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Hired as the ABC’s first full-time female sports broadcaster in 1984, Debbie Spillane has since had a career that’s wandered between sport, comedy, music and news on both radio and television. She has also been media manager and run websites for the Bulldogs NRL team and the West Sydney Razorbacks National Basketball League team, was a sports columnist for the SunHerald for eight years and even sat, briefly, as a board member on the NSW Greyhound Racing Authority. She has two daughters, Jemima and Eleanor, and currently works on ABC NewsRadio as a sports, and occasional news, presenter.
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For my mother, Beth
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e e H R W do YoU think Where Do You Think You’re Goin’, Lady?
YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Debbie Spillane
Adventures of a SPoRTs-mad redhead
DEBBIE SPILLANE
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First published in 2007 Copyright © Debbie Spillane 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Spillane, Debbie. Where do you think you’re goin’, lady? : adventures of a sports-mad redhead. ISBN 978 1 74114 662 2. 1. Spillane, Debbie. 2. Sportswriters - Australia Biography. 3. Sportscasters - Australia - Biography. 4. Sports journalism - Australia. I. Title. 070.449796 Set in 12.5/15 pt Goudy by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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CoNTeNTs Contents
1 Waiting for Robbo 2 Pardon me, I’m shedding PART I
1 9
The freckled freak in the panama hat
3 The sporterers’ apprentice 4 Certifiably sports mad PART II
21 23 36
The years of living sweatily
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Head in the media scrum LA confidence lull Tales from the touchline, the tunnel and beyond Sidelined Exit strategies Hoops hopes Motherhood, mid-dawns, weekends and knights 12 The sport show with three ‘secretaries’ 13 Hard coffee and a saucer of milk (miaow!) v
51 53 67 87 102 117 134 143 156 174
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? PART III
14 15 16 17
Gone to the dogs
187
A dog of a year Moored and ill-Hughesed Not-so-super friendly fire The oasis that turned out to be a mirage
189 199 212 226
A woman of the world and the web
239
18 Meantime, in the real world 19 Through the wrong end of the binoculars
241 249
PART IV
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1 Waiting for Robbo Waiting for Robbo
The first time I set foot on the sacred cement of a rugby league locker room my mission meant coming face to face with the player that Bulldogs fans dubbed ‘The Wild Man’. Geoff Robinson was an indestructible front-rower with a famously luxuriant, unkempt mane of hair and a bushy black beard. On the footy field he seemed fuelled by explosive rage—his hair and opponents flying in all directions. In action photos ‘Robbo’ looked like one of those guys chasing bison in a prehistoric cave painting. I was advised he was being fetched for me direct from the dressing-shed showers. So there I was in the busy post-match Belmore Sports Ground locker room, like a shag on a rock. What was I supposed to do while I waited? Apart from sniff liniment and try to look graceful as I scraped bits of adhesive bandage off the sole of one shoe with the toe of the other one? Technically, I was not even there in the line of duty. It was 1984. I’d been a sports broadcaster with the ABC for just a matter of months. On learning I was a long-time season ticket holder with the Bulldogs, the club’s legendary patriarch Peter ‘Bullfrog’ Moore had invited me to watch a game as his guest in a corporate box. This was a lofty and unexpected elevation from my regular seat 1
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? in Row F. When, nearing full-time, Peter casually asked if I would present the club’s man-of-the-match award in the dressing room, I was, to use traditional rugby league lingo, flabbergasted. I only knew the high-profile Bullfrog by reputation—he was viewed as a shrewd operator and a strict Catholic, with nine children to prove the latter. So I wondered whether I should react to his suggestion that I perform this ceremony in the dressing room as a compliment or as an outrageous suggestion. Suddenly I felt, with great certainty, it was a test of my nerve. ‘Yes, sure. As long as the man of the match has clothes on,’ I remember replying, hoping desperately to appear unflustered. Trying to appear unflustered was to become one of the holy grails of dressing-room demeanour for me. So it’s time for the announcement. I read out ‘Geoff Robinson’ as man of the match, and someone tells me they’ll go and get him from the showers. I start wondering exactly how far I’m going to be tested here and whether I can carry it off. ‘Please, let him be dressed’ I repeat over and over in my head while I wait.
I saw Billy Joel in concert once (there was a time when he was relatively cool in a mainstream kind of way—before FM radio decided to play six or seven of his songs every three hours for about 15 years) and one of the first songs he played was ‘Piano Man’. He said he wanted to get it out of the way so everyone wouldn’t spend most of the concert thinking ‘When is he gonna play that song?’. I’ve developed the same attitude over the years to discussing football dressing rooms. It’s the cheesy pop tune everyone wants to hear me sing. So I’ll cut to the chase. Seeing footballers naked apparently put my career on the map. Over the years I’ve been introduced often as the ABC’s first female sports broadcaster. I’m occasionally remembered for being the first woman to do cricket commentary on ABC Radio (for which I’m grateful, as long as people don’t actually remember the commentary). And there are some people, with a certain set of social problems, who 2
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know me better as having been one drivelling half of Triple J’s Hard Coffee with Ian Rogerson. But, for the average punter, nothing has beaten the conversationopening popularity of: ‘Hey, weren’t you that first chick in the footy dressing rooms?’ Most commonly followed up by a nudge-nudge winkwink aside like: ‘I bet that was interesting, eh?’ The long and the short of it (always a useful phrase for keeping people’s attention when discussing locker rooms) is that no, I wasn’t the first and yes, it was interesting. But on a scale of one-to-ten interesting, it was maybe a four or five. Ten-out-of-ten interesting was covering an Olympic Games, or sitting on the sideline during a grand final, or interviewing Paul McCartney. I know none of these examples involves naked men, but somehow I manage to think of them as career highlights anyway. As far as I know, the first woman journalist to do battle with the dressing-room door nazis in rugby league (in this country anyway) was a sportswriter with the Sun-Herald named Dorothy Goodwin. I heard about her a year or two before I started with ABC Sport and, although she was off the scene before I got onto it, other journos often mentioned her to me. Mostly with genuine admiration too. Well, apart from the usual suspects—and we’ll get to them later. While I remember the fuss surrounding her forays into the sheds, I never had any sense that it was an important battle she was waging. Busting in there was hardly something that I aspired to do. I was interested in being a sports journalist, but I thought the ‘women can’t come in to the dressing room’ reaction was more likely an irrelevant obstacle thrown in her path. And, based on my own previous experience in the world of men’s sport, I had good reason for thinking that.
As a 16-year-old cricket addict I’d jumped at my father’s suggestion that I could make myself useful in the local cricket competition by swotting up on the rules and qualifying as an umpire. Like all local cricket associations, the Western Suburbs Junior Cricket Association 3
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? suffered a chronic shortage of umpires. Dad opened the bowling in an A-grade team. He reasoned that my passion for the game, plus twenty-twenty vision and undamaged hearing, put me at least on a par with—if not already ahead of—some of the old chaps he was at the time submitting his ‘howzats’ to. To their credit, the Western Suburbs Cricket Umpires Association of the early 1970s seemed pragmatic enough to be pleased to have anyone offering to join their ranks and allowed me to sit their test, which I passed. But there was a massive problem to overcome before I could be appointed to any matches. And it all revolved around— guess what?—the dressing shed. ‘But there’s nowhere for her to get changed’ was the helpless cry from some officials. ‘She can’t use the players’ dressing sheds.’ This seemed to me a most unexpected and trivial obstacle. I’d fully expected some men would find reasons to object to a high-school girl officiating their games, but I thought they’d come up with something more substantial than ‘There’s nowhere for her to get changed’. I’d pictured myself striding purposefully and authoritatively out towards the pitch. I could see myself standing impassively, giving the stonewall treatment to an enraged fast bowler and a full slipscordon chorus. I’d imagined signalling the scorers bench with a confident flourish. What I hadn’t ever factored into this bewitching vision was me getting my gear on or off, before or after a match, down in the sheds at the local park. How extraordinary that this could be a problem. It crossed my mind that some of the elderly men who’d raised the objection might have thought my whole purpose in memorising the Laws of Cricket had been to scam my way into a shed full of men, where we could all get our kit off together. ‘How about I turn up dressed, umpire the game and then go home dressed?’ I helpfully suggested. It was a bold plan, but I knew I could pull it off. Or leave it on, as the case may be. If doing the job had involved wearing a gorilla suit or dressing like Wilma Flintstone, it would have been silly to think about turning up dressed for work. But here we were talking about a uniform of black trousers or skirt 4
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(I preferred a skirt because, in my 16-year-old mind, I was sure the combination of wanting to umpire cricket AND wear trousers would probably persuade everyone I was a lesbian), a white blouse, black tie, white shoes, white jacket and white hat. ‘I’ll come wearing everything but the coat, hat and tie and put them on standing on the side of the field. I don’t need a dressing shed to do that,’ I proposed. My radical plan was accepted and I began umpiring men’s cricket. Being a total prat, I decided I’d wear the full ensemble on the bus on the way to my first game. I thought I looked like a cricket umpire and was extremely proud of my appearance. Embarrassingly, to the other passengers boarding that Saturday morning bus at Burwood shops, I must have looked like some very odd girl wearing an oversized old man’s bowling blazer and an utterly unfashionable white panamastyle hat. Plus a tie. But I had beaten the dressing-shed objection and it had been the only serious obstacle put in my path. So it was against this background that I heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth some years later when Dorothy Goodwin started covering rugby league. I cynically assumed what was going on was that some men were opposed to female rugby league journalists and the dressing-shed objection was the best they could come up with. None of this helped me much, though, as I stood numbed with awkwardness inside a truly operational dressing shed for the first time, waiting for Robbo to emerge from the showers.
I should explain that, by the time I began working for ABC Sport, I was hardly a virginal teenager. I was 28 years old, separated from my second husband; my first daughter was a toddler. I certainly wasn’t afraid of seeing naked men, it was more a case of not wanting to be seen seeing naked men. And, if I was seen seeing naked men, how would I look? Peter Moore did his best to allay my uneasiness as we waited, by pointing out at least two other women in the room. One of them 5
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? was a doctor and the other a physio. ‘See, it’s not that big a deal,’ I told myself. Philosophically that made me certain I had every right to be there. But where did it leave me practically? Those women were scurrying around purposefully. I wasn’t. And I couldn’t really watch what they were doing without appearing to be checking out the men in various forms of undress that they were attending to. Trying with great urgency to imagine what constituted professional behaviour in this setting, I improvised some guidelines that served me reasonably well over the ensuing years. Guideline One (as mentioned): Try not to appear flustered. (As well as being the first guideline devised by me, it was also the first one I broke on that initial dressing-room excursion.) The crucial challenge here is to avoid blushing. I have pale skin and I’ve always felt I blush in the exaggerated manner of a cartoon character. It’s as if someone starts filling my head with hot beetroot juice, pouring it in somewhere near the nape of my neck. The crimson juice level rises in slow motion from my collarbone, accompanied by a toasting sensation all the way, until it finally hits my hairline. It’s a reflex reaction, of course, but I eventually found I could stop it being triggered if I paid particularly careful attention to a head gash being stitched, or to the filthy state of someone’s socks on the muddy floor. Guideline Two: Find someone who’s dressed, lock your eyes on them and use them as a visual home base. Engage them in conversation. If somehow you can include in your nervous prattle some comment that shows you’re not a raving pervert, obsessed with glimpsing male genitalia, all the better. Admire some club official’s tie or lapel badge if you’re struggling. Earnestly chit-chatting with Peter Moore on that first dressingroom visit, instinctively directing my gaze to areas in the room where I could see fully clothed folk, I noticed a former player who’d retired some years earlier. ‘Is that Greg Howard?’ I asked, clutching at conversational straws. The player in question hadn’t been a big name at any stage of his mainly lower-grade career at Belmore—a career that had ended seven 6
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years earlier. Bullfrog chortled with delight. He said it proved I wasn’t kidding about being a keen fan and related the story to other officials. It also proved that, in a room full of naked men, I could still notice and identify one with clothes on. It meant I had the right stuff, surely. Guideline Three: Focus on the reason for being there. Tell the clothed person you’re using as a visual life raft who it is you’re hoping to speak with. Often the clad one will reply: ‘Oh, he’s over there.’ Then, without moving your eyes from their anchor point, you can enquire casually: ‘Does he have pants on yet?’ I reckon I told everyone who was within coo-ee of me on that first visit that I was there to present the man-of-the-match award. Sometimes I said it before enthusing over his lapel badge, sometimes after. Right up until I retired from active dressing-room duty, I found it useful to take a couple of deep breaths and repeat the purpose of my mission to myself on approach. This serves the dual function of keeping you focused, and giving you a ready justification should someone in a blazer suddenly say: ‘Where do you think you’re goin’, lady?’ That happened less as the years went on, but I learned to never discount the possibility. Guideline Four: Don’t adjust the focus on your peripheral vision. Blur is good. It’s all that’s required to distinguish flesh tone from all the other respectable colours of the dressing-room palette. If you need to manoeuvre yourself, keep your eyes focused directly ahead. Aiming for an eyeline to the shoulders or above is good. Having established a safe primary viewing target, you then use your peripheral vision to identify the areas of nude activity in the room around you. This way you don’t pick up any unwanted detail but you know where it is for navigational purposes. Guideline Five: Position your interviewee against a neutral background. I always loved the story that Jacquelin Magnay, who covered rugby league for the Sydney Morning Herald (and still does), told me about grabbing coach Tim Sheens by the shoulders as he started answering media questions at Penrith Stadium one day. She physically turned him so his back faced a brick wall rather than the row of fully occupied 7
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? unscreened showers that ran along one side of the room. She said she didn’t need an eyeful of showering fellas every time she looked up from her notebook. What Jacquelin did amused me most because it showed she had the same attitude as I did. We weren’t going into locker rooms hoping to get an eyeful of prime male sporting flesh. The presence of naked men didn’t make a locker room a more exciting place to ply your trade, it made it inevitably more awkward.
When Robbo finally appeared to receive his man-of-the-match award from my anxious hands, he turned out to be not quite dressed and not quite naked. He collected his award from me wearing a towel, a lather of shampoo and a faint grin. I don’t remember any witty repartee being exchanged on this occasion.
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2 Pardon me, I’m shedding Pardon me, I’m shedding
The mantra of the minority Male-Only Mafia was: ‘They just want to see naked men.’ Peter Peters, the ex-player who broadcast matches in a peculiarly breathless and belligerent way on 2GB in those days, regularly told his listeners that Debbie Spillane wasn’t interested in rugby league— she just wanted an excuse to watch men take their clothes off. Yeah, sure—isn’t it the first thing every woman factors into her career goal setting? It’s an accusation that says more about the mindset of the accuser than anything else. In this particular case, the jibe was a deliberate misrepresentation of what Peters actually knew about me. His own radio station had given me a start in sports journalism. He knew I had a genuine, longstanding interest in the game. He could have challenged the depth of my knowledge, but no, he put about the belittling idea that I just wanted to see naked men. Ultimately it wasn’t really about the dressing room at all. That was just a convenient and literally ‘sexy’ issue to be used by those who preferred women not to intrude on their territory. The main reason I knew it couldn’t really be about the dressing rooms was 9
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? because in those days, when I worked for ABC-TV and was attracting all the fuss, I rarely went inside one.
My first regular job on rugby league was as ‘sideline eye’ for ABCTV in season 1985, when they were broadcasting the Saturday afternoon games. Some radio stations were using sideline reporters at the time but it hadn’t been done on television, so it was an assignment with only a vague brief. If someone got injured, I was supposed to get the details; beyond that, well, it was up to me. Former coach and commentator, Bill Anderson, once described being a sideline eye as like being the third speaker at a wedding reception. By the time your turn comes, everything important’s been said. It was like that. A comment made in passing to me by the then sports editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Tom Hammond, had greatly influenced my view of league journalism. He’d scoffed at my preference for league (he was a staunch soccer man) saying that if you took the injuries out of rugby league, league journalists would have nothing to write about, because no one bothered with the game itself. I desperately wanted to talk about something other than injuries. So I suggested that at half-time I could try to find out, not just which bits of what players were injured, but about what the coaches had said to the teams. This involved lining up an official, injured player or trainer who’d be in the sheds at half-time and could meet me before the second half started and throw me a few scraps of information. Jim Maxwell, who was ABC-TV’s league caller at the time, would then cross to me saying something like ‘Debbie’s got a report from the dressing rooms’. I don’t believe he ever suggested I’d been in the dressing rooms at half-time, but that turned out to be how most people heard it. I started getting letters congratulating me on kicking down the dressing-room door. Marvellous stuff—storming male bastions, ending discrimination in the workplace, power to the sisterhood and the like. I was chuffed. I got far more kudos for my cameo role than 10
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I expected, but there was an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. The dressing room was being painted as the central issue, and it wasn’t. When I got an untidily scrawled note from some chap telling me how he often pictured me in the dressing room preparing my halftime reports with all those naked men, and how he enjoyed the gleam in my eyes when I did that report right after emerging from the sheds, I was horrified. It was a wash-your-hands-after-handling kind of letter. What had this become? I wasn’t going inside the dressing rooms anyway. But, even if I was, why would the players be naked? It was a half-time break in a football match, not an adjournment to the jacuzzi where everyone relaxed nude for ten minutes. Many times when I pointed out this pesky detail to those who enquired about my half-time adventures, the reaction was one of genuine shock and disappointment.
For members of a narrow-minded minority, the dressing-room door became the threshold where they stood in resistance against the advance of female journalists. Those who didn’t think women could, or should, be football reporters tried to mobilise the male solidarity of the dressing room to exclude them. Maybe there were some old stagers genuinely worried about the morality of us seeing nude men, but it seemed more like the issue-of-choice for those who wanted the blokiness of their football left unsullied. But if the dressing room of the 1980s was a battlefront, I can honestly say I wasn’t the one doing the hard work in the trenches. The handful of women I met early in my career who were covering league for print media, like Jacquelin Magnay and Jenny Cooke from The Sun, had a tougher time. My job as sideline reporter ended within minutes of full-time. Theirs meant doing the hard yards in the crowded post-match dressing rooms, getting quotes and details, and rushing to file to a deadline. This often had to be juggled with the extra grief of being hassled, delayed or blocked by some (usually) anonymous official declaring ‘I don’t care who you work for or what your job is, lady, I can’t let you in here’. 11
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Jacquelin was the journalist who eventually took the Balmain club to court—and beat them—over their refusal to allow her dressingroom access. Many people I’ve met over the years believed it was me who fought that court case. But that’s popular myth. Right up there with the one about me being the first woman in a football dressing room, and the prevalence of player nudity at half-time. For several years Jacquelin and her bosses at the Herald tried working around Balmain’s unflinching stand against women in their dressing room— a stand that continued into the 1990s, long after women had become commonplace in dressing rooms at all other clubs. In the early days of the ban, Tigers coach Bill Anderson would move into the corridor to talk to the media if there was a female reporter being kept outside. The brusque but brilliant Warren Ryan also coached there while the ban was in force. One afternoon in the week leading up to the grand final in 1989, he invited me into the forbidden shed at Leichhardt to do interviews after a training session. Never one for defending the foibles of officialdom, he made it clear that those who had the problem with women had gone home, which meant it wasn’t him or the team. But when former rugby union coach, and radio talk-show conservative, Alan Jones succeeded Ryan it seemed the club at last had a coach who would support the ban with enthusiasm—even as its use-by date drifted further into the past. When covering Balmain games, Jacquelin used to turn up at the door after the match with the rest of the media. They’d be shown in, she’d be kept out. One day at Newcastle, as she banged on the door, again trying to argue for her admission, Jones—at his patronising best—told her to stop behaving like a schoolgirl. It was the last straw. She took the issue to the courts in 1993 and won. Working for ABC-TV in 1986, I had two advantages over other women reporters. One was my face was bobbing up on TV, so most of the blokes in blazers started letting me pass unquestioned. The other was I had a minder working with me, or what they call in television a floor manager. Floor managers specialise in moving things along and when I first started out, most debates about whether 12
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‘that woman is allowed in here’ were handled without me having to say a word. But in 1987, when I was working for Sydney radio station 2GB, I found out what a battle it was to fend for yourself. Each Wednesday night I had to cover the mid-week cup competition game. These games were mostly at Leichhardt Oval, which presented a strange anomaly. It was the home ground of Balmain, one of only two clubs that banned women from their dressing rooms. (Eastern Suburbs, for a while, was the other.) But this was the rule of the club that operated the venue, not the teams who were using the venue. The catch was telling that to the crusty old Tigers doorman who manned the entrance to the players’ tunnel. You had to pass his checkpoint to reach either dressing room—and he wasn’t having any of it. It was like a weekly trip across a bridge guarded by a cranky old troll. If he saw me quickly enough, he’d physically block my way. On occasion male colleagues had to fetch officials of the clubs who were using the dressing rooms to call off the troll. Then he’d let me go, but tell everyone within earshot how wrong it all was. ‘There she goes, look at her, off to see the men undressing,’ he’d shout and it would echo down the tunnel behind me. Adding gems like, ‘Brazen as anything. Wouldn’t let my daughter do it.’ Yes, it was almost laughable. But it was still an unsettling start to my post-match assignment, which was to get player interviews for the radio station. It had me starting behind the eight ball in relation to Guideline One: remaining unflustered. Mostly the Balmain ban didn’t impact on me. It was an occasional inconvenience, but a petty one, and not even an honest one. The official line was it protected the players from the embarrassment of women seeing them naked. Seemed to me it was the club’s priggish elderly powerbrokers who really had the objection. Benny Elias, one of the sassiest, most self-confident players the game has ever seen, with a somewhat racy reputation to boot, was once interviewed on TV as captain of the Tigers and asked about the ban. He turned in a glorious performance as the sensitive, shrinking violet, frightened 13
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? sick at the prospect of having a lady catch him with his daks down. Well, he kept a straight face as he pitched the company line anyway. I was rolling on the floor laughing. Women were allowed into the dressing rooms at representative games, which might have been a terrible impediment to Benny’s career advancement if he was serious about all this. But luckily, whenever he got picked for City or New South Wales, Benny seemed to temporarily overcome his debilitating shyness. It just didn’t ring true that we were embarrassing the players. Players at other clubs seemed totally disinterested in the presence of women in their locker rooms. They are noisy, busy, crowded places anyway. Footballers, apparently trained to shower and change in front of live audiences, simply didn’t seem fussed. Most of the time.
In 1986 at the ABC I got the kind of assignment that didn’t come my way often. It was in the weeks leading up to the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh and some staff had already gone ahead to Scotland. I was one of the broadcasters scheduled to leave in the last group for Edinburgh; in the meantime I was roped in to fill a gap in ABC Radio’s rugby league reporting team. The New Zealand squad was in Australia preparing for a Test match, and was playing a warm-up game against NSW Country in Newcastle. I was despatched to do live score updates and a match summary. The job had a few little twists. Radio New Zealand would also be using my match summary so I was told to be sure to mention anything from the game that looked likely to impact on Kiwi team selection. No problem, I thought, focusing more on the door-tointernational-stardom angle in my own head. At that time I’d never been to the stadium at Newcastle that was later to become the Knights’ home ground. I was on unfamiliar territory and, as I was doing radio rather than my more familiar job on TV, I didn’t have a minder. Not to worry, I thought, if I’m doing score updates and a match summary I won’t need to go to the dressing rooms. That was the plan right up until the New Zealand half-back 14
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was stretchered off the field during the game, not to be seen again. I realised I couldn’t file a report for New Zealand without telling them what had happened to one of their key players. The only way to get that information quickly was to go to the New Zealand dressing room. I set out purposefully (Guideline Three: ‘I just need to find out what happened to the half-back, I just need to find out what happened to the half-back’) but with no idea where I was going. Wielding my media pass, I just headed for the bowels of the unknown grandstand— embarrassed, yet encouraged by the passing comments from fans on the stairwell, like ‘Hey Deb, show us yer tits’. Hey, they recognise me in Newcastle, I thought. Perhaps the officials will let me through without holding my media pass up to the light and asking if it’s really mine. As it turned out, the attendants and officials were more than helpful. I was delivered to the New Zealand dressing-room door feeling quite pleased with what seemed to be my burgeoning reputation— and acceptance. The door was opened by someone I took to be a member of the squad not involved in the game that had just finished. He was young, handsome, wearing a team blazer and smiled when I said ‘I just need to find out what happened to the half-back’. ‘Well you’d better come in,’ he said. I probably should have recognised the smile as sly, rather than genial. I walked through the door and all hell broke loose. Men started yelling, ‘There’s a woman in here! A woman!’ Whistling, hooting and raucous laughter erupted. While some players rushed to grab towels and cover themselves, one totally naked bloke rushed towards me and started doing something resembling a Maori haka. I felt every pair of eyes in the room was turned on me. I averted mine, suppressed the desire to turn and bolt, and just kept walking. The guy who’d let me in had melted away, no doubt to a good vantage point from which to view the spectacle, so I walked right across to the opposite side of the room to some other men in blazers and said ‘I just need to find out what happened to the half-back’. The team doctor was pointed out to me, and I had to navigate back through the continuing commotion to speak with him. He 15
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? answered my questions politely, then I put the peripheral-vision blur onto full throttle and beat what I hoped was a dignified retreat. I’ve long since forgotten what had happened to the half-back—even who he was—but I’ve never forgotten that feeling of wanting to turn and run. What prevented me wasn’t exactly the courage of my convictions. Just the instinctive certainty that me high-heeling it back out the dressing-room door, with a naked man gyrating in my wake and his teammates barracking like a Jerry Springer audience, would have made an even more humiliating picture than the one I’ve described. While the experience shook me, I also felt there was a positive angle. The fact I didn’t get that reaction in Sydney club dressing rooms showed progress had been made.
Elle McFeast once joked that women are physically suited for dressingroom reporting because ‘Even if we’re wearing tracksuit pants, you can’t tell what we’re thinking’. A good line which went, typically, to the crutch rather than the crux of the matter. It was a snappy retort to the most common gripe from male sports journalists: ‘It’s a double standard. If we cover the netball, I bet we can’t get into the sheds while the team’s getting changed?’ It was a hypothetical question, of course. The male journalists who posed it would have chosen to boil in oil rather than accept an assignment covering a women’s team sport. My preferred reply was to ask why netball, or any women’s sport, should choose football as its model and use the team’s change room at peak hour as a post-match information centre. Journos weren’t popping into the Davis Cup locker room to chat first-serve percentages with a showering Pat Cash, or discussing relay splits with members of the Mean Machine as they hauled off their Speedos, or analysing club selection with Greg Norman minus the plus fours. Why was it such a part of the football reporting landscape anyway? You could just call it tradition. But I suspect there’s more to it than that. 16
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Male football reporters seemed inordinately attached to the dressing room. The very idea that you could cover a game adequately without being in the sheds afterwards, as the sweaty shorts came off and the showers fired up, was seen by most of the blokes as preposterous. I assume the dressing room was originally where reporters talked to players and coaches after games because, in the days of minimalist facilities, there was nowhere else. But, as grandstands expanded and provided all sorts of spare rooms on match day, it was fascinating to see how many male reporters whinged long and loud if they were diverted from the dressing room. In the late 1990s, when I was media manager for the Bulldogs rugby league club, I was there when the compulsory post-match media conference was introduced. I thought it an eminently sensible and professional arrangement, in line with what I’d experienced covering sports like golf, tennis, cricket, basketball and even the Olympics. The coach and captain, and other players specifically requested, were brought to a room away from the locker room where they answered questions. It didn’t prevent anyone getting one-on-one interviews, it just meant journalists weren’t mingling with the players as they got changed. The outcry was pitiful. The fellas didn’t feel like real footy reporters doing it that way. ‘You can still talk to any player you want to,’ I reassured one senior newspaper journalist. ‘Just let me know and I’ll bring him to the media room for you.’ ‘We like to catch and kill our own,’ said Action Man sulkily. When I started working with footy players it became clear that yes, they did want some privacy in the locker room. But it wasn’t because being seen nude bothered them. It was because they preferred to deal with their reactions to any game amongst themselves first. On a less philosophical level, some just wanted enough space to get showered or treated for injuries without having to push their way around a small space as crowded as a nightclub dance floor. Understandably, the journalists preferred an arrangement that allowed them to grab the more emotional off-the-cuff quotes that interviewing, or eavesdropping, in a busy post-match dressing room afforded. After 17
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? a big game, players admitted they sometimes didn’t even know whether they were talking to journalists, or to any one of the many visitors, officials and guests floating around the room. Inevitably clubs realised that dealing with the media wasn’t something you did while you rummaged around in your bag for deodorant. It needed to be taken seriously and required undivided attention, so the post-match media conference was gradually implemented. Women had been battling the politics of locker-room access for more than ten years and then it turned out that there was a more civilised alternative anyway. The men’s men in the media corps grieved for the lost world of dressing-shed mateship, when players would have a well-earned beer and a yarn with the media, and you didn’t have to watch your language on account of some woman being there. But the irony was: letting women in didn’t destroy all that, the men did it themselves. They made the game and the players more professional, they made the media more intrusive and they got thrown out of their little cement Garden of Eden where nakedness was natural. They couldn’t pin this one on us women. Besides—and I can’t let this dressing-room discussion end without pointing this out—the only information I ever picked up about the kind of tackle that doesn’t go on the stats sheet came from the press box, not the dressing shed. The media lads quite liked to chat about how so-and-so was like a bloody tripod, or what a weener some other player had. They knew enough detail to suggest they were the ones getting in there and having a good old gawk. Occasionally they’d ask me whether I’d ever seen so-and-so’s enormous stalk. I’d always shake my head and say ‘I don’t look’. ‘Of course you do, Deb. You must have a quick perve,’ they’d insist. ‘You must check out the blokes you fancy, at least.’ But no, I didn’t. It was exactly what I didn’t want to do. In fact, the more attractive I found a man, the less I wanted to see him naked in a dressing room. I’ll own up now to feeling sick with worry every time I went into the Illawarra dressing sheds. I had a long conversation with their 18
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winger Alan McIndoe at the Rothman’s Medal dinner in 1986. He was charming, handsome and, unlike most men in the room at the time, totally sober. This resulted in me having a crush on him for a few years and the thought of accidentally seeing him naked always panicked me completely. I never did see him naked, accidentally or deliberately, but I know the aversion to meeting him without clothes on in the dressing shed was very real. And the fact that it was so much the polar opposite to what men expected was going on in my head still amazes me. Several years after I’d first ventured into rugby league dressing rooms, I had a hysterical encounter at a book launch with a friendly 30-something guy. When introduced to me, he smiled conspiratorially and said ‘You remember me, don’t you, Deb?’. ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied. ‘You were a winger with Penrith, weren’t you?’ ‘Uh-huh,’ he nodded, still grinning. ‘But, you know, you remember me?’ At this point I was lost, but intrigued, and so was the small group of people privy to the conversation. What the hell was he on about? ‘You know, from the first time you came to our dressing room and you know . . .’ he trailed off. By now I felt like I was actually in the Monty Python nudge-nudge wink-wink sketch. ‘Well, I remember going into the Penrith dressing room, but I can’t say I especially remember the first time. Why? What happened?’ ‘I was the one who kept on walking in front of you naked all the time. Remember?’ he persisted, disbelief creeping into his voice. ‘No. Look I’m sure I’d remember it if I’d seen it,’ which sounded more personally reassuring than I meant it to be, so I added, ‘I mean, I’d remember seeing you doing it, if I’d seen you. Doing it.’ It transpires the young winger had been part of a scheme to test if I could be put off my work. He was sure he must have rattled me just a little, but the truth was I remained blissfully unaware of the entire campaign. He admitted it was a game the players soon tired of because I never seemed to react. The reason was I simply never noticed in the first place. 19
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? It felt like poor form, telling some pleasant man that he’d paraded buck-naked in front of me in his prime and I hadn’t even had the courtesy to notice. But there it was, the simple truth—I didn’t look. And with those three words I can sum up my locker-room experiences. Which seems a dreadful shame now, because Chapter Three—Some Famous Penises I Have Seen would have been excellent for book sales.
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PaRT I The freckled freak in the panama hat
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3 The sporterers’ apprentice The sporterers’ apprentice
If you accept my claim—implausible as it might seem to some—that I wasn’t attracted to sport by the hope of seeing naked men, what was it that got me in? Well, originally it was Jaffas and soft drink. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) had a first-rate lolly kiosk near the back of the Ladies Stand. I recall it being something like a carnival stall, although it mightn’t have been much more than a table with a brightly coloured umbrella and a bit of bunting. The old dark-green rooved grandstands, with vines creeping around their walls, were very serious; by contrast, the lolly stall looked temporary and flippant against that backdrop. But to me, at age five or six, it represented everything that was great about sport: Jaffas, Fantales, Marella Jubes and soft drink. My father’s family attended the rugby league match of the day at the SCG every Saturday, religiously. And I don’t mean religiously as in the nearest available cliché—there really was a sense of religious ritual involved. Our extended family attended as a group, arriving at the same time every week (half-time in reserve grade), and sitting in pretty much the same place: the top deck of the Ladies Stand, where the polished timber bench seats with backs were uncannily like church pews. The impressive age, size and ornate detail of the grandstands 23
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? themselves gave the whole occasion a dignity, reinforced by the fact that my father and ‘Pa’ liked to watch their rugby league in complete silence. No comments, no reaction, just serious contemplation, not to be interrupted. It was like being in church. My grandfather Frank Spillane, a former Western Suburbs and New South Wales second-rower, had just missed out on becoming a foundation member of the SCG. He always mentioned it with the wistfulness of an Olympic silver medallist or beaten grand finalist— although I was never quite sure what it meant we’d missed out on. Anyway after joining, apparently in the second year that memberships were available, Pa made sure his three sons were all registered at birth for junior membership so they’d become members as adults. This institutionalised nepotism didn’t extend, though, to female family. Women weren’t allowed to be SCG members. But by having a ‘Ladies Guest Pass’, they could gain admission to the members’ area (a quadrant of the ground that stretched from the Ladies to the M.A. Noble Stand, and included the practice areas behind them). These Ladies Passes were allocated one per adult male member, but they didn’t let you in everywhere. The Members Pavilion was for men only. I was fascinated by that piece of forbidden territory—I’d dream up scenarios which might force the suited gentlemen to make exceptions and then I’d test these imaginings out for size on my aunt Janet as we sat in the adjacent Ladies Stand. ‘What about if the Queen wanted to go to the football? Would they let her in?’ ‘No,’ Janet would reply. ‘They’ve got a special enclosure for her downstairs in the Ladies Stand.’ ‘What about if someone needed a nurse? Or one of the players had to tell his wife something, or his mother?’ ‘No, they still wouldn’t let them in,’ she’d persist implacably. ‘Shhhh, I’m trying to watch the football,’ was the usual answer from Dad if I tried out these hypothetical ban-busting situations on him. But he did make it clear he had no time for the Members Pavilion set. Not because they were narrow-minded enough to exclude women from their company, but because they were foolish enough to 24
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sit in a grandstand that didn’t offer the premium viewing angle for either rugby league or cricket. Dad wouldn’t have been caught dead watching football from anywhere other than exactly in line with halfway or the cricket from anywhere except above and behind the stumps. Anyway, if I asked enough questions and bothered Dad too much, my aunt Janet would take me down to the lolly kiosk and that’s where the Jaffas, Fantales and Marella Jubes came into play. The men-only grandstand seemed more of an oddity than an outrage so my first bout of ‘it’s not fair’ feminism came when my brother Brad, 20 months younger than me, got his junior member’s badge. I had to continue using Dad’s Ladies Pass. As I got older, one by one my male cousins started getting their junior membership badges too. I railed against the inequality of it all. It was more than just a matter of principle—it caused genuine problems in a football family. The fact that each adult male got just the one Ladies Guest Pass meant that decisions regularly had to be made between wives, daughters and sisters. And it caused other dramas. My grandmother once told me about some dear old woman who’d attended the football every week for decades with her husband, only to be stripped of her ticket when he died. One of the ways my grandfather alleviated the problem of having a family where several women wanted to attend was by finding an elderly gent who preferred to sit in the Members Pavilion (some goose who didn’t seem to know where the best views were), whose wife never attended. Quite illegally he’d sell Pa his Ladies Pass each season. This allowed Janet, my dad’s eldest sister, to attend. This worked out excellently for both me and the guy who ran the lolly kiosk.
