3/03/00
Fallen Idols
Summary:
This week, the flip side of sporting genius. If, as it's often claimed, sport is supposed to build character and teach useful lessons for life, why is it that some of sport's greatest winners lead chaotic lives beyond sport? President of the Australian ociety for Sports History ROY HAY discusses this in relation to Gary Ablett, Diego Maradona, and others.
Plus, "many are called, few are chosen". While athletes are now competing in selection events for the 2000 Olympics, New South Wales Institute of Sport psychologist JOHN CRAMPTON explains the plans he's putting in place to help pick up the pieces for those athletes who fail to qualify.
Also, cricket biomechanist JOHN HARMER details why he thinks the Pakistani fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar is not a chucker. And how the endlessly fraught issue of suspect and illegal bowling actions should now be dealt with by cricket authorities. And yachting commentator ROB MUNDLE reports from Auckland on the America's Cup.
Details or Transcript:
THEME
Amanda Smith: On The Sports Factor this week, creative genius in sport, in particular those sportspeople who are utterly brilliant on the field, but whose lives are otherwise chaotic.
Amanda Smith: Also coming up, how cricket authorities should deal with bowlers whose actions are considered suspect or illegal; it’s an aspect of the game that continues to be a murky one;
And, as our Olympic hopefuls are now starting to compete in selection trials, what happens to those who don’t qualify, who miss out on their chance to compete in the big one in September?
Before that though, to the dark side of sporting genius. This comes to mind in relation to the former Australian Football champion, Gary Ablett, regarded by many as the greatest player ever of this game. But the famous Number 5 for the Geelong Football Club had a reputation for being ‘hard to handle’, and often pretty out of control in his private life. Two weeks ago, a young woman with whom Ablett was sharing a hotel room in Melbourne died of a suspected drug overdose, another sad and strange episode in the troubled life of the player known as ‘God’.
MUSIC/FOOTBALL COMMENTARY/SONG: ‘Ablett’s in the Air’
Gary Ablett: I’d just like to congratulate Hawthorn, and I’d like to thank the Geelong Football Club, and I’d just like to thank God for making it all possible. Thank you.
POEM: ‘The 11th Commandment (Ode To Ablett)’
It was really quite amazing
And the people stood there, gazing
Up towards the Great Messiah who had marked the Holy Tablet,
And I think that they were knowing
When the Number Five was showing,
On a blue-and-white striped singlet
And the angels chanted ‘Ablett’.
Now you probably think I’ve gypped youse
But the truth is in the Scriptures
So I bid you have a read of them before you call me odd.
But if your Bible’s somehow skinner
Then I’d go out to Kardinia
Where still these days the crowds give praise
To Number five, their God.
Amanda Smith: But why is it that some of sport’s greatest winners seem to be losers in life? Roy Hay is the President of the Australian Society for Sport History, and he’s been thinking about this as it relates not only to Gary Ablett, but also to some of soccer’s greatest players, players like Diego Maradona, the Argentine superstar of the ‘80s; and George Best, Manchester United’s best of the 1960s, both of whom lost control of their lives with drugs or alcohol. Nevertheless, each was regarded as a genius at their game, if such a thing as ‘genius’ is possible to define. Roy Hay:
Roy Hay: The characteristics I’m looking for are the people who in a sense, raise your expectations of what is actually possible within the limits of the game. I think in most walks of life, people are always trying to push the boundaries and trying to test themselves to the ultimate limit, and in doing so, they create a different set of expectations in the minds of the spectators, or the groups with whom they’re working. And it seems to me that people like Ablett did that for Australian Rules Football.
But it’s those people who in a sense, transform your sense of what is possible within the bounds of the sport. There have been people like Don Bradman, who I think did it over a lifetime. But the ones that really interest me are those mercurial types that you identified in your introduction, the ones who have mercurial careers on the field, really change your expectations, but somehow don’t seem to be able to cope with life outside the sport in which they’ve been involved.
