SADDLE UP

Pretty sure there’s a rip in the space/time continuum at the moment. How else to account for the fact that the only way I have been able to gauge the passing of time lately* is by deducing what day I put my rubbish out (Monday) and using that as some kind of tragically domestic and slightly deranged touchstone?

Well all that is soon to be over. The 2012 NRL season is but moments away. This means that I will be giving myself over to the tyranny of time-sucking televised football. No more seeking comfort from fatty foods and firearms, then. Good, good. And at least you know where you are with televised football. Even during those mesmerising moments when it’s difficult to determine where the sport ends and where the theatre begins you generally still know where you are. By this I mean that you understand the hideous, soul-shrinking pointlessness of life and recognise that you are an insignificant and odious being caught up in the unforgiving machinations of a materialistic and hostile world but are able to spend eighty lucid minutes several times a week altogether untroubled by these rude realities. It’s a portal, football, much the same as flannel sheets and fairy bread. It’s more than just a game, too – it’s something to hold on to, a fixed point in the ephemeral modern world. It will also quench my depraved thirst for titillation, meaning I will have no further need for Manu Feidel (he’s French, in case you missed it). So. 2012. Not a new world, no, but a brave new beginning nonetheless. (And I don’t know why but the epic bombast of November Rain is echoing in my head right now.)

*I did know the New Dawn was soon to break because 6 or 7 weeks ago my brother sent me a text telling me about his annual round of long-range bets: “I just put $10 on Souths for the wooden spoon and $10 on Campo for the dally M. How do you like those apples?” Clearly I fucking love those apples. (Last year, at around this same time, he put money on Dugan winning the Clive Churcher medal – you know, the one that is awarded to whatever player did interesting and/or amazing work in THE GRAND FINAL?? Far-sighted realism has always been his thing.)

Bernard Tomic - The Teenage Dream

Ned Flanders said you’re never alone when you’ve got a fluorescent light. Word. C.S. Lewis said we read to know we are not alone. Word again. I say you know you're not alone when you’re watching sports.

Bernard Tomic administered a five set beating with dramatic splendor last night and, bless the boy’s cotton socks, delivered me to that state of almost narcotic sports-induced bliss. Talk about a bristling thriller. Tennis. Goddamn. What a game. It’s gladiatorial. Two men enter the arena and only one leaves. In a figurative rather than a literal sense, but still. And both players have to lug their own kit bags. I just love this; the way both victor and loser have to set about fussily stowing their gear in those giant bags in the game’s immediate aftermath. It speaks of gritty realism and real-world truth – win or lose YOU CARRY YOUR OWN SHIT.

These – what is the word I’m searching for? – shitheels who only last year were painting Tomic as a demanding and combustible boy overburdened by ego and poised for a slow crash into the chasm of oblivion can today AND FOREVER MORE endure the wretchedness of looking into the dirty mirror of truth and seeing themselves reflected as the fuckwits that they are. Wily precociousness is GO!     

And for the rest of us, this now affords the opportunity to marinate in the self-satisfied smugness that comes from longtime, ‘before they were cool’ fandom. Back when he was all emaciated-adorable swagger, remember? Yes.

There are many reasons to love Bernard Tomic. Here are just four:

1. He has the sheen of a beautiful youth strolling through Elysian fields and at the same time he exudes dark, eastern European cragginess. His father coaches him and, unlike the Dokics, the two of them constitute a charming narrative wherein the weight of European history is exchanged for New World optimism. John Tomic is just dour and spiky enough to preserve the thread of gothic intensity running through this story, and Bernard has just about the right mixture of jovial intensity and together the two are an aching invocation of how truly awesome tennis is.

2. He used his racket to walk a cricket off the court in the middle of round two, thereby saving it from certain death by tennis shoe and endearing himself to me, and, upon my retelling, my judgemental mother, who has never missed an opportunity to comment on how she cares not for his 'hard cold face'. Wench.

3. He crosses himself. Subtly, though. He doesn't, like, drop to his knees in the way of religiously demonstative NFL quarterback Tim Tebow. That would be wack.

4. He goes for the Gold Coast Titans. He is a huge fan. Fantastic. I love finding out people I rate support loser teams. It's one of life's great levellers.   

I love You Lleyton Hewitt

Summer. Uggh.