Janet was in many ways an unlikely role model for a young lass destined to end up trawling around football dressing rooms. She was the classic maiden aunt: she lived almost all of her life at home with her parents and had the imposing, bee-hived, big-bosomed presence of the opera-singing diva she’d always aspired to be. Apart from working as an executive secretary, she went out rarely—mostly to 25
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? attend the opera, church (where her booming, trained voice used to obliterate the rest of the choir) and the football. An arch-conservative, she was into heavy-duty corsetry, extravagant clip-on earrings, expensive perfume and Robert Menzies. When her youngest sister, Marie, was eligible to vote for the first time, Janet accompanied her to the polling booth and famously barked the lastminute instruction to her across the crowded room, ‘Make sure you don’t vote Communist’. Keeping up the appropriate dress standards for the members enclosure at the SCG was something Janet took very seriously. The same sorts of pure wool suits, furs, hats, costume jewellery, gloves and severe high heels that she sported at the opera or church got a run at the football. She was the kind of aunt who looked on the Oroton handbag as the height of good taste. Janet certainly treated an afternoon at the football as more of a social occasion than did the men in the family. She talked to other spectators, offered her opinions volubly and, if she saw a high-profile player—as we arrived, during our excursions to the lolly kiosk or on our way to the ladies room to powder our noses—she’d grab my hand, rush after him and get an autograph. I got to meet the likes of Ken Thornett, Graeme Langlands and, ironically, the man who went on to become Balmain’s quintessential ‘no women in the locker room’ boss, Keith Barnes. He was perfectly charming. I remember I was carrying a toy rabbit with red and green ribbons around its neck and he told me it was a ‘lovely bunny’ and asked if I was a Souths’ fan. I wasn’t. It was just that, having been born late in 1955, I’d never seen any team win a grand final except St George (they won 11 in a row from 1956 to 1966) so I took to always supporting whoever was playing against them. It’s only in recent years I’ve realised that my first rugby league mentor was a woman. Janet was the one who talked to me during games, read me pieces from Big League and answered questions like, ‘How come one player always stands a long way behind all the others?’— ‘He’s a full-back.’ That particular snippet of knowledge started me on my quest for football understanding and led directly to the fact that 26
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both of my very first favourite players—my ‘idols’, as Janet used to refer to them—were full-backs. Namely, Ken Thornett and Les Johns. I suspect Janet must have been the driving force behind my first foray into sports comment, a moment etched on my brain as my earliest specific memory of rugby league. I’m watching a Test match between Australia and Great Britain at the SCG. There is some sort of flare-up on the field; the referee halts play and I shout precociously ‘Send that naughty Vince Karalius off!’. Karalius was the bad boy of the British team, though clearly someone must have briefed me on his character for me to come up with that line. In the staid, respectful silence of the Ladies Stand, the shouted comment carried further than it would in a modern-day football setting. It felt like everyone turned and looked at me. Grownups were laughing. Bingo! The seeds for a media career were planted. I got attention by saying something about football. Decades later, I can’t help wishing now that I’d said something cute about someone’s frontal lobe in a doctor’s waiting room and got positive reinforcement from that. Perhaps I would have then chosen to be a neurosurgeon. It’s no wonder I got a reaction, though. I shocked even myself when I looked up the date for that Test while writing this book. It was 1958. I hadn’t turned three. Apparently I also tried out my scything wit on the radio commentator Frank Hyde, who was legendary for describing goal kicks with the words ‘It’s long enough and it’s high enough. If it’s straight, it’s there’. Although I do remember being carried up the stairs in the Ladies Stand by Frank, I don’t remember the conversation that led up to it. My father swears the following is a faithful account. Dad had his arms full, carrying both my younger brother Brad and the obligatory picnic bag full of sandwiches, thermoses and cakes that my grandparents always packed. I was left to fend for myself, plodding up the two flights of steps. Frank was behind us, clearly being hampered by my slow progress; he asked me if I’d like him to carry me up the stairs. ‘Yeah, why not,’ I allegedly replied. ‘They’re long enough and they’re high enough.’ If I actually said that, I did show promise, even if I do say so myself. 27
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Though rugby league was the sport officially endorsed by the extended Spillane family, it certainly wasn’t the only sport in my repertoire as a youngster. Outside the football season, Dad played cricket. Mum used to joke that springtime in our Annandale home was always heralded by the kerthump kerthump of Dad’s cricket boots on the stairs. My father was a talented cricketer. He had been an opening bowler and opening batsman for Western Suburbs in the Green Shield, the Sydney inter-district Under-16s competition; he was then graded with Petersham, but didn’t go on with it. He finished high school at De La Salle Ashfield with the Leaving Certificate, took a job in the New South Wales Public Service, and started doing well in what was quite a high standard Public Service cricket competition in Moore Park on Saturday mornings. But stumps at lunchtime followed by a few beers with teammates and an afternoon of grade cricket proved an unworkable trifecta. I dare say becoming a father at the age of 18 had most likely taken the edge off his single-minded pursuit of cricketing glory anyway. It’s funny how you can grow up knowing how young your Dad is, be proud of his youth, then only later in life begin to understand what having parenthood hit you at 18 would really mean. The fact that my father, in 1955, was too young to marry without parental consent when my 20-year-old mother found she was pregnant made it all the more awkward for both of them. Dad had to go before a magistrate to get a marriage licence, arguing in the courtroom against his own father, who opposed the marriage and withheld permission. There were some unique compensations later in life though. Dad’s age when I was born made it possible for me to umpire him in ‘A’ grade cricket when I was 16. He was still opening the bowling in the local comp at 34, sporting a Dennis Lillee moustache and sideburns.
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Back in my pre-school and primary-school years we didn’t go to watch Dad play. The exception came a couple of times a season when his workplace, Bonds (of Chesty Bond singlets fame), would organise a social match. Bonds social matches were family occasions and, to keep the kids happy, there would be free soft drink. This was the kind of sanctioned group gluttony that my brother and I would look forward to for weeks. Soft drink was still rare enough for us in those days to be a treat. We certainly never had any in the fridge at home, so the prospect of getting as much of it as you could pour down your neck if you worked at it for a whole day was not to be scoffed at. Although they were only social games, Dad’s team (he was always the captain) often had guest first-grade players. A friend of Dad’s, Merv Black, was a first-grade fast bowler for many years and a regular at these Bonds games, as was a very good first-grade batsman called Mark Hope. At about eight or nine I developed a crush on Mark. My first recollection of actually watching cricket for any length of time was one day at Camperdown Oval when Mark told me he’d score a hundred for me. I can remember being perched in the grandstand, clapping and ‘helping’ Mum and Mark’s fiancée, Sue, count the runs from when he was 80-something until he got to 100. It was maybe only ten to 15 minutes of cricket watching but, for a kid of that age, fuelled to the gills on free soft drink, it wasn’t a bad effort. It would be years before I really paid attention at a cricket game again but, when I did get a taste for it, I went for it like free soft drink. I couldn’t get enough.
While my father’s family (who reconciled with Dad and accepted Mum into the family about a year after the court drama over the marriage) trained me in matters rugby league, and Dad put me in situations where I started soaking up cricket with my soft drink, it was from my mother’s father, John Daly, that I learned the ropes of the sport I was most obsessed with by the time I finished primary school. 29
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Pop lived at our house. Or rather, in the beginning we lived at his. When my parents were finally given permission to marry, just a few months before I was born, Pop let them share his large semidetached home in inner-city Annandale. They moved in on Christmas Eve 1955. I was born the next morning. Pop was a long-time widower. My maternal grandmother, Nell, had died of tuberculosis when Mum was a teenager. Pop worked as a cabinet-maker, he dated—in a very non-committal way—a barmaid from Stanmore called Nita and read paperbacks by the truckload. But his main hobby was horseracing. The archetypal small punter, on Saturdays Pop would have two bob each way on most races ‘just for an interest’. He had the latest in cutting-edge technology—a transistor radio—and its tinny tones carried the faint, nasal chant of race-calling through the big Annandale house from his room each Saturday. When I was in third grade, we moved to what seemed like the wide open spaces of the outer western suburbs, though we only went a few miles down the road to Croydon. A tree-lined street, a backyard with lawn and a garage were the payoffs, but we’d traded a fivebedroom home for a three-bedder and Pop was now sharing a room with my brother. The kitchen became operations centre on race days, much to Mum’s chagrin. The transistor, the race form and a new innovation called ‘The Tipping Book’ were spread across the laminex table top; anyone attempting to speak during Saturday morning’s Three-Way Turf Talk, or while the races were being broadcast in the afternoon, was ssshhh-ed. Mum was familiar with the ‘Ssshhh!!!’. During her childhood, Pop, her mother (when she wasn’t ill) and her grandmother had commandeered the radio in the kitchen for punting purposes every Saturday. She’d been hushed and hunted out of the kitchen regularly and consequently swore that, when she grew up, she’d have her own kitchen and, in that kitchen, no one would be listening to the races. My brother Brad and I, with encouragement from Pop, skewered that dream completely. The Tipping Book was a neatly ruled-up exercise book in which Brad, Pop and I would register our tips each Saturday for Sydney and 30
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Melbourne races (Brisbane as well if it was Doomben Ten Thousand, Stradbroke or Brisbane Cup day) and points were scored: Three for a winner, two for second and one for third. Pop would put a few shillings in the kitty, Brad and I a shilling each (scrounged from longsuffering Mum) and, at the end of the day, the tipster with the most points took all. Tipping in each race meant learning to read a form guide, which we both did with Pop’s assistance. I was shocked and dismayed years later on Melbourne Cup day at school to find most of my classmates had no idea, for instance, that ‘br m 4y (10-2-2-1)’ meant a brown mare, 4 years old with 10 starts for 2 wins, 2 seconds and 1 third. How did people get through life not knowing this stuff, I wondered. On Saturdays in the football season Brad and I took to going to the SCG armed with a transistor radio and a form guide. Considering we were both still aged in single figures, this must have made quite a sight. On Saturdays when we weren’t at the football we sat around the kitchen table with Pop listening to all the races and adjusting the points score in The Tipping Book after each race. In between races Pop would tell us stories about having seen Phar Lap, Tulloch and Bernborough race, about the day Shannon got left standing at the start and still won the Epsom, and how Ajax got beaten at 20 to 1 on. The Tipping Book ritual must have started when I was about eight or nine, because it preceded my first actual bet on a race—on Storm Queen in the 1966 Golden Slipper. I was a horse-storybook fanatic. My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara, and its sequels Thunderhead and The Green, Green Grass of Wyoming, were my favourite books and, for a ten-year-old that way inclined, a name like Storm Queen sounded like the star of an equine storybook. Storm Queen won that Golden Slipper (which sounded like a storybook race name) and with her victory came, not the start of a lifelong gambling problem—which one of Mum’s friends pessimistically predicted—but the start of a long-time affinity for Bart Cummings. I still often back Cummings horses in big races, simply because they’re Cummings horses. 31
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? All I can say about the theory that being allowed to bet on a horse race at ten years of age leads to a lifelong gambling problem is that, more than 40 years later, the biggest bet I’ve ever placed on a horse is $20. Betting more than a few dollars makes me too nervous to enjoy a race. You need a certain character trait (or flaw?) to become a hardcore gambler—and it’s got nothing to do with a love of horseracing.
The first race meeting we ever attended was Golden Slipper Day 1968. After that Pop took Brad and me to seven Golden Slippers in a row, and any other race meetings in between that we could talk him into. The obsession took an even firmer hold. I had photos of racehorses on the covers of all my schoolbooks. Brad and I used to buy the newspapers on the way to school to pore over trackwork listings; we had a contest to see which of us could memorise every Melbourne Cup winner from 1861 on. The answer was, both of us. We’d recite it like a poem: Archer, Archer, Banker, Lantern, Tory Boy, The Barb, Tim Whiffler. Glencoe, Warrior, Nimblefoot, The Pearl, The Quack, Don Juan.
Well, I memorised it like a poem. Mum had indoctrinated me with Banjo Paterson verse from an early age. Brad actually remembered which horses won in which years. I used to run through the names and count with my fingers to work out what year it was. One day, after lamenting the fact that we couldn’t get Racehorse Cards like the Football Cards that came with bubblegum, we had a brainwave. We’d make our own. And we did. Hundreds of them. We used to take the Sunday sports section, which featured strip photos of each race finish. We’d cut out each of the horses that wasn’t obscured by others around it, and then glue it on to a small square of cardboard, leaving enough room for its name to be printed neatly 32
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across the bottom. Our homemade horseracing cards were probably only slightly bigger than postage stamps, but we had hours of fun with them. The back room in our house had polished timber flooring and a big oval rug in the middle. Using the outside of the rug as the ‘inside rail’ and the polished floor as the track, we found we could ‘race’ our horse cards around the rug, sliding them along the slippery floor, running, re-running and, of course, providing a race commentary on several Group One events per day. By the time I was in my second year of high school, I’d developed my biggest obsession with an individual horse: a Cummings-trained filly called Lowland. I don’t remember what attracted me to her initially—she was nothing out of the box appearance-wise—but I seem to remember her jockey, Roy Higgins, enthusing about what a talented and good-natured filly she was in one of the many racing magazines I used to spend my pocket money on. Her photo adorned my favourite schoolbooks. For me she was a four-legged, hay-burning pop star. When she ran in the Melbourne Cup of 1968 (started favourite), I was wound up tight as a spring. Sadly, she bruised a hoof a few days before the race and turned in a slightly below-par performance, to finish fourth behind Rain Lover. The following autumn she was entered in the Sydney Cup and I was all fired up to be there. Particularly when her owners announced she’d be retired to stud after the Cup. I was moved to poetry. This was classic melodramatic early-teen behaviour, combined with toddler training in Banjo Paterson I suspect. Almost as soon as I could speak (which relatives assure me was early, then often), Mum taught me to recite Clancy of the Overflow. As I got older and learned to read his poetry, I found that Banjo, like me, had a passion for horses. So, with a head full of Pardon the Son of Reprieve and How the Favourite Beat Us, I penned a rollicking tribute to Lowland, which culminated in her winning the Sydney Cup and retiring to stud in glory. Don’t worry—the poem itself was lost long ago; it won’t be reproduced here. But the significance was that it became my first ‘exposure’ in the sports 33
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? media. Pop, no doubt inspired by grandfatherly bias, thought the poem was so good he sent it to legendary 2UE race-caller Des Hoysted. I was at Randwick racecourse the day Lowland acted out my poem and won the Sydney Cup, so I didn’t hear Hoysted’s comments before and after the race. But family members told me excitedly how he’d mentioned before the race that he had a poem from a 13-yearold girl named Debbie Spillane from Croydon predicting that Lowland would win. He said he had passed the poem on to Bart Cummings to give to Lowland’s owners and then, respectfully, predicted I’d be disappointed because he didn’t think the mare could beat Rain Lover. But when she did, he generously admitted he’d been out-tipped by a 13-year-old girl. I thought I was a celebrity. No one in our family had ever been mentioned on the radio before. And for that mention to come from the lips of someone as respected in our household as the voice of wisdom and good horse sense himself, Des Hoysted, well, it didn’t get much better than that. A month after the Sydney Cup, a framed photo of Lowland winning the race was delivered to my house with a letter from her owners. Bart Cummings had passed on the poem. Frank Bissell, the head of the syndicate, told me in the letter that they’d had my poem recorded and added to a tape they had of her races. Sadly, on the very day the framed photo arrived, Lowland dropped dead after an exhibition gallop in New Zealand. I was in tears for days, and the newly arrived photo became the centrepiece for an altar, replete with flowers and newspaper clippings.
Sport, Banjo Paterson and the media converged for me again the following year when some friends and I put together an act for a school talent quest. Calling ourselves The Freckle-Faced Freaks, we performed a song called ‘The Lament of the Aussie League Fan’, written by me (well, the lyrics were mine, the tune was ‘On Top of Old Smokey’) about Australia’s shock loss to Great Britain in a rugby league Test series. This was not, as I recall, a big topic at Bethlehem 34
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Girls High School—which probably explains why the song (and indeed the performance) wasn’t even a lukewarm success with my peers or the judges. God only knows what the rest of the girls in the group made of lyrical content like: Johnny Raper’s too old now, Billy Smith’s getting on And since he got married We ain’t seen Les Johns. Phil Hawthorne’s from union, So he can’t be any good, And Johnny King can’t run Like a Test winger should.
It’s abundantly clear to me now that other people’s families weren’t dissecting the 1970 Australian team’s dismal home series against Great Britain like mine was. I wasn’t personally horrified about Australia’s loss. I was more amused by the kind of outrage it provoked. That’s what I was having fun with. And, no matter how obsessive I was about any sport, it was always, above anything else, fodder for fun.
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4 Certifiably sports mad Certifiably sports mad
‘The Lament of the Aussie League Fan’, as it turned out, was better suited to the market at De La Salle Ashfield, the next-door boys high school attended by my brother. His class had its own magazine called Exit, The Way Out Magazine (I’d be really scathing about that title now if my own material from the same era wasn’t every bit as cheesy!) and he submitted my song lyrics to it as a poem. His teacher, Dennis Twomey, a rugby league fan, was much taken with the ditty and forwarded it to the Sydney afternoon paper, The Sun. It was printed in The Sun’s sports section on 23 July 1970 along with a photo of its author, who definitely looked like someone who belonged to a group called The Freckle-Faced Freaks. The story that accompanied the lyrics, headlined Schoolgirl’s Song of League, was written by none other than Peter Peters. The league player and journalist who, 15 years later, was to accuse me of only developing an interest in rugby league so I could get into dressing rooms to see naked men.
Admittedly, by age 13, the hormones had started to kick in and I was noticing that some sports stars appealed to me for reasons other 36
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than their on-field ability, but I was still seriously obsessed with sport for sports’ sake as well. Several years ago an old school friend turned up a diary from 1970 that I’d left behind after a sleepover at her place. Its entries reveal a poignant mix of teen angst, naivety and bizarre horseracing detail. Puberty Blues it ain’t. ‘Listened to the races today and picked four winners including Mona’s Joy. Poor old Medieval Maestro broke down too but he wasn’t put away thank goodness. Went to the pool later but Brian wasn’t there. Darn!!’ (January 3, 1970.) Brian Clifford was a blond-haired teenage boy from down the street, who lived opposite my best friend, Alannah Searls, one of the school friends I used to haul along to the football with me. By this stage, the ritual by which the match-of-the-round was always played at the Sydney Cricket Ground had become history; it had been abandoned in favour of all matches being played at club grounds with the match-of-the-round now shown on television. While my father and grandfather, surprisingly, declined to follow the game to suburban grounds, I decided to throw my lot in with the team from the neighbouring district, Canterbury. My father’s younger brother Bernard, his sister Janet and my grandmother followed Pa’s old team, Wests, but my dad thought they were embarrassingly biased when they watched the Magpies and refused to attend matches with them. He opted for a stay-at-home career as an armchair expert instead. I decided, against my father’s wishes, to support a team because I wanted to keep going to games. As I’d been going to the SCG every Saturday for so many years, the question of which team I supported had never been relevant—although I’ll confess to a mid-60s fondness for Parramatta inspired by the ‘idol status’ I assigned to their fullback Ken Thornett. Trouble was, he’d retired by the time I needed a club to follow. Technically our suburb, Croydon, was Wests territory but we were within walking distance of Belmore, where Canterbury were based. An admiration for Les Johns (another full-back, whose poster was on the 37
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? back of my bedroom door), plus the fact Canterbury had ended 11 years of repetitive and predictable boredom by stopping St George from making the 1967 grand final, swayed me. I became a Canterbury fan. So, usually with my father’s instructions ringing in my ears—‘Make sure you watch both teams, not just one!’—Alannah and I, and later my high-school friend Zita Antonios, would make the half-hour walk to Belmore for each home game and be waiting at the turnstiles at noon, ready to check out the good sorts in the lower grades, as well as enjoying the top-grade football. An example of our transparent lechery can be found in the infamous 1970 diary: ‘Boy—Terry Murphy! I talked to him today. Poor guy, he got hurt but he came and stood right behind Alannah and I. After the game we spoke to him. He’s got beatiful eyes and he’s only young, too. (Sigh.)’ (August 16, 1970.) But even when I was in the throes of ogling young footballers, the idea that I should become a reporter, get into the dressing room and see them naked never crossed my mind. The possibility that I was going to the football to ogle young footballers or, even worse, to behave ‘like a yahoo’, obviously crossed my father’s mind. He’d often cross-examine me when I got home from matches, to test whether I’d been paying attention to both teams. He’d ask things like ‘Who was the best player for the other team?’. If I hesitated, or gave an answer that the TV replay later proved to be bogus, I’d be in trouble.
While horseracing dominated my early years at high school, by the time I was 16 cricket was definitely in the ascendancy. During the West Indies tour in the summer of 1968–69, when I was 13, it suddenly became apparent to me that, if I was going to spend eight hours a day at the SCG with Dad and his family during Test matches, then I might as well try to figure out what the hell was going on. It was almost self-defence. The days were too long, and I was too old to be tagging along just for the lollies. So I started asking questions. 38
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There was the small matter of an autograph from Paul Sheahan making quite an impact too, I think. Dad had had something of a ‘Road to Damascus’ experience with Test cricket in the summer of 1960–61, when he got to the Sydney Cricket Ground well ahead of the start of play between Australia and the West Indies one day and decided to visit the practice nets behind the members’ pavilions at the smaller ground called the ‘SCG number 2’. The Windies were warming up. Eventually he positioned himself right behind the batsman with just a high cyclone-wire fence separating him from the deliveries of the legendary fast bowler Wes Hall. He still talks about the frightening force with which the balls smacked into the wire in front of him. He said it was something he never could have appreciated without standing right there. At this stage my father would have been only 23 years old, and still bowling reasonably quick himself. Anyway, that moment made such an impact, he felt afterwards that a day at the SCG wasn’t really complete without some time spent down at the practice nets watching the players warm up before the start of play. So we usually arrived more than an hour before the scheduled start. We’d head straight to the M.A. Noble Stand to secure seats behind the wicket, then my aunt and grandmother would mind the seats while Brad and I ducked down to the practice nets with Dad. We quickly discovered that the real attraction of going to the nets was that, after players finished a net session, they were vulnerable to autograph hunters. Dad would never have taken us down there to hassle players for autographs but, once we were there, he was too preoccupied to prevent us cashing in. That’s how I came to get Paul Sheahan’s autograph on my Test program. My aunt Janet was, of course, thrilled. ‘He knows Robert Menzies,’ she beamed. No greater seal of approval could be bestowed on any human being in Janet’s eyes. And she agreed he was quite handsome. So Paul Sheahan became my cricket 39
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? ‘idol’ and the net sessions did give me some feel for what I was watching out on the field. The learning curve had begun. Dad told me Sheahan was one of the greatest cover fieldsmen he’d ever seen, so then I had to find out what a cover fieldsman was. That led me to one of those diagrams of fielding positions in the ABC Cricket Book, and from that I started to memorise the fielding positions. I loved absorbing the trivia and terminology of cricket, and started going to watch Dad’s game each Saturday. After Brad began playing in the team, I was desperate to get involved. Dad suggested I could be the scorer, but I was (and remain) a mathematics disaster. He advised me to double-check my scorebook regularly by making sure the bowling figures all tallied up to the total runs scored off the bat, plus no-balls and wides. While that was the sort of calculation he’d carry out in his head in seconds, I’d typically start totting up the numbers at the end of an over, and then miss the first five balls of the next over while I was checking and re-checking, getting different answers each time. My scoring efforts ended in a lather of frustration, embarrassment and inaccuracy. Around that time there was a crafty old wicketkeeper called Barney Reynolds playing for another local team. Barney had a cricket-loving daughter, slightly older than me. Kim Reynolds, with her dad’s encouragement, passed the umpires test and stood in some games. Word got back to my father, who suggested to me that I could do the same. It was a possibility I hadn’t considered. I never met Kim and, by the time I started umpiring shortly afterwards, she seemed to have given it away. I gather she stood only in her father’s games as an umpire supplied by the batting side (most teams rarely saw an official umpire, so it was usually a BYO arrangement). Local cricket officials had certainly never had a woman join their umpiring ranks before, even if they’d had one qualify for the ticket. I was presented with a Western Suburbs Junior Cricket Umpires Association emblem for my blazer pocket, a lapel badge and tiepin, and welcomed warmly by the other umpires, a small core of elderly gentlemen. Once everyone had been assured that there was no need for me to take off my clothes anywhere except at home 40
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before and after play, I was appointed to my first match. That was certainly not an occasion devoid of difficulties. As I mentioned, most matches in the local competition went without an official umpire. Usually two players from the batting side would do the honours. There was, however, a team from the Adult Deaf Society in the ‘B’ grade competition and, because it was deemed inappropriate for the hearing impaired to take a turn umpiring, they were always provided with an association umpire. Maybe the fact that they never got to rort the system, as some of the other sides did, made them bitter and twisted. Maybe it was their longterm exposure to the official umpires. I can’t say because I never really got a chance to communicate much with any of them, beyond a few scribbled notes and hand signals. But I can say the Adult Deaf Society made my first game (and quite a few subsequent ones) sheer hell. These men were profoundly deaf. My mother had a major hearing disability, but she could hear a little and was able to fill in the gaps with lip-reading. She also spoke reasonably clearly, although I was often asked if she was foreign—the hint of a speech impediment being misidentified as an accent. These guys, however, were seriously mute. Most of what they tried to say was frustratingly unintelligible. I was in no doubt, however, when they appealed for wickets. They produced an unnerving, howling ‘Aarrghhh!!!’ which I got to know well, very quickly. They appealed on every one of the first 40 balls of my first game. Even if the ball went wide of off stump all the way and straight through to the keeper without any shot offered, they would let rip with a blood-curdling ‘Aarrrghh!!’. If the batsman played and missed by miles: ‘Aarrghh!!’. I started out by rationalising this behaviour. Maybe, if they couldn’t hear a snick, perhaps they appealed to be on the safe side. But when batsmen from the other side were smacking the ball along the ground, nowhere near a fieldsman, and they were still turning to me, arms up, giving their banshee howl, I realised I was having my chain yanked. Dad had drilled me never to give an explanation for a decision (‘Just gives ’em something to argue with’) and I quickly perfected 41
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? what was probably a slightly extreme stonewall response. So while the Adult Deaf Society players jumped, waved and howled, I stood unmoved and silent. A 16-year-old girl with hair in tight braids, wearing a horrible old Panama-style white hat and an oversized, men’s lawn bowls jacket, offering nary even a shake of the head. Perhaps they were just trying to establish if I was comatose, or frozen stiff with fear. Whatever. I wasn’t giving an inch. After the fifth over, I saw a sign-language exchange between players, some laughing and shrugging, and the compulsive appealing stopped. It was a relief to feel I’d staved off this first attempt at intimidation, but I was somewhat stunned at how blatant it had been. In retrospect it seems hilarious, like a scene from some offbeat continental movie. My biggest drama with the Adult Deaf Society came a season or two later when one of their bowlers, with a reputation for poor sportsmanship, thumped me in the arm because he wanted to change the line of his run-up. I couldn’t understand that he wanted me to stand back and allow him to run between me and the bowler’s end stumps. He gave me an angry shove. The incident was reported by the other team and I was asked if I wanted to lodge an official complaint about physical assault. I understood the charge, if sustained, would have ended the guy’s career and, while I disliked him, I didn’t want it to go that far. I let it drop. These days I wonder about how much potential there might have been for media fallout if I had chosen to pursue the matter. I imagine it would have been turned into a circus freakshow story with a headline like, ‘Deaf Penalty: Bowler Thumps Girl Ump’.
Generally I was received well, if treated as a curiosity, by teams in my first season of umpiring. The most awkward moment always was fronting up on the first day of a match if I hadn’t officiated either team before. I used to keep my official umpire’s appointment card in my pocket, and occasionally had to show it to incredulous captains to prove I was really the umpire, but mostly word had spread beforehand that ‘the lady umpire’ was standing in their game. 42
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Apart from in finals, I never had an umpiring partner in the Western Suburbs competition. The ranks were so thin that every umpire was a solo act. Sometimes I look back and wonder how the hell I got the moxy to do this when I was 16. Especially when many of the players were more than twice my age. Dad was a big help. He kept stressing that every umpire made mistakes, and that when I made one I wasn’t to let anyone convince me I’d made it because I was a woman. One time I caught a wily wicketkeeper, standing up over the stumps to a spinner, tapping the base of the stumps with his boot and then appealing for bowled. I hate to think how many pranks or traps-foryoung-umpires got by me. I’m sure there were some players congratulating themselves on fooling the rookie girl umpire, but I can’t have done too badly. I progressed quickly and was getting mostly ‘A’ grade appointments by my second year. One of my most memorable and difficult days came when I volunteered to do some junior representative matches. This meant working with umpires from other associations in the inter-district age group competitions. I was given a Harold Moore Shield (Under-14s) match at Meadowbank between Western Suburbs and Northern Districts. Unfortunately on the morning of the first day I woke with hay fever. I took an antihistamine, which cleared my hay fever but made me ridiculously sleepy. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to literally falling asleep standing up. The packet probably warned against operating heavy machinery, but it didn’t mention the dangers of standing in the hot sun for several hours surrounded by pre-pubescent boys with boundless energy. One of the things I focused on, to help prevent my eyelids from drooping, was a little freckle-faced kid who was into everything at a thousand miles an hour. The total opposite to how I was feeling. He opened the bowling at one end with medium pacers, then, when the shine was off the ball, he bowled off-spin. I’d never seen such a little kid bowl spin. In those days every kid on the block wanted to be a demon fast bowler like Dennis Lillee and start their run-up from the next suburb. 43
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? He was a compelling little character. Polite, but animated, competitive, intense and he nattered encouragingly to himself as he walked back to his bowling mark. When it came his team’s turn to bat, he opened the batting as well. Holding his baggy cap while he bowled, I noticed his name written inside. I thought to myself, ‘That will be easy to remember, it’s like two christian names.’ When Greg Matthews made the New South Wales side eight years later, I’d long since forgotten the name but remembered the ‘two Christian names’ clue. Once I’d seen a photo and heard his personality described, I knew it was the grown-up version of the hyperactive kid who’d kept me awake at Meadowbank that Saturday morning. Not long after Greg got into the New South Wales side, I got into the media. A magazine called Cricket Lifestyle asked me to do player interviews and the first one I did was Greg Matthews. When I phoned him I started by saying something like ‘I don’t know if you remember this, but when you were playing Harold Moore Shield I think I umpired you’. His answer: ‘Of course I remember you. How many red-headed, left-handed lady umpires do you think I’ve had in my career?’ Our paths have crossed many times over the years; we even worked together for a year in 1999 on Triple M’s sports radio show, The Deadset Legends. Unlike with a lot of sportsmen, I’ve never felt any need to justify my place in sports journalism with Greg. He knew my interest was genuine. And I knew he wasn’t playing to the crowd by being so animated. He was like that when he was 14 and there was no crowd. If he hadn’t been so animated, I would have been the only red-headed, left-handed, asleep-standing-up lady umpire he ever had.
After four years of umpiring in the local competition, I decided to have a shot at grade cricket. Mark Hope, who was then involved in cricket coaching, got me the details of the NSW Cricket Umpires training courses held at the old NSW Cricket Association offices down the Quay end of George Street in Sydney. I’d been told, probably by Mark, that it was likely women who passed the exam that year, 44
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1974, would be appointed to grade games. Previously women had been allowed to sit the exam, but were not appointed to grade matches. There were four women who passed and started umpiring grade that year. One of them I met at the Sydney classes. Her name was Dorothy and she worked at the New South Wales Cricket Association (NSWCA). One of the others was officiating on the north coast of New South Wales and I didn’t meet her until years later. Back then her name wouldn’t have meant anything to me but, by the time I caught up with her in the Green Room before an episode of ABC-TV’s Live & Sweaty, she was known for many other achievements. When I heard Cheryl Kernot say she’d been one of the first group of women to umpire grade cricket, I nearly fell off my chair. But we compared notes, and we did indeed share that bizarre early step in our careers. The arrival of women umpires in men’s grade cricket made quite a splash and I got more publicity than the other three women. At the time I believed it was because I’d already been umpiring for four years. Now, having been in the media, I reckon it was probably because I was the youngest and therefore this made the story the most sensational. In the lead-up to my first game I made the news section of the Mirror newspaper. Dad said he got lots of intrigued looks when he told work colleagues that his daughter was on page three. But, of course, I was not the one in the bikini with the pouting lips and enormous breasts—I was the one pictured without make-up, squinting into the sun, wearing a very ordinary skirt and jumper. I was, however, standing in the middle of the SCG and—in a moment more symbolic of breaking down barriers than any other in my career—I’d been let into the men-only Members Stand to gain access to the field. After all those years of sitting in the Ladies Stand trying to dream up scenarios where a woman could get around the men-only rule, I’d done it. The ground was empty at the time, but it didn’t matter. I’d seen the inside of the Members Stand and, even if my photo in the paper wasn’t exactly glam, it had been worth it. 45
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy?
After all the fanfare my actual debut in grade cricket felt low-key. It came at Punchbowl Oval in a fourth-grade game. Bankstown was the home team; I can’t even remember who they played. My partner for the match was first-grade umpire Arthur Watson. They’d sent a firstgrade umpire back down the grades to stand with the new umpires for their initial games. Arthur was great and gave me lots of useful advice—especially about how umpires in tandem could check calls with each other. Probably the most helpful asset Arthur had, though, was a sense of humour. I always find laughter the best release when I’m nervous— and I certainly was that day. The pre-match tension wasn’t helped by there being some wet weather about. When we were getting ready to head out onto the field, Arthur looked up at the sky and said, ‘I think we still might get wet.’ I replied: ‘Oh, I hope not. If this blouse gets wet, it’s really see-through.’ I wasn’t trying to be titillating. I’d bought a whole new umpiring wardrobe for the big occasion but, after deciding we’d take the field without our white coats, I’d suddenly remembered noticing that my new white blouse, when hanging on the clothesline wet, was almost transparent. The look Arthur gave me was priceless. I think he made some comment like ‘Well, let’s hope for rain then’. I was wretchedly embarrassed, but had to laugh. Within moments of stepping onto the field I’d managed to lower the tone, turning cricket into a cross between the traditional gentleman’s game and a wet t-shirt competition. When women umpires first stood in grade cricket, most of the senior umpires were helpful, except for one: Bruce McDonald. He said he’d flatly refuse if he was asked to stand in a game with a woman. The others I spoke to told me they thought his ‘I’ll take my bat and ball and go home’ attitude was uncalled for but, as far as I know, the association never put him to the test by appointing him alongside a woman.
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Grade cricket didn’t turn out to be a brilliant move for me. I’d been used to officiating in games that started at one o’clock in the afternoon at grounds less than 20 minutes from home. Now I was standing in games that required me to be on deck at 10.30 a.m., often in far-flung parts of Sydney, and I was being told that, if I really wanted to make first grade and have a shot at Sheffield Shield, I’d also need to make myself available for Sunday competitions like Poidevin-Gray Shield. On the other hand, the matches themselves were easier to officiate. You always had an umpiring partner, the players tended to be more familiar with the rules and more polite dealing with umpires than they were in the rough-and-tumble Western Suburbs competition. By midway through my first year of grade, the 1974–75 season, I was finding it a grind. In my first few years of umpiring, I’d been at high school with a long break over summer, plus I lived at home with a cricket-trained Mum who’d have my umpiring gear ready on Saturdays. After dropping out of university in my first year, I took a public service job with the Department of Defence and moved out of home. A Monday-to-Friday nine-to-five gig followed by a Saturday morning of getting up early, getting my gear ready and getting off to cricket was like working six days. Besides, I was now singing in a band that had a residency at a restaurant on Saturday nights and that meant sometimes rushing home to the inner west from somewhere like Sutherland or Mosman, getting showered, changed and back out the door to stand on my feet until one in the morning. I was 20; none of my friends were even remotely interested in cricket; the band was paying me 50 or 60 dollars a night, as compared to something like 20 dollars for umpiring. Something had to give—and it was the cricket umpiring. I actually went back to the Western Suburbs Juniors in the summer of 1975–76, the season after I left grade, thinking the shorter hours and minimal travel might have allowed me to keep up my interest, but life was pulling me in too many other directions and I dropped out of official umpiring altogether. On occasion much later I was called on to do charity social matches—which gave me the thrill of working once with Test umpire 47
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Ross Emerson and umpiring some high-profile players. Being able to stand at the other end of the wicket and watch players like Doug Walters and Steve and Mark Waugh bat, even if it was just in a social setting, was fantastic. But it was being up close to genuine fast bowlers that really got my adrenaline pumping. One charity game featured Len Pascoe and Mike Whitney. Although Pascoe had retired, he was still letting them go at a clip I wasn’t used to. Hell, I was shocked to find that Mark Waugh (considered a medium pacer in first-class cricket) could bowl about as quickly as most fast bowlers I’d been used to seeing at the lower levels.
