over the past few months.

Will Essendon draft Ethiopian super athlete Goaner Tutlan? What does Melbourne Cup winner Subzero think of the taste of Glenferrie grass? Is Len Thompson using the Collingwood pool? Is a Wizard Cup grand final more important than Nick Stevens' brother's wedding? Who is giving the best man speech at Stevens' brother's wedding? In return for an interview on The Footy Show, did Gary Ablett (the father not the son) demand a role on McLeod's Daughters? Does Rob Butterss like Grant Thomas? Does Grant Thomas like Rob Butterss? Does anyone really care?

It says something for the popularity and celebrity cache of the AFL that the answer to the last question is "yes" - footy fans do care. Or if they do not care, they certainly consume. The proof is in the newspaper sales and the television ratings.
Of course we want to know if Gary Ablett has demanded an appearance on McLeod's Daughters. If the alternative is district cricket scores or news that Andy Roddick has thumped 37 aces past an unknown Ukrainian, the acting Ablett wins hands down. I for one would love to see him on McLeod's Daughters, maybe wearing a cowboy hat, cracking a stock whip with those menacing hunched shoulders.

What is frustrating is that clubs, media outlets and some players know we will lap up anything football related, and so particularly off-season, anything is what we are getting.

The clubs cannot be blamed for having a go. The theory is that column inches translate into members, which translate into dollars. On that front, the Hawthorn marketing team hit heights that its playing list will struggle to match. Crawf sitting astride Subzero; the buddy punishment system for late-comers to training; the endless Kokoda Trail. The only issue, one assumes, is whether scoring column inches distracts players from the task of scoring goals. In the fictional world of Players, traditional tough-as-nails coach Ken Gorton wonders whether his time might be better served actually coaching, rather than at a zoo photo shoot, perching on a log with meerkats.

Ideally, the filter in the whole process would be the media. But with AFL rights commanding the price they do, it's little wonder that television and radio stars are competing for publicity, concocting their own stunts, staking their claim over the publicity pie.

And so instead of there being an editorial process, we are saturated with non-game related content. Sammy calls Rex "a lying two-faced prick". Rex feeds off that. Sammy feeds off that. A showdown of celebrity egos that overshadows anything positive or great about the game itself. Couldn't Glenn Archer's Shinboner of the Century gong been the story of the day? At the very least, I wanted to hear about the best man speech at the Stevens wedding.

My main worry about the more-is-more approach to AFL media content is that the game will suffer from overexposure. Ian Thorpe thinks swimming is overexposed. If Thorpey based himself in Melbourne for a month, he would withdraw that comment. Hackett and Henry and Klim and Mills can splash around in the Australian championships, but if Terry Wallace is up for a spruik on the five tenets of human leadership, they will drown in his wake.

Other summer sports labour under football's smothering weight. Tennis flashes across the radar for the two weeks of the Australian Open and one week before. Basketball remains a non-event, except if Andrew Gaze woos us with his lopsided grin. Even cricket, once a legitimate rival for footy, now wallows in a malaise of twenty-odd meaningless one-day games.

Footy - you have not really gone away but I've missed you like hell. Thank God (the Father and the Son) for the bounce of the ball on Thursday night.