HOCKING’S DO ATTITUDE
WHEN WHISKAS WAS THE NAME ON EVERYONE’S LIPS
arrived at the MCG, the fact that one of the players on the field had renamed himself after a pet food was the most interesting thing about the fixture.
Geelong had a run-through emblazoned with a cartoon of Hocking, the warning, “The Cats Are Hungry”, and the exhortation, “Go Whiskas!”
As the game began, puzzled Richmond fans might have wondered if Hocking’s — or, rather, Whiskas’s — ruse had taken in their coach, Jeff Gieschen.
Given the job of silencing Geelong’s veteran midfield engine was Duncan Kellaway, more accustomed to playing in defence, alongside his younger brother Andrew.
Gieschen’s gamble paid off. By half-time, Hocking’s sponsors might have been doubting the wisdom of their investment: Whiskas had barely had a touch on the field, and for that reason had spent more than 15 minutes of game time off it, benched by Cats coach Gary Ayres. Whiskas’s teammates had picked up some of the slack, however, and at the main break Geelong were just two goals adrift.
The Cats edged three points closer during the third quarter, but disintegrated in the last as Richmond ran away by 35 points.
Matthew Richardson was almost precisely the difference between the teams, finishing with six goals for the Tigers.
Whiskas had a dreadful game, only six kicks and four handballs, few of which went where intended; commentators calling the game were relieved to be infrequently confronted with the ethical dilemma Whiskas posed them. (They refused, in general, to play along.)
Anyone who had seen Hocking hoover up 30 disposals against Essendon the week before would have wondered if his arrangement with Whiskas had included dining on the stuff before the bounce.
Though their sponsoree’s abject performance on the day scotched any hopes that Whiskas executives might have harboured of hearing their company’s name called on Brownlow night, the deal worked out pretty well for them.
Their $100,000 outlay brought them widespread coverage across all media, and not only in Australia — the jape was a late-1990s prototype of what would become known as a viral story, reported in outlets not usually much interested in Australian football or, indeed, in cat food, including The Guardian, BBC and CNN.
Most of this was relayed in somewhat tittering tones, and probably rightly: there was little more to the story than Geelong, and Garry Hocking, reasoning that $100,000 was a decent return for a minor quantity of inconvenience and mockery.
But it is nevertheless possible to perceive the arrangement as an astute combination of satire and prophecy (these two disciplines, in an increasingly ridiculous 21st century especially, growing ever less distinguishable). the