The impact that umpiring men’s cricket had on my attitude was significant. I’d ventured into an area where women hadn’t been before and, to be frank, hadn’t exactly had to kick down doors to do it. I’d simply proved my competence, ignored some minority opposition and criticism, and cleared a few trivial obstacles. In 1974, when my brother, then in his final year of high school, told me there was a desperate shortage of rugby league coaches at his school, I set about getting my Level 1 Coaching Certificate in rugby league. (Level 1 was the entry-level coaching certificate in those days; its current equivalent is Level 3.) Dennis Twomey, the same teacher who’d sent my ‘Lament of the Aussie League Fan’ to The Sun four years earlier, agreed to vouch for me although he said he just wrote down ‘D. Spillane’ on the list of coaches. I was put in charge of the De La Salle Ashfield Under-14s for one season. It was only an eight-game Catholic Schools competition; we won our first three games, then had a loss before the remaining weeks of the season were washed out. I enjoyed the experience but, when the next school year started, I was umpiring grade cricket and working five days a week, so I didn’t have the time to continue. Dealing with a couple of fathers who didn’t have time to coach the side themselves, but did have time to show up and criticise how I was using the boundless talents of their sons, was also a major disincentive. 48
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As with the cricket umpiring, I found no organised resistance to me getting the qualification or taking on the job. The one surprising burst of aggravation came from my grandfather, Frank Spillane. One weekend, over a few drinks on his back verandah, Pa told Dad and I that, as an ex-footballer and football coach, he thought it made a mockery of the system that they let a girl get a coaching qualification. He gave me grudging credit for passing the test, but he declared that, having never played the game, I couldn’t possibly coach it—and anything I’d learned from coaching manuals was probably rubbish. Dad, whom I didn’t often see confront his father, told Pa that if women couldn’t coach football then he couldn’t understand how so many men could become obstetricians. It ended in a shouting match with my aunt Janet weighing in as well, only to be told by Pa to ‘shut up because you know nothing about it either’. Family stoushes were hardly a rarity in the robust, beer-drinking, Irish atmosphere of the Spillane family, but that was the only time we got up and left my grandparents’ house over an argument related to football. It must have blown over OK though, because Pa ended up coming along and giving me a hand to drill the boys in scrummaging not long after—and he was a tremendous help. The boys themselves were fantastic. They didn’t seem to question my authority at all. Not long out of primary school, most of them had had plenty of female teachers and I was simply Miss Spillane, who taught them rugby league. One day, three games into the season, an older boy turned up and hung around training. While we were doing a drill, a ball bounced loose and landed near where he was standing. He caught it. As one of my players ran over to retrieve it, the older kid taunted: ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got a girl coach—that’s pathetic.’ My player shot back, ‘Yep, and we’re undefeated so far. So give me the ball—we’re training.’
No doubt the prevailing ‘Women’s Lib’ climate of the 70s helped me with these challenges. I certainly didn’t see myself as part of that 49
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? movement, but there was a genuine sense of momentum with women pushing the envelope in many areas of western society. I also recognise now that I was pushing in directions where there wasn’t much resistance. I got opportunities partly because there weren’t enough men interested in being cricket umpires or school-football coaches. It was different when it came to the prospect of turning sport into a career. During my last couple of years in high school I talked about wanting to be a sports journalist. A vocational guidance counsellor told me straight out that I could be a journalist, but he couldn’t imagine a woman being hired to report on men’s sport. Of course, I ignored him. In my final year I sent letters to both the major Sydney newspapers and the ABC enquiring about cadetships in sports journalism. I got zero response from the newspapers and a form letter from the ABC saying no journalism cadetships were on offer that year. Then I decided I wanted to be an actress anyway. I’d been studying speech and drama, and was successful at debating and public speaking throughout high school. I auditioned, unsuccessfully, for NIDA, then enrolled in Arts at Sydney University, planning to audition a second time for NIDA the following year. But sport never stopped being a passion. I knew I was getting sideways glances from the hardcore left-wingers in my openly socialist Government tutorial at uni each Wednesday, because I always turned up with the latest edition of Rugby League Week. But I didn’t care. There were many times when I asked myself the question ‘Why sport?’. I was certainly never any good at playing it, never attended any schools where it was treated as important and, apart from my family, I didn’t really mix with a lot of people who cared much about it. I recall once at university having an argument with a fellow English Literature student about the ‘worth’ of being interested in sport. He told me sport was pointless. I asked him to explain to me the point of poetry. The discussion ended a nil-all draw.
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PaRT II The years of living sweatily
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5 Head in the media scrum Head in the media scrum
I didn’t stick my head into the sports media scrum until I was nearly 28 years old. It was 1983. After eight years of singing in bands in pubs and clubs around Sydney, and occasionally further afield, I’d ended up owning a record shop in North Sydney with my second husband Roger Gold, a musician. Our daughter Jemima was two years old. I had eventually finished my university degree. I studied part-time while I worked in administration at Garden Island Dockyard for three years, then went back full-time, then part-time again. Mustering enough interest had been my biggest challenge, but I got there in the end—albeit in the same time as it takes most students to get through Medicine. I never did get back for the second audition at NIDA—I suspect the singing satisfied my performance urge—and I’d certainly found no way to turn my still-simmering interest in sports journalism into an opportunity. Then one day it jumped out at me from the sports pages. I was in our shop, reading the newspaper back-to-front, as usual, when I saw radio station 2GB had launched a competition to find ‘fresh talent’ in sports reporting. ‘The 2GB Sports Talent Search’ was really part station promotion, part job vacancy. The newspaper ad claimed the station was looking 53
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? for something ‘different’. I thought to myself: ‘Well, a woman would be different.’ I didn’t rush out and apply, though. We had our own business, and a toddler, and sports reporting still seemed more like a long-held pipe dream than a realistic possibility. Still, the ad kept bobbing up in the sports section over the next few weeks. I chewed over questions like: ‘What would happen to the shop if I got the job?’ and ‘Would the hours be workable with a twoyear-old daughter?’. Finally I told myself I was crazy for even worrying about these issues because I wasn’t going to get the job anyway, so why not apply just for the hell of it? Roger took my application in by hand on the afternoon of the closing date. The application had to be submitted as an audition tape, in which I introduced myself and spoke on the topic of ‘What is the Greatest Moment in Sport?’. Rather than pick a specific moment, I decided to hedge my bets, saying that my answer would depend entirely on what time of year the question was asked. If it was in winter, then the rugby league grand final was the moment; if it was summer, then nothing would beat the first session of a cricket Test between England and Australia; and in autumn, I probably wouldn’t go past the Golden Slipper. I’d been Debbie Gold for a couple of years (Mr and Mrs Gold of Gold Records, would you believe? Most people didn’t, but it was for real). However, I applied using my maiden name. I thought they’d want to check my claims that I was a cricket umpire and rugby league coach, and I’d got those qualifications as Debbie Spillane. There was a strict time limit on the audition tape and I decided not to waste precious seconds explaining name changes. I’d like to claim that I kept my maiden name because I was a modern woman, but it was sheer pragmatism. Not long afterwards I got a letter advising I’d been shortlisted for the Sports Talent Search and that they’d like to meet me. Richard Fisk, 2GB’s sports editor, interviewed me and explained I was one of 25 contenders picked from more than 600 applicants. I was pretty chuffed with getting that far. When I found out shortly afterwards that I’d survived the cut and was one of the last ten contestants, I was beside myself. It turned out I was the only female in that final group. 54
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There were three sections to the final stage of the audition/interview process: writing and presenting a two-minute sports editorial; a mock radio interview with former rugby league referee, Greg Hartley (a league commentator with 2GB at the time); and, finally, each contestant had to go before a panel of experts for questioning on a variety of sports. Oddly enough, the topic I chose for my sports editorial was tennis.
I remember Dad’s family watching Davis Cup at Christmas when I was a kid, but I never got interested. I thought the scoring system was just plain weird and, as none of them could explain to me what ‘love’ or ‘deuce’ had to do with anything, I just put it in the ‘too hard’ basket. My change in attitude came the year my eldest daughter Jemima was born. She was about six months old in the summer of 1981 and, as I’d had to resign my full-time job managing a music shop at Burwood when I had her, I was crawling the walls at home. It was either daytime soaps or ‘Seven’s Summer of Tennis’. I chose the latter and never looked back. There’s a reasonable argument to suggest that, back in the days when the Seven Network used to start in early November with some obscure Tasmanian tournament (where Brad Drewett was invariably the top seed) and then run wall-to-wall right through until February, tennis was a daytime soap masquerading as sport. Except the characters were more attractive and the scripts better than Days of Our Lives. I got to know the main characters and the bit players; I even got a handle on their tactics and strategies. By the next summer I was hooked and, for the first time in my life, started attending live tennis. It just so happened that the 2GB audition in 1983 was not long after the Australian Indoor at the Hordern Pavilion, where I’d been horrified to find the courtside seating monopolised by corporate boxes, full of people noisily stuffing their faces, clinking glasses, getting pissed and generally being a distraction to players and hoi-polloi fans alike. So in my editorial I had a polite if marketing-naive rant about this, suggesting these folk needed to 55
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? decide whether they wanted a night out at a restaurant or a night out at the tennis. Probably because the ‘bolshie young sheila’ tone appealed to him, 2GB’s Mike Carlton—at the time the top-rating breakfast host in Sydney—gave my audition editorial an airing. It had an amazing effect. People assumed I’d won the Sports Talent Search, though I hadn’t. I was told I’d come out on top in the editorial comment section and that my interview with Hartley was OK, but I’d not done well in the ‘trial by panel’. That didn’t surprise me. I distinctly recall thinking ‘And this is the bit where I fall apart’ when I was ushered, nerves jangling, into my first radio station boardroom and told to take a seat next to a snowy head of hair that turned out to belong to (gulp!) Richie Benaud. Sure, there were other intimidating people peering at me from points all around the table—Daily Telegraph rugby league writer Peter Frilingos and Olympics boss Phil Coles among them—but being required to sit and answer sports questions while being watched at close quarters by that master of dispassionate assessment, Richie Benaud, pretty much did my head in completely. If I was drawing up a list of people I’ve met in life whom I’d least like to try to bluff, Mr Benaud (as I felt compelled to call him) would be at the top. Sure, I could pretend to be confident, but I felt like a used-car salesman who’d unexpectedly been asked to deliver his sales pitch to Michael Schumacher. Stupidly, I found I couldn’t get that maniacal Monty Python line ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’ out of my head, which didn’t help me in my quest for focus. I couldn’t answer most of the questions and, when Mr Benaud posed one that sounded like it needed a 10 000-word thesis written in response, I just gibbered. I wish I could remember the exact question, and the fact that I can’t has nothing to do with the intervening decades. I can guarantee you that, within a millisecond of him asking it, I found myself wishing I could remember it. It was something along the lines of: 56
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When commentating on sport which of the following is the most important prerequisite: a. Knowledge and understanding of the sport itself b. Knowledge of the players and their relevant statistics c. Use of the English language And please give reasons to support your choice. I answered ‘c’—mainly because I’d already forgotten what ‘a’ and ‘b’ were. I lamely contended that, if you didn’t know how to use the English language properly, then ‘a’ and ‘b’ might be irrelevant, because you couldn’t communicate what you knew. Or something. Mr Benaud told me outright I was wrong and gave me the correct answer—which I’d love to share with you now but, naturally, it went straight through my brain, which remained in a paralysed and sievelike state.
Ultimately, I was announced runner-up in the Sports Talent Search and the sports editor, Richard Fisk, offered me a two-minute spot on the station’s Saturday morning sports show, Sportsline. He admitted 2GB didn’t really know what to do with me. They’d been impressed, and the Carlton breakfast show exposure had generated positive feedback, but they felt offering a full-time sports reporter’s job to a 27-year-old woman who owned a record shop was too much of a gamble. I was in good company. A fellow runner-up was David Middleton, who became the official statistician for the National Rugby League and author of an annual yearbook on the sport. The winner of the contest, and the job, was a young guy named Jon Harker, already a journalism cadet at The Sun newspaper working on sport. He’s gone on to have an extensive career in print, radio and television. I got most of the publicity, because I was the more unusual story; he got the job. I can understand that. But what I still can’t figure out is how he, the bloke, ended up fronting all those NapiSan ads on TV. But that’s a question for another time. 57
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? For now, there was one small problem with the proposed cameo role on Sportsline. They wanted me to give ‘the woman’s view’ of sport and I had no idea what that was. And the more I thought about it, the less I liked it. I could give my views on sport, I told Richard Fisk, but I didn’t see how these would be peculiarly female, or even representative of the views of other women. I noted they had several men who disagreed with each other about sport on a daily basis and wondered which represented ‘the male view’. After some discussion I was given the go-ahead just to write and present my view of any sporting issue each Saturday morning. I didn’t have to give up running my shop, but I had a small position in the media scrum—and the ball was in play.
Within a month or two I had offers from the Sydney Morning Herald and Cricket Lifestyle magazine to write articles for them. Writing mainly about cricket led to an invitation from the Cricketers’ Club of NSW to compere a farewell function for the Australian women’s cricket team who were leaving to tour India. At that dinner I was introduced to a couple of ABC Sport commentators, David Morrow and Jim Maxwell. David told me the ABC was about to advertise for a full-time sports broadcaster and he’d heard a rumour that management would be looking for a woman. It was very flattering and I was interested but, with a shop to run, a weekly 2GB segment to prepare and a twoyear-old at home, I wasn’t really scanning the Positions Vacant. Several weeks later I got a phone call at the shop from David, wanting to know why I hadn’t applied. I hadn’t even seen the ad. He read me the details and stressed again that there was management pressure to hire a woman. Sport, he explained, was one of the few ABC departments that didn’t have any women on air and the Deputy Chair of the ABC Board, Wendy McCarthy, was making noises about rectifying that situation. So again I scrambled at the eleventh hour. I literally drove into the city and posted the envelope at the GPO shortly before midnight on the closing date. This time I had the advantage of being able to 58
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send an example of me actually performing on-air, thanks to my weekly 2GB spot. I got an interview that included a general sports knowledge quiz of something like 50 questions thrown at me in quick succession by a panel of three people, including then ABC-TV rugby league commentator Alan Marks. I escaped the radio audition because of my 2GB work, so the next step was an audition at ABC television. In those days sport was what they called ‘an integrated department’— that meant ‘sports broadcasters’, as they were called, could be called on by either the radio or TV sports departments. I learned I’d been successful when the then head of ABC News, Sport and Current Affairs, Derek White, rang to say he was offering me the job on one condition. I held my breath. On the condition that I was available to go to the Olympics in Los Angeles later that year. The wacky prankster in me was tempted to say ‘No, I’m afraid I’m busy in July and August’. I didn’t. I don’t know what I said, but the word ‘Yes’ was included somewhere in the babble.
So, in early 1984 I became the first woman employed by the ABC as a full-time sports broadcaster. Within weeks it was clear everyone knew I was there because of ‘Wendy McCarthy’s bloody affirmative action’. It was the Olympic commentary gig that caused most bitterness. Various members of staff pointed out that several extremely capable broadcasters, like Jim Maxwell and Peter Wilkins, had never been chosen on an Olympics commentary team. How were they supposed to feel, knowing some woman with next-to-no experience had been offered the plum assignment before even setting foot in the door? They had a legitimate gripe, but I had no idea what I could do about it. The hostility interstate was even more pronounced. Two sports broadcasters wrote letters of complaint to their local politicians. One of them, Tim Lane, at least had the decency to front me about it at the very first opportunity—which happened to be on the flight to Los Angeles. He wanted me to understand it was nothing personal; he opposed the policy, not me. I went on to work with Tim many 59
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? times, mainly on athletics, and, despite the awkward start to our working relationship, we got on well and I learned plenty from his professionalism, his knowledge of sport and his sense of humour. I was never officially told I’d benefited from an affirmative action policy, but it was an open secret. Someone told me I’d been the best qualified female applicant, but there’d been several better qualified men. My Catholic upbringing made me good at doing guilt. I felt I’d snared a once-in-a-lifetime dream job because others had been unfairly boxed out. On the other hand, I also understood at a philosophical level that if the ABC waited for a woman to apply for a sports broadcaster’s job—who had an extensive background in reporting sport, or calling races or footy—they would wait forever. Most of my colleagues seemed to accept my appointment as a quirky fact of ABC life. I felt fortunate to be working with a group of men so passionate and informed about sport. The Sydney broadcasters in 1984 were Gordon Bray, Ron Davies, Jim Maxwell, David Morrow and Peter Wilkins. Above them, in mostly managerial roles, were Alan Marks and John O’Reilly. The latter, who was close to retirement, was asked to take me under his wing. John O’Reilly had been a rugby league commentator on television and radio for many years. A pleasant old-fashioned gentleman, he was never going to tell me outright that he didn’t think a woman could be a commentator on male sport, but I was never in any doubt that’s how he felt. He suggested I brush up on sports like lawn bowls which had, he pointed out, many prestigious women’s competitions. My Spillane grandparents were delighted to hear that such a venerated gent as John had been appointed my mentor. ‘Always seems such a nice man,’ my grandmother would enthuse. ‘And such a beautiful speaking voice, too.’ The speaking voice was something John took very seriously. He let me know early on that he’d identified in my audition tapes a major impediment to my future as an awardwinning ladies lawn bowls commentator. I had seriously flat vowel sounds, particularly my ‘i’. Now, I imagine this is not an easy matter to be honest with someone about. A bit like being upfront about shortcomings in personal 60
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hygiene. Or ‘hoygene’. I needed to refine this rogue vowel sound. So every morning, from the time the tea trolley arrived outside his office shortly after ten o’clock, I was to join him for speech exercises. ‘This is a piece of pie; this is a cherry pie’ was the particular vowel-tightening exercise he favoured. It was vaguely humiliating having to sit opposite him at his desk each morning, repeating ludicrous phrases like this while the other broadcasters did real work. I felt scarred for life when I met for the first time Reg Gasnier, the legendary St George rugby league player. John made him wait in the doorway while I finished a dozen repetitions—‘This is a piece of pie; this is a cherry pie’—concentrating the whole time on keeping my palate elevated. I told this story to Sonia Humphrey, an ex-ABC staffer who interviewed me for a profile piece in The Australian soon after my appointment. She sent me into hysterics by asking if I’d been required to smear myself in whipped cream for the cherry pie exercise. I didn’t share this gag with John. Our senses of humour were postcodes apart.
The hardest part of my job was perhaps defining exactly what it was. I suspect those who wanted me hired had no clear idea of how ABC Sport should use me. And there were no clues to be gleaned from looking at who I was replacing. On paper that was Norman May. The catch was, Norman was still working for ABC Sport. He’d simply vacated his staff position and was being hired on contract to do much of what he had always done; so I wasn’t stepping into his role, I was just being added to the pool of full-time broadcasters and, understandably, for much of the time I was at the shallow end. One of my bread-and-butter tasks was preparing and presenting a half-hour 6.30 p.m. radio Sports Roundup program broadcast daily on Sydney and regional stations, segments of which were occasionally relayed nationally. At least a couple of times a week I was rostered to do that show. I had precious little experience in radio presentation, but even less in editing and production, which made it stressful at first. I had to find and prepare most of the content, then transfer all of this 61
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? onto a clumsy reel-to-reel program tape. The segments had to go on the tape in their correct order, with a ‘clean’ gap of ten seconds between each item. I’d introduce each item ‘live’; when the pre-recorded segment finished, the operator in the control room would spool the tape forward and cue the next item to be ready to go after my intro. After creating the program tape in the sports department, which was based in Westfield Towers, next door to the Boulevarde Hotel in William Street, I had to hoof it up the hill to the old 2BL studios in Darlinghurst—just near the infamous ‘Wall’—a distance of about 500 metres. Many times I left my run a bit late and wheezed asthmatically through the first few live introductions.
One of the other quaint tasks that ABC sports broadcasters had to perform in those days was the announcement on 2BL of the midweek Sydney race scratchings. In the mid-80s the ABC still broadcast races on Saturdays and, because racing was part of our agenda, we had a regular slot for reading scratchings on the morning current affairs program on Wednesdays, then hosted by Jane Singleton. Jane always looked like she would have preferred a colonoscopy without sedation to giving over a couple of minutes of her program to horseracing. I’d turn up on Wednesdays to be welcomed by her team with exclamations like: ‘Oh shit, we’ve got the bloody race scratchings to fit in.’ They’d then bark encouraging instructions like ‘Make it quick’. Nothing impedes smooth delivery quite like impatient people drumming their fingers while you do your schtick and a hard-hitting journalist sitting opposite, who looks like she wants your nonsense finished, pronto, so she can get on with tearing strips off Bob Hawke or someone. Fortunately I was more welcome on the program hosted by Buzz Kennedy. He arranged for me to appear each Monday on his lunchtime show, wrapping up the weekend sports. Buzz wasn’t overly interested in sport, but he was interested in the unusual twist of having a young woman explaining the intricacies of sport to a stubbornly disinterested, 62
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grumpy old man. It was a subtle role-reversal thing that he played up for all it was worth. I don’t think it’s stretching the point to suggest that Buzz Kennedy’s weekly exchange with ‘The Sporting Spillane’ (as he insisted on calling me) was in some ways a template for the on-air ‘partnerships’ I had later in my career with Andrew Denton on Live & Sweaty and Ian Rogerson on Triple J’s Hard Coffee.
During my early forays into 2BL-land, I had no idea who most of these people were whom I was dealing with, nor what kind of programs I was appearing on. Up to that time I had been a mainstream girl on the rock’n’roll radio wavelength. I’d just come from five years running a record shop. There was no question—this was a dream job. But it was also a massive culture change. When Derek White, the Head of News, Sport and Current Affairs, called me into his office one day and told me the leopard-skin print suit I was wearing presented an unsuitable image for the ABC, I was dumbfounded. Having worn nothing but jeans and record company t-shirts or sweatshirts to work for several years, I thought the ‘upgrade’ to a suit was a massive concession to respectability. But Derek told me I needed to dress every day so that I ‘wouldn’t look out of place at a funeral’. I opted for plain skirts and blouses after that, but I’ve never been much of a fashion connoisseur. I got the football chromosome instead. The ‘what to wear’ question is one I’ve always hated. Given this, you can imagine that the appearance-obsessed world of television presented me with a huge challenge. Management wanted me to dress on camera like the rest of the sports broadcasters, which meant donning the navy blue ABC Sport blazer and feeling like I was back at school. But it was a way of simplifying the ‘what to wear’ issue, so I accepted it. Well, at least I’d escaped the hat and gloves. An unexpected gender complication arose when I started getting rostered occasionally to present sport on the seven-o’clock TV news. Minimal time in make-up for the presenter of sport was the custom as this had always been a man. A quick pat on the face with a bit 63
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? of powder and a comb through the hair was all the preparation needed for the likes of Gordon Bray or Peter Wilkins. (Wilko usually minus the hair-combing bit.) But the make-up department was aghast at the prospect of having to prepare a woman in the five to ten minutes normally scheduled for the sports presenter. Around one hour was typically allocated for women presenters. My initial reaction was: ‘Well, give me the same time in makeup as a man.’ Not so simple. It was put to me that viewers don’t expect a man to be on-screen with eye shadow, rouge, lipstick and hair styling. But they expected it from a woman. Now, I had no trouble whatsoever identifying this as an absurd, indefensible double standard. I’d been well schooled in feminist doctrine during my university days and, as I was now its beneficiary, I felt some loyalty to the theory. But when it came to the practice, I had to admit that loyalty didn’t extend to working ugly. One studio rehearsal under full brutal lighting sans make-up was enough to convince me that self-preservation should have precedence over principle. Without industrial strength make-up my pale skin, fair eyelashes and prominent freckles translated on screen to a washedout face, covered in something like the leopard-skin print I’d been banned from wearing around the office. Fortunately, I was a bit low down the pecking order to be rostered for television news often. So the problem was in the main avoided rather than solved.
My limited time with TV news did produce one of my most embarrassing moments. I was sent to interview golfer Ian Baker-Finch prior to the New South Wales Open in 1984. The plan was to meet him after a practice round, so we set up for the interview on a practice putting green on the edge of the course. Now, there was no avoiding the fact that Baker-Finch was not only high profile but also stunningly handsome. As we watched him complete his practice round, I made the mistake of saying as much to the cameraman who was to shoot the interview. 64
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All went reasonably well until after we’d finished the interview proper. At this point the cameraman will usually ask the interviewer and interviewee to pose for some extra shots for use later in the editing process. These are called ‘noddies’ because they usually feature the interviewer nodding thoughtfully, as if listening intently to the interviewee’s answers. Being a rookie, I found doing ‘noddies’ silly and awkward anyway. But when the cameraman said, totally within earshot of Baker-Finch, ‘OK, Deb look into Ian’s eyes and nod as if he’s just asked you on a date and you’re agreeing’, I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me. Baker-Finch, being a perfect gentleman, who’d probably done more television than me, handled it with great aplomb and smiled sportingly. When shooting was finished I pulled together the shreds of my dignity, mustered my best business-like ‘Thanks for your time’, shook BakerFinch’s hand, turned to walk away—and left both my high-heeled shoes embedded in the turf. I wasn’t stupid enough to walk onto the green wearing those shoes, by the way, I was standing on the grass verge. Preoccupied by the interview, however, I hadn’t realised that my shoe heels had gradually sunk down into the grass. After stumbling out of them, I turned back in my stockinged feet, grinned foolishly and blabbered: ‘Guess I’d better take my shoes with me.’
Most of the men in the sports department made no secret of the fact that they considered commentary the ultimate test of ability. It was a waste of a good sporting mind to spend all day preparing a 90second story for television, then to sit in a studio and read it off the autocue. Likewise, to laboriously piece together 20 minutes of audio segments onto a reel-to-reel tape and introduce them in a radio studio. Calling the cricket or the football was not only the real adrenaline rush, it was a ticket to travelling the country and occasionally the world. Several people told me I could probably do everything the guys did—except for the commentary. Immediately it became the part of the job I most coveted. 65
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? My determination to learn the commentary ropes was also fuelled by the fact that within months I was scheduled to face the first test of my commentating mettle: as the caller of diving events at the Los Angeles Olympics. I certainly didn’t get assigned to diving because I knew anything about it. But everyone assured me most commentators were in the same boat. It was a matter of researching the sport, interviewing as many of the Australian competitors and officials as possible before the Games, and developing a working understanding of the rules, the tactics and the personalities. Diving being a slow-moving contest (i.e. one competitor at a time), unlikely to yield any medals for Australia and not a sport that lent itself to radio anyway, probably had a lot to do with me being chosen to cover it. But my allocation to the diving pool was also influenced by a choice I made not long after starting at ABC Sport. I was told my main job at the Olympics would be as interviewer at one of the major venues, either at the swimming pool or at the track and field stadium. I was allowed to choose and I chose swimming. People recounting stories like this usually say about now: ‘And if I was given the same choice over again, I’d make the same decision.’ Well, I don’t mind saying I wouldn’t. I let the most ridiculous factor sway me. I reasoned that, because I’d been in a swimming club as a kid and raced on summer Sunday mornings for a few years, I had some idea about swimming. At highschool swimming carnivals I was the one who got the third-place ribbon in breaststroke and backstroke because I was one of only three girls who could swim 50 metres of those strokes. Or who could be arsed doing it on the day. So, as irrelevant as it was, ten to 12 years after I’d last flung myself off the blocks in some suburban Sunday morning handicap over 50 metres, I decided that swimming was a better sport for me to cover at the Olympics than athletics. I’ll also admit to being swayed by knowing that choosing the swimming meant working alongside the revered Norman May. I thought that would be an experience I’d really learn from. It was. But not in the way I’d expected. 66
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Four months ago I had made the unlikely career switch from shopowner to sports broadcaster. Now I was being sent to cover an Olympic Games. Initially this seemed reason for nothing but sheer excitement and celebration. It wasn’t long though before the Olympics looming so close started to feel like a double-edged sword. It didn’t take me long to figure out that sports reporting, radio presentation, live commentary and interviewing were all skills nobody was going to master in four months; yet in four months I’d be doing those things at the Olympics. And even though I didn’t need TV skills for the Games, I was having to get my head around them as well. Sure, I had fleeting daydreams of taking the nation by storm with an inspirational debut commentary effort in Los Angeles, making myself a household name, while astonishing sports fans and ABC management alike with my eloquence, knowledge and obvious destiny as an all-time great of sports broadcasting. But I didn’t drink enough to have these delusions often. The more I became aware of how much there was to learn, the more I struggled to see myself as competent and qualified. I sensed others saw me as some rookie blundering around with a cardboard 67
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? crown on her head saying ‘Princess of Affirmative Action’. These people were going to push me out on centre stage at the Olympics very shortly—ready or not.
One of the best breaks I had leading up to the Olympics was the addition of a second woman to the team. ABC News and Current Affairs had decided to send a reporter who’d file for their programs, and who would also be assigned to work as interviewer at whichever of the two major venues was passed up by me. Thanks to my obscure history at the Enfield Swimming Club, this second reporter would be based at the magnificent Los Angeles Coliseum, home of the Olympics track and field events. Vivian Schenker, who was working as an ABC Canberra correspondent at the time, got the gig. Vivian has since gone on to have a distinguished career in serious journalism, as host of SBS’s Insight, as presenter of the Radio National breakfast program and as staffer for two ALP leaders, Simon Crean and Mark Latham. Sent to Sydney for a short time to familiarise herself with the Olympics commentary team, Vivian was assigned to tag along with me for a few days. Although younger than me, she already had several years’ radio experience. She was easy to get along with, smart and funny, with a wicked throaty laugh. I learned more from her than she did from me. Most memorably, she introduced me to one of the conventional theories about women in radio—one I was to encounter regularly over the years. It’s the theory that a woman’s voice doesn’t carry the same authority as a man’s. It’s nothing more than a prejudice and a product of conditioning, of course, and fortunately it’s an attitude less prevalent these days than in the 80s—although I wouldn’t suggest it’s died out completely. Back then I actually saw ABC Radio switchboard reports which logged comments from listeners like: ‘When a woman reads the news, the voice is too high for me to understand properly. Please go back to male newsreaders.’ Now Vivian didn’t believe it was a valid criticism, but she pointed out you could minimise the fuss by remembering one thing. Before 68
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opening your microphone, stop and note where you’re going to pitch your voice for the opening words, then consciously drop it down a notch. At first I resisted; I argued that, if it wasn’t the natural place I’d pitch my voice, then it would sound false. But she countered that nerves (and I was still getting plenty of them) normally lifted your natural pitch slightly anyway. Speech and drama training had made me familiar with the concept that nervousness sped up delivery, so it wasn’t a stretch to accept it also affected pitch. It also made sense in terms of my singing experience—picking the right note to begin on, I knew, was allimportant in ensuring you had the range to cover the rest of the song. It was a small technique tip, but the one that helped me develop an acceptable radio voice more than any other. Well, not counting the ‘cherry pie’ vowel exercises at morning tea-time, of course. Vivian was also a good influence because she was a sports fan, not a fanatic. Though excited about the Games, she didn’t see it as a defining moment of her career—as almost everyone who was involved from the sport department did. She helped me stand back a bit and laugh. But unfortunately she wasn’t around on a day-to-day basis in the lead-up to the Games. I was having regular crises of confidence. I kept being told that, after the swimming finished, I’d be on my own at the diving pool— which was a problematic situation for me to imagine, given that I’d never seen a live diving competition or done an outside broadcast before.
At one stage I was told to also prepare for possible assignment to the basketball. As with diving, at this time I knew zero about basketball; but I was told it might be a good sport for me to become an instant expert on because, obviously, women’s basketball couldn’t be all that different from netball, right? And I was a girl, so I’d obviously played netball, right? So that knowledge wouldn’t be too hard to transfer to women’s basketball? Wrong. 69
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? To prepare myself, I couldn’t go and see any women’s basketball at this time, because the Australians were in Cuba trying to qualify, so I took myself along to Bankstown Stadium to watch the Australian men’s team play a Yugoslavian club side. Three things swiftly became clear. One was that I knew absolutely zero about basketball; the second was it bore no resemblance whatsoever to netball; the third was that, even without actually having a clue what was going on, it was the most exciting sport I’d ever watched, and I was going back for more. How much more I could never have guessed. Little did I know that within a few short years I’d be working most days of the week at that same pokey, school-gym-like stadium for a team that didn’t exist in 1984, the Sydney Kings. But ultimately the Australian women’s team didn’t qualify for the LA Olympics and, apparently, I was only considered suitable for women’s basketball. Still I was relieved when basketball was crossed off my list of sports to prepare for. I knew that if my bosses thought I’d pick it up quickly because it was like netball, they didn’t know a singlet from a pleated skirt.
In preparing for the diving I had enormous help from the secretary of Australian Diving, Jack Sanders. Jack was a garrulous man who enthusiastically sought me out the moment he got wind of the news I was diving commentator for the Games. He loaded me up with information, showed me videos of diving competitions, taught me to at least recognise a rip entry from a bellyflop, and regaled me with stories about the legend I was soon to see in person: Greg Louganis. Still, a few weeks out from departure I got cold feet. Cold feet right up to my knees. It was a combination of the pressure stemming from the tetchiness of those broadcasters who weren’t going and the sheer weight of stupid mistakes I felt I was making on air. If I’d said something dumb on the 6.30 sports show, I’d lie awake at night wondering how many more hundreds of thousands of people would hear that kind of mistake during the Olympics. 70
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When I heard that those Sydney broadcasters left behind in July and August were going to be given opportunities on radio and television rugby league in the absence of Alan Marks and David Morrow, I hatched a plan. If I was going to be tested for the first time covering a major sport then wouldn’t staying home and covering rugby league, a sport I actually knew, give me a fighting chance? I went to Alan’s office and told him I didn’t want to go to the Olympics. Now Alan was someone I always felt awkward around. Unlike his boss, Derek White, Alan had no background in news and current affairs, where women reporters, newsreaders and presenters had become commonplace. He was pleasant enough to me, but I sensed he was not a fan of affirmative action playing any role in planning an Olympics, which, by the way, he did with military precision. When I pleaded to be taken off the Olympic commentary team, he heard me out, betraying absolutely no reaction, and then matter-of-factly asked whether I’d ever seen anyone selected for Australia in rugby league who was generally regarded as lucky to get the call-up. ‘Yes,’ I offered, eager as always to prove my league stripes. ‘Ross Conlon.’ ‘Good example,’ he replied calmly. ‘So do you think Conlon would go to the selectors and try to give the jersey back?’ ‘No.’ I swallowed hard. ‘So you take the green and gold jersey when it’s offered, OK? It’s not something you hand back, even if everyone thinks you didn’t deserve it.’ I didn’t know whether to be honoured or offended. I know I was intimidated. When I repeated this conversation later to Vivian, she looked at me seriously and asked, ‘He really said that?’. ‘Yup,’ I nodded. She stared at me for a moment, as if weighing up the import of the advice. And then suddenly threw her head back and laughed her marvellous throaty laugh. ‘That’s the funniest thing I ever heard!’ she roared. 71
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy?
To even begin to unpick the jumble of challenges, climaxes, anticlimaxes and frustrations that flood into my head when I think of the Los Angeles Olympics is simply not possible—well, not in any orderly fashion anyway. The first point I can’t stress enough is that working on an Olympic Games—and I was lucky enough to do it again in 1988 with the Ten Network—involves longer and more demanding hours than most people imagine. You’re working and thinking in two different time zones, doing split shifts. And the action you’re trying to absorb is happening all around you every day, from early in the morning until late at night. Into this mix you need to throw the fact that I was not only a radio rookie but was hardly well travelled. I had been overseas, but only to New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, and, thanks to a gig in a band on a cruise ship in my early 20s, I’d spent an afternoon in each of Honiara, Suva and Port Vila. Los Angeles was a whole other thing. We were staying at The Ambassador Hotel, for cripessakes! I was staying in the very hotel where Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. That seemed exciting and significant, at the same time as chilling and poignant. In 1968, in a rare break from racehorse and football idols, I’d unaccountably developed a fixation with RFK which never entirely left me. Now, 16 years later, I went to the Ambassador ballroom and kitchen; I wandered around and wondered what weird twist of fate had ended up bringing me to this very place, on such a totally unrelated mission. Even then, in my late 20s, I couldn’t explain to myself why the killing of an American presidential candidate had so upset me as a non-political 12-year-old Australian kid. Of all the crazy factors to be dealing with, RFK flashbacks were the last thing I expected. But there they were, surfacing occasionally amidst the emotional and logistical blur that was the Olympics.
