Playing it by the books
The serious side to a weekend away, PLUS: Sam Cane calls it a day, Aimee Fisher's big call, Michael Hendry's big win and more.
The ghostwriting version of The Bounce headed to Featherston this past weekend for the Booktown Festival. Head On: Rugby, Dementia and the Hidden Cost of Success, Carl Hayman’s memoir, took a feature slot in the three-day programme.
It was my first appearance at something like this. I was far from my comfort zone but took solace in the idea that as the ghost I could drift in and out largely unnoticed. In my room at the Royal Hotel there was a vintage, gilt-edged copy of Around the World in Eighty Days; I liked to think that the next day I would be Passepartout, a mere valet.
This restful thought was shattered the night before the session when the presenter was struck down with vertigo. My Long-Suffering is vulnerable to the condition so I know that it is no laughing matter, but selfishly I cared less about the poor bugger whose head felt like it was in a tumble dryer than I did about my sudden elevation from “valet” to host.
I furiously started to make my own introductory notes and question threads, which I was anxious to run past Carl in plenty of time before we hit the stage. That meeting didn’t settle my nerves. Carl wanted me to abandon the notes and just “wing it”. I might have tried to gently persuade him that a paying audience deserved something more than winging it, but I didn’t want to push it: this was his book and his show and if he was going to insist that I not take my iPhone notes on stage with me then I was just going to have to… lie.
The notes came with me. The talk went swimmingly. Carl was switched on. So blasé beforehand, there must be something of the performer in him left over from his playing days because he knew what buttons to push. A joke about Cardiff here, a self-deprecating line or two there; he instinctively knew when to lighten the mood.
Yet underneath it all, the subject matter remains dark. Carl’s battles with his brain and his struggles with himself are writ large in the book and they continue. He can smile and sign books for the line of people waiting. He’ll have a ready quip and make someone’s day by simply telling him what it was like to pack down with and against Andy Sheridan. That’s the easy bit. It’s when the line of people ends that the uncertainty starts.
Carl talked about the death of Billy Guyton and how it brought to mind his own darkest thoughts.
Perhaps no surprise then, that I found this Jonathan Horn column on the death of former Fremantle Docker Cam McCarthy to be the most powerful piece of sports writing of the weekend.
I was surprised to learn that since the Dockers’ inception as an AFL club in 1995, four of the 250 players who have represented them have died and three were in their 20s.
This paragraph in particular stood out.
When I write about footballers, I’m often struck by how little I know about them. We assess them, rank them, reorder them, build them up, and pull them into line. When they retire, some get laps of honour, some go straight into the Hall of Fame, and some are farewelled via a media release. But they remain a grey blur.
There is so much truth to that line. The type of changes that were starting to dehumanise athletes were coming into force by the time I became a journalist.
The rise in influence of comms departments, players’ associations and talent management agencies has reduced the athlete-public interface to a transaction. Manicured social media posts hint at brand power more than the existence of real people.
Yet these athletes are still made of flesh, bone and blood, and they still have the same fears and anxieties as the rest of us.
Writes Horn: Remember we’re talking about a person. Some of them weird, some of them different, all of them flawed, all of them worthy.
For many, who have spent their young adult lives conditioned to be unbreakable, the sudden realisation that they’re flawed, damaged or heaven forbid different, comes with consequences.
You hope that stories like McCarthy’s and Guyton’s will be the last reminder you’ll need of that, but you fear they won’t.
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