I’ve lived in this part of the country for a long time. You’d think I’d be getting the hang of things by now. But no. The specifics of the seasons continue to surprise and unnerve me. And by ‘surprise and unnerve’ I mean ‘make me feel suicidal/homicidal of a morning and, as my energy levels drop through the afternoon, wearily nihilistic by nightfall. So, summer. It just gets so goddamned HOT. Even if you’re lucky enough to lose consciousness at some point you eventually come to feeling like your internal organs have undergone a session in a thermally-heated slow-cooker, which in a way they pretty much have. The punishing nature of my work means that I am left devoid of the energy and inclination to do anything much of, oh, say, anything other than watching boxed sets of HBO television series and reading four and five day old newspapers with that kind of glazed immobility that comes over you when you are bone weary busted.

Summer is not the ideal season for those of a morose persuasion. All those people who seem to be inexplicably enjoying themselves? It’s irritating. No, summer is not for me. I prefer cooler weather. I can coat myself in goose fat and legitimate my melancholia.

I live in a town that fills with people from Melbourne’s outer suburbs over summer. Bogans. They swarm in and set up elaborate camps all over the banks of the Murray and amuse themselves hurling their obnoxious water crafts over the water at high speeds. Occasionally they crash them; run them up banks or wrap them around submerged trees and such. This leads to deaths and various forms of paralysis but it never seem to thin out their ranks any. Every year, more and more holidaying bogans; they come and they come. And every year the town runs out of meat and ice and bait and parking spaces. They all seem to have a terrific time, crashing about in the bush and crashing about on the water and drinking like fishes and emptying the town of its vital supplies.

Because I work outside every day under the brain-boiling sun of the punishing nature of my work out under the sun I tend to look at their zealous commitment to al fresco leisure as the last word in lunacy. I stagger to the supermarket after work looking like a walking autopsy and am made twitchy by plague proportions of boardshort wearing bogans exuding their special kind of frenetic, abrasive energy; buying huge quantities of sauce and Reef tanning oil and pre-mixed pasta salad and, out in the car park, staggering and reeling under the weight of the two or three slabs piled against their chest and obstructing their vision and mobility. Good people.

In any case, total respect to those who take charge of two tonnes of speeding metal over the Christmas and New Year’s period to drive hundreds of miles across the country in an insane pursuit of holiday happiness. Props. Also, I like people who appreciate inland beauty. This obsession Australians have with the coast perplexes me. The Murray is in something of a ragged and shabby state but it has a kind of faded elegance; it’s wide and serene and quietly majestic and goes about its timeless business of just rolling on and that’s about all you can ask of a river, isn’t it? There’s something to be said for people who chose to take their holiday somewhere out in the continental vastness, in indeterminate farming country, in the stinking summer heat, far from the cool afternoon sea breeze that blows over places like Lorne and Portsea of an afternoon.

Bill Bryson wrote something about the days before air-conditioning came along in America, and the special kind of grimy summer heat that used to characterise American cities, and how

“people spent every waking moment trying to alleviate it – wiping their necks with capacious handkerchiefs, swallowing cold glasses of lemonade, lingering by open refrigerators, sitting listlessly before electric fans.

The world has changed a lot since those days, of course.

Everywhere you go is air-conditioned, so the air is always as cool and clean as a freshly laundered shirt. People don’t wipe their necks much anymore or drink sweating glasses of lemonade, or lay their bare arms gratefully on cool marble soda fountains, because nowadays summer heat is something out there, something experienced only briefly when you sprint from your parking lot to your office or from your office to the luncheon counter down the block.”

I don't know about you but Bill Bryson has the uncanny knack of making me feel nostalgic, homesick, even, for a time and a place that I've never known. I'm not entirely sure I even know what a soda fountain is but he has me and my bare arms right there on it. Remarkable.

HOWEVER. January sees my horizon expand to such a degree that I have  Something! To Look! Forward To! I know. Talk about insane optimism. If that sounds like it's the sun-baked delerium taking hold and warping my perspective, you're only partially right, because January is also the time that the Australian Open comes to town.