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The week we had in Los Angeles leading up to the opening ceremony was meant to give everyone time to find their way around, do checks of equipment and gather last-minute information. But there was plenty of time leftover for a lot of tense people to get on each other’s nerves. I was intensely grateful for Vivian’s company. Without her I would have spent a lot of time alone. David Morrow made a valiant attempt to involve me in what were unofficial team-bonding sessions, but most of the time it didn’t really work. In the evenings we’d be told to meet in the bar before dinner and the night’s activities would be planned from there. On more than one occasion Vivian and I found we were sitting there chatting with our male colleagues; they’d be making polite conversation, but then gradually in dribs and drabs they’d all drift off saying they had plans for the evening. We’d hear the next morning that they’d actually all gone on to meet up somewhere else, simply minus Viv and me. When we attended official events, they couldn’t give us the slip. On one of these occasions Vivian summed up our status as that of kid sisters out with our older brothers—because Mum and Dad said they had to take us. It was the perfect analogy. We amused ourselves with this ‘pesky kid sisters’ tag throughout the Games. On the flight over I’d forged an amiable truce with Tim Lane, whom I’d expected to be one of my most awkward teammates, but gradually I realised he was the least of my worries. He’d had the honesty to speak to me directly. Vivian was working with him and George Grljusich at the track. They hadn’t become best buddies or anything, but she was enjoying her working relationship with them. For me Norman May was proving to be a problematic partner. Well, for starters, there was no way it was a partnership. Norman was the legend, the most experienced Olympic commentator on the team, and I was the new kid on the block. Any attempts to engage him in discussion about what might be expected from me at the pool were fruitless. He seemed of a mind to do what he always did, and how I worked around that was of no concern to him. Too well-connected and fond of socialising to spend much time around our hotel, Norman proved elusive for me to pin down just 73
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? long enough to make sure I got included in things like recce trips out to the swimming venue at the University of Southern California. My insecurity, added to the palpable tension that everyone was feeling, made these little snubs feel like major incidents to me. Quite possibly Norman remained blissfully unaware that he gave me even a moment’s grief.
The hardest tickets to get at an Olympics are opening ceremony tickets. And having media accreditation is not enough to get you in the door. The ABC was given a limited number of passes, something in the order of eight or ten, and Derek announced that those who’d never been to an Olympics before would be accommodated first, then a ballot would be conducted for the remaining tickets. Naturally this was another cue for Catholic guilt training to come to the fore. While smiling gratefully and saying ‘Oh, thanks’, I’m thinking: ‘Great. First they give me a place on the Olympic commentary team that almost nobody thinks I deserve. As a result, everyone’s trying to pretend I’m not here. Now I’m one of the chosen few for opening ceremony tickets.’ What made the guilt worse was that I really wasn’t fussed about going anyway. I’d barely given the opening ceremony a moment’s thought. But, after being told I had a ticket, and being roundly congratulated and proclaimed ‘so very lucky’, I felt it would have been sort of ‘unpatriotic’ to point out I’d had a lifelong lukewarm reaction to arenas full of flag-waving, dancing, singing and acrobatting entertainers, schoolkids and stuffed animals. Call me a hard-hearted bitch, but I didn’t go all warm and fuzzy when Matilda winked at the Brisbane Commonwealth Games. Cute, sure, but give me a break—it was an oversized kangaroo doll on a float with a retractable ‘eyelid’. I felt embarrassed when people gushed about it. It was impressive when they got the crowd in Moscow to create motifs with coloured cards, or whatever they used. But it didn’t move 74
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me; it just made me think ‘That’s clever. Wish we could watch a race or something’. So maybe what happened at the Coliseum was just karma, though I prefer to blame the Los Angeles water.
The Coliseum is a grandiose name for a sporting venue, but you couldn’t deny this 100 000-seater stadium had the character to carry it off. The good news about attending the opening ceremony was that I got to see something at the Coliseum. The bad news was that it was a stinking hot day, the seating was all open to the baking sun, and the crowd crush, in and around the venue, was quite daunting. There are two key factors to remember as backdrop to the Los Angeles Olympics. One is that, in retaliation for the US boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the Soviet Union, East Germany and most Eastern-bloc nations had pulled out of LA just a few months beforehand; and, in the wake of the financial failure of the Montreal Games in 1976, Los Angeles had been given the green light to become the first fully commercial Olympics. You didn’t need to be a clairvoyant to predict organisers were on a mission to make this the most lavish opening ceremony ever. What Moscow did with precision and discipline, Hollywood was going to outdo with money, excess and sheer razzamatazz. I turned up with the attitude ‘So, go on, impress me’. And I was impressed. When the guy with the rocket backpack flew across the stadium like someone from the Jetsons, my jaw dropped. When several dozen pianists appeared at grand pianos on platforms around the stadium, simultaneously playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, my jaw dropped. But you know what happens if you drop your jaw often enough? You stop picking it up, and you just become dazed and slackjawed. Besides, I was cooking in the sun. Coca-Cola was free for the media at these first commercial games—I was drinking it by the gallon, working up a lather of sweat and starting to feel vaguely unwell. I’d begun feeling listless during the grand march of the teams onto the arena. To start with, I’d absorbed myself in the detail of the teams 75
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? making their entrances in alphabetical order, by checking the program for the name of the flag carrier, the number of competitors, officials, team uniforms and so on. After what seemed like hours, I realised we were only up to Ghana. The notion that I was clammy rather than sweaty started to take hold. I was feeling queasy. I went and found a stairwell to stand in for a while, to get a break from the relentless beating of the sun on my head, but of course security kept moving me on. Each time I returned to my seat, I found maybe another two letters of the alphabet had marched past. Several members of the commentary team had been laid low by a stomach bug in the days preceding the opening ceremony. Seasoned travellers had assured me that this was not uncommon and that it was most likely a reaction to the water. I’d previously congratulated myself on not having succumbed to the illness, but now I realised it had me in its grip. With many hours of the opening ceremony to go, I was trapped in a crowded stadium, frying in the heat and facing the certainty that, when it was over, we were going to have to battle 100 000 people getting out of the place and stand, crammed tight, on a media bus for the two-leg journey home, via the International Press Centre. I lasted until just before the proceedings ended, when Derek realised I was seriously ailing. He told me we should make a dash for the buses before the mass exodus began, and that’s what we did. I remember him literally holding me up as he used ABC Olympic pins to bribe the bus-queue officials to allow us to jump to the head of the already massive line. Until this moment I’d thought trading pins were stupid. But in my present situation I was hardly going to bitch about a trivial trinket obsession—I was too busy trying not to pass out. After being delivered back to my hotel room, I took a call from Derek telling me I’d been withdrawn from the first day’s commentary roster. No correspondence was to be entered into. I was too sick to argue. Too sick even to feel guilty. In the hours I was conscious I watched US television and tried, unsuccessfully, to catch a glimpse or a mention of an Australian. But by day two of the swimming, I was on deck and ready for my first live experience of Olympic competition. 76
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The University of Southern California swimming pool was outdoors and open to the brilliant sunshine that persisted throughout the Games. All the events were held in the daytime and sunlight on the pool water created a piercing aqua colour that really set off the jumble of bright flags, logos, bunting and banners that surrounded it. The fact that media and spectators were banked round the pool on nothing more than scaffolding-style seating, and that the media conferences were carried out in marquees, made it feel more like a festival than a momentous sporting occasion. There were times when I couldn’t believe how much it felt like an oversized school swimming carnival. Well, that’s if you can imagine an oversized school swimming carnival with uniformed guys carrying military assault rifles manning all entrances. A brass band played in the lead-up to each session and its signature tune was something I later learned was the theme from Ghostbusters. I’d never even heard of that movie then. As a result, in my mind, that song is forever inextricably linked with the Los Angeles Olympics. That and ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. The Eastern-bloc boycott had left the United States firmly in charge at the pool and I was shocked at how quickly I caught myself cheering (discreetly) for anyone who had a chance of interrupting the flag-waving and hand-on-heart warbling all around me. This made me very fond of the West German who was the undoubted star of the pool—Michael Gross. Gross was already the buzz by the time I made it for my first day at the pool. On day one, in my absence, he’d broken his own world record in winning the 200metres freestyle. He was racing again in the 100-metres butterfly on day two, and he was the swimmer I most wanted to see. Far from being a ‘heart throb’ type, the 20-year-old was prickly and uncommunicative with the media. He had a slightly ethereal appearance—tall, angular, gangly and pale. His nickname was ‘The Albatross’—mainly a reference to his extremely long arms, which gave him, according to Sports Illustrated, a ‘wingspan’ of more than seven foot four-and-a-half inches. This moniker was especially 77
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? appropriate when he swam butterfly—he looked like he was flying, and his times proved he was. Nevertheless Gross didn’t line up favourite in the first final I saw him contest. The favourite was the American world-record holder Pablo Morales. The crowd, of course, was stridently with Morales, who was not just American, but Californian. It was a breathtaking butterfly shoot-out. Gross and his long white arms gathered in Morales just ten metres from the finish, stunning the crowd. The race had been swum at such a breakneck pace that the first five swimmers all broke Morales’s old world record. Gross had the gold, Morales the silver and Australia’s Glen Buchanan the bronze. I mused on how the guys finishing fourth and fifth must have felt, making the Olympic final, breaking the world record and not even getting a medal. But mostly I just marvelled at Gross—his rivals had swum the best races of their careers and he’d finished over the top of them all. Two days, two world records and two gold medals. Spinetingling stuff for a sports fan. Through this excitement I was perched alongside Norman, near the back of the bank of seating that was set aside for broadcasters of all nations. There was no such thing as a commentary box; we were all just in rows of wooden bench seats. This was probably the last Olympic Games where computerisation didn’t play a major role in disseminating information. At the pool, information distribution was the preserve of a posse of volunteers moving up and down the grandstand, handing out sheets of paper with start lists, results, times, splits and even media conference quotes for those broadcasters who couldn’t get away from their positions to attend the conferences held after each final. Attending these media conferences in a tent behind the stand was part of my job. I had a cassette recorder for interviews, but that wasn’t expected to be put to much use unless an Australian won a gold medal. General consensus was that the best hope of that happening rested with Mark Stockwell in the 100-metres freestyle and the ‘Mean Machine’ in the 4 x 100-metres relay. Mostly I just sat in on the media conferences and reported back on air with Norman. I wasn’t 78
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involved in calling the races but, when we were in preview or postmortem mode, I had been told to chip in with comments. The scoreboard was proving a problem for Norman. It was one of those early electronic models that formed chunky, squared-off letters and numerals out of a series of light bulbs. With the sun shining onto it, it was difficult to distinguish between some numerals. On a couple of occasions after races, when Norman misread times posted for events, I mentioned the correct times—I thought saving him gracefully, as I even described the difficulty presented by sunlight on the scoreboard. But that was going too far. Derek took me aside and told me I should never correct Norman on air. ‘Has he complained?’ I asked. He hadn’t. It was irate listeners phoning ABC switchboards around Australia. Derek reminded me that Norman was a legendary authority on Olympic swimming. ‘As far as the public’s concerned, he’s right and you’re wrong,’ he said bluntly. ‘That’s the reality, you have to work with it.’ If Norman knew of the listener reaction back home, to his credit he never referred to it. I pulled my head in and let him say whatever he wanted. The interviews, which I’d hoped to busy myself with most of the time, had ended up taking a backseat; this was mainly because they couldn’t be live anyway, but getting something on cassette and then feeding it back to the Broadcast Centre for them to edit and replay was more fiddly than expected. The arrangement stood that, if Australia won a gold medal, I was to bolt downstairs and try to catch the winner moving along a roped-off walkway leading to the media tent. In an effort to make myself useful meantime, I became part-time clerical assistant, sorting through the myriad sheets of paper delivered to our commentary position and getting the right one into Norman’s hand at the right moment. It was an art I thought I mastered pretty well. Off-air, Norman remained detached in his dealings with me. It wasn’t a nasty detachment; he simply had nothing to say to me. His public persona was all hale and hearty jolliness—he had an endless 79
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? string of old mates he encountered around the traps; he was always arranging to catch up for ‘a few bottles of Bollinger’ with this person and that. In between races he’d be chatting with friends, calling out to chaps several rows away, waving, smiling and being affable. Only on two occasions did he express any impatience or frustration with me. The first was when he asked me for a start list for a relay final. I told him I’d already given it to him. He got extremely irritated and told me he didn’t have it and I should find it immediately. I searched frantically through the dozens of pages in front of me. I was sure I’d given it to him, he was adamant I hadn’t. The atmosphere was frosty between us for the rest of the session. As we got up to leave I noticed a sheet of paper on the ground under Norman’s seat with the word ‘BOLLINGER’ scrawled across it in giant letters. He’d been holding it up as a message to a mate a few rows away at one stage in the afternoon. I picked it up, and there on the flip side of the ‘BOLLINGER’ message was the missing relay start list. I didn’t bother mentioning it. This is not to suggest I was miserable during the Olympic swimming. Far from it. I was thrilled to be there on any terms. The relationship with Norman just added an underlying tension to a situation I already felt was loaded with pressure. That pressure was never more clearly illustrated than when Australia’s Mark Stockwell was beaten into second in the final of the men’s 100-metres freestyle. In the lead-up to Los Angeles I’d met and interviewed all of the Mean Machine swimmers and Stockwell was my favourite. In a swim team that didn’t boast as many gold medal prospects as we’ve become accustomed to at subsequent Games, he seemed the best hope for individual gold. But, as you’d expect, an American stood between him and the gold medal. And that American happened to be the world record-holder ‘Rowdy’ Gaines. Gaines got the best of the start and, although Stockwell was never too far behind and chased determinedly, the American claimed the gold 0.44 seconds ahead of the Australian. I was disappointed. I felt my best chance of seeing an individual gold to Australia had gone 80
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begging. Norman, who adopted a far more pro-Australian attitude than I did in previewing events, was especially deflated. But deflation turned to bitterness when he started talking to other swim commentators around us. The whisper was that Gaines had got ‘a fly start’. Norman was seething, but I didn’t quite understand why. Back at the hotel the reason for this quiet rage became evident. As we stepped into an elevator, he was speaking with a journalist about the ‘fly start’ controversy. I was standing alongside him, so the next comment was clearly intended for my ears as well as those of the person he was talking to. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘if I’d had Tracey Wickham as co-commentator, she would’ve picked it up.’ Up until this point I’d thought Norman was angry because the officials had missed the ‘fly start’ and it had cost an Australian a gold medal. Now it became clear he was angry that he hadn’t mentioned it in his call, and he was bemoaning the absence of a ‘real swimming co-commentator’. He was right, of course. I hadn’t picked the ‘fly start’. Someone who’d done more than hang out for a couple of summers at Enfield Swimming Club as a kid would have spotted it. The brutal truth is I was trying to fathom how you did a butterfly start in a freestyle race anyway. That’s how far off the pace I was. If they’d said Gaines had jumped the gun, or ‘broken’, I would have known what everyone was on about. But when they all kept saying ‘fly start’, I assumed it was ‘fly’ as in an abbreviation for butterfly. I was befuddled about how he could have done that, and what the hell difference it made anyhow. Gold finally came for Australia at the pool, but it was so out of the blue that even Norman, ever the positive-thinking patriot, was taken completely by surprise. It was on that occasion I discovered, to my shock and discomfort, that patriotism simply wasn’t the powerful force for me that it clearly was for those around me. Jon Sieben, a quiet 17-year-old Queenslander, was always an outside medal chance going into the final of the men’s 200-metres butterfly, but even the most optimistic preview had him taking silver or bronze. The reason? Towering over the field in lane four was ‘The Albatross’. Michael Gross hadn’t swum an individual event since day two of competition at the pool, when he’d shattered the world record in the 81
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? 100-metres butterfly. The 200-metres fly was his best event. He held the world record. The West German’s world-record swims on the first two days had made the following days anti-climactic for me. One day out from the end of the swimming events, Gross was still ‘The Man’.
OK, now that I’ve said ‘The Man’, I do need to address the fact that my memories of the Olympic swimming are male-dominated. I’m aware my fondness for male sport has often upset some in ‘the sisterhood’. The simple truth about the Los Angeles Olympics was that almost all the best women swimmers in the world weren’t there. Just about every women’s gold medal in the pool at Moscow four years earlier had been won by the Eastern bloc, mostly East Germany. None of those women were in LA. Most of the current world record-holders were absent, and there wasn’t a single women’s world mark broken during the Los Angeles Games. Out of 13 women’s events in the swimming, America won ten. After a while the women’s races just felt like momentary interludes between solemn, heart-clutching renditions of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. The US media treated it like one big procession of America’s sweethearts. I stopped absorbing detail after a while. So it’s the men’s events that dominate my recall.
I’d never had much exposure to real Americans until I went to the Olympics but I sensed that, in a situation so fraught with patriotic fervour, they weren’t really to be seen to best advantage. But I’ll admit to finding the solemnity of their patriotism irritating. The fact that Ronald Reagan addressed the crowd at the opening ceremony meant nothing to me at the time, but in retrospect I realise patriotism was enjoying a particularly golden era in the United States right then. Now, whether this skewed my reaction to Jon Sieben’s gold medal, or just threw it into high relief in my own mind, I don’t know. But I can tell you with certainty—a certainty that still makes me 82
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uncomfortable—that my first reaction to his victory was disappointment that Gross had been beaten. It had all the tension of a classic sports showdown in the leadup. Gross was again expected to fight it out with the American Morales, and the American crowd by this stage seemed to be baying for Gross’s blood as much as supporting their own man. They’d won most of the gold medals, but Gross was the party-pooper. He’d enraged the US media by refusing to show up to press conferences, and had therefore been portrayed as a rude and ungracious winner. That was good enough for me in the mood I was in. I wanted him to win. As the race built to its climax—and remember this is 200 metres, four laps—I was engrossed, pardon the pun, in the battle between the German and the American. Then, almost in the same split second I felt the German had the American covered, I glanced to lane six and registered that Sieben was motoring home fast enough to cover them all. For an instant it felt like I was the first person at the pool to notice it (I’m sure I really wasn’t) and I started squealing. I wasn’t allowed to be involved in actual race commentary but, when I played the tape back later, I was shocked to realise quite how much squealing I’d done. Especially given my immediate reaction once the result was apparent. I felt distinctly flat. Under the circumstances, I didn’t have time to dwell on this feeling. I had a gold medallist to interview. Olympic gold-medal interviews were regarded by my colleagues as trophy moments in a sports broadcasting career. I headed off in search of my quarry, with a cumbersome cassette recorder over my shoulder, and waited near the roped-off walkway behind the stand where Australian swim team officials had advised me to lie in wait for medallists. I did eventually get the interview, but I recall nothing of what was said by either of us. I do remember having to grab hold of Sieben’s wrist at one stage while I almost engaged in a tug-of-war with some woman on the other side of the rope who was literally trying to drag him away. Others gathered around too, snatching at him, shouting and firing questions. For the first time I saw ‘up close and personal’, 83
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? to use the American phrase of the Games, what it looked like when everyone wanted a piece of someone. It made me very uncomfortable.
Given my minor role at the swimming pool, there wasn’t much opportunity for my thoughts on Michael Gross to be discussed on air. So my enthusiasm for him didn’t earn me much attention from my workmates. But left on my own to do the diving commentary, I found there was no way I could wax lyrical about men in swimmers—with supple bodies, gracefully gliding through the air and making ‘rip entries’—without triggering outbreaks of ribaldry amongst male colleagues. My enthusiasm for Gross, by the way, had nothing to do with finding him attractive. I didn’t. But watching him swim gave me goosebumps. There was no point trying to present this nuanced view to some of my male colleagues, however. Cheering a non-Australian at an Olympics was almost incontrovertible evidence that I wanted to have sex with him. To deny this was futile. I love how men will shake their heads and perform a bewildered shrug as they patronisingly assure you they have no idea how the female mind works. Yet these same guys will be absolutely sure you’re lying if you tell them you admire a sportsman, but aren’t thinking about screwing him seven different ways. What dramatically increased the degree of difficulty for me at the diving was that commentary in Los Angeles involved trying to describe probably the most freakishly talented, charismatic and, yes, devastatingly handsome athlete the sport has ever seen: Greg Louganis. As it turns out, he’s also one of the highest profile athletes ever to ‘come out’ as proud and gay—but that’s a situational irony that only emerged some years later. I know it’s a trivial point to bring up—and it certainly didn’t provide me much cover in Los Angeles—but, at the heart of it, I’m a sports fan. I grew up in a household where having seen Tulloch race, or Gasnier play, or Lillee bowl was hard currency. I didn’t know much about diving, but everybody I’d met who did told me Louganis 84
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was possibly the greatest of all time. He was one of the few divers who’d ever scored perfect tens from every judge in a major competition. I was excited out of my tiny mind about the prospect of watching him dive. Well, that was my story anyway. My male colleagues explained it quite differently: ‘Spillane was creaming her jeans for Louganis.’
Louganis was hot favourite in both the springboard and the platform event. In fact when he took gold in both events in Los Angeles, he became the first male diver since 1928 to do so. He was brilliant, American and glamorous; so the excitement as he was introduced each time to dive—the awed silence when he stood on the board or the edge of the tower—was overpowering. I tried desperately to communicate this but, away from the University of Southern California, diving wasn’t exactly on everyone’s mind and so my colleagues acted like this was all really about me having a crush on Louganis. Once when the studio crossed to me for a Louganis dive and I began to launch into live commentary, I could hear heavy breathing in my headphones. It was the shift producer, the late Dick Mason, who later became head of ABC Radio Sport. Obviously the listeners couldn’t hear what I could hear on the talkback line, so I couldn’t react, but gradually the unnerving racket in my headphones escalated from heavy breathing, to ‘Ooh Greg, ahhh!! . . . Greg, that’s right, yes . . . Yes! . . . YESSS!!!! Greg.’ And I had to keep talking as if nothing unusual was going on. I’ve got a pretty well-developed sense of humour, and certainly I could see the funny side of it. Once ‘boys’ start including you in their pranks, there’s a certain degree of acceptance implied. But after bumbling through my description of that dive, and thankful that radio audiences couldn’t see my burning red face, I wondered what would have happened if I’d dropped the bundle and been unable to continue. I would have been labelled unprofessional, not the senior male colleague who was doing his best to embarrass and distract me. And all because I was enthusing about an athlete in exactly the same way that Tim Lane was enthusing about Carl Lewis or Glynnis Nunn at the track, 85
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? or Dick Mason was enthusing about Michael Jordan at the basketball. The underlying message was that the men saw themselves as the genuine sports aficionados while I was a ‘groupie’ who’d found a shrewd angle. Actually, I don’t wish to single out Dick for criticism—his prank just happened to demonstrate most graphically what I felt I was up against. In the brief time he headed ABC Sport, Dick offered me lots of support and encouragement—and steered me towards an interest in basketball. I kick myself regularly that, during my time in Los Angeles, I didn’t take him up on his standing offer of going to see a game with him. While I felt my credentials as a sports aficionado were largely overlooked, I didn’t resent having a lower place in the commentary pecking order. Listening to colleagues like Dick, Tim Lane, David Morrow, Gordon Bray, George Grljusich, Drew Morphett and Neville Oliver calling fast-moving live sports like basketball, athletics, rowing, cycling, soccer and hockey was genuinely intimidating. I was in awe of their ability to memorise and recall under pressure the vast array of unfamiliar names. Alone at the diving during the second week of the Olympics, I spent a lot of time just listening to what they could do and wishing I could do it too. I didn’t want the Olympics to end; but when I got within sight of the finish line, I felt ready to fall in a heap. I rejected an offer of a ticket to the Closing Ceremony, sensing I’d probably sit there and sob like a fool through most of it. I did exactly that, but alone in my hotel room watching it on TV, not out in public. My experiences in LA had left me tired and emotionally frazzled. But I got to feel tired and emotionally frazzled for five days in Hawaii on the way home. Life sure had changed from the days of running a record shop.
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7 Tales from the touchline, the tunnel and beyond Tales from the touchline, the tunnel and beyond
A month after returning from the Olympics, I was assigned for the first time to be the reporter/interviewer on an ABC-TV rugby league game. Not just any game, either. It was the grand final between Canterbury, the team I’d been following since my teens, and Parramatta. And it wasn’t just any venue. It was the Sydney Cricket Ground. Exposure to Los Angeles Olympic venues hadn’t dulled the aura of the SCG for me. To walk out through the picket fencing onto the side of the field and look up at the packed, familiar green grandstands felt in many ways a more remarkable turn of events than finding myself at an Olympics. I wasn’t really there to talk about football. My first report, from the playing surface itself, was about the pre-match entertainment, atmosphere, weather and so forth. Just as Alan Marks made his cross to me from the commentary box, the band, Rose Tattoo, fired up at full blast inches away from me. OK, I’m exaggerating, but they were close enough that I could read the writing on Angry’s chest. I could hear nothing of Alan’s questions. I couldn’t even hear myself. Out behind the grandstands I was assigned the job of interviewing league celebrities as they arrived. For the first time in my brief 87
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? sports-broadcasting career I felt on familiar territory. Years of autograph hunting with Aunt Janet had taught me the best spots at the SCG to lie in wait for the arriving big names. Sadly Janet didn’t live to see any of this. She died in her mid-40s, a few years before I even got my start in sports journalism. But that day, hearing the crunch, crunch, crunch of my high heels on the SCG’s loose pebble paths as I purposefully pursued familiar rugby league figures with a face full of make-up and a head full of hairspray made her memory vivid. All that was missing was the Oroton handbag. The years of rugby league experiences I’d absorbed made me feel at home talking about the sport, and I was so interested in what was going on I stopped being conscious of being on camera. It was a ‘Wow, maybe I can actually do this job!’ moment. Despite some promising murmurings from the television sport office, the next season started without a role for me in the rugby league coverage. Then an odd thing happened. The Ten Network hired a woman commentator for their experiment with Monday Night Football. Through a newspaper-supported competition, they selected a woman billed as a kind of ‘housewife, mum, footy fan’. Robyn Preston got to be part of the tasteful accessorising of Monday Night Football that also featured a cheer squad called the ‘Fruit and Veggie Rockettes’ and some poor sod in what looked like a chicken suit with a stretched neck who was meant, for no apparent or logical reason, to be an emu mascot. He prowled the sidelines, the lugubrious butt of jokes and insults, but mostly just prompting the question: Why? Robyn Preston got similar reviews to the emu. The media grapevine suggested Channel Ten’s male commentators thought her segment an exceptionally stupid idea, and it didn’t survive long. Within a few weeks of Preston being added to the Ten commentary team, ABC Sport told me that I was to be added to the Saturday afternoon telecasts. A role for me on the football was being considered anyway, so it wasn’t entirely the ABC following another network’s lead on an equal opportunity issue. Calling anything that happened with Preston ‘equal opportunity’ anyway would be exaggerating profusely. 88
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She was a gimmicky accessory tossed away when the gimmick stopped attracting attention. Many dismissed me as a gimmick too. One TV reviewer said something along the lines of ‘A woman who can talk rugby league is like a three-legged dog that does a handstand when it pees. Interesting, but do you actually need one?’. I would have settled for a few cheap allegations that my stunning good looks had landed me the job. Crushingly, those reviews never came. I was under no illusion that ABC-TV’s rugby league coverage had a real need for a sideline eye—of either gender. I was an optional accessory. A bit of chat about the weather and ground conditions, stray bits of team information, injuries, interviews . . . it was not like they’d have had to cancel the coverage if I hadn’t turned up. Still, I liked to think I served a higher purpose than triggering a ‘Getta loada that, Macca—there’s a girl on the telly talking about football!’ response. Working on live football telecasts every Saturday gave me some continuity of experience in the medium, but more crucially it made TV fall into perspective for me. Being at the football didn’t allow for the same sort of self-consciousness that developed sitting in a studio surrounded by monitors and being fussed over by make-up artists repositioning curls and powdering ‘shiny spots’. Broadcasting sport was for ‘men’s men’ who didn’t use make-up or put spray in their hair. There wasn’t even money for make-up artists included in ABC’s football telecast budget. Anxious to prove that I wasn’t more ‘high maintenance’ than the men, I agreed to fend for myself in the hair and make-up area. That sure mitigated against any temptation to think of myself as a ‘star’. It’s flattering to be recognised, but when it happens while you’re fixing your hair and lipstick in the ladies loo at the back of a suburban grandstand you don’t feel quite so special. Patrons seemed bemused rather than impressed. Your ABC, sharing your public toilets. In the back of my mind was the theory that, if I didn’t appear to be aiming for glamour, there was more chance I’d be taken seriously.
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? I worried a lot about being taken seriously. Especially given that people like commercial radio football commentator Peter Peters were suggesting on-air that my TV role was all a rort so I could see naked men. Others suggested it was naked ambition—that I was out to build a TV career for myself by doing something controversial and attention-seeking. At a rugby union dinner I attended, another leading Sydney radio identity—with a particular fetish for critiquing the ABC—questioned the usefulness of having a woman involved in football television coverage. It was just dinner-table conversation, and I was at another table, but I found out because of who’d defended me. The former Minister for Sport, John Brown, told the radio announcer I was from a family steeped in rugby league and that he’d known my grandfather as a well-respected coach at Concord CYO (Catholic Youth Organisation). A rugby union player who’d been at the table when the conversation occurred repeated it to me because he thought I’d be pleased to hear how gallantly I’d been defended, not because he wanted to highlight the criticism. But hearing what the radio personality had said was enlightening, given he’d been so charming to my face. Nothing unusual about that in the media, but it’s still a shock the first few times it happens and you realise what accomplished professional smarm artists you’re dealing with. Eventually I learnt to take pride in the calibre of critic I attracted. There’s a certain reassurance in being pilloried by people you agree with on almost nothing anyway. Rex Mossop, Alan Jones, Peter Peters, Ray Hadley, Fatty Vautin . . . if you were selecting a side to take on the world in reactionary, conservative griping, that’s your forward pack right there.
I understood totally that I was getting attention, positive and negative, simply because I was a woman. It was part unfair pressure and part unfair advantage. My feeling was that, while I had the attention, I needed to prove I could understand, appreciate and talk about football. Quickly, before the novelty wore off. My novelty value was something 90
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the most colourful member of the ABC commentary team had made a conversation starter the very first time we met. Mike Stephenson was an Englishman who’d starred in Great Britain’s rugby league World Cup victory in 1972 and then signed a very high-profile deal to come to Australia to play for Penrith. He ended up working in the Australian media. The season I started on the sideline coincided with the promotion of Jim Maxwell to the role of league caller; Stevo was his expert analyst. Stevo and I had met before. Not long after the 2GB Sports Talent Search, the Sydney Morning Herald offered me some freelance work. The sports editor sent me to a sportsman’s lunch, a good old-fashioned one, where I was the only woman in the audience and the speakers were telling beer-and-prawnnight yarns with swearing, fart gags and sexual references in abundance. Stevo was one of the speakers and he was in his element. A very funny man, quite prepared to work blue, too bad about there being a woman in the audience. Actually that impressed me about him. The other speakers kept saying they were watering down their stories ‘because we’re in mixed company’—at which point everyone in the room would turn and look at me. I felt like I had the word ‘partypooper’ tattooed across my forehead. But Stevo didn’t pay any mind to that sort of propriety. It didn’t necessarily make me feel more comfortable. Instead of looking at me when a dirty joke was averted, or diluted, I got gawked at when the dirty joke was told. It was like ‘Ooh, that was a bit crude, wonder if the woman’s laughing?’ After the official proceedings had ended, I was standing around, making polite conversation with a group of guests, mostly middleaged guys in suits whom I’d just met. Everyone was being terribly hospitable and polite. Stevo bowled up, introduced himself, shook my hand, held onto it and slowly whirled me around as if we were on a dance floor. ‘Have a look at her,’ he said to the men, as he did this. ‘Her arse is a bit big, she’s flat-chested . . . She’s all right, but nothing stunning. If she wasn’t the only sheila in the room, you lot wouldn’t even be paying any attention to her.’ 91
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Naturally I was shocked and embarrassed—an industrial-strength blush kicked in immediately. But there was something in the cheekiness of the delivery and the fact I knew Stevo had spoken the truth that made me laugh. I knew men didn’t normally flock around me ten or 15 at a time. It was because I was the only ‘sheila’ in the room. It was a memorable first meeting.