Amanda Smith: Well those who advocate the positive benefits of sport, Roy, often talk about how sport builds character, and co-operation and discipline, those sorts of qualities, and that you learn through sport to play the game of life. So you’d think it might follow from that, that the better you are at your sport, the better your life skills might be, and yet this seems not to be the case at all with someone like Gary Ablett, as you mentioned. What are your thoughts on why?
Roy Hay: That’s again quite the critical edge isn’t it? Because I think in general, sporting communities do teach youngsters a fair range of what are very useful skills: how to win and lose, how to work in a team, how to cope with adversity, how to cope with injury, how to cope with political questions, how to organise your life and finances, you’ve got to negotiate salary, sometimes you have an agent to do this but for many people it’s an exercise they have to perform themselves. So all these things you would think would translate into the big world outside. But the cases we are talking about are the ones where the athletes become almost deified. I mean you mentioned Ablett as God, and people have taken the sort of characters I’m interested in and put them on a pedestal, and really said, ‘Look, you are different from the normal run-of-the-mill people; you have characteristics which are unique. And therefore somehow you need to be treated differently; the normal rules don’t apply.’ And there is this sense in which those limited number of really great practitioners of the sport, the expectations of them are different from those of the run-of-the-mill journeyman who form the bulk of our sporting stars.
Amanda Smith: But are you saying that you think that inhibits in fact, that character development that is possible through sport?
Roy Hay: I think so. I mean the image of Ablett particularly, as this character who rides on the shoulders of the other athletes as he takes the marks, and in a sense has ridden on the shoulders of the Geelong Football Club, going back earlier to the Hawthorn Football Club, who went to great lengths first of all to capture and then to retain him within the sport, and latterly to support him through all sorts of activities which if performed by lesser players would have resulted in being straight down the road. But because Ablett’s genius was such that it seemed worthwhile to retain it, that the rules did not apply. And that set up enormous tensions inside each of the organisations with which they were involved, as other lesser players looked round and saw the superstar getting away with things which they couldn’t even aspire to. And so instead of having to wrestle with many of life’s problems, these superstars were, in a sense, cotton-wooled from, or insulated from, and it was certainly true in the case of Ablett.
Amanda Smith: What do you see then as the parallels between George Best, Diego Maradona, in soccer, and Gary Ablett in Australian Football?
Roy Hay: Well first of all that their life is not their own from a very early age. They are deprived of things which people in other circumstances would regard as normal. And that’s not just by being put in the sport, and therefore insulated to that extent. It’s because they are identified as super talents and somehow treated as exceptional, even within that context. I don’t know how you would develop the strength of character not to eventually think that this is normal, and the lives that other people lead are somehow abnormal. And so when that is suddenly ripped away from you, as it is, because the sports career even for a Maradona or a Best or an Ablett is relatively short; it’s what? a quarter of their life at most, if they’re lucky. And they have a long time to come to terms with life outside that. So that’s the first thing.
And then there are all these pressures and adulations and expectations that go with the super stardom: the lifestyle that you’re expected to adopt; the fact that you have a mass of hangers-on who are associated with the club. I mean in many cases these are well-meaning people who have your interests at heart and are trying to provide support and keep you on the straight and narrow, but there are others who are there because they like being associated with genius, with stardom, with power, with the aphrodisiacs of wealth and charisma, and so on. And sometimes these influences are not good.
And then there are absolutely cynical people who see the superstar as the meal ticket, and each one of them has these stories of being ruthlessly exploited by people because of the goodness of their heart on the one hand, and the unworldliness, because of the patterns of life they’ve been leading, on the other.
Amanda Smith: The downside to sporting genius. And that was Roy Hay, the President of the Australian Society for Sport History.
Well, let’s swap around now to those whose difficulties are very much on the field of play. If you’re a bowler in cricket, probably the most horrible thing that can happen to you is to be accused of throwing, rather than correctly bowling, the ball, as happened this summer in Australia to the Pakistani pace bowler, Shoaib Akhtar. The whole business of legitimate, or illegitimate deliveries in cricket continues to be a murky area to identify and to control, and this week, the International Cricket Council announced that it once again needs to review how it is going to handle situations such as arose with Shoaib Akhtar this summer.
