Steve Smith’s tears a symptom of a 21st-century apology
Some test cricket records are destined never to be beaten: Don Bradman’s average, Sachin Tendulkar’s tally of centuries and New Zealand’s innings low score of 26.
Until last week, I would have put another record in that category. When Kim Hughes blubbed his way through a press conference back in November 1984, he set the bar very high indeed.
Previously, Australian cricket captains had declined to cry in public. It never crossed Stan Mccabe’s mind. Bradman was stoicism itself. Ian Chappell would sooner cut his arm off. Allan Border had his tear ducts removed at birth.
Hughes’ metrosexual fragility was not only unprecedented, it was seemingly unsurpassable. Until last week.
When not one, but two, Aussie skips balled their eyes out for the edification of a worldwide audience, it rather kicked poor old Kim to the kerbside of history.
First, Steve Smith openly wept about how he had let his dear old dad down. Then Davey Warner, rising to the challenge, as is his want, wailed like an Italian gangster in an opera house when considering the impact of ball tampering upon Candice and the kids.
The spectacle was not a pleasant one. ‘‘Pathetic’’ is too inadequate a word to describe such mea-culpa melodrama. It was a full-blown crisis in Ocker masculinity. We are all the poorer for having witnessed it.
What good do such press conferences serve? Little information is imparted. Warner in particular wasn’t really on hand to answer any questions about the ball-tampering affair.
It was all about him saying he was sorry. Over and over again. The lines were robotically delivered. Perhaps the tears were as well. Perhaps not, though. If Davey were that good an actor, he could have lied his way out of things.
At Smith’s press conference, one wag sought to put things in perspective, changing the topic radically by asking a question about Married at First Sight .A hilarious moment, it was subsequently spun as an affront to the gravitas of a distraught, contrite, broken hero.
The real joke is be found not so much in the tears of Smith and Warner, as in the way in which they demonstrate the soft, sentimental underbelly of the stereotypical Australian ‘‘hard man’’. Scratch a tough guy and you reveal a big sook.
This is doubly funny, considering that is exactly what Warner called South African Quinton de Kock. The insult led in turn to de Kock’s comments about Warner’s wife and – allegedly – to Warner then hatching the ball tampering plan. So, who’s the sook now, Davey?
A New Zealand parallel to all this can be found in the Aaron Smith saga. Guilty of little more than being an active, red-blooded heterosexual man, Smith, like his namesake and Warner, was compelled to make a public apology and he too cried on cue.
The 21st-century public apology is our equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition or Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s.
It’s not concerned with telling us anything, still less with establishing the guilt or innocence of the person fronting up.
Whereas once the issue was whether or not you had been chatting with Satan in the guise of a goat or plotting a Trotskyite counter revolution, today the stakes are disappointingly low.
That said, public shaming could have applications closer to home. It occurs to me that Hamilton has no shortage of public personalities who could be thrust into the spotlight and forced to emote.
Bob Simcock would could say sorry for the millions wasted on that petrol-headed folly and then say a word or two about the appointment of Dr Nigel Murray at the Waikato District Health Board.
Murray’s apology could also attract high ratings. An explanation of his travel expenses could perhaps be accompanied by a slide show featuring the most expensive Canadian hotels and/or testimonies from those undersized Hamilton men who sought penis enlargements from Waikato Hospital during Murray’s time in charge. Masculinity, or lack thereof, often brings tears to the eyes.