Stevo was outrageous, but one of the easiest types of men to deal with. Not long after I started working on ABC-TV’s rugby league, he took me aside and said: ‘Look, I always find it’s simpler to get this out of the way right up front—Am I any chance of a fuck?’ I just laughed and said, ‘Absolutely not.’ ‘That’s fine. I just like to have that sorted out.’ He grinned, changed the subject and then continued to be one of the most helpful, entertaining and honest colleagues you could ever hope for. He never returned to the subject of having sex with me. Well, there was one occasion. He’d just come back from a midweek trip to a country town and, as we were about to go to air, he told me a service station attendant in the town had asked ‘Is that Debbie Spillane any good in the cot?’. ‘What did you say?’ I asked, aghast. ‘I told him you were terrific,’ he replied, looking at the camera rather than at me. ‘You what?’ ‘I told him you were terrific.’ Continues looking at camera and pauses. ‘You don’t want me driving around the countryside telling people you’re a dud bash, do you?’ At that point he turned round, flashed me a wicked grin and a helpless shrug, and it was impossible to be angry with him. Not only did Stevo make me laugh so much that I relaxed on camera, but he treated me as an equal when discussing football. The fact that a man who’d been an international star in the game was prepared to do that mattered to me far more than his lack of political correctness. 92
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Within the ABC I mostly got positive reaction to my sideline reporting role. The director of the telecasts, Col Rogers, was most encouraging and gradually found more ways to get me involved. Much of my increased involvement, though, was part of the live coverage that in 1985 only went to regional areas and interstate. In Sydney the games were shown as a one-hour highlights package in the early evening. Eventually Col started including my half-time dressing room report in the highlights package for Sydney. It also became my job to interview the winning captain at the end of matches. By the end of the 1985 season, I felt I’d settled into the role and couldn’t believe my luck when, on top of it all going well, I was headed for another grand final that involved my team, Canterbury. The Bulldogs had won the grand final in 1984, beating Parramatta, when I’d made my debut on TV football, and now I was going back to the SCG for another premiership decider that featured them. To put this in perspective, I’d been following the Bulldogs since 1968 and only twice between then and 1984 had they even reached a grand final. Now they had reached two in a row and I was there, working on television. In grand final week I went to Belmore to attend a Bulldogs training session and interview the Mortimer brothers for the radio sports show. Steve, Peter and Chris Mortimer were the best known and most loved stars of the team. It was my first chance to chat with them face to face and they were every bit as affable and charming as their image suggested. The Bulldogs boss, Peter Moore, had made sure the Mortimers knew I was a long-time Bulldogs fan, so we had a pleasant exchange about my years following the club. On grand final day I was more nervous about the result than I was about my job. I wanted this to be the sweet moment of revenge for all the years I’d turned up wearing the colours of St George’s grand final opponents and been disappointed. And, unlike the previous year, if the Bulldogs won, I’d be on the field at the end of the game talking to the captain, Steve Mortimer. 93
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When I say that my job included interviewing the winning captain each week, I should point out that just once I interviewed the captain of the losing side instead. It happened because suddenly one day I couldn’t face another encounter with Parramatta’s Captain Grumpy, Ray Price. Price, a dual international in union and league, is up there with the great back-rowers from any era. His phenomenal work rate earned him the nickname ‘Mr Perpetual Motion’. He always seemed to be, as coaches these days say, ‘in the frame’, wherever and whatever the action was on-field. Parramatta were especially successful in the 80s, so not only did they feature regularly on ABC-TV’s Saturday game but they usually won—which meant I got to interview Price. And he was invariably thrilled about it. No really. One particular game we telecast featured Parramatta walloping a lowly-ranked side after leading them 24–nil at half-time, or something similar. At full-time I had to chat with Ray. I asked him how, when a team is leading 24–nil at half-time, does a captain keep up the enthusiasm of his troops? His answer went something like: ‘That’s a stupid question. If one team can score twenty-four points in the first forty minutes, then it’s obvious the other team could do the same in the second forty minutes.’ Having never played Test football for Australia, I wasn’t game to use the rejoinder ‘Yeah, in ten seconds Carl Lewis can run a hundred metres, but that doesn’t mean in the following ten seconds you might do the same’. I bit my tongue, but was annoyed by the dismissive tone of his answer. In these brief interviews, sometimes barely more than 60 seconds, it wasn’t ever the objective to elicit vital information—this was more a quick reaction, the sporting equivalent to a news doorstop interview. My mission was to ask two or three quick questions—I’d been warned that none of them should ever be the hackneyed ‘How d’ya feel?’ (an instruction for which I’ll always be grateful). Of course, there were plenty of angles that amounted to the same question, but the challenge was to get a sense of how the interviewee felt without asking ‘How d’ya feel?’. 94
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How Ray Price felt was usually quite evident: irritable. His agreement to a post-match interview was always given grudgingly and, in the minute or two that it sometimes took for the commentators to cross to me, he’d complain about how long it was taking and grumble about wanting to get back to the dressing room. He gave an interview through gritted teeth. No doubt it was a pain in the butt to be delayed from getting off the field at the end of a game, but the fact remained that every other captain, especially after a winning game, was gracious about it. I concluded that Price was one of those men who thought I’d no business being involved in football, and that his difficult demeanour simply flagged that objection. One day at Wollongong Showground, Illawarra came very close to pulling off a major upset against Parramatta. In the final minutes, when it became apparent Parramatta were going to snatch victory after all, I decided to work around Price. I asked the director if it would be OK to interview the Illawarra captain, Brian Hetherington, instead. He quipped that most losing captains made sunnier TV than Price anyway, so I got the go-ahead to interview Hetherington. He was amiable, well-spoken and didn’t mention that he’d fractured his ribs during the game. This last point, as it turned out, earned me my first ‘n’yah n’yah’ from the rugby league press. They’d been ever so nice, until then—indeed, one of the tabloids once even dipped into the page-three girl phrasebook to describe me as a ‘vivacious redhead’. While I was (self-centredly) expecting someone to pick up, and maybe question, my avoidance of Price, one of the trivia/gossip columns noted that Debbie Spillane had interviewed Illawarra’s Brian Hetherington but failed to get the scoop that he’d broken his ribs and was likely be sidelined for some weeks. This he revealed to the male scribes in the dressing room just minutes later. Damn! I’d missed the injury story—the cardinal sin in the traditional league media. But on the other hand, they’d missed the ‘Spillane thinks Price is an irritable chauvinist’ story. On the whole, I was happy with the trade-off. The footnote to the whole prickly Price saga is that, a few years later, the topic came up at a lunch when I was sitting with some ex95
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? players. I pointed out that there were certain players who obviously had problems accepting women in the game and nominated His Grumpiness as an example. ‘Oh, it’s got nothing to do with sexism,’ laughed one of my lunch companions. ‘I roomed with him once. It’s just that he’s naturally a misery guts. Every day he’s in a lousy mood.’ It was like a variant to one of Dad’s maxims from my cricket umpiring days. ‘Women umpires don’t make mistakes because they’re women, they make mistakes because they’re umpires.’ Ray Price wasn’t snarky with me because he was sexist. He was just snarky. The lesson is: Don’t assume sexism just because the symptoms fit. Don’t discount the possibility you’re dealing with a man whose problems are not with women but with people. Or maybe he just doesn’t like you. Sometimes taking it personally, rather than on behalf of your entire gender, is a more constructive approach.
The full-time siren in the 1985 grand final ended one of the grimmest premiership deciders ever. There was only one point separating the Dogs and the Dragons and just 13 points scored in the match all up. Coach Warren Ryan had fashioned the Bulldogs into the ultimate defensive machine. In the 1984 grand final they’d beaten Parramatta 6–4: the next year, 1986, they were to go down to Parramatta 4–2. Ultimately the Ryan-devised defensive dominance forced league rulemakers to introduce rule changes—like pushing back the defensive line ten metres instead of five, to create more space for attacking play and to allow more points to be scored. But in those three years in the 80s the grand final score lines were so low that right up to the final whistle one goal or try could have changed the result. Often in the weekly game telecasts the result would be quite evident well before full-time and I’d have an opportunity to jot down a few questions to ask the winning captain. I preferred to have some specific aspects of play to ask about. It helped avoid the dreaded how d’ya feels? In the dying minutes of the 1985 grand final, I had no idea who I’d be talking to about what. I was beside myself with tension 96
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anyway; then suddenly it was full-time, the Bulldogs had won by a point and I had to interview Steve Mortimer. For some inexplicable reason, I expected (when I should have known better) that the procedure at the end of a grand final would be the same as any other week. That the players would leave the field, I’d stand near the sideline, and the winning captain would be ushered in my direction by the ABC floor manager. Of course, this wasn’t a normal game. Chaos erupted at full-time. The players raced together to form a surging, celebrating mob with captain Steve Mortimer at the hub of it, surrounded by huggers, backslappers and champagne sprayers. Coaching staff, reserves and officials raced onto the field, increasing the traffic. It quickly became apparent that Mortimer was hardly thinking about being interviewed by me and he was ignoring my floor manager. I’m certainly not bragging about what happened next. I found it humiliating to have to hunt through a wild bunch of screaming, hugging men and try to attract Mortimer’s attention. This was probably residual damage from my convent education (‘Nice girls never chase after men’) and evidence of a lack of true journalistic temperament. I felt stupid and intrusive, but I was driven by fear of the greater humiliation that would result from not coming up with the winning captain interview after my team had won the grand final. I was just a couple of paces away from Mortimer, preparing to lunge, microphone first, when he caught sight of me. But he got in the first lunge, put his arm around me, and for some reason started rubbing the top of my head while shouting excitedly things like ‘Mate, you’re a little Bulldog’. The awkwardness of the chase, the elation of being ‘included’ in my team’s grand final win, and the disproportionately paralysing fear that I was now on national TV with my hair messed up, resulted in me becoming totally distracted from the fact that I was supposed to be asking some questions. At the very point in my career when I should have delivered my most impressive post-match interview, I was almost incoherent. To my astonishment, the Mortimer ‘interview’ was greeted as a huge success despite me barely mustering a question. ‘Didn’t matter,’ 97
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Col Rogers told me. ‘It was great TV.’ People in the ABC that I barely knew complimented me on it for months afterwards and I’ve no doubt it cemented my place on the rugby league commentary team for the following season. So I learned that ‘great TV’ didn’t necessarily hinge on me being competent or in control—an idea simultaneously deflating and reassuring. Steve Mortimer’s repeated reference to me as ‘mate’ (a habit he kept up in every subsequent interview) was also a source of amusement to many. Some even asked if I was offended by being addressed in such a generic, blokey manner. Far from it, I took it as a compliment and a sign of acceptance.
I was a little less sure how to take it, though, when the Bulldogs coach, Warren Ryan, tapped me on the shoulder after a match one day and asked ‘So what team did you play in the front-row for?’ This was not an onscreen encounter. It was in the Members Bar at the Sydney Cricket Ground. After a match involving the Bulldogs in the 1986 finals series, I was threading my way through the densely packed bar, looking for Dad, when I felt a hand on my shoulder, turned and found I was face to face with the enigmatic Ryan. Considering I was, by this stage, on first-name terms with the club boss, Peter Moore, and the team captain, Steve Mortimer, it might seem odd to hear that I’d never spoken to the coach. But it was precisely because I’d become friendly with Moore and Mortimer that I’d not made the acquaintance of Ryan. It was a poorly kept secret that, despite the club’s on-field success, Moore and Mortimer didn’t see eye to eye with Ryan. ‘Bullfrog’ Moore had painted the coach to me as a strategic mastermind who was unfortunately arrogant, uncooperative and irascible. He made no bones about wanting him gone from the club. Trouble was, under Ryan, they were winning. Even though I was a fan of the earlier ‘Entertainers’ era, when the Dogs played expansive, free-flowing football, I didn’t really have a gripe about the style of play under Ryan. Close to the play on the sidelines I guess I was able 98
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to appreciate the intensity of ‘Wozzaball’, as it was sometimes called. I didn’t spend time comparing it to the days of watching extravagant back-line movements from up in the grandstand. Anyway, even though I was well aware of them, the anti-Ryan undertones didn’t directly affect me—until I found myself face to face with the man in a crowded post-match bar, trying to think quickly what he meant by the front-rower comment. ‘Guess I’d better start that diet tomorrow’ was the best rejoinder I could come up with at short notice. I knew he wasn’t suggesting I was built like a brick shithouse; I assumed he was alluding to me never having played the game. ‘I wasn’t suggesting you need to lose weight,’ he continued gruffly, dismissing my weak attempt at self-deprecating humour. ‘I think you talk like a footballer, and I wondered where that comes from.’ I briefed him about my lifelong association with rugby league. He didn’t say much, didn’t seem impressed or unimpressed. He cut to the chase: ‘But, for instance, when you tell the ABC viewers what I’ve been saying at half-time, how do you know?’ I nervously stammered out details of the arrangement I had with Peter Moore—that either Moore himself, or someone else who was in the dressing room, would come out just before the break ended and pass on some details. ‘Might’ve known bloody Bullfrog was involved,’ Ryan growled grumpily. ‘Anyway, I think you do a good job,’ he added in a more conciliatory tone. ‘Just wanted to know where you got your information, that’s all.’ And so I pressed on through the crowd, shaken by my encounter with the man I’d studiously avoided in the dressing sheds but chuffed that he’d given my work a thumbs-up. From that point on I was never frightened of Ryan, although politically it wasn’t possible for me to become too chummy with him at the Bulldogs. Later, during my years writing a rugby league column for the Sun-Herald, when he was at Balmain and then Wests, I found him always willing to discuss what he knew about the game—which was plenty. I never hung up from 99
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? a phone call with Warren Ryan without feeling I had a new understanding of whatever we’d just discussed.
My most ridiculous sideline eyeing experience had nothing to do with television. I was invited to be the special guest at a State League match in Rockhampton, Queensland. It was the Central Queensland Capras, the local team, playing Brisbane club, Wynnum-Manly, captained and coached by Wally Lewis. Bear in mind this was preBrisbane Broncos, so Lewis was known to me through State of Origin football, but wasn’t someone I’d had any dealings with. The Capras officials had this brilliant idea that I could go to the dressing rooms at half-time and then, over the ground public address system, give the half-time report I’d normally do on television. Before the game I met Wally Lewis and explained I’d need someone in the dressing room to pop out shortly before the end of the break and pass on a few snippets that I could use in my report. He introduced me to another man, possibly the team manager, and it was arranged I’d wait near the dressing-room door and he’d see me after he’d heard what coach Lewis had to say. The game was played in a tropical downpour on a mud heap and that probably saved the Capras from being 60 points behind at halftime. It was always going to be one-sided, given Wynnum-Manly was one of the strongest Brisbane clubs and their opponents were a regional team boxing well above their weight division. Plenty of first-half scoring opportunities went begging for Wynnum-Manly in the slippery conditions but, as I recall, they were still leading by around 30 at the break. When I reached the players’ tunnel, I could hear a voice booming out non-stop abuse, laced with expletives. ‘That was fuckin’ disgraceful, if that’s the fuckin’ best we can do well fuckin’ forget it, unless we fuckin’ hang on to the fuckin’ ball! . . .’ The sound reverberated all around the small concrete tunnel. An old dressing-room doorman resorted to embarrassed fidgeting when he saw me. There was no point pretending I couldn’t hear the ruckus so I asked whether it was the Capras coach who was so angry. 100
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‘No, that’s Wally Lewis,’ he ventured. ‘Hmmm, hate to hear what he says when his team’s trailing at half-time,’ I grinned, but the old guy’s discomfort wasn’t to be allayed. Looking around I realised why the sound was carrying so effectively. The dressing sheds were that old-style beach change room design. Just timber screening separating the locker room from the tunnel, and the screening didn’t go all the way to the floor, or all the way to the ceiling. Not only could I hear every word of the bollocking the players were getting, I could actually watch their muddy boots shuffle as they copped it. After this had gone on for several minutes, the dressingroom door opened and the official I’d arranged to meet emerged. With an air of great confidentiality and a breathtakingly straight face, he said something like: ‘Overall, Wally’s pretty happy with the first half. He just wants them to concentrate on ball control in the second forty, and, ah, play the game in Capras territory. That’s about it, really.’ Having, for the first time, heard every unedited word of the coach’s half-time talk for myself, I was left wondering exactly how much bullshit I’d been fed by these dressing-room go-between guys.
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My handling of sideline duties seemed to crystallise for ABC Sport how they could use me. Before long I was filling the sideline reporter role at random events like hockey and polo. I felt a bit remote from those sports and didn’t enjoy knowing I had little to contribute. I was, perhaps with unreasonable impatience, beginning to fear typecasting. For that reason I wasn’t overly excited when in early 1985 I was told I’d be the trackside interviewer at the National Athletics Championships in Canberra. It was another name for another sidelineeye gig at another sport I didn’t think I had much of a passion for. It was only as I walked onto the track at Bruce Stadium in Canberra that I realised I’d never actually been to a real track-and-field meet. There was so much colour and energy and activity all around that I was hit with a wave of excitement much like the one I’d experienced on my first trip to the racetrack the day Royal Parma won the Golden Slipper. There wasn’t a huge crowd in attendance but, as I watched the athletes warm up, some of them trotting languidly around, others making prancing, high knee-lifting movements, I couldn’t help thinking of sleek racehorses parading or cantering to the barrier before a race. 102
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This was going to be great—I was at a big race meeting, but the horses were all human. (Hey, coming from me, it was a compliment.) I hung around on the grass verge just near the end of the home straight for two days, interviewing various winners, skilfully avoiding the dreaded ‘How d’ya feel?’. The athletes were mostly unknown to me other than as names in my notes, but I found, without exception, they were friendly and articulate. Of course, over the two days, the top athletes mostly contested more than one event so I got to know the main characters and that made the competition even more exciting. By the end of the meet I was buzzing and keen to be involved in more athletics. Luckily, it was to be a good year for ABC involvement in track and field. The World Cup was being staged in Canberra later in the year, a genuine international-standard meet. Not only did the ABC have the telecast rights, they were making six half-hour preview programs, The Road to Canberra, which I was to co-host with Tim Lane. At the time there was a comedy duo on Triple J called Tim and Deb (‘I know Tim, I know. It’s like so unreal.’) and we actually made promos for the show talking like them, but the head of ABC-TV Sport, Kevin Berry, didn’t see the funny side at all and they were canned. To make the program we were given access to the tapes of major athletics meetings from around the world—everything from the European Grand Prix circuit, to the US, African and Asian championships. One of my duties was to sift through these tapes to find footage of some of the major contenders who were heading to Canberra for the World Cup. I was like a kid in a lolly shop. Tim Lane and Ric Mitchell, a former Olympic 400-metres runner, who was also involved in the project, were athletics nuts as well as very witty and entertaining company. Spending a couple of days with them each week, hearing them talk about races, results and records from around the world, helped me appreciate the footage I was watching and editing. The prospect of seeing two athletes in particular had me pumped. The most prolific world-record breaker ever in the pole vault, the Ukrainian Sergei Bubka, was competing, as was Uwe Hohn, the East German who’d forced officials to change the specifications of the 103
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? javelin because he started throwing it so far it was landing on the athletics track instead of the stadium infield. ‘He was threatening to make a shish kebab out of track runners’ was how someone explained it to me. Altering the aerodynamics of the javelin was easier than making bigger athletics stadiums all around the world. The week before the big meet in Canberra there was a warm-up meet in Sydney where many of the East German stars, including Hohn, were competing. ABC gave it some live television coverage. I was thrilled when I learned Hohn was available for an interview after he easily won the javelin. But I was a little thrown (if you’ll pardon the pun) when he fronted with a translator. Naively I’d expected these athletes to speak English. In my own defence I should point out I’d seen many of them handle interviews in English quite competently on the tapes I’d been watching from Europe. But their team management had decided that for this Australian visit competitors shouldn’t be left to their own devices to handle interviews in English. Some of them clearly spoke English because they’d answer my questions without even waiting for a translator to relay them. I don’t know whether Hohn spoke English or not, but I did learn that doing a live television interview through a translator is a nightmare and something you don’t want to try without the time to think it through. It’s like sending off a message in a bottle and waiting for the reply to drift back to you. And while you’re standing there, waiting, stupid thoughts flit through your head, like how square the guy’s jaw is and how you feel like you’re standing next to that drummer from Max Merritt and the Meteors. And you start wondering why the question you’ve asked takes twice as long to ask when it’s relayed to him and yet, although he appears to answer in intricate detail, the answer comes back: ‘He says he’s very happy with his form.’ And ultimately you don’t even remember if that had anything to do with the question, because you’ve long since forgotten it anyway with all that square jaw and Max Merritt stuff filling up your head. There’s also an awkward eye-contact dilemma that goes on. You don’t know whether to talk to the interviewee or the translator; and when the interviewee is answering you, they’re looking not at you, 104
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but at the translator. I found Hohn was looking at me when neither of us were speaking. That felt odd, so I’d look away to the translator; but when I went to ask a follow-up question and I’d look back at him, he’d be looking at the translator. It was the eye-contact equivalent of phone tag. After this it was decided that for the following week live trackside interviews would be restricted to those who could be interviewed in English. The World Cup itself was an unusual concept. Rather than pitting nations against each other, the competition was basically between continents; but, for the purposes of the World Cup, the Soviet Union was defined as a continent of its own and all of North and South America were just ‘The Americas’. Of course, there was also Europe, Asia and Africa. Australians and New Zealanders made up the bulk of the representatives of Oceania so, realistically, there weren’t a lot of potential winners to interview on our team. The decision only to interview athletes who didn’t need translators severely limited my access to winners. The East Germans had sent more of their stars than any other nation—less than a year after boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics, they had something to prove. Anchored by Marita Koch, a gold medallist in Moscow and a former world-record holder, the women’s four by 400-metres relay team smashed the world record in Canberra. Frustratingly, I couldn’t speak with any of them. At the time they were popularly portrayed as muscle-bound, robotic she-men—sort of Stepford athletes. But not only were some of those women stunningly beautiful, they were as warm and friendly and emotional as any of the other competitors. Sure, in retrospect it appears many were probably using steroids; but that didn’t make them all ugly, unfeeling sheilas who were probably really blokes. Yet that was the standard line at that time. I remember Peter Peters as sports editor at 2GB once griping on air about East German women dominating an international poll on the greatest women sport stars. His rant went along the lines that he didn’t care if some East German woman built like a brick outhouse was rated more highly than Chrissie Evert Lloyd, Chrissie was ‘more of a woman than the rest of them put together’. It was based on that 105
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? classic premise that, while a man’s sporting success unquestionably enhances his masculinity, a woman’s sporting achievements should cause her femininity to be questioned. It also indicated Peters’s ignorance of athletics because one of the women in question, Heike Drechsler, the sprinter and long jumper, had the slender, long-legged, high-cheekboned appearance of a super-model. Just about every man I worked with in Canberra thought she was one of the most stunning women they’d ever seen. But she was an East German female athlete— so ignorant stereotyping decreed she was a muscled, robotic hulk. While the Soviets and East Germans sent top-ranked athletes, the American stars stayed away in droves, which severely diluted the Englishspeaking interview possibilities. So I was feeling a bit useless, although happily enjoying the spectacle from close quarters on the track. My floor manager, Kevin Lacey, though, was keen as mustard to hunt down interviews and after one of the distance races he produced an African winner I’d never heard of. ‘He goes to college in the US, speaks English,’ he told me enthusiastically. I can’t even recall the athlete’s name now; all I remember is his beaming smile and the fact that, although he seemed to understand my questions, I couldn’t understand a word of his answers. At first I thought he was answering in another language. The interview was live to air and I was almost frozen with horror. My charming African was answering at great length, but I didn’t have a clue where to go with the follow-up question because I couldn’t figure out what he’d said. So I just thanked him and ended the interview abruptly. That made me feel awful because he seemed such a delightful guy. I also felt as though everyone around me—even my own crew—was laughing. But that wasn’t my most embarrassing moment of the World Cup. A young Canadian sprinter who’d taken the bronze medal behind Carl Lewis at the Los Angeles Olympics was being tipped as the likely winner of the 100-metres. All I knew about Ben Johnson, other than his Olympic bronze, was that he’d run some fast times and was considered a sprinter on the rise. We had him earmarked as a probable interview from day one. When he duly won the 100-metres final and 106
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was ushered to our interview area, I had another awkward surprise to deal with live on television. No one had warned me that Johnson battled a debilitating stutter. I didn’t know until he tried to answer my first question. He could have run another 100-metres in the time it took him to get out the first few words. I felt terrible for him, but was at a loss as to how to react. Reflexively I wanted to finish the sentence for him, because I could see where he was going and it was such a struggle for him to get there. I decided that would seem rude, so I shut up. Instead I moved on to the dilemma of whether I should ask another question when he finally wrestled down the answer to the first one. Already ashamed of having given such short shrift to the African runner, I decided I’d try to carry on as normal. It was excruciating, probably for both of us. As his career progressed Johnson seemed to master that stutter, which I always admired him for. Until I got to wondering whether stutter elimination is an under-reported side-effect of anabolic steroid use.
By the end of the World Cup I was thoroughly disgusted with myself for having chosen swimming ahead of track and field for the Los Angeles Olympics. I began hoping fervently that, if selected for the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games commentary team the following year, I’d be assigned to the track rather than the pool. As it turned out, ABC Sport hired Lisa Forrest and the role of Norman May’s offsider at the pool went to her. That was fine by me. Even in Australian stadiums, where there was only a smattering of spectators, I found athletics exciting. When I got to Edinburgh and had a chance to see some of the world’s best in action in a bigevent atmosphere, I was in sports-fan heaven. Sure, there was no Bubka or Hohn in a Commonwealth Games but Scottish and English crowds seemed more into the sport than Aussies. It helped that at the time English track and field was going through a particularly strong phase with stars like Daley Thompson, Steve Ovett, Sebastian Coe and Steve Cram. Australia also had some seriously world-ranked 107
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? performers like Debbie Flintoff-King, Darren Clark, and the marathoners Rob De Castella and Lisa Martin. The 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh provided me with my most enjoyable experience covering a major sporting event. I was involved with a sport—track and field—that I’d become absorbed in over the previous 12 months. And I genuinely liked our key performers, Darren Clark and Debbie Flintoff-King, who I’d met and interviewed many times in the lead-up. We were covering the Games for television, rather than radio, which meant more resources and a bigger team than in Los Angeles. Edinburgh was a fairytale city, with its castle perched on a steep cliff, visible from all around the little cobblestone streets of the city centre. At night, when the castle was lit up and the cliffs were left in darkness, it looked like a magic castle floating in the air. I was also in love. My marriage to Roger had ended a couple of years before and in late 1985 I’d met a touring Oxford University cricketer. After the Games, Guy was going to show me London and Paris and take me to meet his family near Peterborough in the English Midlands. It wasn’t entirely perfect, of course. There were bagpipes and Scottish weather to contend with. I’ve no wish to be culturally insensitive but, for me, bagpipes are the musical equivalent of fingernails scraping on a chalkboard. I’ve no desire to prevent bagpiping between consenting adults, but the problem in Edinburgh during the Commonwealth Games was you couldn’t avoid the damn things. The absence of anything remotely recognisable as summer weather was daunting as well. We used to joke that, if it was only windy or raining on any given day, you were in front. Most days it was both. No matter how unobsessive you are about your appearance as a female television presenter, wet and wind-whipped hair are your natural enemy. Not to mention the red-nose look that goes with it. But, despite bagpipes and lousy weather being almost constant, they couldn’t possibly out-rate Commonwealth Games officialdom as an irritant. For example, each day I had to access the infield of the stadium via a tunnel which was manned by an official who would stop me and check 108
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my pass. The first day I got waved on, no problems. On the second day, I was stopped by the same official, who told me my pass didn’t allow me centrefield. I explained I was a trackside interviewer for Australian television and, after consultation with some higher official, I was allowed through. Next day there was a different official and I was told my pass definitely didn’t allow me centrefield access. That I’d been working there the previous two days didn’t matter a scrap. Negotiations went backwards and forwards between the ABC and the accreditation boffins and finally I was told I did have the required access. So I got to centrefield. Trouble was I’d make stupid mistakes, like leaving the track to go to the toilet or grabbing something for lunch, and then have the same guy who’d let me through earlier in the day refuse me access when I tried to return. It was like a bad sitcom, and it carried on for the duration of the Games. The award for the best handling of one of these officious idiots went to the wife of one of our commentators Peter Hadfield. Marilyn, herself a former athlete, had just had a baby and had a job on our team as a researcher. She was there with baby in tow. Unfortunately the bub wasn’t a happy little camper and poor Marilyn had a terrible time, having to leave the commentary area several times a day to pace around with a wailing baby. After one sojourn in the canteen, where I could see the strain of the crying baby was starting to tell on her, we headed back up into the grandstand when an official stopped her. He told her she could go into the restricted media area, but not the baby because the baby had no accreditation. Without hesitation Marilyn said ‘Fine, then I won’t take the baby’, pushed the tiny bunny-rugged bundle towards his chest and tried to keep walking. That scared the life out of him; he recoiled and waved her past— baby and all.
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Debbie Flintoff-King was as good as an interview ‘in the bag’. As reliable as ever, she never looked like not winning the 400-metres hurdles and the 400-metres flat. If, as the old cliché goes, you had to choose an athlete to win a race to save your life, Debbie would be the kind of dedicated, confident athlete you’d want. Darren Clark had a different aura about him. Nobody questioned his ability and everyone expected great things from him; but, though he was well liked, there were always rumblings about his training methods, coaching, attitude and tactics. Not in a nasty way. It was more as if everyone recognised his prodigious talent and had their own theory on how best to nurture it. It was his run as an 18-year-old in the Olympic 400-metres final at Los Angeles that had exploded Clark into the national—and international—consciousness. He was the rookie in a field of American and West African sprinters, an unheralded kid who decided to go for broke. He tore it up for the first 350 metres and led into the straight but just couldn’t sustain the effort. He ended up being pipped for the bronze medal by just four one-hundredths of a second. I’ve never seen that race. I was probably watching Greg Louganis dive when it happened, but the tale of Clark’s unexpectedly audacious run on the biggest stage of all was told with folkloric fervour by track folk. It was the kind of run that international reporters, like those I was hanging with out in the middle of the track in Edinburgh, remembered two years later. Clark was widely regarded as the ‘next big thing’—an adhesive tag that radiates pure pressure. I found him relaxed and confident to deal with. But you knew the game was now at a new level for him. He had been the kid who’d surprised everyone; now he was the athlete everyone expected to deliver. To complicate matters, his campaigns were dogged by injury and illness that added to the sense of pressure surrounding him. My trackside interviewing comrades had conceded me the winner’s interview in the lead-up to the 400-metres final in Edinburgh, even though Clark had posted a disappointing time in the qualifying race and been pushed out to lane eight because of that. That in itself had worried Ric and Tim who, as usual, spent hours dissecting everyone’s 110
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form, their tactics and their times. Breakfast in the hotel dining room was like three-way turf talk with spikes. I’d learned plenty about the principles of 400-metres running through these conversations. When I saw Clark lining up in lane eight for the final, I knew enough to understand what a dangerous lane that was. For those not familiar with athletics, it’s worth explaining that starting lines are ‘staggered’ for the 400-metres. The runner in the inside lane, lane one, starts a long way back on the track to compensate for the shorter run around the inside. The starting positions for each subsequent lane fan forward on the track until you get to lane eight on the extreme outside. It’s well in front of the others because the track out there takes the widest arc to the finish line. What that means is in lane eight you’re theoretically in front from the get go and can’t see the other runners. Even if they catch or pass you, you might not know until the field straightens for home. Clark apparently didn’t see the English sprinter Roger Black until it was too late. He was beaten into second. The picture will never leave me of him standing disconsolately in centrefield after the race, staring at the replay on the big video screen, studiously ignoring one of those damn officials buzzing around bossily saying ‘Competitors must leave the infield, must leave the infield’. I’ve seen competitors look heartbroken after big events plenty of times. But when most sportsmen lose, in a grand final, or a Test match, or even a Wimbledon final, they mostly see defeat coming at least for a few minutes before it hits. It was like Clark had just seconds to absorb the fact that he was going to be beaten in the race he was supposed to win, and then it was over. He didn’t know what had happened in the race, so he’d stopped stock still near the top of the stairs that led into the exit tunnel when he saw the race being replayed on the big screen—his eyes fixed expressionlessly. The man squawking at him, flapping his arms and trying to shoo him down the stairs, didn’t even exist. From metres away, where I was, it was almost too personal and too painful a moment to watch.
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Horseracing analogies were flying thick and fast for the entire time we were in Edinburgh (Ric Mitchell took to calling Tim Lane ‘Piping’ and was thrilled that I got the reference to Melbourne Cup winner, Piping Lane, a horse that, like Tim, hailed from Tasmania). Perhaps that’s why I came to think of seeing Steve Cram run as akin to having seen Phar Lap race. Cram was an English middle-distance runner who quickly became the competitor I most admired at the Games—proving to myself once again that, when it came to international sport, I wasn’t prepared to let patriotic concerns determine who and what impressed me. The 800-metres and 1500-metres were the races that really captured my imagination. Those were the events where not only speed but staying power and strategy came into play. For 800-metres and beyond, it’s not a matter of going the full distance flat out, but a question of when to sprint, how fast and for how long. These were the Cox Plates or Caulfield Cups of track running, as Ric put it. And, as in those big horse races when the field bunches up, there is often interference—runners clipping each other’s heels, outside runners boxing in inside runners and rivals sitting on the tail of favourites to cover any sudden moves. Steve Cram played none of those games in Edinburgh. He was so confident that in the 800 and 1500 heats, semis and finals he simply dropped right off to the rear of the pack and waited until the field hit the back straight on the last lap, then put his foot on the accelerator. It was awesome to watch. Sometimes he’d be five or ten metres behind the second last runner at the time he’d kick up the pace, but he’d cruise effortlessly around the field and reel in the leaders, mostly before they even hit the home straight. It happened like clockwork and, each time he did it, there would be a roar from the crowd and I’d feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It was magnificent. After each race he’d stroll from the finish line over to the trackside media area and talk to the British track interviewer with nary a hint of a laboured breath, a bead of sweat or even a hair out of place in his wavy blond mane. I couldn’t help myself—I had to gravitate close enough to hear what he was saying because this man was surely 112
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the coolest customer in the world of athletics. To top it off, he was a delightful interviewee—charming and witty, with a devastating smile. The duel everyone had been waiting for was between Cram and Sebastian Coe. Coe was the Englishman who’d won the previous two Olympic gold medals in the 1500-metres, as well as the silver in the 800-metres in both Moscow and Los Angeles. Cram had finished second behind Coe in the 1500-metres in Los Angeles and there was a massive personal rivalry between the two. Well, to call a spade a spade, they hated each other. But after Cram streeted the opposition in the preliminary races, Coe withdrew with the flu from the finals of the 800-metres and the 1500-metres. Cram as good as said his arch-rival scratched because he knew he couldn’t win. Both golds were duly collected by Cram, surging past the field effortlessly in both finals with a run starting in the back straight. After his second gold medal, I decided I was going to drop the mediaprofessional facade and get his autograph. I loitered nearby while he did his British television interview after the 1500-metres final and then, though it embarrassed me to do so, I introduced myself and said that, if I wasn’t allowed to interview him, I’d at least like his autograph. He graciously obliged. Within minutes I got a tap on the shoulder from an official carrying a walkie-talkie, who nodded his head in the direction of a glassedin area at the top of the scoreboard. The official said simply, ‘They said to tell you if they see you doing that again, you’ll be ejected from the infield.’ I didn’t have to ask who ‘they’ were. The binoculared ones in the observation tower had sent a message to me a few days previously. I’d been spotted sitting next to one of our camera positions eating a sandwich. Apparently eating in the centrefield was verboten. It’s not like I was perched on the edge of lane one, scattering bits of shredded carrot and lettuce onto the track or anything, but I was warned. I tried to explain I’d taken to eating my lunch there because, if I left the infield to eat in the cafeteria, there was a better than even chance the doofus manning the accreditation checkpoint would block me from getting back after lunch. But it was pointless arguing with them. 113
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? My behaviour clearly constituted a serious threat to track and field, and everything it stood for. Cram went on to break the world record for the 1500-metres in Europe just a few weeks after the Commonwealth Games and eight years later I did get a chance to interview him. When I told him that watching him race in Edinburgh had been one of my career highlights, he told me he believed, in retrospect, that during those few months in 1986 he’d been at the absolute peak of his powers. When I did get to meet him properly in 1994, the circumstance surrounding that meeting became pivotal in a major career decision.
Overall, the Edinburgh experience was fantastic. I was working with an intelligent team of commentators, whose company I enjoyed and learned from, and they didn’t seem to spend all their time trying to avoid me outside work hours as I’d felt had been the case in Los Angeles. As Guy, my boyfriend, had driven to Edinburgh from Peterborough, we had a car and did some touristy things too. I’ve often felt I’ve worked better with all-male groups when I’ve had a husband or boyfriend in tow. But I’ve never been sure whether it’s because my confidence has been strengthened in such circumstances, or because the presence of an established partner makes working relationships more straightforward between males and females. I noted that, despite my obvious enthusiasm for Steve Cram, I was never accused of ‘having the hots for him’ as had been the case with Greg Louganis in Los Angeles. Perhaps it was because I was so obviously head over heels about the man I was with at the time. Or perhaps I’d just earned some cred as someone who appreciated sport.
When I wasn’t on the sideline at rugby league or athletics, my duties had now expanded to doing sports reports on breakfast radio for ABC’s Sydney station, 2BL, and also Newcastle’s 2NC. This wasn’t a task assigned to me in particular; it was shared between the sports broadcasters. 114
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The strangest thing happened when I started needing to be at work by five-thirty in the morning. I found I actually liked very early starts and that my brain seemed to function more crisply at that hour of the morning. But unfortunately the job itself was problematic. Clive Robertson (who’d coincidentally been a regular customer in my record shop in my pre-media days) had departed 2BL not long before I started at the ABC and there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about who should replace him as breakfast presenter. Over the time I did sport on these shifts, there were maybe five different breakfast announcers. One of them was Bob Hudson, who I regarded as a legend—not only as a radio presenter but as a recording star, his ‘Newcastle Song’ having been a number-one on the Australian charts. Bob had been doing evenings on 2BL. He and I had actually been thrown together at the end of 1984 to co-present a one-off New Year’s Eve program of ‘Quotes of the Year’. I have no idea whose brainchild that was, but it was tremendous fun. I can’t recall much of the content except an extraordinary quote from someone describing Adelaide as ‘like Yass with poofters’. (It’s the kind of line you don’t forget easily.) When Bob turned up as ‘stand-in’ breakfast presenter, hilarity ensued. Trouble was, hilarity wasn’t a commodity much in demand. I was always being nagged by a very strait-laced producer to cut out the humour and not encourage Bob to joke around. ‘Just do the sport quickly and get off’ were my regular riding instructions from some character whose name escapes me now, mainly because around the corridors he was always referred to as ‘The Undertaker’ anyway. I couldn’t believe that, with Bob Hudson hosting the breakfast show, they were telling him to be serious and were planning to replace him as soon as they got their secret, new, improved line-up off the drawing board. That turned out, eventually, to be Mike Jeffreys and Virginia Bond. Mike was then the Program Director of the station; he had a long history in commercial radio and clearly wanted to be on air. He had a certain style and wit about him; but the prevailing seriousness within ABC Radio led to a decision to pair him with Virginia, a current affairs journalist who I can’t say I ever really knew personally but who sounded as stiff as a Victorian governess on air. 115
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? To make matters worse, ‘The Undertaker’ was still in the control room and still bawling me out if I ‘allowed’ any banter during my sports segment. This really riled me because Mike was the Program Director—in other words, the person ultimately responsible for what went to air on the entire station—yet if Mike joked around with me, I got into trouble when I left the studio. Around the time all this was happening, I’d also had my first performance ‘assessment’ session with ABC Sport. This ABC formality involved a meeting with management types who evaluated your job performance and decided whether you deserved a move up through various pay grades. As the newest member of staff, I was right down near the bottom rungs. Fair enough. But as the guys I was working with started reporting back on how many pay levels they’d been jumped through, I started getting my hopes up for a little bit of advancement. Guess what I was told? That my program presenting and interviewing skills were quite good, but they couldn’t give me anything other than a token pay rise because, unlike the men, I was hardly doing any live commentary and demonstrated ability in that area was essential. I wanted to scream—that was the very thing I wanted most desperately to do but it wasn’t up to me whether I did live commentary, it was up to management. Now they were telling me unless I could call sport, I couldn’t go much beyond the pay rate I was on. I tried arguing it was a Catch 22—that I couldn’t prove I could call sport unless they gave me the chance. They told me others were better qualified to get the chances. The insult wasn’t the money, it was the existence of a clear ranking system that showed I was losing ground to the men around me. They’d given me a profile by putting me on the sideline but, effectively, I’d been sidelined because I couldn’t actually do commentary from there. To top it all off, the Head of TV Sport, Kevin Berry, told me he wasn’t sure ABC-TV would be televising rugby league in 1987. In frustration I resigned from ABC Sport, and departed in November 1986. I’d been there for around two and a half years.
