Watching sport has brought so much emotional light in a time of pandemic darkness
Never have I found so much solace in the Australian football codes as during this latest ongoing Sydney lockdown. Having grown up in Melbourne AFL is my main game. But during Sydney lockdown I’ve also relished NRL, not least Origin 111 – played on the Gold Coast in front of actual barracking, cheering, exuberant fans to deliver so much unanticipated emotional light through my screen in a time of pandemic darkness.
The football and the triumphs and dramas of the Olympics has brought so much joy and escape from frightening, oppressive reality. So much so, I fear for the fast approaching moment when all of the games – Olympics and footy finals – end with a double-bite of realism.
My love of AFL has always been grounded in what are, for me, its impossibilities. Put simply, I was never any bloody good and I marvel at and admire those who are!
As the grandson of an early Richmond player (long dead by the time I was born) I’d sometimes wondered what excessive footballing expectations might’ve been placed by virtue of birth on two of my uncles who were handy players. I’ve pondered this more intently since reading 28, the new book by talented former Sydney Swans player Brandon Jack, son of famed NRL Balmain Tigers hard man Garry Jack and younger brother of celebrated former Swans captain Kieren Jack.
When our teams lose, when we see individuals and teams reduced to tears at the Olympics because they’ve failed to meet personal, club, family or national expectations, we spectators can shrug it all off – console ourselves that “it’s only a game” and move on.
But Brandon Jack is here to give us a timely reminder that for the athletes it is never uncomplicated and that moving on amid the weight of disappointment can be near impossible.
This is the truth at the heart of his book, 28 – titled after the number of senior Swans games Jack played. For the very reason it is a book that is intentionally about so much more than just AFL, it manages, ironically, to shed more light on the game and its human toll than any of the many cookie cutter post-career ghost-written autobiographies of those we regard as code legends.
It lands, alongside PeterRose’s Rose Boys, as one of the most poetic insights into Australian Rules, the emotional weight of sporting dynasty and the struggle to define yourself when Plan A falls apart and you feel like you’ve failed.
The young Jack’s identity was shaped around football, first league and later Australian Rules. And yet he is almost disappointed when he eventually gets the call from the Swans. His reluctance to emotionally invest all in it – even when he’s waking in the middle of the night to train that little bit extra so he might attain perfection – is the core of his experience.
So, too, is a complicated family dynamic – a long estrangement between the parents, Garry and Donna and other siblings, and Brandon and Kieren, that has sometimes, inevitably, played out publicly. An unspoken but heavy melancholy about all this underscores this book.
Sex, drugs, booze and football – Jack is painfully honest about it all. But it is the tension between striving for unattainable football perfection, the manic drive to be selected from among the similarly marginalised teammates you’re binge-drinking to oblivion with on the weekend and the uneasy sense that perhaps he doesn’t want it all, that makes those of us who could never do it, stop and think.
“Within football I was given an identity, and I derived my earliest sense of joy from the fulfilment of that identity. I was validated by my parents, and would see them smile and cheer, and I would feel the warm comfort of family, so closely aligned to weekend games of football that the two became inseparable,” he writes.
“Families are a dichotomy; the foremost struggle between individual and group. They exist in tension: a constant balancing of closeness and distance and freedom and loyalty. In their imperfections there are no definitive answers, and every family seeks common ground to unite them. Ours was football. Because no matter the space between us – the fights, the tears – we would still go and watch each other’s games on the weekend, and talk about performances at the dinner table, and on that, more than anything else, we hung our conception of loyalty and family. That was our Church.”
Jack’s experience probably typifies that of nine in 10 professional footballers. Twenty-eight games for the Sydney Swans seems like an impossible success for people like me who love the game but could never dream of playing.
But the game shreds and sheds them. Most disappear to obscurity. To his enormous credit, in shedding, chrysalis-like, the footy player he never seemed quite certain he wanted to be, Brandon Jack came to find his inner aesthete – a musician and a writer with so much to say.
It’s no bad thing that he’s helped me watch the football that is sustaining me through these terrible times with a more mindful eye for the frustration, human pain and anguish not too far below the surface of elite performance.
Ditto the Olympics (and as it will be for the forthcoming Paralympics).
For every Emma McKeon there are hundreds of other elite performers who aren’t thought too much about again – even though they’ve all helped keep us sane and buoyed our spirits and souls in lockdown.