I look forward to the Australian Open with a fervor that is vaguely religious in scope and intensity. Strapping athletes straining through a series of intense and increasingly grueling encounters and Andy Roddick throwing a series of strops is a perfect accompaniment to the rigorous do-nothingness that summer afternoons, evenings and nights demand. I have a very real and personal appreciation the opportunity it affords to sprawl hypnotized in front of the box for hours on end watching that little ball being pinged back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It’s immeasurably soothing. It is cool balm for my fevered forehead. Sometimes it puts me into a state of almost narcotic bliss. What happens here is that sets and then games blend together so that they have no start or finish but are just continuous, like time. It's lovely. It's how I imagine heroin must feel.

I also appreciate the Australian Open for bringing John McEnroe back into our midst. That naff advertisement for his up-coming commentary role on Fox Sports? The one where he’s screaming “You have got to be KIDDING ME” at his answer phone - the veins of his forehead lively - as his agent leaves a series of messages suggesting increasingly ludicrous but kind of cool (“McEnroe – the musical”) career options? It excites my imagination every time. I know. My brain wants nothing to do with reason. It never has, especially during the summer months. Ergo: I look forward to Jim Courier, too. I like his egotistical waffle and his quiet but lacerating disdain for most things un-American and his poorly timed and mostly mediocre anecdotes. It goes without saying that I also like his carefully styled hair. I find it vulgar and tragic and perfectly suited to a man of his character and temperament – ie. a man who would greet friends and strangers alike with a non-traditional handshake. Yes, a knob.  

But you know what I look forward to the most? Lleyton Hewitt getting into the commentary box. My Hewitt-love is nothing short of strenuous. The poor bastard has had a torrid time of it, what with being cast by large portions of the population and media as a thorn in the side of the Australian psyche. This has always been unwarranted. God love him, though, he’s always stayed faithful to his own universe. It had long been my belief that Hewitt, along with Laurie Daly, is in possession of one of the sharpest sporting minds in Australia. This was brought home with some force last year when he did guest commentary at the Open and startled , oh, I don’t know; EVERYONE with the skillful truth, charm, grace and intelligence of his observations. Let me tell you something. There’s a reason that Hewitt and Daly have those sharp and darting laser-like eyes, and that reason is that they have spent their entire athletic careers seeing shit that other people - those in possession of slower-moving, bovine-like eyes - routinely overlook or misread. Fundamental truth #1. 

Being misunderstood was all part of his package as a player, but it would be lovely if the weak chinned cowards with ashtray eyes to whom his singular, seagull-eyed intensity posed innumerable threats could see him as the huge-hearted fighter that he is and thereby marinate in their own uniquely Australian blend of guilt and hypocrisy for a while. That would be nice.

Fundamental Truth #2:

“It’s hard to be a decent person when you have your boot on someone’s neck”

– some old saying: origins unknown (to me at least.)

In any case, I am very fucking keen for the Australian Open to begin so that I can 'slip into something more comfortable' - ie. a glassy-eyed horizontal tennis-trance.

egh

 HELLOis this thing on

Josh Dugan in 2011...& those other guys..

2011. I know all this eye-bulging, jaw-slackeningly mesmerising shit happened because I have a vague, sepia-tinged recollection of the overall season housed in my head. Problem is that this off-season has been dragging like an absolute bastard, and things are becoming blurry. Also, the tedium of the finals series forced my mind to retreat into a place of wind-blown splendour, where separated lovers think about each other and stare out of windows into rainy nights. It was a choice between that or confronting the hideous reality of Sydney's northern beaches, and my mind cannot process plague proportions of affluent WASPS any more than it can accept the carpet that covers the floor of my ensuite. Carpet around a toilet is, like people who live in Manly, a concept too terrible to bear. Anyway. Because my general posture is backward-looking and nostalgic I'll try to sift through the bored shards of my off-season psyche and dredge up some of the high and lowlights of last season.

Let's start with the people I love or approve of.

-Josh Dugan's Origin debut. Seeing him cross his arms and tap his sky-blue clad shoulders as he ran out of the tunnel looking hotter than the centre of the sun was a sight to squeeze the hardest of hearts. I shed tears.