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Leaving the ABC because I wanted to do more sports commentary made about as much sense as leaving Havana to look for cigars. If there was a place in the Australian media where it was most likely a woman would turn up calling the footy or the cricket, it was the ABC. I was now 30 years old—old enough to know better—but I was still a media newbie from a family where saying hello to Frank Hyde at the SCG was ‘knowing someone in the media’. The truth was I had done some sports commentary. In 1985 the sport department was short enough on staff that I was rostered as a commentator for one day of a Sheffield Shield cricket match between New South Wales and South Australia. The Shield match was on at the same time as a Test match, though, and they only needed commentary during the lunch and tea breaks of the Test. On that day I was sick with nerves—unusual for me. Nothing seemed more demanding than calling cricket and I had no idea how the ex-cricketers on the commentary team, Norm O’Neill and Dave Renneberg, would react to working with me. Norm was the poor sod given the assignment of being the analyst for my first 20-minute stint and he was fantastic. He told me not to worry if I didn’t have much to say; he was capable of filling in the gaps, which he did. 117
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? My cricket commentary debut wasn’t flagged in advance so listeners would expect it. I was relieved ABC Sport just slipped me on air without banging the drum in advance. The Kate Fitzpatrick debacle— which had happened shortly before I got into the media—was still fresh in everyone’s mind.
As a cricket fan, I’d been terribly disappointed in what Fitzpatrick had done with her opportunity to be part of the Nine Network’s cricket commentary team. I was a fan of hers as an actress, but cringed as I listened to her ask stupid questions and make puerile comments as part of the short-lived experiment. Many cricket people I knew and respected had assured me Fitzpatrick was quite the fan and understood the game, so I’d held high hopes. I knew something was wrong when, in the first few minutes, she asked Ian Chappell what the track was around the outside of the field at the Gabba. Anyone who’d watched, or listened to, even a cursory amount of cricket knew there was a greyhound track encircling the ground in Brisbane. Alarm bells rang immediately. Either she didn’t really know much about cricket, or she was being asked to play the dumb blonde. I always suspected the latter but, never having met her or discussed the matter with anyone who’d know, I can’t say for sure. What I can say is that women with aspirations to become sports commentators were saddled with her legacy for years to come. I couldn’t possibly count the number of times people, including other women, said to me ‘Well, women cricket commentators don’t work. Remember Kate Fitzpatrick?’. If I told people I wanted to call rugby league, I’d get comments like ‘Oh, you want to be the Kate Fitzpatrick of rugby league, huh?’ (snicker). The idea that one person is an indicator of the capabilities of an entire gender is pure nonsense, of course. Not long after I quit umpiring, I had a few cricketing types point out that most of the women who’d taken up umpiring had given it away, citing this as evidence that women weren’t really cut out for the job. The fact was (and probably still is) that most men who took 118
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up umpiring also dropped out before long; but a man dropping out was never considered evidence that men as a gender weren’t cut out for the job. If Kate Fitzpatrick had been a brilliant and popular cricket commentator, no one would have believed that every female in this wide brown land was a budding Richie Benaud. So why, when she generated too many complaints and was dropped from the Nine Network team, did it follow that all women were unacceptable as cricket commentators? As I sat in the ABC commentary box at the SCG in 1985, shaking like a leaf, I was intensely grateful that almost no one was expecting to hear a woman’s voice and that it was only a Shield match and not the first day of a Test at the Gabba. But I couldn’t slide out from under the pressure I felt Fitzpatrick had bequeathed me. If I stuffed up, it would corroborate what so many already believed: ‘It doesn’t work having a woman cricket commentator.’
What I hadn’t counted on was being judged quite acceptable, getting pats on the back all around, and then being told: ‘Who knows, maybe sometime in the future you’ll get another crack at it.’ I’d done one 20-minute stint during the Test lunchbreak, and slightly less than 20 minutes during tea. Just enough time to get a feel for what was required and to realise that doing lots of commentary would be the only way to become fluent. What I wanted was to get back on air and put what I’d learned into practice quickly. Trouble was there were too many men ahead of me in the pecking order— and they all wanted to do cricket commentary. I had to count on a combination of people being sick, on holidays or off on other assignments. Just before Christmas in 1985 I did get a full day’s work on a McDonald’s Cup one-dayer, which I remember vividly because of what happened in the SCG Members Bar afterwards. I was having a post-match drink with the commentary team who were trying to guess the identity of a touring party of young, blazered men with English accents drinking nearby. While at the bar I noticed one of the blazered 119
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? lads standing next to me, so I figured I’d solve the mystery by asking what team he was with. It was unlike me to strike up a conversation with an unknown man at a bar (I blame the adrenaline still coursing through my veins from a day in the commentary box) so I hurriedly explained that a couple of my colleagues were former Test and Sheffield Shield players and had been intrigued by their team emblem. The Englishman expressed an interest in meeting Norm O’Neill and Dave Renneberg, so I took him back to our group. ‘The touring party is the Combined Oxford Cambridge Universities cricket team,’ I announced. ‘And this is Guy Franks, the Oxford wicketkeeper.’ Guy explained that the squad had just flown into Sydney for the start of a round-Australia tour and had come direct from the airport to the SCG to catch the last few hours of play. He mentioned they’d been listening to ABC radio commentary on the way to the ground. Then—and I could almost see the penny drop—he swung around, looked at me with a touch of incredulity and said, ‘You’re the woman we heard calling the game, aren’t you?’ Heady times indeed. Not only had I just survived a full day in the commentary box, but I was suddenly being treated like a celebrity by, what I had to admit, was a handsome young cricketer from Oxford University. When he asked for directions to the Oaks Hotel in Neutral Bay, not far from where I lived, I found myself offering him a lift and when, as we were driving across the Harbour Bridge, he enquired about good restaurants and I suggested one, he asked if he could take me to that restaurant later in the week. I was in shock. This sort of thing never happened to me. I’d always dated men I’d known for some time, never someone who’d just picked me up in a bar. Or, I realised with shock, maybe I had just picked him up. However it had started, it accelerated quickly. Guy spent Christmas with my family and then left to travel around Australia with his touring party, keeping up a regular stream of phone calls, letters and flowers. By the time the tour ended in late January, he’d decided to stay in Australia and I’d invited him to move in with me. My personal relationships are not the subject matter of this book. If I ever get enough perspective to delve into the intricacies of my 120
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private life, it will be a hefty trilogy of Herman Wouk-sized volumes. But, for many reasons, the relationship with Guy is inextricable from the plot of my professional life. Firstly, Guy heightened my desire to do more cricket commentary just at the time my opportunities again seemed to dry up. There was a tension set in play. I felt he was educating me for the job I wanted to do, but the chances to put the education into practice weren’t forthcoming. Secondly, he gave me the first taste of the tensions that could arise in a relationship because of my job. He came to resent being ‘Debbie Spillane’s boyfriend’. His recruitment to Manly cricket club through a friend of mine, Ron Holmes, then president of the NSW Cricketers’ Club, also sat uneasily with him. As it happened, he barely played in the season he was with Manly. Keeping wicket in the first game of the season to the seriously fast England opening bowler David Lawrence, Guy wrenched his knee ligaments and only recovered in time to play a few lower-grade games near the end of the season. Still, he took his team commitment earnestly enough to show up just about every week. I tagged along. I’d been around cricket grounds for many years. But my regular attendance with Guy prompted a revealing comment from a teammate. In the context of dressing-room banter, his captain said, ‘She won’t let you out of her sight, will she?’ That infuriated me. Of all people I thought I deserved to be recognised as a legitimate cricket fan, but apparently my repeated attendance was interpreted not as a sign of interest in the game, but of possessiveness. Guy was more than happy to share a love of cricket with me and, as he’d played rugby union, he didn’t find rugby league too big a stretch, but basketball was a major bone of contention. Assigned to report on NBL games for ABC Radio in 1985, I’d become quite the basketball fanatic. In time I became court announcer for the Bankstown Bruins and then the West Sydney Westars; by now I was spending some Friday or Saturday winter nights working at their home games. Guy almost always attended matches with me, but he never enjoyed himself. We’d often quarrel on the way home. Initially I laughed this 121
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? off as a cute, role-reversed tension—the poor put-upon boyfriend, dragged along by his girlfriend to watch sport that bored him. Finally, the relationship with Guy is important because of what happened when it ended.
I concede there was an element of petulance in my exit from ABC Sport, but I was also eager for new challenges. I was tired of doing the day-to-day jobs the male broadcasters didn’t want, tired of the straitjacket the 2BL breakfast show was keeping me in, and concerned that ABC’s TV rights to the rugby league were about to be terminated. I did lobby to get on the Saturday afternoon radio shift, which later became Grandstand under my eventual replacement, Tracey Holmes, but at the time it ‘belonged’ to one of the senior sports broadcasters Ron Davies. Ultimately I felt that staying on the off-chance that I might get to do cricket commentary, hesitantly and unconvincingly for a few hours per season, wasn’t worth it. I remember Jim Maxwell advising me that careers in the ABC were a series of climbs and plateaus and that the trick was to stay patient during the plateaus. Twenty years later I appreciate exactly what he was trying to tell me, but I didn’t get it at the time. Did I regret leaving? Yes, sometimes. But then there were so many opportunities that came my way in subsequent years, I can’t really say it was a mistake. Showing media naivety, I resigned with absolutely nothing lined up. I figured that, when word got out I was leaving, I’d get offers. Well, I got an offer—singular. The 2GB station manager, Geoff Duncan, was on the phone pronto. Returning to 2GB had a certain symmetry to it. It was also the number-one station in Sydney at the time with personalities like Mike Carlton and John Laws top of the ratings pile. I didn’t go there for the fabled commercial radio dollar though. When Duncan asked me what I wanted, I told him the most important thing for me was continued involvement in rugby league. They had Greg Hartley and Peter Peters calling the football and I wanted at 122
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least to be part of their around-the-grounds team. No problem, Duncan assured me. That turned out to be an overly optimistic assessment. I started in the 2GB newsroom as a sports reporter/sports bulletin presenter in December 1986. Obviously I couldn’t work on rugby league in summer and my ‘day job’ away from the football was as sports news presenter during drive-time. It seems strange to recount that my switch from ABC to 2GB made the front page of a newspaper. It wasn’t a lead story, but a banner headline with a small photo announcing my move: ‘Full story inside.’ I thought it encouraging the station was so excited about my arrival. But within weeks I realised my highly publicised ‘graduation’ from the ABC to ‘real radio’, as one particularly loathsome 2GB newsroom staffer put it, did not endear me to my new colleagues. From their point of view, not only was I favoured with an unseemly amount of publicity, but I had no idea of the workings of a radio newsroom. The latter was undeniably true. At the ABC, the closest I’d come to a radio newsroom was to walk through one. My most immediate problem was that I’d never used a word processor and the 2GB newsroom was fully computerised. Any help I sought was greeted with a ‘I can’t believe they’ve hired you when you don’t even know this stuff’ kind of impatience. To top it all off, writing news copy at 2GB had more rules than cricket. No split infinitives and no ending sentences with time phrases. No adjectives or adverbs except the almost compulsory ones, like ‘controversially’ decided, ‘extensive’ physiotherapy or ‘top-of-the-table’ clash. Use of the words ‘today’ or ‘now’ were banned—everything was to be written in the present or future tense. Teams were unarguably collective nouns so saying the West Indies are, rather than the West Indies is, was a punishable offence no matter how stupid it sounded. Any word that needed initial capitals was to be typed in all capitals, i.e. not Sydney, but SYDNEY; not Sheffield Shield, but SHEFFIELD SHIELD. Inadvertently flouting these rules had me regularly hauled into the office of the head prefect, Andrew White. He’d condescendingly correct my scripts before sending me back to my desk, where I’d already be behind in my preparation for the next bulletin. 123
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? This was all stressful enough but, when one of the other staff sport reporters broke a leg and I was rostered on split shifts for several weeks over the summer holiday period, I started to feel my head would explode. I was doing four hours on the breakfast shift, going home mid-morning and then returning mid-afternoon for drive-time. It was at precisely this time that Guy announced he was returning to England. The relationship had been through some rough patches, not helped by Guy’s frustration at missing most of the cricket season through injury. I’d known his visa expiry date was approaching, but I’d assumed there were ways around that. Plus I’d been preoccupied with my own problems. I got the news only weeks after my move to 2GB—which was already feeling like a massive blunder. Guy was leaving late February and talking about applying to immigrate when he got home. I don’t think either of us believed that was a genuine plan, just something he was offering to soften the initial blow. The Christmas, New Year and January of cricket that followed were a blur of emotional swings. I often think that during those two months I totally lost my enjoyment compass. We were still very much a couple—attending functions and sporting events together—but the more fun we had, the more I cried when we got home. The happier I was in his company, the more I dreaded his absence. Eventually, before I even started enjoying myself, I’d trigger the misery response. It was a slope slipperier than I could have imagined. I wanted to be back at the ABC, where at least my workmates knew Guy and would have understood my melancholy. In the 2GB newsroom the only ‘friends’ I had were the busybodies who’d faithfully relay to me the latest names I’d been called by other reporters. ‘The sport guys all call you “The Skirt” when you’re not around’, I was told by one woman, who then wanted me to monitor what names she was called when she was out of the newsroom. By the time Guy left Australia, I’d been at 2GB nearly three months. Computers and script-writing rules were no longer problems, but my promised role on the rugby league commentary team was 124
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shaping up as one. The folly of ever believing the existing team would accommodate me was becoming apparent. I should explain that by late 1986 Richard Fisk and Sam Galea, the two people most involved in the Sports Talent competition that had given me a start in the media, had exited 2GB. Peter Peters was now the sports editor and Greg Hartley the sales manager. They were, theoretically, outranked by Geoff Duncan, the station manager, and Charlie Cox, the program director, but I was about to learn an important lesson in Commercial Radio 101. If the on-air talent is rating well and selling advertising, station management gives them what they want. This basic precept first became clear when I was called into a meeting with Duncan and Cox, and told my role on the rugby league commentary team had been decided. I was to pre-record an interview each week with a player’s wife or girlfriend. I spun out. This was not the ‘genuine role’ I’d been promised. I didn’t want some trite, invented role; I wanted a job that would normally be filled by a male sports reporter—such as being on the around-the-grounds team. For those unfamiliar with such footy terms, an ‘around-the-grounds reporter’ is one reporting from a match other than the main broadcast match. During stoppages, the main commentators will quickly go ‘around the grounds’ to check scores in other games. The sport reporter I was replacing, Andy Paschalides, had done around-the-grounds and I wanted at least the same role. Duncan agreed it was a reasonable request, and suggested Cox tell Hartley and Peters. The program director didn’t pretend this would be well received. ‘I’ll tell them. But preferably from a moving vehicle.’
The compromise deal ended up being that I’d do some around-thegrounds, sharing the duties with others already promised a start by Hartley and Peters. While I was on-air with them, Peters resisted the opportunity to lampoon me—he saved that for the comment segment he did on Mike Carlton’s weekday breakfast show. When I’d been at the ABC 125
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? and he’d accused me of feigning a passion for rugby league so I could see naked men, I’d honestly believed he was stirring the pot for ratings purposes. He’d treated me OK when I worked part-time on Sportsline before I went to the ABC and, as mentioned earlier, he’d interviewed me as a schoolgirl when I’d written my ‘Lament of the Aussie League Fan’. I expected that, once we were on the same team again, he’d quit the diatribe. I expected wrong. I expected 2GB management would stop him complaining about women sport reporters once I was working at 2GB. I expected wrong. Duncan told me Peters had been told not to criticise me on air. But when it continued anyway, Duncan shrugged it off with a ‘Well, I tried’ kind of attitude. Way too late, I started valuing the relative egalitarianism of the ABC. I loathed the kind of fawning obeisance that was paid to John Laws, Mike Carlton, Hartley and Peters. Laws was like a fictional character. I wondered if he had secret elevator access to the studio and a private toilet; at least occasionally I’d pass the others in a corridor or alighting from an elevator, but not Laws. When I worked mornings, the audio from the Laws program booming from the newsroom speakers drove me to the ‘easy-listening option’. At each workstation there were feeds of other major Macquarie Network stations available. I started donning headphones and listening to Brisbane’s 4BH. Max Bygraves or the Ray Conniff Singers were less aggravating. I worried that constant exposure to Laws would eventually result in me exploding with rage, tearing down the corridor to the studio where I knew he was (even though I’d never laid eyes on him) and hurling something heavy, like a hole-puncher, at him. It became quite an unhealthy fantasy. One 2GB memory that still makes me laugh (and not many do) is of one of the newsroom staff losing it completely during a Laws program. I won’t give a name because this person is still in radio and Laws remains influential. It was a busy day in a newsroom that seemed always on edge. Laws’s program was blasting out of a large speaker near my desk. Lawsie’s good friend, Wally the Butcher from Wherever, was recommending 126
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the lamb loin chops and breakfast sausages. Lawsie was following up with in-depth questions, when suddenly this high-ranking journo jumped up, shouted ‘Oh shut up!’, charged across the room, stood in front of the speaker and bellowed: ‘Buy your own fucking meat, you arsehole! You’re being fucking paid enough.’ And with that, my esteemed colleague abruptly turned the speaker off. Mentally I sifted through the wording looking for a split infinitive or forbidden time phrase to comment on, but no, I couldn’t find anything to quibble with.
In these surroundings I gradually slid into a kind of despair I’d never felt before. At home, I was missing Guy. For the first time in my life I woke each morning trying to think of excuses not to show up for work. My misery reached a point where each evening, as I’d leave the building in Sussex Street, I’d burst into tears and be weepy all the way home. This became so embarrassing I started driving to work and paying extortionate city parking fees just so I could sob going home in the relative privacy of my car. I tried throwing myself into basketball—the one thing I felt I could enjoy more in Guy’s absence. In addition to West Sydney games I dragged myself along to see the Sydney Supersonics play, phoning through reports to the newsroom in an effort to help the publicitystarved sport. I stopped filing them when another reporter told me the guys who were doing sport would laugh, ‘Another basketball report from The Skirt’, and chuck the script in the bin. Then an extra crushing blow came out of left field. I was in the newsroom one afternoon when Lorraine Landon, a friend and an official with West Sydney, phoned with bad news. Robert Scrigni, one of the team’s star players, had been found dead in his car, a length of hose running from the exhaust into one of the windows.
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? He and the player who’d done most to help me cover basketball as a rookie, Damian Keogh, were like brothers. For most of their lives they’d played alongside each other—through juniors to the NBL and even the national team. Damian married Bankstown player Maree White (Robert was the best man), and moved to Sydney to play with the Bankstown Bruins at exactly the time I got involved covering the NBL. By late 1985 Damian and I had become good enough mates that when I went to Melbourne for a holiday and popped along to watch a Victorian State League game, Robert greeted me like an old friend, despite us never having met. What made me laugh most was he did it during the game. I was sitting near the sideline and at one point he chased a ball out of court right in front of me. As he was about to in-bound it, he turned, flashed a great smile and said ‘Hello Debbie!’. I was floored, and of course flattered. At that time we had a secret in common. I knew he’d signed with Bankstown for the following season, though the news hadn’t been announced. He wanted to celebrate that night and insisted on showing me around Melbourne’s nightclubs. We had an instant rapport. In retrospect perhaps he was a bit manic—laughing, joking, telling stories, dancing crazily and bowling me over with plans of what we could do together when he moved to Sydney. As fate would have it, a couple of weeks later I met Guy. By the time Robert moved to Sydney I was living with an Englishman who hated basketball in general, and Robert in particular. This never seemed to bother Robert. The plans we’d discussed so enthusiastically that silly night bouncing around Melbourne were never mentioned again. We always bantered easily and Robert never failed to make me laugh. After more than a year in Sydney, Robert still seemed unattached and in the back of my mind I wondered whether, if I could accept Guy wasn’t returning, there was a chance of picking up the threads of what might have been with Robert. Then suddenly he was dead. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
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As emotionally fragile as I’d been for months, I’d held myself together enough not to turn on the tears at work. Hence the sobbing on the way home. I cringed when women cried in the office and always promised myself I’d never show such weakness to male colleagues. But the phone call about Robert brought me undone. In the middle of the hysterical sobbing, as newsroom staff gathered round to see what was wrong, I pulled myself together enough to say ‘I guess this is a fairly big story’. I explained how Robert was a national team player, a star in the NBL, and he’d just been found dead in his car, having apparently driven all the way back to his favourite beach near Melbourne before ending it all. ‘Don’t think most people would’ve heard of him’ was the response. Very sad for The Skirt, but basically a non-story. The next day it filled the front page of The Sun. Now I was distraught and insulted, and openly full of loathing for the ignorant people I was working with. More significantly, I started to empathise with Robert. Everyone was saying they couldn’t imagine why he’d do such a thing. I didn’t find it hard to get my head around it at all. I had no clue what had triggered his suicide. He hadn’t left a note and even Damian, who was so close to him, had no insights. While others focused on trying to understand his motivation, I found myself dwelling on the process. I imagined the sense of purpose he must have felt as he bought the length of hose; I wondered what was behind his careful choice of location and if he felt close to release as he hooked up the hose to the exhaust. From those thoughts I moved to theorising about what method of suicide I would choose. I discounted jumping from my seventh-floor balcony, because I thought it would be unfair to those who lived on the ground floor; I liked the idea of drowning, but figured it would take too long; I dismissed anything to do with guns or razors, because I couldn’t stand blood. I assured myself I wasn’t planning suicide, just that it was like having an exit strategy and, if I had an exit strategy, I’d feel less trapped.
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? I did decide, at least, on an exit from 2GB. For months I’d toyed with the idea of going, but stubbornly rejected it because I didn’t want Hartley and Peters to think they’d beaten me. Now I didn’t care. I resolved to tell Geoff Duncan. After plucking up the courage to present myself at his office, I was stonewalled by his secretary, who said I’d have to make an appointment. I was distraught—I just wanted it over. OK, the soonest appointment available. Friday? Well, make it Friday. I battled through the week wanting this resignation over and done with. Feeling sick to the stomach about what it meant for my ‘dream career’, but knowing it had to be done, I fronted at the station manager’s office at the arranged time only to be told Mr Duncan had unexpectedly gone to lunch with Mr Laws. No way of knowing if he’d even be back that day. I could feel the tears of anger and frustration welling in my eyes and darted into the ladies toilets to pull myself together. The boss had an appointment with me, but of course that wasn’t worth a tinker’s cuss if Mr Golden Tonsils suddenly felt like going to lunch, did it? Now I had to struggle through the weekend knowing I hadn’t done the deed. The next week I did get to tell Duncan I wanted out. He informed me that, as an A-grade journalist, I was obliged to give six weeks’ notice. I think I lasted two or three of those six weeks. One afternoon, after I’d been to an athletics lunch and come back with what I thought was a cassette full of interviews only to find I’d screwed up and the tape was blank, I got up and, without saying a word to anyone, walked out. It was only 15 minutes before my first sports update of the afternoon was due. By the time I got home, sobbing hysterically and convinced I’d just run my career right off the tracks, I’d decided it was time to implement the other exit strategy.
What I’ve left out of this story so far—and I left it out here because I’d effectively left it out of my memory at the time—was that once 130
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before I’d tried to commit suicide. In 1985 I’d gone to a Sydney Swans game at the SCG; it had started with one of those long boozy sponsors’ lunches, followed by lots of drinking during the game, topped off with more wine at a post-match function. The then coach of the Bankstown basketball team, Robbie Cadee, had eventually put me in his car and steered me gingerly through the front door of my flat, where I’d become conscious enough a few hours later to feel swamped by total humiliation. After focusing so obsessively for so long on trying to behave professionally, I felt as though I’d brought it all undone spectacularly and publicly and that word of my drunken floozie behaviour would already be spreading all around the city—and beyond. I’d done the one thing I’d promised myself I’d never do. I wanted to die. Literally. And I was still drunk. Although I never used sleeping pills, I had some around the flat that a dentist had prescribed after some nasty dental work. I grabbed a fistful, downed the lot and went back to bed. Luckily Cadee hadn’t locked the door when he left me and I was shaken awake by some ABC-TV colleagues the next morning, who’d become concerned when I hadn’t shown up for work. I was hauled off to hospital, treated like a drunken OD-ing drama queen by doctors and then discharged after assuring them I didn’t normally drink to excess, wasn’t really suicidal and didn’t need any further treatment. I believed my reputation was in tatters and I could never show my face at a sporting event again. Jill-Anne Jordan, a girlfriend who worked at ABC-TV at the time, told me that, if getting rip-roaring drunk was a career-ender, she didn’t know a male sports journalist who’d still be in work. Cadee assured me that, as a basketball coach, he’d seen much worse and told me to buck up and get over it. The incident was almost never mentioned again by anyone and I’d written it off as just something incredibly stupid I’d done when I was extremely drunk.
Two years later, when I arrived home after walking out of 2GB, I was perfectly sober. I did figure I’d need a few stiff drinks to bolster me 131
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? for what was ahead. I shut all the windows in my tiny flat, poured myself a large tumbler of straight scotch—something I never drank— and then turned up to full all the gas jets in my oven. I don’t know how to tell this story without it seeming like a farcical scene from a black comedy but, at the time, I was weeping hysterically and was a long way from seeing humour in the situation. I’d mulled over suicide methodology, but done no research and didn’t know that natural gas wouldn’t kill me. I kept drinking scotch and waiting impatiently to lapse into unconsciousness; after a while I actually put a pillow inside the oven and rested my head in there. Eventually, feeling a bit sick but still depressingly alive, I rang my doctor. It was the first time speaking to a doctor had occurred to me. I regretted calling almost immediately and hung up when she mentioned sending a social worker to see me (I still remember snapping ‘I lived with girls who were studying social work when I was at uni and they were crazier than me!’). But before long there were people banging at my door. I refused to open it, having returned my head to the oven with renewed fervour when I realised the best help on offer was a social worker. Next thing I knew I was being hauled off, groggily, to hospital. This time there was no shrugging off my actions as a momentary aberration. From casualty I was transferred to a psychiatric ward, where I woke the next evening to find the patient opposite me listening to 2GB. Luckily there was nothing sharp within reach.
I gather most people who are told they have depressive illness resist the diagnosis. I wasn’t mentally ill, I insisted. I was depressed for clear, logical reasons—the break-up of a relationship, plus the stress of a horrible, high-pressure job. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest constituted the sum total of my knowledge of psychiatric treatment and, based on that, I was adamant I wouldn’t be taking their drugs. Drugs weren’t going to bring Guy back, and they weren’t going to rescue my ruined career. When it was put to me that they could keep me in hospital 132
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until such time as I took the drugs, I realised I didn’t have much choice. I definitely wanted out. My determination to be discharged took on an unexpected urgency when, after a week or so, I phoned home and found a message on my answering machine from David Wood, a former executive producer at ABC-TV Sport. He was working for a satellite broadcaster starting up a service to telecast live sport into hotels. One of the sports they’d be telecasting was basketball and he wanted me as a commentator. I couldn’t believe it: I was going to go straight from the last place I ever expected to be, the loony bin, to where I wanted to be, the commentary box. Despite my scepticism about the value of drugs in treating my problems—a scepticism which increased when the first medication I tried made not a scrap of difference—I did eventually find my outlook brightening a few weeks after starting on a second type of anti-depressant. The problems that had caused my despair were still there, but gradually they didn’t seem quite so insurmountable. Although I wasn’t thrilled with the undoubted stigma that came from finding I had a mental illness, it was strangely reassuring to be told by doctors that clinical depression sufferers can no more ‘pull themselves together’ than someone with a broken leg can just keep on walking normally. I hadn’t been weak or pathetic—I’d been ill. And if I wanted to get on with life, I needed to accept treatment. So I did. And I recovered.
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10 Hoops hopes Hoops hopes
The era of satellite television in pubs and clubs was so brief that I’m sure most have forgotten it. There were three companies beaming mostly sports programs to venues that paid to be connected to the service. I was hired to do programs for the one owned by Sportsplay, Geoffrey Edelsten’s company that also owned the Sydney Swans and the West Sydney Westars. Each weekend for the rest of the winter of 1987 I worked on basketball games with Phil Lynch, a Canberra-based sports journalist whom I knew from my couple of years hanging around the NBL traps. Phil was steeped in the sport. He’d played basketball for Australia, was married to the sister of NBL coach, Bob Turner, and was the most experienced TV commentator on the sport in this country. I started off doing colour commentary (adding extra information to the call of the game) as well as some interviews and preview pieces with Phil, but the colour commentary role never sat well with me. In line with the conventional ABC Sport wisdom, I felt the person with the more in-depth knowledge of the sport should deliver the analysis and that person was definitely Phil. On the other hand, he also had much more experience calling play-by-play. He understood my misgivings, so after a while we decided to try the system used commonly 134
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in the AFL. We’d take turns doing play-by-play and, as one person took over calling, the other would become the comments person. I got enough experience of calling the game from this that, when later that year the Soviet Union national team toured Australia, and Phil was unavailable, I got to do commentary on their game against Australia at the Sydney Entertainment Centre with Bob Turner as my analyst. It was shown very late at night on the Ten Network and probably watched by three men and a dog, but it really meant something to finally be calling international sport. Not long after this, the Ten Network gave me a guest role on the 1987 rugby league grand final. Having a minor role in a big commercial grand final coverage was a bit like being fourth shepherd in a nativity play, but it did give me a chance to be part of the last league grand final at the Sydney Cricket Ground and that meant a lot, given my personal history at the ground. And I was over the moon about another opportunity that emerged around the same time. Another former ABC-TV producer, Mike Audcent, then working for the Ten Network, offered me a place on the commentary team for the Seoul Olympics. He warned he couldn’t give assurances about what role I’d play—as the network would understandably want to give the prime roles to their own staffers— but they did need extras and I was to be one of them. Better still, my basketball commentary cohort, Phil Lynch, was also on the Olympics team. He’d been hired specifically to cover basketball and, again showing his generosity, undertook to make positive noises about having me as an offsider at the basketball in Seoul.
Near the end of 1987 I got an unexpected offer to join radio station 2DAY-FM as a sports reporter/weekend newsreader. After checking they’d allow me time off to work for Ten at the Seoul Olympics, I accepted. It was so incredibly pleasant to be able to go to the loo at my place of work and hear The Eagles on the in-house monitoring rather than sermonising from John Laws. Sure, after the 800th listening, 135
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Hotel California got a little tiresome, but I never felt the urge to storm the studio and smash the CD. Settling into the more laidback pace of an FM music station newsroom did mean accepting a gig where there was no hope of doing sports commentary. Still in the back of my mind, there was the pipedream of performing so impressively at Seoul that someone somewhere would snap me up for a sports spot. Having gone to Los Angeles with naively high hopes, you’d think I would have had more realistic aspirations about Seoul. But no, I still foolishly hoped it would provide me with that breakthrough moment whereby Ten, or some other network, would recognise me as the woman who could be accepted as a play-by-play commentator and my career path would take another dream turn. Basketball, I figured, was just the sport for me to show my chops on. It was relatively new in Australia so there wasn’t a bank of established media gurus on the game; I’d seen more of it than anyone else who was going to Seoul with Ten (bar Phil Lynch); and it was a women’s sport as well as a men’s sport, in which I had developed excellent contacts. At the end of the previous season, when the Westars had gone under financially, Mike Wrublewski—the owner of the other Sydney team, the Supersonics—had offered to absorb the former Bruins/Westars and create a new Sydney entity. Damian Keogh—the only mainstay of the Westars playing roster to be signed up—had recommended me to Mike as an ideal media manager for the new club, which was eventually named the Kings, and I accepted the part-time role with great enthusiasm. Doing the breakfast shift on radio gave me my afternoons free and I spent most of them at Bankstown Stadium, which was in 1988 the home of the Kings administration. Nevertheless, when assignments for Seoul were finally locked in, I was named as interviewer at the swimming and the athletics. I wasn’t ungracious enough to express dissatisfaction with this—in fact, being at the track for an Olympics was a prospect that thrilled me— but my commentary hopes had been stomped on. I’d been returned to the sidelines. 136
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Ultimately the Seoul Olympics, rather than proving my commitment to sports commentary, served to make me accept that commentary wasn’t to be my future. At the swimming the commentators were Mark Tonelli, Graham Windeatt and Lisa Curry-Kenny. All were quite pleasant to work with but, not being an Olympic swimmer, I felt like the answer in that Sesame Street song ‘One of these things is not like the others’. The set-up for interviewing at the pool in Seoul seemed far superior to that in Los Angeles. Each of the main international broadcasters was allocated a position on the pool deck. I was allowed to work there, provided I stayed inside the area clearly outlined. When Duncan Armstrong won the 400-metres freestyle, I was able to interview him within moments of him getting out of the pool—as opposed to hanging around the back of the grandstand as I’d done in Los Angeles to catch Jon Sieben. Armstrong’s win was unexpected. He was a delightful interviewee and, although I didn’t have as good a view of the racing at the pool level, it was exciting to be so close to the action that I was almost getting wet from the splashing. But, in a few days, the almost perfect set-up was ruined. The American poolside interviewers decided they wouldn’t stay within the area marked out. One of them turned up with an extralong microphone lead and started rushing over to the pool’s edge and interviewing American swimmers before they were even out of the water. I was horrified. If they’d had a waterproof mike, I was sure they would have been asking for a quick comment during the tumble turns. Not surprisingly, the Koreans swiftly banned all interviewers from the pool deck and I had to go back to attending press conferences and hunting around in the adjacent warm-up pool area for interviews.