John Harmer is the coach of the Australian Women’s Cricket Team. He’s also a specialist in the biomechanics of sport, and in particular, cricket, when it comes to bowling actions. And John Harmer believes that in the case of Shoaib Akhtar, it’s an optical illusion that makes it look to some like he’s a chucker.
John Harmer: The work that I’ve done, often a fast bowler can look as if he throws, but in fact the illusion that it brings is that he’s not. And I would doubt that a player at that level would come in an deliberately throw a ball.
Amanda Smith: So why does it appear to some at least, in the case of Shoaib Akhtar, that he is throwing?
John Harmer: Well I think the body is like everything else: there are adaptations to it and people’s joints can actually have variations of flexion and extension in the way they actually operate, and during the bowling action where there’s severe stress put on the shoulder and the elbow and the wrist, because of the speed that the arm is actually being lifted and rotated over, certain illusions can happen, and one is that hyper-extension of the elbow, right? And if I could perhaps explain that: If you held a piece of wood up by the end, it would naturally curve away from you, and that downward curve would be a hyper-extension. So you’ve got that effect.
You’ve got the effect that the bone itself has got some flexion in it, so it will bend a fraction also, and then you’ve got the actual rotation of the hand at a very critical moment on the upswing of the arm, with a ball in it, which is heavier and it’s the end of the arm, so the arm actually bows a little bit more. So you’ve got this illusion that the arm is actually bending.
Amanda Smith: So how do you analyse this bowling action as a sports biomechanist?
John Harmer: Well the only way we can do it is to single frame, using video and camera work, and to still pause it and run it slowly through and watch what’s going to happen. We can use a number of cameras to do this; you can film at various angles, and you’ll be able to detect it. And I would say that if the ICC, ACV, whoever wants to determine if a bowler throws, they could do it with the technology that’s available. Whether they want to go to that expense, that’s another issue. It’s got to be done in the game situation, you can’t do it in a lab, and that makes it very hard.
Amanda Smith: Why is that? Why do you have to do it in a game situation?
John Harmer: Well players know they’re being looked at. They know what you’re trying to do, so they’ll actually produce what they expect the coach or the person doing the analysis is looking for, and if they think that they’re throwing, or that you’re looking for that sort of thing, well they’re not going to come up and do it. So you’ve actually got to do it in the pressure situation where they’re actually bowling.
Amanda Smith: Well suspect bowling actions have long created problems for cricket’s lawmakers. The rules simply say that for a delivery to be fair, the ball must be bowled, not thrown. But what’s the definition of a throw, according to the laws of cricket?
John Harmer: Oh dear, now we’re really … The way I read it is the fact that the arm cannot - if it’s bent, it can’t straighten, if it’s straight it can’t bend. In other words, the arm must stay at a constant angle.
Amanda Smith: Do you think this needs some redefinition in the laws, that’s pretty vague.
John Harmer: I certainly do. It is, and it’s very hard to see. And the umpires, strange but true, are not in the best position to see these sort of things either, from a technical point of view. Because the best time to see is when you’re directly behind the angle of the shoulders of the bowler, which is not directly behind the stumps, and it’s not at square leg or point either. It’s at mid-on, around about that angle, because the shoulder actually rotates as the arm comes over, and at the moment of release, your shoulders are basically facing gully, let’s put it that way.
Amanda Smith: Can you imagine a time when bowlers might be wired up with sensors, to detect any illegal variations in their action?
John Harmer: I can. And you could have irrevocable evidence with that sort of thing. The other thing that’s interesting is that the best time to stop throwing is in their younger years, not at the point when they’ve reached Test cricket; I think that’s very sad that you’ve got to wait for that time to actually be found as a thrower and then actions are taken against you.
