Richmond supporters will be waiting for Tom Stewart on Friday night. It’s been coming for nine months. He’ll be booed as vociferously as a footballer can be these days. He’s fair game, apparently. He’s a magnificent footballer and a big boy. He rearranged Dion Prestia’s face and now it’s payback time. “Good, clean fandom,” the broadcaster Gerard Whateley called it this week.
But what happened at the MCG last Sunday was more complicated than good, clean fandom. It was a particularly spiteful beginning to the Magpies v Swans game and the Collingwood crowd was riled up. At first the booing of Lance Franklin seemed benign. They booed the umpires, they booed Tom Papley (whose entire on-field persona invites opprobrium) and they booed Franklin. It was puerile and it was tedious, but it wasn’t all that unusual. In recent years, duckers, hitmen, smart arses, Christians and No 1 draft picks have all been booed. So why did Franklin become the story? And why was he booed in the first place?
It’s a vexed question on so many fronts, and a frustrating one because booing is, on almost every level, stupid and infantile. After the game coaches and players said they just couldn’t understand it: “Why boo a champion?” Maybe some would claim it was out of a grudging respect. The last time Franklin played Collingwood at the MCG, he kicked one of the goals of the century. He has an imposing record against the Magpies. He was pivotal in the preliminary final last year.
Maybe they were trying to be the “19th man”. The way Collingwood fans rally behind their team is incredible, it was definitely a factor in their Anzac Day comeback. The team feeds off that energy. Maybe certain sections of fanbase simply thought they were doing their bit.
Maybe it was resentment: “He gets paid obscene money, he has a beautiful wife, he’s everything I’m not. Let’s bring him down a peg or two.”
Maybe, and hear me out, if you treat people like children, they’re going to act like it. When you go to the football, you’re treated as a consumer, not a spectator. The AFL is all too happy to whip us into a state of frenzy, to burst our eardrums, ply us with booze and treat us like imbeciles, and then reprimand us via press release when we act accordingly.
If the booing itself was infantile, the reaction has been heartening, depressing, bewildering and all too familiar. We’ve had carefully worded statements, “whataboutery” and moral grandstanding. “Don’t disrespect a champion,” has been the theme. But as noble a sentiment as that is, surely that’s not what this is about. Surely this is about Adam Goodes. Surely it’s about an outgoing chief executive and a wider industry that completely misread the situation and left a champion footballer and a decent man at the mercy of the horde. It’s about administrators, clubs and journalists who are terrified, to the point of overcorrection, of making the same mistake again. In which case it doesn’t really matter why Collingwood fans booed Franklin.
Goodes, like Franklin, had a swagger about him that rubbed the usual suspects the wrong way. But they got him in the end. They wore him down. There was a really clear point where, as a footy fan, an adult, a voter, possibly a parent, you had a choice – you could continue to boo this man, to humiliate him, denigrate him and drive him out of the game, or you could stop.
We are nowhere near that point with Franklin. He hasn’t been forced to beg for our restraint, the way Goodes had to. He’s always been a solar but mostly silent superstar. “I haven’t got much to say,” he told reporter Tom Browne, the son of the Collingwood president, who travelled 700km for the comment. But the echoes, the battle lines and the potential tinderbox of the Goodes affair are all there, being tiptoed around.
The fear now is that a whole new category of booers will emerge: “You’re calling me a racist and telling me how to behave? You, a football club, are telling me to support an Indigenous voice to parliament? I’m pushing back, this is my tiny rebellion.”
On the flipside, there’s the danger that we’re going to police booing to within an inch of its life – that every time a Tom (Papley, Stewart or even Browne) is booed at the football, we’ll be sending them bouquets and psychologists the next day.
That’s how vexed this issue is, how much of a mess it is. And that’s how stupid booing is. For the people running the game and driving this narrative, a good starting point would be to admit what this is actually about: not letting history repeat.
For the rest of us, the ideal scenario would be to stop booing. That’s clearly not going to happen. The next best thing would be to accept that not all boos are the same. A boo directed towards Joel Selwood is freighted differently to one at Franklin. It may initially come from the same witless place but it’s rarely received the same way. When Goodes was booed, the sentiment from his fellow Indigenous players was the same – when you boo him, you boo our people.
If you boo Stewart on Friday night, and you boo Franklin into retirement, the tone, the impact and the context will be completely different. There’s no need to microwave your membership or bemoan a world gone soft. In this sport, in this country and at this point in our history, it’s worth reflecting on what it means to boo an Aboriginal footballer. Failing all that, try not to be a dickhead. It’s not that hard.