There’s no doubt my experiences at the pool affected what happened next, when the track and field events started. 137
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? On my first day at the main stadium, the women’s marathon was run. Hopes were high for a win by Australia’s Lisa Martin, but Portugal’s Rosa Mota took the gold with Martin second. In a set-up not unlike the one I’d encountered at the pool, each broadcaster had a position trackside along the home straight. The main difference was our positions were behind the fence that ringed the stadium. We’d been assured the Australian athletes knew where our position was and, as they left the track, they’d come to us. After being talked up relentlessly as a gold medal prospect, perhaps Martin just couldn’t face an interview having run second. Perhaps she just had other things on her mind—like exhaustion. Whatever the reason, she appeared not to notice my frantic arm-waving and headed back under the grandstand, not coming within earshot of me in the noisy stadium. One of Ten’s news reporters urged me to jump the fence and go after her. I’d make a lousy war correspondent because, apart from anything else, the fact that there were uniformed men ringing the infield, each armed with a massive automatic rifle, discouraged me from making a run for it. I was also aware of what had happened at the pool and I didn’t want any part in spoiling the set-up for everyone else. So instead I headed for the area under the grandstand, where I expected a media conference, but got caught up instead in a crush of reporters and crews who literally stampeded down a corridor when Rosa Mota appeared briefly at one end of the passageway. The tiny, exhausted runner had the look of a hunted animal when she saw the mob bearing down on her shouting in various languages. She was quickly hustled into a room and the door slammed behind her. It was bedlam. Frantic reporters were banging on the door—which told me she wasn’t coming out any time soon. There was no chance of any athlete getting to the media conference room at the other end of the corridor while it remained totally clogged up with shouting, shoving media types. After several minutes of this madness I felt useless, discouraged and claustrophobic. I headed back out to the trackside and resumed trying to hail down passing athletes. 138
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At the end of my first day at the track, I told the Ten Network that, if they needed someone to fight for interviews and run the gauntlet of armed guards, I wasn’t their person. In retrospect my reaction does seem rather lily-livered, but I felt totally inadequate and frustrated. Much to my surprise, they switched me to the basketball— which was a far better outcome than I had any right to expect. Luckily, my revised roster allowed me to still be at the track, although not in any official capacity—when Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis staged what was being billed as the greatest 100-metres showdown of all time. As someone who considered commentary the highest art form in sports reporting, I was in awe of Bruce McAvaney, who was on the Ten commentary team. Here was a man who possessed the skills to call a Melbourne Cup, an AFL game, a tennis match or the 100-metres at the track. My respect for him increased ten-fold seeing him in action during the Seoul Games. It wasn’t just his ability to call live sport. The man is a walking sports encyclopaedia. One day, as he prepared for a studio hosting shift, I watched him walk through Ten’s facility at the International Broadcast Centre, past a long row of video machines, into which events from all around the Games were being fed: races, media conferences, team sports. At each one he would stop and identify the competitors on the screen, commenting on how this particular event was progressing and indicating to the tape editors who and what to look out for. On top of that, he was more approachable than many of the other high-profile commentators and presenters from commercial television. We talked track and field a few times, and I discussed with him the task ahead of him of calling the Johnson–Lewis ‘race of the century’. In an event like that, which would last less than ten seconds, there was no room for stumbling or hesitation—every word chosen had to be valuable. The rule of thumb for timing in radio is that, at normal speaking pace, you say three words per second. Naturally, in a racecall you up the tempo a bit, but the basic equation in front of him as he prepared for this race still came down to having to produce, under pressure, not many more than 30 words to describe the most 139
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? prestigious event of the Games. If you had that assignment as a writer, and an hour in which to choose the right words, it’d be tough. To come up with them spontaneously was a monumental task. The only downside to being at the Olympic Stadium to see the race live was that I couldn’t listen to how Bruce handled the challenge, although I did get to hear his call later on tape. It turned out that the words he chose and how he arranged them became fairly insignificant anyway. I was delighted with the result. I wanted Johnson to win because he seemed such an unglamorous battler. He’d largely overcome the stutter that had made him such a nightmare to interview in Canberra three years earlier, and I appreciated how difficult that would have been. He still seemed shy, though, and I thought that compared favourably with Lewis’s glib oozing-confidence routine. I felt I’d been granted one of the greatest privileges ever in sport to be there when Johnson exploded out of the blocks and beat Lewis in the most eagerly anticipated 100-metres final of all time. I concentrated hard on storing this experience in my memory bank. I thought I’d be boasting for the rest of my life: ‘I was there when Johnson and Lewis raced in the hundred-metres final in Seoul.’ So two days later I felt something precious had been taken from me. After a post-midnight finish at the basketball the previous night, I’d staggered out just after six the next morning, only half awake, into the living room of the media village apartment I was sharing with Network Ten personalities, Tim Webster and Graeme Hughes (that was an apartment with a queue for the hair-dryer let me tell you!), to be greeted with the news that Johnson had tested positive and was likely to be disqualified. I thought they were pulling my leg because I’d been so chuffed with Johnson’s victory.
Drugs, thankfully, were not a topic of significance at the basketball. The main focus there was the serious challenge to American supremacy being issued by the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Seoul laid the foundation for the emergence of the American Dream Team in Barcelona four years later. It was in Seoul that 140
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American basketball got the wake-up call, signalling that the world was catching up. If they kept sending college players, they were going to lose the big games to countries fielding professionals. Players from the American professional league, the NBA, were playing for their countries of birth and shining. The Soviets had Sharonas Marcheolinus and Arvydis Sabonis, who played in the NBA. Australia even had a gangly kid destined for NBA fame—Luc Longley—whom I’d never heard of when he was picked as an 18-year-old for that Australian Boomers side. Nor had I heard of the other two 18-year-olds, Mark Bradtke and Andrew Vlahov, who came straight from US colleges into the Aussie team that year. Seoul, at this time, was Australia’s best international tournament ever. The men’s and the women’s teams played off for the bronze medal and finished fourth. And I got to see the Soviets—whom I felt I knew from their previous winter’s tour of Australia—win the men’s gold. But, as far as my basketball commentary career went, I made little progress. Phil agreed we should try our old Sportsplay TV commentary arrangement, with us alternating throughout the game as the playby-play caller and the non-caller adding colour comments. But, after a day or two of that, word came down from on high that I should leave calling the action to Phil. Considering myself incredibly fortunate to have been diverted to the basketball, I figured it would be poor form to put up a fight about what role I should play there.
I knew by the end of the Seoul Olympics that I wouldn’t be parlaying my experience there into a prominent sports commentary role. Yes, I’d wriggled my way into an opportunity to show what I could do, but effectively I’d been told ‘Thanks, but no thanks’. I had to let go of those commentary dreams. Perversely enough, however, an opportunity to return to the commentary box was to materialise out of nowhere two years later. 141
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? As a footnote to this: I was so convinced that I must have sounded awful doing the play-by-play commentary on those early games at Seoul, I could never bring myself to even listen to the tapes. When I started writing this book and thinking again about my long-held commentary ambitions, I dragged out the dusty old VHS tape that had sat unplayed on the shelf for 16 years—bracing myself for maximum embarrassment. In all honesty, I don’t think I did so bad a job. Could the decision to move me aside from the main commentary role have had less to do with competence and more to do with the perception that it jarred hearing a woman’s voice doing that job? I can accept perhaps that those who made the decision thought I wasn’t good enough, in the same way I thought Kate Fitzpatrick wasn’t good enough. But I wish someone could tell me why there are, apparently, no women good enough to be in the commentary box for men’s sports. The commentator’s job isn’t to relate to those playing the sport, but to those who watch or listen. Go to any football, cricket or basketball match and tell me if you see any women there.
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11 Motherhood, mid-dawns, weekends and knights Motherhood, mid-dawns, weekends and knights
On my return from Seoul I settled into the world of FM music radio. I’d married Greg Dimon, an announcer at 2DAY-FM, on the eve of the Olympics. He’d been a music radio disc jockey since leaving school and was certainly more interested in that world than the world of sports. My background in rock bands and record shops made me feel quite at home in what was really the realm of the other kind of jocks: the guys with a rock’n’roll lifestyle, long hair, smooth presentation skills and hip one-liners. I was able to still indulge my love of sport, although the opportunity for live commentary was gone. The trade-off came in the shape of movie premieres, rock concerts and, I guess, mixing with a crowd that seemed to me at the time more ‘hip’ than those I’d been working with at the ABC or 2GB. When I first started at 2DAY-FM in early 1988, several staffers confided they were surprised to hear I’d been hired. The station’s program director, Cherie Romaro (at the time the only female radio executive in Sydney), was infamous within the business for her dislike of women on air. All the jocks (yes, that’s what they were called!) were men with extremely deep voices, adjudged to be sexy to women 143
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? listeners. That was her target audience and, as women didn’t generally sound sexy to women listeners, there wasn’t much call for female voices at the station. Fortunately for me, Cherie was a sports fan and she believed, shrewdly, that the best way to provide sports coverage on a station targeting women was to use a woman sports reporter. It sent the message that women shouldn’t feel excluded when topics like football and cricket were discussed. I felt at home at 2DAY-FM and the job also led to me getting a newspaper column in the sports section of the Sunday paper, the SunHerald. It was really just a flippant, odds-and-sods collection of scuttlebutt and comments buried in the sports section bleachers. I’d been offered it by Steve Crawley, then assistant Sun-Herald sports editor, because of my sports reports on 2DAY-FM, where my brief was to have fun with sport rather than deliver it straight-laced. Freed from the constraint of being serious, which I’d been saddled with at the ABC and 2GB, I found fun was a good substitute for the challenge of commentary that I’d aspired to. Early in 1989 I won the Federation of Radio Broadcasters Award for the Best Sports Reporter on Metropolitan Radio in Australia, beating people like Sydney’s Ray Hadley and Adelaide’s Ken Cunningham. The award, I hoped, would see me through what appeared to be a rocky road ahead. Around that time 2DAY-FM was in the process of being purchased by the Austereo network, notorious for purging existing staff at newly acquired stations. Everyone at 2DAY was nervous and I had an extra reason for concern. I’d just found out I was pregnant. Given that incoming management might want to make changes, I figured being a pregnant woman sports reporter was like walking around with a sign pinned to my back saying ‘I’ll be inconvenient to keep’. I confided in Cherie, who was soon to be pushed sideways out of the program director’s job (although her new role as station manager looked like a promotion on paper). She advised me to keep the news quiet for as long as possible while the Austereo bigwigs completed staff evaluations. 144
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Gradually I started to feel like I was getting enough positive feedback to be upfront with them before I got too upfront for them, so to speak. The acting program director, Keith Fowler, and the man who eventually took the job, Bill Reiner, were very supportive. Both assured me I was highly regarded by the Austereo hierarchy. I assured them I was keen to get back to work as soon as possible after the birth. I loved my job and knew I’d miss it, joys of motherhood notwithstanding.
I had good historic reasons to be nervous about job loss as a sideeffect of motherhood. Late in my first pregnancy in 1980, before my media career, I gave up a job I loved managing a music store. As I didn’t know what motherhood would be like and I didn’t have childcare arrangements in place, I helped train my replacement and left—with my employer promising part-time work as soon as I was ready. Finding the widely predicted wave of maternal feeling registered with me as barely a ripple, I was back behind the counter within four days of leaving hospital. I immediately regretted having conceded my managerial responsibilities. What I wanted after having a baby was a mental challenge, not a job as a check-out chick who could listen to records while working. I applied for jobs managing other music shops in the following months but each time was told that, as the mother of a newborn, I wasn’t considered a reliable proposition. Ultimately my desire for a real job after Jemima’s birth led to Roger and me buying our own record shop.
Nine years later, the last thing I wanted was to have this job slip through my fingers while I was holding the baby. It was a confinement that suited radio ratings—although that was unintended. The baby was due mid-January. I was to finish work at Christmas, take nine weeks holidays owing to me, then return late145
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? February, missing only a couple of weeks of the first radio ratings period of 1990. My biggest concern revolved around my husband Greg’s future at 2DAY-FM. In conversations about my ongoing role at the station, and the logistics of managing job and baby, I’d been warned in the strictest confidence that I shouldn’t count on Greg keeping his job in the shake-ups ahead. I was asked not to share this information with Greg. While I might have ignored that request under certain circumstances, I reasoned that telling him would only undermine his confidence on air and make matters worse. So I kept it to myself. Before I headed off on leave, it was announced a guy called Tim Bailey would be filling in for me. His regular gig was on the Ten Network’s Good Morning Australia, which was in recess over the summer holidays. He’d previously made a smash hit with Austereo management on the Gold Coast by setting a record for the most consecutive rides on the big dipper at a local amusement park. Despite these stellar credentials, it never occurred to me to think of him as a threat to my future at the station. I was an award-winning sports presenter, wasn’t I? When Eleanor was born, 2DAY-FM sent flowers and a ‘Hurry Back To Work’ card. They even organised a tiny 2DAY t-shirt for Elly to wear when a photographer visited to get Mum and bub pictures for the Sunday Telegraph. Imagine my surprise when, on the same page a fortnight later, I read that Bailey had been given my job permanently. Neither the radio station nor the newspaper had contacted me. The general manager, Bob Scott, was quoted in the paper as saying that, when I was ‘well enough’, they’d discuss another role for me, probably something part-time that would better suit a new mother. I was outraged. I’d given every indication I wanted to return to full-time work. I certainly didn’t need a man telling me what would best suit a new mother and the idea that I needed to get ‘well enough’ before my future at the station could be discussed was patronising and insulting. The next morning I had to make a humiliating phone call enquiring whether my job had really been given away. 146
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Bob told me to come in for a meeting with him and Bill Reiner, at which they confirmed Bailey had indeed been given my job. I was offered a spot as the station’s second sports reporter, working a couple of afternoons a week and on weekends, filling a role so vital it had never been needed before. My memory of how difficult the job market was for a new mother was the only thing that stopped me from telling them what they could do with their offer. The most absurd snippet of the extremely tense conversation—a line I’ll never forget—came when I enquired why the reporter, Heather Chapman, should have been told before me that I’d lost my job. Bob explained, ‘She asked before you did.’ I remember almost shrieking ‘So am I supposed to ring every day I’m off after having a baby, just to be sure that I find out first if I don’t have a job?’ Bill, to his eternal credit, agreed with me and apologised right there in the meeting for how it had been done. Unsurprisingly, his future with the company was limited. He now works in Brisbane for ABC Radio, programming music for local radio all around Australia. I caught up with him in 2003, but we certainly didn’t spend our time reminiscing about fun experiences at 2DAY-FM. I returned to work in February and was retrenched in May—alerted in advance by another newspaper report about impending staff cuts. When asked the next day to attend a meeting, I rang Bob Scott and said I didn’t want to show up simply to be told I’d lost my job. He gave me the spiel about the company needing to rationalise, blah, blah, blah, and then informed me I was being given three months’ notice. ‘You want me to work for another three months before you fire me?’ I gasped in disbelief. I thought the three-months notice provision applied if I was resigning, not if he was firing me. He argued he was quite entitled to ask me to work out the notice, rather than pay me for nothing. He was rabbiting on about legal requirements when I threw in a comment pulled right off the top of my head. ‘Legally I was supposed to get my old job back after having a baby and I’ve been pretty good not taking that issue any further . . .’ I tapered off because I really didn’t know what action I could take. It 147
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? was just something a few people had said to me and I was angry enough to use it at that moment. ‘We’ll have three months’ pay in your bank account by the end of the week,’ he suddenly volunteered, then hung up. I’d clearly hit a nerve. I made a few phone calls. My old school debating team colleague, Zita Antonios, was working for the AntiDiscrimination Commission. I tracked her down and she told me she thought the issue was worth pursuing. Ironically, she was off on maternity leave herself at the time and couldn’t take the case personally, but she put me in contact with the right people. I had a few evaluation sessions with anti-discrimination officers, who ultimately said I had a case and they were prepared to take it on. There were, however, problems. One was that the case would probably go to mediation, meaning the outcome wouldn’t be legally enforceable. More worryingly, my husband was still working at 2DAYFM and they couldn’t protect his job if the network sacked him in retaliation for my action. With the expense of a new baby we couldn’t afford him out of work as well and, given I’d already been warned he wasn’t likely to be part of Austereo’s long-term plans, I figured he’d get shown the door at the slightest provocation. The good news was I could commence action any time within a year. We agreed we’d both start looking for work and, if Greg was in a position to leave 2DAY-FM or they sacked him within the 12 months, we’d go ahead with the action. Greg’s job, oddly enough, lasted until January 1991. They fired him on the anniversary of Tim Bailey’s appointment. We knew exactly what that date was because we’d kept the memo that had been circulated to staff when he was hired.
Having a door slammed in my face at 2DAY-FM made me think about whether I was heading in the right direction anyway. During my parttime stint at the station after having Eleanor, I taught myself to panel a music program. I’d come to understand that, as a sports reporter on music radio, the best I could hope for was to be an accessory to someone else’s program and I wanted to do more. 148
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Greg and I had bought what was intended to be a holiday home at Lake Macquarie, south of Newcastle and, after Elly’s birth, we spent more time there than in the city. Listening to Newcastle radio I discovered a few former colleagues were working for a recently launched FM station called NEW-FM. I contacted the station boss, Mike Webb, whom I remembered as one of the 2SM Good Guys from my radiolistening youth. Turned out he wanted a sports reporter for weekend afternoons. I convinced him I could be the weekend DJ and do sports scores and results as well. To get myself up to speed as quickly as possible, I also agreed to take three midnight-to-dawn shifts per week. I knew the more hours I spent on air the faster I’d get up my panelling competence and confidence. So in June 1990 I became a woman ‘rock jock’. This was in many ways more challenging than being a woman sports reporter. In the heavily standardised genre of rock radio, content was similar from announcer to announcer. So it was style that counted for everything, and the prevailing style was ‘blokey’. I found that, if I tried to mimic the men, I sounded like I was sending them up. Some women in rock radio had gone for the breathy ‘sex siren’ routine, but I discounted that. It wasn’t me. Besides, none of the women using this approach had gone much further than late-night shifts on mostly provincial stations anyway. Finding my own ‘voice’ in rock music radio was surprisingly difficult, given I’d been on air for six years. Mike Webb gave me a valuable insight when he explained that, as a newsreader or sports reporter, I’d been demanding the attention with a ‘Listen, I’ve got something important to tell you’ approach. But the role of the announcer on music radio is as company for the listener. That was why the men all sounded so ‘matey’, and why it was tricky for a woman to strike the appropriate tone. As an alternative to driving one of those damnable cruisers (Black Thunders or NEW-FM mobiles, or whatever), as other midnight-todawn announcers had to do, I volunteered to write comedy skits for the breakfast show then being compered by Garth Russell and John Paul Young. It sure beat the hell out of driving around the city and 149
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? suburbs, meeting listeners and giving out embarrassing prize packs that contained a packet of chewing gum, a bag of chips, a magazine and an ice-cold can of Coke. Or whatever the going ‘freebies’ were. Besides, writing comedy was something I’d been itching to have a go at. In 1991 I won another FARB award, this time for the Best Comedy Skit on Regional Radio. But the most out-of-left-field turn my career took at NEW-FM was when the station signed up to broadcast Newcastle Knights rugby league games for the 1991 season. Having, in my own mind, accepted the door was closed on sports commentary, I was stunned to be asked if I’d like to work on the broadcasts. The ball-by-ball caller was one of those grizzled old veterans of regional radio and TV, Leigh Maughan. Leigh, also the marketing and promotions manager of the Knights, had been calling their games on the local AM station, 2HD. He was the type I’d have expected to respond with ‘You’ve gotta be friggin’ jokin’, mate!’ to the suggestion he call footy with a woman, but we hit it off immediately and had a riotous time working together. Again I found myself in the second commentator’s chair, where I felt uneasy. I certainly wasn’t going to pass myself off as an expert rugby league analyst. But Leigh and I agreed that, on FM rock radio, football should be more about having fun—getting away from the desk-thumping, ‘let’s-get-outraged-abouta-hot-button-topic’ coverage on offer on AM radio. Leigh had a glorious sense of humour, but was fond of shockingly sexist phrases like ‘The defenders are bunched together like a ladies’ knitting club’. He’d say it, I’d give him the rounds of the kitchen, he’d guffaw, tell me to stop naggin’ him and we’d carry on. The Knights themselves were generally a pleasure to deal with. Two of their key players, captain Michael Hagan and forward leader Mark Sargent, were former Bulldogs whom I already knew a little and their reserve-grade coach, David Waite, had been a lower-grade coach at Belmore. I was welcomed into the fold, invited to after-match functions and had access for interviews whenever I needed them. Sadly, a season that started well for Newcastle gradually degenerated into miserable results and in-fighting. The Johns brothers were just 150
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a twinkle in the Junior Development Officer’s eye back then; the top grade was a mix of players who’d stepped up from the local Newcastle comp and spare parts leftover from the bigger-spending ARL clubs. After starting with a win in the Sevens competition, which lifted expectations around the Hunter, they began the season proper by going unbeaten for five rounds (albeit with three draws), but then fizzled. They won only one of their next five, looked out of sorts and out of ideas on the field; off the field the atmosphere was getting poisonous. Coach Allan McMahon became a very difficult man to deal with. At one point he flew into me at a post-match press conference when, after he listed a litany of handling errors his players had committed, I asked what he planned to do about it. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he barked threateningly. ‘Well, I don’t know—do you do more ball work at training, or something?’ I stammered uncertainly. I wasn’t being critical. I was trying to find a forward-looking angle for the next morning’s news bulletins on NEW-FM. ‘These are first-grade footballers,’ he shouted, red in the face with anger. ‘You want me to teach them how to catch and pass?’ It turned out I’d unwittingly stumbled onto a bone of contention between him and senior players, who’d suggested they needed more ballwork sessions. He’d been furious because he apparently thought someone like Michael Hagan had put me up to asking the question. In some ways it gave me confidence knowing an issue I’d instinctively raised was in line with the thinking of the players, although the rage I provoked at the time scared the hell out of me. I’ll never forget the game that turned out to be McMahon’s last. It was at Parramatta and the Knights lost 30–nil, their seventh loss from eight games. I’d begun to dread just walking into the dressing room after games; I wished I didn’t have to get material for the Monday morning news. It was progress in a strange way though. I’d stopped feeling stressed about the awkwardness of being in a room with naked men; their state of mind was now bothering me more than their state of undress. 151
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? That day in the sheds at Parramatta you could have sliced the atmosphere with a knife. Something had to give and, when McMahon resigned later that week, I was relieved. Anyone who tells you the spirit in a club exists only theoretically, or in the clichéd terminology of sportswriters, is wrong. It’s a tangible, organic thing and its corpse lay draped in the middle of the dressing room that day at Parramatta. After the match I was critical of the Knights’ performance on air. They’d been humiliated, held scoreless by a team not even in contention for the finals. The next day at NEW-FM, I was shown a written report on comments phoned through to the radio station switchboard. Amongst the calls for coach and/or player sackings, attendance boycotts and radical tactical changes was a comment that summed up what I was up against: ‘I don’t care if my team loses 30–nil, I’m not going to listen to a woman bag them.’
David Waite became Newcastle’s caretaker coach and was eventually promoted to the position. Despite his first four matches as coach being losses, the change in dressing-room atmosphere was amazing. There were rational reasons for the results, problems to be addressed and positives to acknowledge. Post-match press conferences became something I looked forward to—win, lose or draw. Waite’s muchpilloried ‘high-school teacher’ approach worked for me. In 1991 I hadn’t heard much talk of possession percentages, missed tackle counts, speed of play-the-ball and so on. Neither had most of the Newcastle media. ‘He’s got a list of friggin’ excuses, hasn’t he?’ muttered one local scribe as we filed out of the sheds after one post-match press conference. ‘Thinks he can baffle us with bullshit,’ griped another. I’ll admit the terminology left me slightly bewildered at first, but the bits I understood sounded interesting so I decided to bite the bullet and ring coach Waite. He kept talking about ‘completions’ but I didn’t know what was being completed, so I thought I’d ask. We’d spoken several times at post-match functions when he was reserves coach and I was always pleased he’d talk to me about football, so I 152
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wasn’t really intimidated—although I didn’t relish the idea of admitting I didn’t understand what he was on about. ‘What’s being completed is sets of six tackles,’ he offered, and then congratulated me on asking. ‘I’m sure you’re not the only one having trouble with my jargon, but you’re the only one who’s had the gumption to ask.’ He made some wisecrack about how, if I was a male journalist, I’d probably keep nodding and writing it down. He told me to ring any time I had questions. At the end of the season NEW-FM decided to broadcast all the finals matches, even though the Knights weren’t involved; David was hired as a guest commentator. That made me uncomfortable. I felt like a pretend football analyst sitting next to the real article. ‘He’s a technical genius,’ Leigh kept telling me, which was hardly reassuring. I was also painfully aware that, friendly relationship notwithstanding, David wasn’t beyond upbraiding me publicly. Once in a press conference I got an oh-so-school-masterly: ‘Debbie, I’m disappointed, I thought you knew better than to ask a dumb question like that.’ I don’t even remember the question any more, just the searing response and the sensation that marks were coming off my end-of-year assessment. So I was nervous as a kitten about doing comments with this man sitting at my shoulder. I asked before the first match if he’d let me go first in the commentary batting order, because otherwise I feared spending the entire 80 minutes saying ‘Yeah, I agree with what he said’. I also made him promise not to declare it on air if he thought I’d made a stupid comment. He’d drawn up a stat sheet for his own use and, after my request, added a column ‘Deb’s Comments’. Fifteen minutes into the first game I looked down and saw I had two ticks in my column. From that point on my nerves subsided somewhat. The experience turned out to be invaluable. Over those five weeks of the finals, David spent time after each game explaining for me concepts like sliding defence, moving coins around a desk to illustrate the geometry involved. He convinced me of the significance of one of his pet technique issues—the speed of the play-the-ball. He pointed out patterns in attack that I’d never noticed before, took me through the pros and cons of various fifth tackle options, and generally made 153
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? me realise that, although I’d been watching rugby league keenly for years, I had no real idea of what I should be looking for. The glimpse he gave me into the world of professional league analysis deepened my appreciation of the game and got me more excited about it than I’d been for years. So that was exactly the moment NEW-FM decided to pull the plug on their rugby league broadcasting experiment. It wasn’t that they were unhappy with what we’d done, or with our ratings. Although 2HD had continued to beat us overall, we had the under 40-year-old demographic sewn up and it was accepted that over 55-year-olds were never coming to FM radio for football anyway. But the brutal truth was that NEW-FM only needed one announcer and 40-minute slabs of Cold Chisel, INXS and Bon Jovi to rate their pants off on weekend afternoons. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars covering Knights games pulled in some new listeners, but not enough to make it worth the extra outlay. My final fling behind the microphone in a sports commentary box came to an end as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had begun. I would have stayed at NEW-FM anyway if there had been any sign of me being promoted to a serious on-air shift. I loved living in Newcastle—it’s a prettier city than most people give it credit for being—but I was totally frustrated. While Mike Webb was prepared to have a woman broadcast football, he believed there would be resistance to a woman hosting a prime-time program. In December 1991 I was allowed a short stint filling in on the morning show, from nine in the morning till lunchtime. Afterwards Mike said, ‘You sounded good and we didn’t have any complaints about having a woman on air.’ That he would even make that comment disturbed me no end. Ultimately it was a caller to the station who forced me to face the futility of my situation. He rang to request a song and spoke to me offair during a midnight-to-dawn shift at some ungodly hour of the morning. Then he asked if I knew there was a woman working on a show on ABC-TV called Live & Sweaty who had the same name as me. ‘Yeah, that’s me,’ I laughed. ‘Is this some sort of joke?’ 154
Dad posing as Dennis Lillee in our backyard at Croydon in the 1970s.
My daughter Jemima has always been keen on sport, and basketball was her favourite from an early age.
Jemima and my mother, Beth.
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One of my old band publicity photos. We played Top 40 style pop and, as you might’ve guessed, were called ‘Benjy’.
Behind the counter in my record shop at North Sydney in the early 1980s. I never tried the red stockings at ABC Sport.
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On the sidelines during a pre-season match at Brookvale Oval, mid-1980s.
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Interviewing Ben Johnson after his win at the World Cup, Canberra 1985. It looks better than it sounded.
Interviewing Darren Clark and Alan Ozolins after the 4⫻400-metres relay at the World Cup.
Poolside at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The yellow shoulder next to mine belongs to Norman May.
With Vivian Schenker in the Ambassador Hotel during the Los Angeles Olympics.
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Interviewing the Mortimer brothers in the week of the 1985 rugby league grand final (from left to right: Chris, Peter and Steve).
Guy Franks, during the 1985 Oxford/ Cambridge cricket team tour of Australia.
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Autographing the wall in the scoreboard control box at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
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In the studios at 2DAY-FM with daughter Eleanor in early 1990.
Live & Sweaty second season. Clockwise from the top: Crackers Keenan, me, Lex Marinos, Andrew Denton, Libby Gorr and Karen Tighe.
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Live & Sweaty publicity photo. Photographers always wanted me to pose with a football; this was one time I relented.
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A Live & Sweaty highlight, when we got my favourite Australian band, Sherbet, back together for the show in 1994.
I got to hold Chris Isaak’s guitar! Also in the photo are producer Ann Marie Debettencor, Ian Rogerson and Kenny Dale Thomas.
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With Triple J Hard Coffee co-host Ian Rogerson and guest Kylie Minogue.
Ian Rogerson tries to wrest the joint from Rolling Stone Keith Richards’ grip while I smile for the Triple J camera.
A career highlight, having Paul McCartney as a guest on Hard Coffee. On the left is producer Gerry Caulfield.
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With Ian Rogerson and Tom Jones at Triple J.
Reciting a Banjo Paterson horseracing poem at Woollahra Council’s ‘Poetry in the Park’, 2005.
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‘No way that’s you!’ he declared in an earnest, up-too-late, hadtoo-many-drinks kind of way. ‘Well, it is me.’ I insisted. ‘Why would someone on a TV show like that be on radio in the middle of the night in Newcastle?’ Live & Sweaty, hosted by Andrew Denton, was a show I’d started working on in early 1991. It had just reached the end of its first series and was developing a real cult following. We were booked for a second series. It was unbelievable that I was on national TV and still hosting midnight-to-dawn on regional radio. When put to me so simply, by a drunken man no less, I realised it. For the rest of that graveyard shift I tried to imagine under what circumstances a male ‘jock’ with plenty of radio experience, who was working on a national TV show, wouldn’t have a spot found for him in the prime-time line-up on NEW-FM. I couldn’t think of one. I’d been happy to commute to Sydney from Newcastle for the first year of Live & Sweaty but, with no football to call on NEW-FM and a station boss who was surprised when there weren’t complaints about a female announcer, I decided to pull up stumps and head back to Sydney.
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12 The sport show with three ‘secretaries’ The sport show with three ‘secretaries’
In the mid-80s I was contacted at ABC Sport by a guy called Geoff Portman who I should have known if I’d had any idea about television at all—but I didn’t. He asked me to take part in a TV show pilot. Portman was the head of ABC-TV’s Comedy Department and the producer/director of Mother and Son. He was piloting a new show called Theatresports—a television adaptation of a live theatre phenomenon. The basic plot as it was outlined to me was intriguing: actors and various performers competing in teams at theatre improvisation games. The show was to heavily work-over the sporting metaphors and so they were asking me, a sports journalist, to be one of three judges. The part of me that had auditioned for NIDA and dreamed of an acting career was stirred by this offer. The shows were taped on Saturday nights in winter 1985. So I would come direct to the ABC-TV studios at Gore Hill from doing my TV Sport sideline gig at the rugby league match of the day. Quite often as I arrived I’d be bailed up in the corridor by a nerdy-looking guy with glasses who loved talking rugby league. He’d invariably 156
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watched the game I’d just come from and always had questions, comments and quality gags about it. It was reassuring to know that at least one of the contestants knew who I was. The other contestants occasionally enquired about my life outside Theatresports; when I explained that I was a sports journalist, I mostly got from them a lukewarm ‘Oh really? That must be interesting’. Followed by an immediate glazing over of the eyes. But this guy from a team called ‘Writers Bloc’, one of the funniest in the competition, was a genuine sports tragic. Theatresports lasted only one season and the next I heard of this nerdy tragic was when he became Doug Mulray’s offsider on the Triple M breakfast program, where he went by the sporty handle of ‘Andrew, the boy genius from indoor cricket’. I can’t say I paid a lot of attention to his much-acclaimed ABC-TV shows, Blah, Blah, Blah or Money or the Gun, which came along after that. In those years, when I was doing either breakfast or midnight-to-dawn radio, late-night television wasn’t much more than a rumour to me. So it came right out of left field when, one day in early 1991, I got a call from Andrew at my home on Lake Macquarie asking if I’d be interested in co-hosting a pilot TV show with him. He said he was looking for someone who knew sport and had a good sense of humour. The show was to be a comedy/variety format with a sports theme. While it seemed he was keen to avoid this being ‘another Andrew Denton show’, by sharing the hosting duties, it soon became clear that, understandably enough, what the decision-makers at ABC Comedy wanted was indeed ‘another Andrew Denton show’. The idea of me as co-host didn’t survive the first pilot. Although I was disappointed to be relegated from the co-host’s chair to a cast member with the Live & Sweaty ensemble, it wasn’t as if I’d had enough time to get attached to my original role. It was hard to argue with the executive producer’s assessment that he didn’t really know what I was doing there because, in the space of just one pilot, I certainly hadn’t figured out what I was doing there either. I’d hoped for time to develop an alibi, but it wasn’t to be. Anyway the good news was the show was going into production and I had a part. 157
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? The format was one of those ‘I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before’ ideas. At this time sport and comedy had only ever really been mixed together on radio—most notably by Roy and H.G. on Triple J. This was pre-Footy Show days. The concept of a late-night Friday show that poked fun at sport—and at the same time reported on it—was brilliant. What was truly quirky was that Andrew’s three off-siders were all women and, as luck would have it, a blonde, a brunette and a redhead. (Of course we accused Andrew of having a Charlie’s Angels complex, and this was before that became fashionable again as well!) Libby Gorr, aka ‘Elle McFeast’, was our AFL correspondent in Melbourne. She had a lot of footy-based humour in her act on Melbourne radio station FOX-FM, so she pre-recorded lots of crazy interviews with Australian Football identities, crashed AFL functions and did vox pops on footy-related topics. Karen Tighe, who was working in a similar job to my old one at ABC Sport, was the ‘straight woman’. She presented a proper sports news bulletin, including results and news from Friday night sport. My main role was to do a sports chat with Andrew, where we looked back at the week in sport, focusing on the silly. Working with someone as adroit as Andrew was a challenge, especially given the show was genuinely live. Most shows at this time, if they were taped in front of a live audience, got away with pretending they were live (Hey Hey it’s Saturday and some Tonight shows, for example) but Live & Sweaty was live to air. Immediately before the show each Friday night we’d do a run-through. We’d rehearse my segment, so Andrew had an idea of what I was going to talk about and had a chance to view the footage being featured. Pretty soon it became apparent that one purpose of the run-through was for Andrew to case the joint for gags. We started holding back on each other. If I had a jibe at Andrew planned, I wouldn’t play that card during rehearsal. Conversely, he’d often keep his best lines up his sleeve as well. It kept us both on our toes, and kept our reactions real. Watching Andrew rehearse for a live show was a treat. Sometimes the interview rehearsals were funnier than the real thing. They were 158
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usually done with a crew member pretending to be the guest. These mock ‘interviews’ made me understand that Andrew prepared for an interview like a professional sportsman preparing for a contest. Not only did he spar verbally with the pretend guest, to keep himself sharp, but he showed he’d researched his interviewee well beyond knowing enough to ask the right questions. He’d usually anticipate the most probable answers as well. It was like second-phase interview play. He’d have a one-liner ready to drop when the expected answer was delivered. It made him seem like he was operating at mach 3—and sometimes it was sheer speed that produced the gag—but quite often it was because he almost knew what was coming. But he never forced a gag. If the opportunity to play the shot he’d rehearsed didn’t come up, he’d leave it unplayed. That’s discipline. The problem for me at the outset with Live & Sweaty was trying to carve out my own territory. Karen was the serious sports presenter, crisp, blonde and sweet, while Libby was the comedian who could dress up, clown around and be crude. So I had to find a role that wasn’t either. I wanted to be funny, but I couldn’t entirely ditch whatever claims to sports journo cred I had, because I was still working as a rugby league commentator on NEW-FM and had my Sun-Herald sports column too. Then a piece of advice emerged from the ‘too-hard basket’ in my mind, where it had been filed for about seven years.