Amanda Smith: Well that’s presumably a coaching issue, so you think that’s not being dealt with at the moment?
John Harmer: Exactly right. On the way up, somewhere along the line, they’ve got to get the expert umpires, that is the top umpires that are doing the one-day games and the Tests, look at young players who are suspect or perhaps they’re suspect, or they’re held in doubt by umpires, by cricket associations or whatever, and then they’re viewed and some assessment is made, so they’ve got an opportunity, a real opportunity to change their action, and then not be faced with the very embarrassing situation when they’re playing at the best level that a player can play at.
Amanda Smith: Cricket coach and sports biomechanist, John Harmer.
Now, there’s just over six months left until the Sydney Olympics. And in this lead-up time, athletes across the range of Olympic sports are now competing to qualify. But what happens to those who miss out on being selected? The ones who won’t get a chance to front up at the Games in September? It’s become an issue for Australian track and field athletes, whose final Olympic trials are scheduled to be held at Stadium Australia in August. After last weekend’s Australian Championships at the Stadium, where the wind conditions proved difficult for many athletes, there have been calls for the trials to be held in a different venue, to give Australian athletes the best possible chance of meeting the qualifying times or distances they’ll need to be able to compete in the Games.
Although Cathy Freeman, the world 400 metres champion, has already qualified, she thinks other Australian athletes will be disadvantaged if they have to try to qualify in difficult conditions, and the trials should probably be moved to another venue.
Cathy Freeman: I think if it means people have got a better chance of qualifying, sure. The more I think about it, I think it would be nice to just give people the best possible chance of, you know, this is a dream, an Olympic dream of some people, so why deny them of the opportunity to qualify?
Amanda Smith: Cathy, what were your thoughts about the wind conditions at Stadium Australia?
Cathy Freeman: I’ll be honest with you: sure, in the first round of the 400 metres, yes, what Matt Sherrington said I’d never experienced conditions like that ever before. I had a headwind all the way around, but that’s just the nature of the sport, that’s just - I mean obviously I understand how some of the athletes who haven’t got eight qualifiers obviously are a little bit touchy about it because it may mean the difference between an Olympic spot or not. But I’m only taking care of myself, and I’ve qualified for the Olympics, and I’m happy; and the Olympics are going to be in this Stadium come September, and that’s just the way it is, and just get on with the job.
Amanda Smith: Cathy Freeman, who can get on with the job of the Olympics, having already qualified.
But what about all those other Olympic hopefuls who won’t make selection? After all, many are called, few are chosen.
John Crampton is a sports psychologist at the New South Wales Institute of Sport. And in conjunction with the Australian Olympic Committee, he’s been developing strategies for how these athletes might be helped through what will undoubtedly be a difficult time over the next few months. The need to have a plan in place for this became apparent to John Crampton some time ago.
John Crampton: We became aware of the need over the last, say 18 months at the New South Wales Institute of Sport. There are just a couple of situations that happen with athletes, past scholarship holders, that made us aware that organisationally we really hadn’t taken care of all of the risk management issues.
Amanda Smith: Such as? What happened?
John Crampton: There was one specific instance where a parent actually contacted me and it was a call out of the blue. It actually turned out to be that her son had suicided. Now this is not a standard situation in sport, thank goodness, but unfortunately through a long process where he was quite depressed, and a number of things hadn’t gone right in his career, the mother had come to me because there was almost a check list of things that she had heard that he was going to be doing, one of which he told her, that he was going to contact me. And the mother was asking why did he do it, and besides the challenges that were inherent in that situation, it just made me sit back and realise that there are quite a few athlete situations that perhaps, if you take the organisational perspective, we were actually leaving ourselves open to some potential criticism or even legal action for. But from the individual athlete’s perspective, we didn’t have procedures nicely in place.
The same thing applies in this Olympic situation.
