Team-mates not always on side
SO WHY did the little push and shove handbag moments shared by Manchester City footballer Mario Balotelli and his manager Roberto Mancini echo around the world?
What they did was, let’s be honest, very funny. Watching little Mancini trying to wrestle Balotelli to the ground, like an hysterical bichon snapping at a distracted Great Dane, was pure slapstick.
But what made the scene such a popular guilty pleasure came from the fact these two dorks are supposed to be on the same team.
One tenet all true believers in sport hold is that being in a team builds comradeship. Sometimes it does. ‘‘I’ve got your back’’ was a catch phrase for the 2011 world cup winning All Blacks, a sentiment reinforced to them not long before the final by SAS hero and Victoria Cross winner Willie Apiata.
So it’s a shock when people who should be giving a team-mate a hand up, choose instead to stomp on the mate’s fingers.
The most appalling incident in recent times happened in The Loft bar in central Sydney in 2008 when two groups of Aussie swimmers were celebrating after Olympic trials.
Nick D’Arcy, who would become, according to sports columnist Jacquelin Mangay, ‘‘the most hated man’’ at the London Olympics, was a rich kid, a butterfly champion already known for his surliness.
There was a verbal exchange between him and triple Commonwealth Games gold medallist Simon Cowley. D’Arcy king hit Cowley in the face, breaking his jaw and his nose, fracturing his eye socket, crushing his cheekbone, and fracturing his palate. ‘‘My face is now held together with plates and screws,’’ Cowley would tell a court in 2011.
D’Arcy claimed self defence, but the judge didn’t believe him. D’Arcy was given a 14-month suspended sentence, and ordered to pay what, with interest, would become a total of A$380,000.
How much has D’Arcy paid? Not a cent. He declared bankruptcy, saying that he owes his family the half a million dollars he’s paid in legal fees.
His promise in court to get in touch with Cowley to apologise and work out payments was ignored. Astonishingly, D’Arcy was still selected for the London Olympics.
As Peter Fitzsimons wrote, ‘‘D’Arcy’s defenders maintain we all make mistakes in our youth and should move on, but that would be so much easier if, just once, D’Arcy had expressed real regret and commitment to do his best to make good the damage done. Instead, we get an arrogant dismissal of the whole issue.’’
Perhaps buoyed by comments on the ‘‘Support Nick D’Arcy’’ website calling Cowley a ‘‘sooky little girl’’ who should ‘‘cop his flogging and move on’’, D’Arcy, in the United States for training camps before London, posed with another Aussie swimmer holding handguns, aping the dumb and dumber Australian pair who held up a bank in Vail Colorado wearing their name tags from the sports goods shop where they worked.
There was a shred of natural justice when D’Arcy’s Olympic campaign lasted one day, and he was eliminated in the semifinal of the 200 metres butterfly. Cowley’s lawyer summed up the feelings of many when he said, ‘‘Sportsmen are people Australians look up to, and if they carry on like pork chops and still go to London, then Swimming Australia are saying there is your role model. It is a total disgrace.’’
In this country the most tragic case of a falling out between sportsmen strikes close to home for me.
My father’s first cousin, Bernard Rogers, was in the 1936 Maori All Blacks, who played and lost, 31-6, to the touring Australians in Palmerston North. His fellow loose forward was Hawea Mataira, an All Black. What followed is one of the most extraordinary, largely unknown, stories in New Zealand sport.
That night, at the Cafe de Paris hotel, Mataira was in his room giving an ill friend, Fitzgerald Bell, the jersey Mataira had worn in the game.
Rogers came into the room and accused Bell of stealing his jersey. In evidence at the trial that would follow Mataira said he and Rogers were both ‘‘muddled’’.
Mataira sprang to Bell’s defence, and whether Rogers was punched, pushed, or just tripped, he fell backwards and hit his head on concrete. He was taken to hospital and died the next day. ‘‘We were all bundled off, catching the express train to Wellington,’’ the team’s fullback Mick O’Connor told author Malcolm Mulholland, for the 2010 book, Beneath The Maori Moon. ‘‘We had to get out of the place.’’
Mataira was charged with manslaughter. His lawyer argued self defence, and said Mataira did all he could to avoid fighting with Rogers. The judge agreed, telling the jury, ‘‘When your neighbour wants to fight you, and insists on fighting you, then you simply have to oblige him.’’ The jury found Mataira not guilty.
Mataira never played for the Maori team again, but had a successful career in league, going to Britain on a 1939 Kiwis tour that was aborted after two games when World War II was declared. He died in 1979. You’ve probably heard of the late Bernard Rogers’ niece. His younger sister was Donna Awatere Huata’s mother.