Cameron Smith's Catastrophic Plan

It started off so innocently. Tell me something that doesn’t.

First it was Horse Weyman, for reasons which are still unclear, but, okay. He seems harmless, you let it slide, you’ve made a life out of ‘letting it slide’, after all.   

Next, G.I. Well, you can understand it; I’m coming from a place of respect, he’s a leading proponent of devastation and now that he no longer looks like Precious he has a certain sleek allure and has anyone actually ever made a successful tackle on him I mean one that he didn’t casually reel out of? I think not.

Now, though, Cameron Smith? If I keep this up there will be no one left to loath. Where the fuck will it END? What, with me liking Jamie Soward?? That is the last frontier. As far as I am concerned, if I cross that terrible threshold it’s finished I’m finished this blog is finished and I will surrender myself via voluntary admission to the nearest locked ward for some electroshock therapy and Vaseline-related violations. And that would not do. That wouldn’t do at all. Vaseline is vile stuff. 

I’ve always enjoyed detesting Cameron Smith. Now that I don’t, it feels like a loss.

The son of a bitch made a clean sweep this year. Captaining the Storm to a premiership, a seventh straight Origin series and 2 from 2 Kangaroo victories over the Kiwis. The only other players to achieve this are Lockyer and Langer and they’re Broncos and if there’s one team that annoys me more than the Storm the Rabbitohs and the Tigers it’s the Broncos.

Once I started empathising with him it was all over. It always is. Empathy is an irritatingly powerful tool for dismantling prejudice, ill-will and irrational dislike. The empathising began when I started watching him closely. I can’t remember when, or why, I started doing this. I can’t remember when the sight of poplar trees dropping their leaves started setting off my preoccupation with time and death that has come out of nowhere in the last two years. I can’t remember when I vowed to never read Ulysses because to read it is to condone it, or when I decided it was ethically okay to eat Hungry Jacks but not McDonalds. You just do stuff and say stuff until gradually and then suddenly it’s entangled within you and then it is you.

So I watch him, doing work, going about his terrible business all calm and laser-like and perfect and I know I FUCKING KNOW what is going on in his head with every play every tackle every kick every run every metre and most of all with every idiot opponent he encounters and the song lyric equivalent of this is that they are all, to paraphrase, microscopic cogs in his catastrophic plan designed and directed by his red right hand and also Craig Bellamy.

JoshDugan = Bambi II

That Michael Weyman statue in Moruya stirred something in me. Who knew a bronze rendering of an unattractive rugby league behemoth would speak of universal feelings and fiery passions?  It damn well stirred something in him too; did you see him go like a fucking bull at a gate to get first try in the opening minutes of last week’s game? He ran thirty metres! He looked like a moose! By the by, how the hell did I not know Weyman’s nickname was the Horse?? I found this out on the same day that I discovered there’s a Dulux paint colour called ‘Hog Bristle’. It’s the little things. It has to be, because the big things maul us to pieces. I wish his nickname had somehow been incorporated into his statue. Hooves, a mane, flared horsey nostrils, something.

So. I’ve been giving this commemorative statue issue some thought. So too have the Daily Tele. They’ve approached it from a slightly different angle, and arrived at a wildly different conclusion but, still. Nick Walshaw, I love you, you bogan. You are a top shelf sports writer. How’s this for a lead sentence: “A Nathan Hindmarsh statue would not be complete without a little bum crack showing.” Eels great Brett Kenny got involved. “You know that appearance Hindy has at the back end of games – exhausted, pants slipping down…mate, that’s him.”

The Tele also appears to have launched a campaign to give the idea traction. It’s called ‘Back the Crack’. They have, like, a logo and stuff.

I have no objection to this. Hindmarsh is a standup guy. Well, there was that time he called Michael Ennis a grub in a press conference last year, I didn’t much like that. It was unwarranted. Michael Ennis is a legend.  

Anyway, charming as this ‘Back the Crack’ business is, I like the idea of statues going up when players are still active and relevant. Plenty of time for retrospection later.  

This brings me to Josh Dugan. I think he warrants some kind of statue. Just because he’s got mad game, really. And he re-signed with the Raiders for another two years and gave playing alongside Terry Campese as one of his key reasons for staying. BALLER! He doesn’t have an animal alias, at least not in the public imagination. He does in mine, and he’s not the only one. Plenty of those rangy backs remind me of Dobermans, for example. Dobermans are fast and enjoy chasing people.