Amanda Smith: Well it seems to me that when you’re pushing hard for something that’s important to you, you sort of can’t risk countenancing the idea of what you want not happening, because you might put the mockers on yourself, and that applies to all of us, in all sorts of situations. But this is probably a particularly intense example that we’re talking about here. But are you actually encouraging athletes to consider, in advance, the possibility of not qualifying for these games?
John Crampton: If I said yes, I’d be open for criticism, but I’ll say yes. The answer is that we really want athletes these days to be looking at their career in total context. Now there are some athletes who, to make the Sydney Games, that would be a bonus because they’re very early in their careers. Unfortunately, what we don’t want to see, (and this is happening, you can hear this in some attitudes from some athletes) ‘I’m trying to make the Sydney Games, and life finishes in October 2000 and there’s nothing that happens afterwards.’ Well in fact, as we know that there are quite a few athletes that have stayed on in their careers in order to compete maybe at their third, maybe at their fourth Olympics this time round. If they retire, as would be predictable, given age and so on and so forth after Sydney, then we really need to have that next generation of athletes ready to take their place. So in a lot of instances, yes we actually have been planning for three, four, five years in some instances, not just to the Sydney Games but also to the Athens Games and also to the 2008 Games wherever that would be, and compete in the Commonwealth Games and World Championships in between.
If you have a single focus that ‘This is the only event that I’m preparing for’, you’re actually making it harder for yourself. Getting ready for selection events is about doing what you do well, and not complicating it.
Amanda Smith: But nevertheless, how are you working at identifying those athletes who are likely to be at risk of going to pieces if they miss out?
John Crampton: The material that we’ve put together at the New South Wales Institute of Sport, along with the Olympic Committee, is trying to identify some filters, if you like. You can look at athletes who maybe should make the team, then perhaps athletes that maybe were to be an outside chance to make the team, but maybe they’re late in their career; maybe athletes that might be an outside chance to make the team but they’re early in their career. So in other words, there’s some categories of different contending athletes. And then you look at the next level which is well, have they put all their eggs in one basket? Are they people who’ve got a nice balance and a longer term plan and a longer term view? Have they had difficulty in terms of some of the political issues around selection in the past? Have they perhaps got a poor track record of performing at selection events? And when you start combining some of those, you can come to a profile or a risk status if you like. I would have to say that with the groups that we’ve been looking at in this instance, that I would be surprised to find more than two, perhaps three athletes in a sport or in a group that are contending, and it’s only because there’s that kind of combination of situations for them that they would become at risk.
Amanda Smith: All right, so say a particular athlete who might be at risk in the terms you’ve described it, say that athlete misses out on a place while a number of his or her peers jubilantly go on to face their big moment in Sydney in September. How are you going to help that athlete who isn’t going to be there?
John Crampton: Well first up, what the AOC has been able to do is facilitate a network of support services that are around the country. Jeff Bond, at the Australian Institute of Sport, has also been involved with this project, and through the resources of the various State institutes and the National Athletic Career and Education Program, there is the potential there to be able to find that athlete who missed the selection, and to make sure that we have the right way of dealing with him first up, and I’ll just add to that if I may. In the New South Wales Institute what we’re looking to do is to identify the social group if you like, around each athlete, and it might be a physiotherapist, it might be a doctor, it might actually be one of strengthening and conditioning staff; it might just be an assistant coach who is the absolute confidante of that athlete. And understanding what that social network is, and where the best resource is, in the couple of days around the announcement time, when you get that major grief reaction, that major emotional reaction, what we don’t want is just not to know where people are at that time. Clearly the selection events are all around the country, so there’s the challenge. The absolute parallel to this I might just add, is the post-Games de-briefing process that we’re also going to be looking at. And there’s a lot of organisational things we’re learning here that are going stand in good stead there. Fundamentally, it s question of knowing where that athlete is, and what sort of support we figure that particular athlete would be requiring. So it’s forewarned is forearmed.
Amanda Smith: John Crampton, who’s the Head of Athlete Management Services at the New South Wales Institute of Sport.