Just on this -  it's been a terribly long time since I've seen any new Josh Dugan pictures and experienced the heart arrythmia that accompanies this. What, do 'they' think we have better things to do over summer or something? Because 'they' are wrong. Damn wrong. I can only assume he's doing okay there in Canberra. I mean, as okay as anybody can be in Canberra (don't start me). Josh Dugan underwent a brief excursion into irrelevance last season. I didn't like it. I can't imagine he enjoyed it much either. Bitch just kept on getting himself hurt, and the Raiders kept on losing and the whole season had a horribly monotonous, yet anxious rhythm and was as unsatisfying and unsubstantial as a bowl of rice bubbles: ie. shithouse. The essence of football is knowing what's going on, and knowing who's liable to do what in any given situation. Josh Dugan took this far too far last season. How many times do we gotta see him doubled over and clutching at a colt-like leg or limping from the field, grimacing so hard that his face looks like an old man's knee? How many times, Lord? His constant injuries resonated with me in a painful fashion. Usually I'm a fan of a little painful resolution, but not in these many instances. It fucking blew. On a vaguely related and similarly painful note, the Raiders receieved ten percent of the vote in Rugby League Week's readers' poll for the 'club that won't win another premiership in the next ten years' category. Sad.

-Todd Carney drinking himself out of another club. You gotta love him. Whatever he does he gives it his goddamn ALL. And we will know him by his trail of empties.

- Paul Gallan's audacious performance in Origin II. Gal played out of position at front row and for the whole eighty minutes. What a warrior. He should be stuffed and mounted in a glass case and hung on the wall over my fireplace.

-Terry Campese's seven minute season. Yes, Campese played for approximately seven minutes, for the entire season. On the upside, this gave him time to knock his wife up again about five minutes after she had their first baby, which is nice.

-Jarryd Hayne. He saved someone from drowning in the sea and then spent the rest of the season headbutting people with simple-minded merriment and considerable panache. Players, punters, whoever. He's brilliant. Such is his charm that everybody loves him all the more for his bursts of violence. Plus he rocks rosary beads like nobody else, with the possible exeption of Madonna circa 1986.

-The words 'he's just a grub.' Post game press conferences can be painful to watch. The air is often thick with unreality. Players and coaches (discounting Tim Sheens) habitually squander the opportunity to judge, slander and insult opposing teams, coaches, referees, fellow teammates and the people who set the prices for the stadium snack bars. This is a damn shame. A grim-faced Nathan Hindmarsh did his bit to rectify this when he capped off a spiteful Eels Bulldogs game by refusing to elaborate on Michael Ennis beyond these four words, forced from between gritted teeth: "he's just a grub." Excellent. More, please.

-Michael Ennis being voted the game's 'Biggest Grub' by fifty one percent of the RWL poll. Legend. He compounded this by extending his scope and burning the shit out of Brendan Cowell on the League Lounge with a derogatory comment about his cardigan. Bless.

-JT watching QLD celebrate their sixth straight Origin series from a wheelchair with his head lolling around like a bladder on a stick. This was actually a terrible sight, but JT is so cool that he can carry off wheelchair-bound weeping while loaded on pain-killing drugs and still look like Harry Callahan.

-Benji Marshall belting someone who yelled out "hey Benji, Lockyer's better than you!" outside McDonalds on George Street and being found not guilty. Good to see that his nifty sidestep also applies to matters of the law.

-Ricky Stuart losing his fucking mind in the coaching box when the Blues won Origin II and unleashing a frenzied flurry of punches into assistant coach Gavin Wood's ribcage.

-Jamal Idris rag-dolling the nippy but not nippy enough Nathan Gardner by lifting him up by his ripped-down shorts, like a piece of carry-on luggage, and tossing him around, bare-assed, for a good thirty seconds. Mark Geyer compounded the hilarity later by pointing out that "you could see his junk" You could, and we did.

-The Battle of Brookvale. Awesome. This was an explosion of violence so glorious that it should have been italicised with a burst of surging trumpets. Anybody who watched any of the three thousand replays of this charmingly retro incident without miming uppercuts in their living room has no business watching league and should switch codes immediately.

-The Rabbitohs Broncos game played in Perth on the world's worst-draining surface, ie. a lake. It was wild, as all things in the West should rightly be. Senior-cit Bunies coach John Lang launching into a celebratory, 'arthritis-be-damned' belly slide through a puddle afterwards was a lovely and altogether unexpected final flourish.

-Billy Slater holding up play, and David Williams' badly injured neck, after a tackle went bad. Billy Slater is no paragon of virtue - fact is I can't stand the prick - but this just struck me as very sweet and sporting. However, I also remember roaring my approval when Paul Gallan stomped, with undisguised savagery, on an opposing player's neck as he lay twitching on the grass post-tackle, so it's all relative.