I’m thinking an interpretive rather than literal rendering could be the go – something capturing that ineffable essence – here are some of my ideas. Well, one idea, really – Dugan as deer. Behold!





Everybody Loves Weyman, or, The Horror of Long Haul Bus Rides

You know how when you talk a lot about football you end up talking almost as much about life, because the two so regularly intersect? Well, it was only a matter of time before the intersection between football and the visual arts demanded attention. Read on, culture vultures!

A fabulous life-sized bronze statue of Dragons behemoth Michael Weyman has been fashioned by a local artist in his hometown of Moruya and installed it in the park by the river. I can think of several hundred NRL players I would prefer to see immortalised in bronze ahead of Weyman (the visually splendid Carney astride the Big Merino, for one) but, still. From what I saw the artist appeared to have captured something of Weyman’s essential blue-collar, battle-axe spirit, as well as that look of piercing, squinting, enraged-bull stoicism he wears a while running at and/or over the top of opponents. (“Get Out of my Weyman”- humourous Red V sign)

I used to ride the Pioneer bus up and down that coast constantly from Bega to Nowra between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Months of my life were spent on that bus, nauseously watching landscape flash past though dirty windows. Moruya was the scheduled stop for the meal break*. It was a faded, seedy town in a state of nonchalant, not altogether offensive disrepair back then. Still, that river mouth or estuary thing lent the place a certain air of raffish elegance in a Mark Twain kind of a way. Towns with a river passing through them somehow always appear more interesting than towns without, even if they are filled with poor-looking people and mean-looking dogs and signs pocked with shotgun blasts. Perhaps the Weyman statue has added a new, more sophisticated dimension to the character of the place. I hope so. I hope the artist hasn’t misread his market. The Laurie Daly statue certainly lifts the tone of Bruce Stadium, but Laurie Daly is a very charming man so it almost goes without saying that his bronze rendering exudes characteristic charisma and charm.  So. Michelangelo’s David, Laurie Daly, and MICHAEL WEYMAN.

In any case, if you haven’t experienced a long distance coach ride you really haven’t lived. To ride on a cross country coach is to engage with a sordid underside of sad and awful lives.  You only really go on a long distance bus because you can’t afford to fly, you can’t afford a car, or you are a delinquent who has been forbidden from driving, and possibly from living within three hundred meters of schools and daycare centres as well.  As a result, most of the people on long distance buses are one of the following: actively schizoid, armed and dangerous, in a drugged stupor, or just released from prison.  

In the same way that you do not buy a meat pie for the meat, you do not expect to meet the finest and best of mankind on long distance buses. I mean, you wouldn’t expect to slip into an empty seat beside the corduroy-wearing Stephen Fry, would you? Hardly. The whole experience is infected with an inexpressible melancholy, punctuated by occasional eruptions of violence as passengers lapse into psychotic episodes and are abruptly ejected from the bus. Additionally, there is the smell. It is a heady bouquet of stale, BO-steeped upholstery and grim, unspecified despair, and it increases in intensity the further back into the bowels of the bus you go. Apparently the Pioneer bus company has become the Premier bus company and has drastically cut back on trips and drastically jacked up their prices.  I wonder where this has left the dangerously disordered and the chronically down and out who genuinely need the bus service to travel up and down the coast? When is the world going to be arranged to benefit the people who need small mercies such as these?  

In other NRL art news (not a sentence I ever expected to write, but something I feel we could all do with more of in our lives), a portrait of Ryan Tandy has been entered in the Archibald competition. It’s a full frontal nude and he is depicted, just as nature intended, with a blue pig lying by his side. It took me aback when I saw it. I stared in a kind of frozen astonishment. The last I saw of Tandy he was being unceremoniously evicted from his apartment, hauling boxes and sweating profusely. He was locked into the slow, untidy spiral of decline that had seen him charged with match fixing and fired from the Bulldogs amid accusations of a gambling problem and substantial debts.

Clearly his personal decision making processes leave something to be desired, but, still, moments of mental collapse happen to the both the best and worst of us, and, if they didn’t our lives wouldn’t be enriched by wonderful moments such as Mel Gibson being caught driving with an open bottle of tequila clenched between his thighs and calling a cop “sugar-tits”. Mad respect to anyone who brings the term sugar-tits back to public prominence.

Really wakes up your interest in the visual arts, all this, doesn’t it?

*Me- “Was that takeaway in Moruya called the Red Rose Café?”

-Brother- “Yeah. Wasn’t that where we used to buy footy cards too?”