And finally on The Sports Factor, to the world’s most prestigious yachting trophy, the America’s Cup. Yesterday, New Zealand retained possession of the Cup. It’s a best-of-nine race series, but New Zealand’s ‘Black Magic’ beat the Italian yacht, ‘Luna Rossa’ in each of the first five races. So a five-nil lead means New Zealand won the series.
Yachting commentator Rob Mundle joins me now from Auckland.
Rob, since the races began two weekends ago, this America’s Cup final has been a stop-start affair, with lots of postponed races due to lack of wind. Did that take the momentum, the wind out of the sails of the event.
Rob Mundle: Oh Amanda, it certainly did; it was extremely frustrating for everyone concerned. Normally in Auckland at this time of the year they have really strong sea breezes, and so we would have seen fantastic racing. To lose three days of racing just stunned everyone, and really did, as you say, pardon the pun, but knock the wind out of the sails of the event. But now, we’ve got a resolve, a great resolve and a very deserved resolve.
Amanda Smith: Well this is the first time a non-American team has successfully defended their hold on the Cup. But is there as much enthusiasm for the event in New Zealand now as when ‘Black Magic’ challenged and won the Cup in San Diego back in 1995?
Rob Mundle: It’s even bigger, because it’s a home turf win, and if you could see the activity that’s gone on around Auckland over the last few days, and what’s happening with the yacht coming into dock after this last race, the thousands of spectator boats, and I’d hate to count how many, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in Auckland to see the yacht come back and to claim the Cup.
Amanda Smith: Given that this defence and challenge this time around was by a New Zealand and an Italian team respectively, and the first time the United States hasn’t been involved as either holder of the Cup or challenger for it, have Americans lost interest in the America’s Cup?
Rob Mundle: No, there’s no doubt, they’re more determined than ever to come back next time. It’s almost embarrassing, well it is embarrassing, for them to be not part of the event. The Cup isn’t named after America obviously, it was named after a yacht named ‘America’, but the situation is that for America not to be in it really has stunned them and spurred them on to greater things. They’re already planning their challenges for next time, as are a lot of other countries around the world. But I think from here, in not having an American challenger, the America’s Cup will go from strength to strength yet again, as an international event.
Amanda Smith: Yes, well as you mentioned, although the America’s Cup is one of the oldest trophies around in international sport, and next year is the 150th anniversary of it, the America’s Cup didn’t actually begin as an American event, did it?
Rob Mundle: No, it started in Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, in 1851 when the Americans were invited to go across and compete against the best yachts that Britain had to offer. The race was around the Isle of Wight and it was one yacht named ‘America’ that raced a fleet of British yachts, and that American yacht, ‘America’ just absolutely cleaned up by a huge margin. They took the Cup back to America and it became The ‘America’s’ Cup; it was held by the New York Yacht Club, and that was in 1851, and as we all know it wasn’t until 1983 that they parted company with the Cup and that was when our own ‘Australia II’ took the Cup away.
Amanda Smith: How could we forget? Well, we’ll let you go and celebrate with a few Kiwis now, Rob. Rob Mundle, thank you very much for joining me.
Rob Mundle: My pleasure, thank you.
Amanda Smith: Yachting writer and commentator Rob Mundle, speaking to me from Auckland, the scene of New Zealand’s America’s Cup win.
And that’s it for The Sports Factor for another week. Michael Shirrefs is the Program Producer, and I’m Amanda Smith. Thanks for your company, and I hope you’ll join me again next week for The Sports Factor. Cheers.
THEME
Guests on this program:
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Roy Hay President of The Australian Society For Sport History |
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John Harmer Cricket Coach and Sports Biomechanist |
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Cathy Freeman Australian sprinter and World 400 metres champion |
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John Crampton Sports Psychologist at the NSW Institute of Sport |
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Rob Mundle Yachting writer & commentator and author of "Fatal Storm" |
Presenter:
Amanda Smith
Producer:
Michael Shirrefs
©1999 Australian Broadcasting Corporation