-Reni Matuai and his at once attractive and repellant reptile eyes making their NRL return after a two year ban for drug use. He's hot, and he has a bankrupt-soul spookiness about him. Like I said: hot.

-Darren Lockyer kicking the field goal to get the Broncos to the qualifying round with a grotesquely fractured cheekbone. Bonus points for the fact that this put the Dragons out of contention for the season.

-Micheal Jennings handing out two thousand free tickets to fans from his own pocket as punishment for showing up to a training session blind drunk. That'll learn him.


So that's the champions. Now, to turn my attention to the fuckwits and fools.

-Brett Stewart breaking into a  ' giddy-up gallop' to celebrate the club try-scoring record at Manly in a stupid swipe at David Gallop for suspending him for four weeks in 2009.

-Brett Stewart telling David Gallop he owed him an apology when collecting his premiership ring. In the absence of hard proof and the ability to read lips, I can only assume that Gallop's response was somewhere along the lines of "boo-fucken-hoo."

-Brett Stewart becoming increasingly erratic, delusional and paranoid.

-Brett Stewart in general. Just a massively unpleasant person.

-Ryan Tandy. He poured ill-repute on the game like gravel off a fucking dump truck all year long.

-Mark Gasnier announcing his retirement and cutting short his comeback contract by two seasons, allowing him more time to squirt the sauce. Presumably.

-Isaac Luke's incessant canonballing. Small man syndrome. How else to explain his obsession with getting all up in David Shillington's grill (not literally - he only reaches Shilly's waist) on an annual basis in Four Nations games?

-William Hopoate quitting NRL to become a Mormon missionary. Just what God needs: another Hopoate on his hands. This is an exercise in industrial-scale pointlessness that only Ned Flanders could possibly approve of.

-Robert Lui. Ugh.

-Mal Meninga penning that inane column after the Origin series win calling elements of NSW rugby league 'filthy rats', among other things. About as novel as an SBS program with the words 'Nazi Germany' in the title.

-Matt Orford. What a disaster. This nuggety little fuck caused me and every other Raider fan (assumed) a considerable amount of pain early in the season, and as such I don't blame whoever it was that keyed his car at Bruce stadium in what was obviously a well-founded fit of maniacal resentment. His ineptitude was very hard to take, okay? That Titans Raiders game back in April? Where he inexpicably lost the ball in a scrum feed and pushed the game into golden point and then let some only slightly less inept Titan (Greg Bird, I think) cross to snatch the game? Dreadful. A defeat dished up in the incapable hands of the Titans was an especially low-point in a season littered with low points, the key one being that the Raiders suffered their longest ever losing streak. Historic horror.

-The disconcerting trend of players getting their surname inked on their body. No comment necessary.

-John Sutton. When he's not being incompetent on the field, he likes to spend his spare time being a Bra Boy. Deep though my respect is for all things Bra Boy, this guy just cannot fucking play. He's awful, it's fantastic. Watching Souths play disastrous football is one of life's great pleasures. It fires my core.

-Daly Cherry-Evans coming home from the Kangaroo tour with a massive hickey on his neck and being met at the airport by his girlfriend. The Tele provided breathless coverage of the issue as it unfolded, which remarkably did nothing to spoil his aura of apple-pie wholesomeness. (He said one of his 'teammates' gave it to him. Along with the crabs, ringworm and rickets.)

-The increasingly fickle and disposable nature of the whole NRL business. There was a dull sense of agitation and fatigue in the air this season. Players and coaches were shuffled, traded and shunted relentlessly. It was distracting. It's also an irritating and unwelcome reminder that the game is no game at all. We know this is the case, of course, but rude and ill-timed reminders (see: Manly one week after winning premiership, the poor bastards) detract from the joy of the game. We have so little opportunity for unadulterated escapism as it is, is there no place where we can retreat from this shit?

So that there is 2011 as I remember it. This has restored in me a sense that I am in charge of things - meaning my faculties, mostly, but also that all my grudges, obsessions and irritations are in order. This is comforting. It doesn't go so far as to suggests that my eye for the 2012 season will be infused with Sphinx-like focus and cathedral-like calm, but I imagine that kind of simple serenity would fucking suck.

Nothing Like a Good Piece of Ass.