In the summer of 1983–84, while doing some freelance writing I got as a result of the 2GB Sports Talent Search, I met a hard-drinking, wise-cracking old pro of the newspaper business named Ken Laws. I knew Ken’s work well. His was one of those articles in The Sun that I’d turn to every afternoon before even finishing the back page. He could bang out a column every day that would make me laugh— cheap gags, cynical gags, silly gags, any kind of gags—on whatever sport was making the news. The first time I met Ken he was propping up the bar in the Members Stand at the SCG and my father and brother Brad decided 159
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? to help him with that task. Before long he was taking the piss out of them, making me laugh and joining in himself with a wheezy chortle that sounded like that cartoon dog Mutley. Another journalist, Ric Allen, who was with Ken told me that if I wanted any advice on my writing Ken was the man to ask because he was a real craftsman. ‘He’s had a few too many drinks now,’ Ric said. ‘But if you’ve got something with you that you’ve written, get him to put it in his bag. Then come back and see him next time you’re at the cricket. He’s always here at the bar.’ I had with me a copy of a magazine called Cricket Lifestyle (cue Mutley chortle) featuring a piece I’d written on the Pakistani fast bowler Sarfraz Nawaz. Ken stashed it in his bag with a promise to look it over. The following day when we went to the cricket, Ken was keeping that same section of the Members Bar propped up. I was mildly surprised to hear he’d read my Sarfraz interview and had some constructive comments. He liked my sense of humour, but thought I’d ended the article with my best gag and told me not to do that. In journalism, unlike joke-telling, he said, the punchline should come first because the opening often determined whether or not the casual reader bothered with the rest. Besides, he pointed out, if pushed for space, sub-editors would often cut from the bottom, so you’d lose your best line. Having been caught that way already, I thought his advice made sense. But then he concluded by telling me to remember: ‘They’re going to call you a smart-arse bitch anyway, so you might as well go for it.’ I was confused and offended. ‘Who’s going to call me a smart-arse bitch?’ I bleated, wounded. ‘Everybody,’ Ken insisted. ‘Just because you’re a woman writing about sport.’ I thought it was the beer and cynicism talking. I didn’t understand why, after being so encouraging, he’d say something so rude. I tried to forget he’d ever said it but, of course, the words never really left me. Then suddenly, in those early weeks of Live & Sweaty, they popped back into my head and, instead of seeming like an insult or a warning, they suggested a motto I could work with. 160
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And so I became the smart-arse bitch on Live & Sweaty. Rather than assume, as I’d always done, that it wasn’t right for a woman who’d never really played sport to set herself up as an expert, I decided to ‘go for it’. It wasn’t about being bitchy for the sake of it, but this was a comedy show and, if I wasn’t going to get off the fence and be cheeky and opinionated, I was going to be dull. Sometimes my arch-bitchiness got me into trouble but, to be honest, that happened far less over the show’s four years than I would have expected. There were two occasions when I made comments that had repercussions. One was due to the hyper-sensitivity of the sport involved and on the other occasion it was my own poor judgement in making an off-the-cuff comment that, in retrospect, I realise was in very dubious taste. The sport officials I managed to upset were from netball. Now there’s a surprise. Up to then, I had always got along so well with the ladies in the pleated skirts and blazers. Not.
I’ve never liked netball. It was the only team sport I ever played as a kid, mainly because it was the only team sport offered at any of the three schools I attended. It was called ‘women’s basketball’ at the time. Being a fan of the sports boys played, I was always suspicious of a sport that was ‘girls only’. My instinct that netball was a sport diluted for women proved to have some basis. Years later, when I first saw women playing real basketball, I started asking why netball had ever gone by the name ‘women’s basketball’ in Australia. I discovered it was because originally in the English school system, on which ours was based, basketball was deemed ‘too rough’ for girls and, for fear that the little pets might get injured or worn out, an adaptation was designed with no physical contact and not as much running around the court. It was re-named ‘netball’ when women started playing real basketball. 161
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? The irony was that, because dribbling wasn’t allowed in netball, a player needed to pull up sharply after taking possession of the ball, and that actually increased the likelihood of knee injuries. The rules now don’t require players to stop quite as suddenly as they used to, but all that pounding around on cement courts, which girls are encouraged to do as part of a ‘ladylike’ sport, hasn’t exactly diminished the risk of injury. This sport remains one of the worst for knee injuries. The inside run that netball is always given in response to calls for ‘more coverage of women’s sport’ annoys me. It’s as if, when a media outlet mentions netball, they feel they’ve done their bit for women’s sport. Over the years I’ve met so many male sports reporters who’ll say, magnanimously, ‘I like women’s sport. Netball’s good. What about that Test when Australia beat New Zealand by one point— wasn’t that terrific?’ (This, I might add, has remained the standard comment even more than a decade after the match in question.) They’re always shocked when I announce I didn’t see it because netball doesn’t appeal to me. ‘You’re a woman, you like sport—you must like netball.’ Yes, I know there is skill involved. But skills being utilised do not necessarily make a sport exciting to watch. Synchronised swimming is skilful. The passing in netball is slick and accurate, but so too is the passing in women’s basketball or in hockey, or the throwing in softball, or the fielding in women’s cricket. To me netball looks stopstart, jerky and not a flowing or aggressive game. My relationship with the sport was awkward right from my arrival in sports journalism. One of the first initiatives taken by John O’Reilly, my early ABC Sport tutor, was to invite me to meet some netball officials. The blazer-wearing old dears were enthused to find I was the ABC’s newest sports broadcaster, but the enthusiasm vaporised when I told them my favourite sports were football and cricket. It was like a betrayal. The expectation that I’d adore netball, and crusade determinedly for it, quickly became a pet peeve of mine. Indeed, I did take flak from ‘the sisterhood’ over the years for not flying the women’s sport flag in general. I’m the first to admit this was probably due to underlying, 162
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if inadvertent, sexist conditioning in my formative years—being taken to so much rugby league and men’s cricket. But I couldn’t unpick my love of those sports when, in my late teens, I became aware that there were women’s sports that I hadn’t been equally exposed to. Surely it was sexist of women’s sports lobbyists to demand that I, as a woman, should be responsible for giving media exposure to women’s sports? I couldn’t develop an affinity with a sport just because the competitors were the same gender as myself. Perhaps if I’d come from the background of being a competitor in women’s sports, it would have seemed different. But I didn’t. It was probably sexism on the part of the men in 2GB and ABC management that made them select a woman who knew ‘their’ sports rather than female sports. I accepted that but, whatever the reason, I was there and I wanted to convince men I could do their job on their terms. I didn’t appreciate women wanting me to do a different job. I empathised with female athletes who wanted it recognised that they could be as dedicated, fit and competitive as their male counterparts, but we were fighting parallel battles, not a common one. If I allowed myself to be shunted off into becoming a women’s sports specialist—as many suggested—I would have damaged both causes. It would have been a kind of sexual segregation, suggesting women’s sport could only be understood by women, and men’s sport by men. I did cover some women’s sport and got involved at times, especially with women’s cricket and women’s basketball: compering the occasional official function, even working as the courtside announcer for the women’s world basketball championships that were held in Sydney in 1994. I liked those sports, but never felt it was specifically my mission to promote them. For that reason, I was seen as a sell-out by many of the more militant female sports activists. And whenever I said anything critical about netball, it was treated as absolute heresy.
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? have some laughs with—you know, a tennis player chucking a tanty, a footballer wearing headgear that looked like a tea cosy, soccer players doing wacky after-goal celebrations. Not once did we ever get a complaint from officials of those sports. But netball officials contacted ABC management after I showed the Australian netball team sharing a box of tissues during a break in an international. ‘It can’t be a real sport if you’re passing around a box of tissues during it,’ I snarked. I pointed out that even rugby union players had stopped carrying handkerchiefs in their pockets and remarked on the absence of tissue boxes laid out on roadside tables during women’s marathons. Netball officials squawked about the insult to their sport and wanted the ABC, who had the television rights to their Test series, to discipline me. I promised I’d never treat netball like a mainstream sport again by mentioning it in my segment. And I didn’t. The other time I found myself in hot water over a comment made on Live & Sweaty, the water was considerably hotter, there was a lot more of it and I did have to make a public apology. In retrospect it seems one of those brain-explosion moments that’s impossible to justify. Pleading extreme naivety and ignorance is the best I can do. During the 1992 Barcelona Olympics we were in a tough spot on Live & Sweaty because the Seven Network had the TV rights and they ruled we weren’t to use any Olympic footage. There’s a reciprocal deal between networks that covers news programs, but we were told our show didn’t pass muster as a news program. Looking back on the week in sport and not covering the Olympics was impossible, so I started racking my brains for lateral ways to ‘re-live’ great moments from the Olympics. The first week I used a chalkboard and did diagrams of the best moments of the previous week, including Lisa CurryKenny’s swimmers disappearing into her bum crack—proving to women everywhere that, no matter how obsessively you worked out, you couldn’t avoid the embarrassment of the cossie disappearing between your butt cheeks as you were climbing out of a pool. For the second week, I decided to construct a board game and use various board game pieces to represent competitors, moving the pieces around the board to re-enact key Olympic events. For instance, the 164
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chess piece, the Black Queen, was the perfect choice to represent Carl Lewis. (Maybe, when you’re dancing this close to the precipice, it’s easier to fall off?) One of the events I wanted to talk about was a hurdles race and so I came up with the idea of making each hurdle out of two small cheese blocks joined by a toothpick. I was flippantly carrying on, live to air of course, demonstrating how these cute cocktail hurdles could be made and then used at a dinner party after your Olympics board game when Lex Marinos, standing in as host that night in the absence of Andrew, asked me what sort of cheese I’d used. Without thinking, I said ‘Coon’ (because that really was the brand) and then added ‘It’s a sprint final’. At the time no one acted shocked or horrified. But by midway through the following week the show had been besieged with complaints. I had a letter of protest signed by a whole class of Aboriginal students from a school in rural Queensland, another from a prominent Aboriginal film-maker expressing her horror. One man had even taken up the issue with a senator, demanding my sacking from the ABC. I was gobsmacked. I’d always regarded the word ‘coon’ as an archaic American expression that was too silly and too far past its use-by date to carry any vitriol in Australia. I’d always assumed it would never have been in common usage here, seeing how they’d allowed a cheese to be given that name. But I’d assumed wrong. Indigenous people wrote to me saying how they’d had that word used as an insult against themselves and their families, and how hearing it used on national television was an outrage. It was a shocking way to get an education about racism in this country—and it made me realise how sheltered from it I’d been. For a couple of days I seriously feared the ABC would sack me from Live & Sweaty and from Triple J, where I was co-host of the drive-time program. But, after an apology from me the following week during my regular segment, explaining that the comment was made off the cuff without appreciating its potential to hurt and insult people, it blew over.
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? One of my Live & Sweaty colleagues in particular must have enjoyed my squirming during the racist faux pas furore. Rex Mossop, who throughout his long career was at the eye of many a media storm, would have been thrilled to see someone else in the gun for a change— and the fact it was me would have delighted him. People used to ask if the friction between Rex and me was exaggerated for the sake of the show. My answer was always, ‘No, it’s toned down for the sake of the show.’ Rex didn’t like many people, but he reserved a keen loathing for me. The opportunity to lock horns with Rex Mossop every Friday night on television was something I’d never have considered possible when I was a kid. The Sunday morning sports show Mossop then hosted, Sportsworld, was compulsory viewing in our household. It served up many sports but the heaviest helping was always of rugby league, which suited the Spillanes down to the ground. For me (and everyone else I knew who watched Sportsworld) Rex was the anti-hero. The champion of tautology, pig-headedness, shouting down guests and bullying panellists. He was the host you loved to hate. And his Controversy Corner was the segment that epitomised everything low-rent and laughable about Sunday morning sports TV in the late 60s and 70s. Cheap sets, a bunch of bull-necked blokes in blazers sitting at tables discussing ‘pertinent league matters’ with Rex in the middle telling everyone what they were allowed to think. Guests on the show were paid each week with groceries like Meapro Hams and Patra Orange Juice and a free Viking Sauna. It was dreadful television. Like me, Andrew Denton had lapped it up Sunday after Sunday. When we first discussed the format for Live & Sweaty, Andrew insisted we should revive Controversy Corner and have it as the final segment each week. Being the ABC we had to go without the Meapro Ham, the Patra Orange Juice and the Viking Sauna, but Andrew decided it was worth having a shot at securing the services of Rex himself as a regular panellist. I figured there would be no way ‘The Moose’ would connect himself with a late-night show that poked fun at sport, but evidently he’d fallen on harder times than I could have 166
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guessed, because he agreed to be part of Controversy Corner, Live & Sweaty style.
I’d actually had a brush with the great man many years before—not that Rex would have recalled it. It must have been in 1974, when I was 18, that someone decided Sportsworld needed a segment presented by a female. They asked interested women viewers to write in outlining why they believed they’d be suited to the job. At the time I was still an active cricket umpire and it was the year I was coaching the Under-14s rugby league at De La Salle Ashfield as well. This was a full ten years before I entered the more formal Sports Talent Search competition at 2GB. I made the interview short list and had to go to the Channel Seven studios at Epping to be interviewed by Rex himself. Despite never having been a fan, I had to admit ‘The Moose’ cut an imposing figure in person, installed behind a desk in all his turtle-necked glory. As I entered, The Emperor of Sportsworld was puffing on his pipe while imperiously scanning my letter, which briefly outlined my two claims to sporting credibility—my umpiring experience in men’s cricket and my rugby league coaching. He peered over the top of the letter at me, told me to sit down, then kept me waiting a minute or two while he pretended to read the letter. Well, I can only assume he pretended to read it. If he did read it, his comprehension skills were zero. ‘Yes, very good,’ he said, gesturing at the letter as he laid it down. ‘But you’ll need to know about more than just women’s sport.’ Maybe nerves prevented me from rolling my eyes, but I know there had to be a hint of exasperation in my voice when I bleated ‘But all my experience is with men’s sport’. ‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ he replied, without giving any indication of understanding. Next I was treated to a prolonged soliloquy about . . . well, I’m not sure. It was generally about Rex, his role on Sportsworld and what he’d expect from any woman he added to the program. I missed most of it, still smarting over his idiotic observation about me needing to know something about men’s sport. 167
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? When he finally stopped talking, he asked if I had any questions. I said no. He showed me to the door, told me someone would be in touch and then added, grandly ‘Well, you’re a pretty enough lass anyway’. And that was that. A ‘Mrs Average Housewife’ type ended up getting the Sportsworld gig. Someone who just served to reinforce Rex’s belief that a woman really had nothing useful to say about sport. She was quietly dropped from the program after a short and inglorious stint.
Despite my anti-Rex disposition, I was happy to have him on Live & Sweaty. His presence on Controversy Corner not only attracted publicity, but we were immediately identified as the chief protagonists in that segment. Within weeks of the show starting, everywhere I went people were egging me on. ‘Keep givin’ it to Rex, Deb!’ I assumed Rex’s dinosaur pals were telling him to keep up the good work, shouting down that sassy bitch on that stupid ABC show. Rex’s TV commentary work had dried up and he’d been long gone from the Sunday morning sports show, so I figured he was smart enough to realise this was good for him. Surely it was ideal for him to be involved in a weekly on-screen stoush with a woman who represented the antithesis of everything he represented as an oldschool ‘Bring back the biff/Get a haircut, son/What would you know if you haven’t packed into 8000 scrums anyway?’ kinda guy. At first it seemed he saw that. But about two months into the show, the Moose crap hit the fan. I was called aside for a ‘little chat’ before the show one night and told Rex had complained about me to the executive producer. I was asked to stop arguing so aggressively with him on Controversy Corner because he felt, being a gentleman, he was at an unfair disadvantage. He could put me in my place but he was too polite to do it. I was seriously being asked to ‘back off Rex’. Several weeks later, in a conversation with footballer Peter Jackson, I got to the bottom of the sudden change in Moose mood. Rex and 168
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‘Jacko’ were both working on 2GB’s rugby league commentary and apparently each Saturday Jacko used to greet Rex with comments like ‘Spillane carved you up again last night!’ and ‘You’re getting’ done by a sheila, mate!’. Jacko would have revelled in getting Rex’s dander up like that. ‘The funny thing is, Deb,’ Jacko beamed proudly, ‘until I started getting into him, he honestly thought he was beating you hands down.’ When we compared dates, we found it wasn’t long after Jacko started his campaign of giving Rex a hard time about me that the big fella filed his complaint. If only Jacko had let him continue to think he was giving me a hiding every Friday night, he might have carried on in good spirits for the entire four-year run of the show. Instead, there were moments when he really did lose it. Like one night, after Controversy Corner ended and the cameras were off us, he turned, looked me in the eye and said: ‘Why don’t you just shut up, you bitch. No one’s interested in what you’ve got to say.’ One bizarre Rex trait was his total inability to absorb any detail about women, other than them being women. There were nights on Controversy Corner when Libby and I, and maybe a female guest, all had different views on a given topic; but Rex always argued with us as if we were a homogeneous group. ‘You women seem to think . . .’ was his standard retort. It was beyond his ken that women didn’t all share the same opinion. Often he decided in advance what women believed and no discussion with actual women could dislodge that idea. On the rare occasions when I agreed with him, he’d argue with me anyhow. If I told him I agreed with him, he told me I didn’t. Furthermore, as far as Rex was concerned, all women in the professional world had the default setting of ‘secretary’. The associate producer of Live & Sweaty was a woman and Rex always referred to her as ‘Andrew’s secretary’. Libby, Karen and I thought it was cool being part of a sports show with three women. We figured Rex was baffled by the concept of appearing on a sports show with three secretaries.
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Despite the absence of diplomatic relations with Rex, I understood the dimension he brought to the show. Andrew did too. So much so that, early in 1991 when we went to Melbourne to do the first of many shows from that city, he was concerned when Rex refused to make the trip. Thinking Controversy Corner would be flat without the ‘dinosaur factor’, Andrew cast around in Melbourne for a suitable Rex substitute. The name that came up was ‘Crackers’ Keenan. This turned out to be an inspired choice. The night Crackers first appeared is one of my favourite Live & Sweaty tales. Libby ‘Elle McFeast’ Gorr was reporting live from an AFL game that was finishing not long after we went to air that night, and it had been pre-arranged that Hawthorn player Dermot Brereton would be one of Andrew’s interview guests. He was to have a brief chat with Elle in the Hawks dressing room after the game, and then agree to hop in a limo and come on the show. The set-up looked spontaneous and worked like a charm but, as the minutes ticked away and the timeslot for the interview approached, there was still no sign of the limo with Dermot. Traffic between the ground and the studio was apparently a nightmare; the match had run later than scheduled. It was going to be much tighter than anyone had expected. On air Andrew had little idea of the drama unfolding outside. Being the ABC, it wasn’t as if there were ad breaks during which he could be brought up to speed with the crisis of ‘Dermotlessness’. He was aware Dermot was running late—the director passed on brief messages via his earpiece—but there was no opportunity for him to be briefed on a fall-back plan. Mid-program someone burst into the Green Room and asked Crackers how he felt about being upgraded from Controversy Corner panellist to special guest interviewee. To his credit, the big, boofy bloke took it in his stride and agreed to be on stand-by. Finally, when all the stalling and stretching that was humanly possible had been done, Andrew gave the big, effusive, ‘Please make him welcome— Dermot Brereton’ introduction. The studio audience went wild . . . And out walked Crackers. 170
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The beauty of Live & Sweaty was that we deliberately did so many silly things that most viewers believed this switcheroo was planned. What they didn’t know was that, at the point when Andrew introduced Brereton, he still thought the man who’d walk onto the set would be Brereton. Instead on came the big fella, grinning like a loon. In the Green Room we were all on the edges of our seats wondering what would happen next. Andrew knew enough about Crackers to give him a ten-second introduction on Controversy Corner. They had met for the first time earlier that evening and now, without any notes and, it has to be said, a reasonably sparse knowledge of Australian rules football, Andrew had to wing five or six minutes of live interview with him. The opening question was smart. ‘So, Crackers Keenan, how did you get that name anyway?’ Crackers launched into an anecdote about what his real first name was and how he came to be known as ‘Crackers’. Andrew heard the whole story out, and then said ‘Well, I meant Keenan, but not to worry’. The next question was something like ‘Surely all the stories I’ve heard about you can’t be true?’. Crackers, sportingly, just kept picking up the ball and running with it. He recounted exploits, told some fibs, went for cheap laughs and built up to the magnificent climax of taking out his false teeth live on national television. It was a brilliant off-the-cuff performance from both of them. Andrew was so impressed he added Crackers to the regular cast. He turned out far too good-natured to be a proper Rex substitute, and over four years we were treated to the most inglorious series of ‘sure things’ at godforsaken racetracks like Wangaratta, Moe and Horsham. But he was a hoot to have around.
Television is a strange and powerful beast. For me it’s the least enjoyable of the three main forms of media. Radio is my favourite. It’s immediate, person-to-person communication; you can be on air talking to an audience completely by yourself, it doesn’t take two AFL teams of staff to make a program happen. In 171
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? the right format, the radio presenter has freedom, space and spontaneity that’s impossible on television. Working in the print media gave me a different kind of satisfaction. Whereas I’d rarely sit down and listen to a program I’d done on radio, and I detest watching myself on TV, I never fail to get a thrill from picking up a newspaper or magazine and seeing something I’ve written. Having something published, laid out by professional artists and presented alongside the work of other professional writers, provokes a sense of having your words, honed and considered, placed on the record. Even if they do end up under the kitty litter tray tomorrow. Television is obsessed with appearance and fakery; it’s self-important and expensive. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have done mostly live television, which in many ways replicates much of the excitement of radio, but, even so, I can’t helping feeling the medium has so much baggage it removes you from reality, while expending an inordinate amount of effort constructing an impression of reality. But while it’s difficult to experience ‘fame’ through radio or the print media, just being on television means people start recognising you. I was never such a regular on television that people en masse recognised me, but I had enough of a taste of it to imagine how disconcerting that would be. There were times, such as standing in a long queue or purchasing expensive whitegoods, when I’d think ‘It would be great if someone suddenly said, “Aren’t you Debbie Spillane? Don’t stand in the queue, come with me”. Or “We can’t have you paying full price for that washing machine . . .”’ But those things never happened. I’d get recognised after I’d had a late night, discovered there was no milk in the house and staggered down to the local supermarket in the morning wearing a tracksuit and thongs. Once I had a weaselly check-out guy say: ‘You aren’t Debbie Spillane from Andrew Denton’s show are you?’ I nodded sullenly, wanting to be somewhere else. ‘You look very different in real life,’ he continued, ruthlessly. ‘My favourite is Karen Tighe. She always looks so sophisticated.’ This last 172
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line delivered with a scathing head-to-toe appraisal of my slept-in attire, ending, of course, at my thongs. ‘Yeah, well Karen doesn’t look too flash first thing in the morning when she’s run out of milk either,’ I scowled, snatching the carton and heading for the door. Still, the embarrassment on that occasion was nothing compared to my number-one ‘Now I get recognised’ anecdote. It involves a locum filling in for my usual doctor, a pap-smear test and her announcement midway through the procedure: ‘Oh, I just worked out where I know you from.’ There’s no appropriate response in a moment like that. The best I could offer was a weak smile at the face peering at me between my raised knees. Television has clout. While radio and print gripe about television lording it over them, they actively feed that pre-eminence time and time again. Appearing on Live & Sweaty opened up opportunities for me in radio and print that all the spadework I’d previously done in radio and print apparently couldn’t. By the time the series went into a second season, the editor-in-chief at the Sun-Herald, David Hickie, decided my writing for the paper should be given more prominence and more column inches. After three years of writing filler buried somewhere near the lawn bowls and yachting, I was encouraged to write about topical sporting issues and be more forthright in my opinions. They wanted my newspaper column to feature the kind of humour I was presenting on Live & Sweaty. Eventually I was given the entire back page of the sports section.
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13 Hard coffee and a saucer of milk (miaow!) Hard coffee and a saucer of milk (miaow!)
Initially on returning to Sydney from Newcastle I’d been unable to drum up any radio work, other than some casual shifts on Sky Radio, a network based in the same building as 2UE that fed syndicated music programs to regional stations. On Sunday afternoons I was the person pressing the ‘Play’ and ‘Stop’ buttons on the Top Forty programs that were already recorded and just needed to be rolled in off a reelto-reel tape player and stopped for ad breaks then re-started. As mind-numbingly boring as the shifts were, I was determined not to lose my panelling skills. Andrew Denton understood my love of radio and my determination to stay involved, but he also believed commercial music radio—where I wanted most to work—was probably wrong for me. ‘Your biggest problem, Deb, is that you don’t have a penis,’ was his favourite assessment of my difficulties with rock’n’roll radio. He steered me back towards ABC radio, giving me the names of people I should speak to at 2BL and also Triple J. I remember him saying Triple J probably wasn’t the best place at that time (early 90s), because there had been sweeping changes made 174
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by new management and he wasn’t sure how it was going to work out. I thought Triple J, being ABC’s Youth network, wasn’t the place for me anyway because I was already 36. But I made the calls anyway, to both stations. It was Triple J that called me back. Some months after my initial approach to a friend of Andrew’s called Andy Nehl, Andy called and said his boss, Barry Chapman, wanted a meeting. Initially Barry talked about a role for me covering sport, Live & Sweaty style, for the Youth network. I explained I’d spent time at NEW-FM learning how to present and panel radio programs so I didn’t have to be the sports reporter on someone else’s program. I pointed out that in a previous life I’d been a singer in a band and the owner of a music shop, and I felt I had more to offer. Not long afterwards, Barry phoned to propose I do an hour each weekday on drive-time with Ian Rogerson. I’d never met Ian, although I knew of him as ‘Danno’ from his ‘Jonno and Danno’ days with Jonathan Coleman. Barry organised for the three of us to have lunch one day. Within a week I was on air with Ian between five and six doing what became known as the Hard Coffee Hour, which evolved into a whole program called Hard Coffee. Hard Coffee was an accidental name. One day while we were preparing a show, I asked Ian if he wanted some hard copy on something we were going to talk about, he thought I asked if he wanted some ‘hard coffee’. We both laughed and decided the pun suited the program. So Hard Coffee it became. Although we occasionally talked sport, the show was more a rambling dissection of the day’s news and gossip. When we did talk sport, of course, we had the role reversal thing happening that had been so typical of my career. When I first started at Triple J, what amazed me most was the abundance of female presenters. Here I was in music radio and there was a woman, Angela Catterns, hosting the morning show and another, Jen Oldershaw, doing the early afternoon shift. Most incredibly, breakfast was a male/female team, Mikey Robins and Helen Razer, and it was the woman who sat behind the panel. In commercial music radio this was (and still would be) as remarkable as it would have 175
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? been, in pre-breathalyser years, for a wife to drive the family car with her husband in the passenger seat. Ian was so laid-back he didn’t mind me doing some of the panelling during Hard Coffee, particularly once he realised my ability to do so meant he could go outside and indulge his nicotine habit. Eventually it was agreed I’d panel at least one of the show’s three hours each day. This made me realise how uneven are the typical partnerships in radio, where the men panel and the women sit at the opposite side of the desk like a guest. The hand that runs the panel—playing the next CD, or cutting to the next phone call—is the hand that rules the program. That person governs the pace and chooses the punchline. One of the reasons Hard Coffee worked so well was because of the equality of the partnership—we both knew what it was like to be in the driver’s seat and we both knew what it was like to be in the more passive co-host’s chair. By early 1994 Ian and I were topping the ratings on drive-time in Sydney—something Triple J had never achieved. In most capital cities Triple J was out-rating the traditionally strong Triple M stations. At the time, I thought I was part of a revolution that was proving for once and for all that women announcers could rate well and that commercial rock radio would have to revise its boys’-club mentality. Sadly, I think I over-read the effect we were having. Nevertheless, I had some of my most memorable moments in the media during those Hard Coffee years. Not only did Ian and I get politicians like Paul Keating, John Hewson and Tim Fischer on the show, I received an on-air proposal of marriage from Ben Elton (although he is a comedian and he was engaged at the time, and I was already married); we also scored live studio interviews with both Keith Richards and Paul McCartney. I don’t think I’ll ever come up with a sports interview to trump having interviewed a Beatle. I’ll never be as nervous about meeting someone as I was before McCartney walked into our studio. And I doubt I’ll ever meet anyone anywhere near as famous who’s so comfortable in his own skin and so cheerful to deal with. He joked 176
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around with us, didn’t dodge any topics and, if he’d answered the same questions a thousand times before, he certainly never let on. We were on-air when McCartney arrived so we didn’t see the outbreak of Beatlemania in the foyer of the ABC building in Ultimo, but I’m told that even the Sydney Symphony Orchestra took a break from a rehearsal to cheer him on arrival. To me McCartney was always the Beatle, too. Yes, John was the tortured genius, but tortured geniuses are a dime a dozen; a well-adjusted genius is a much more rare and fascinating beast. Not having ever been a huge Rolling Stones fan, meeting Keith Richards didn’t faze me quite as much as meeting McCartney; but it was still a career highlight. His record company had offered us the opportunity to go to his hotel room and tape an interview, but, after much agonising, Ian and I decided we wouldn’t break our own program rule—no pre-recorded interviews—even for a Rolling Stone. We brazenly told the record company: ‘If he wants an interview he can come here to our studio—the same way McCartney did. We’re on air between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.’ The reply we got was, ‘Well, it’ll depend on how he’s feeling on the day.’ So, though we knew which day it might happen, we didn’t know if we had the interview until the moment Keef actually arrived at our studio door. We hadn’t mentioned the possibility on air because we knew we’d sound like real losers if we said ‘We might have Keith Richards on the show today’ and then he didn’t turn up. But it sure felt great to be able to say, feigning casual surprise, ‘Oh, look who’s just turned up for a chat—Rolling Stones’ guitarist, Keith Richards.’ The whole experience was worth it for me just to see the reaction from our producer, Rachel Kerr. She was an absolute Richards devotee; so much so that she knew not just that his favourite beverage was vodka, but which brand to have stashed in the freezer in case he arrived. Within minutes of him sitting down, he had a glass of vodka in one hand and there might have been a joint that appeared from somewhere in the other. For nearly an hour we chatted. Several times I had to remind myself we weren’t in a smoky bar, having a rambling 177
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? conversation with this fascinating, well-worn man—we were actually live on national radio. It may well have sounded like national radio live from a smoky bar, though. Despite Ian’s lack of interest in sport, we did have Hard Coffee sporting moments. Michele Timms was our regular basketball expert for a while and gave Ian more cheek in a brief segment than I could give him in a whole week. Damian Lovelock, lead singer with one of Australia’s most cultish rock bands, The Celibate Rifles, turned out to be a total soccer freak and we used him regularly during major soccer events. For some reason never clear to me (I don’t think it was meant to be clear), Damian previewed Socceroos matches by reading from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. His performances earned him a semi-regular spot on Live & Sweaty and he ended up at SBS sport, where he remains Australia’s most ‘out-there’ soccer pundit. But it was my old Commonwealth Games idol, Steve Cram, who turned out to be one of the most entertaining and quick-witted guests we ever had on the show. And it was the fallout from his appearance on Hard Coffee that marked the beginning of the end for Live & Sweaty for me.
At the end of the 1992 season of Live & Sweaty, the second season, Andrew Denton announced he was leaving. He’d been offered a deal with the Seven Network. By the time I heard the news, it had already been decided that Elle McFeast would be taking over as the host. I didn’t know how to take this news. Libby Gorr, being based in Melbourne, wasn’t someone I knew well, and there was an unspoken uneasiness between us. I wasn’t sure how that would play out with her as host. I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t been offered the job. In 1992 Andrew had been away for three weeks, during which time three different stand-in hosts were used—Libby, Lex Marinos and Vince Sorrenti. I’d been told I was too ‘straight’ for hosting. Although I felt insulted at the time, I got over it and, while I would have had a go at sitting in Andrew’s chair for a week, taking over from him permanently 178
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seemed potentially the most thankless job on television. It wasn’t something I could have combined with a five-day-a-week job on Triple J anyway. I gave some thought to leaving the show as I doubted it would survive Andrew’s exit and I certainly didn’t need the work. I had my radio gig and Sun-Herald column to keep me busy. Fridays were a nightmare—needing to file my newspaper copy before I went on air at Triple J at four o’clock; then at six o’clock leaving Triple J an hour early to get to ABC-TV for make-up and Live & Sweaty rehearsal. I’ve always found I function better when overloaded with work. It eliminates time for dithering, perfectionism and introspection. If I have to get on with doing things, then that’s what I do. If I have time to change my mind, re-think, re-write and fuss, then that’s what I do. However, having already ridden high in the media and then wound up on mid-dawns in Newcastle, my instinct was that this career wave wouldn’t last forever but that, while it was rolling, I should ride it. So I decided to stay with Live & Sweaty. Out of the blue, Libby took me aside and told me she thought that over the previous two years we’d been deliberately pitted against each other as rivals. She put forward the theory that men liked women to compete for their attention and that the men running the show had consciously, or unconsciously, set up this dynamic between us. This surprised me. I’d been told Libby thought I got too much time in the show compared to her. But it hadn’t occurred to me she might have been told something similar. Her theory was plausible. Now she was in Sydney hosting the show it was a new era; we’d remove the middle men (men being the operative word!) and show them that talented and creative women could get along. I was energised by her honesty and analysis. We set about cementing a good working relationship. Libby developed the little ‘cat’s salute’ that we used to perform at the end of my segment each week where we’d both lick a finger, smooth down an eyebrow then make a little clawing sign at each other and say ‘Miaow’. (Sounds bizarre as I write it here but, done smoothly and 179
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? in unison, it always got a laugh.) My misgivings about her stepping into Andrew’s shoes proved unfounded. To her everlasting credit the show continued to rate well and the concept of a sports show hosted by a woman, with her two main offsiders also women, was neat. I must have been asked a thousand times how working with Elle McFeast compared to working with Andrew Denton and, after a while, I started to give the sincere answer: it was more fun. Libby seemed more confident in her material, did less questioning, discussing and analysing of content than Andrew did—and she wanted to party after the show, whereas Andrew was a more private type. He generally did the show and went home. The catch was Libby also took criticism more to heart than Andrew did and, when she was criticised, the fun vanished. My first experience of this came when there was a poisonous article about her in Cleo magazine. I was aware of it in advance because the journalist involved, Antonella Gambotto, had tried to interview me for it. The line of questioning had made her intent quite transparent and after a few minutes I told her I had no wish to be part of a hatchet job on a colleague. I phoned Libby, who’d already spent some time with the journalist and knew the result wasn’t going to be pretty. Given the forewarning, I expected she’d don her thickest skin and ride it out. But when I arrived at the studios on the Friday night after the article was published, I was met by producer Mark Fitzgerald, who warned me earnestly ‘Whatever you do, do NOT mention the Cleo article’. I said: ‘What? You mean during the show, because I have no intention . . .’ ‘No,’ he interrupted. ‘Don’t mention it at all, especially not before the show. Libby’s very upset and it’d be best if no one even refers to it.’ While I could well understand Libby being unhappy with the article, I didn’t expect it would affect her as much as it seemed to. Not long before this, Ian and I had been totally shredded by some reviewer in The Age Green Guide. We’d managed to keep our equilibrium despite her describing Hard Coffee as like the incessant 180
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drip, drip, drip of a tap and Ian and I as a couple of nightmare dinner party guests who got stoned, wouldn’t shut up and wouldn’t go home. While the reviewer wasn’t fond of me—describing me as someone who could have, perhaps, been ‘adequate’ without Ian—she was ruthless about him. I vividly recall the look on his face as he finished reading the article. He screwed up his face in puzzlement and said ‘I must’ve slept with her and forgotten about it’. Then we went on air and carried on like a couple of stoned dinner party guests who wouldn’t shut up and wouldn’t go home. It was the only way to react to reviews like that. Andrew had also been sliced and diced by a feature writer in the first season of Live & Sweaty. His comment was: ‘Never react. Never give them the satisfaction of knowing for sure you read it.’ I couldn’t believe that, given her brazen, designed-to-shock Elle McFeast persona, Libby couldn’t adopt a similar attitude. Due to my heavy workload, I had very little input into the overall content of Live & Sweaty at this time; the further into Libby’s tenure we got, the less inclined I was to offer any. Libby had very definite ideas on the shape of the show and wasn’t as receptive to suggestions as Andrew had been; so I kept my head down and tail up, and worried purely about my segment. Which brings me to the Steve Cram story. In 1994, after having Cram as a guest on Hard Coffee, I got straight on the phone to the Live & Sweaty office and told them he was a must for the TV show. He’d been a dream guest on radio with a string of amusing and unique anecdotes which he rolled out one after the other, no matter how stupid the questions were. And Ian, in best stoned dinner party guest fashion, sure hit him with some stupid questions. Cram was such a good talker that, after listening to his thoughts on a mile race that was shortly to be run down Sydney’s George Street, Ian assumed he was an athletics commentator and asked questions based on that assumption. Cram good-naturedly turned it into a joke against himself, asking Ian if he looked like he should retire. Realising that he was a competitor, Ian then asked him what 181
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? went through his mind when, before a race, he got down on the starting blocks. Middle distance runners don’t use starting blocks, but again Cram reacted playfully, giving Ian a hard time and then going on to tell a great story about how, during the 1980 Olympics at the starting line for the final of the 1500-metres, he actually let himself get distracted by the rivalry between the other two great English middle distance runners in the field, Sebastien Coe and Steve Ovett. He even had rock’n’roll stories about touring with the British band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, with whom he’d shared a sponsor. He confessed their lifestyle would have killed him if he’d had to keep it up for more than a brief time. Anyway, I was told Live & Sweaty would book him—which they did—but when I arrived for the show that week I discovered he was a guest panellist on Controversy Corner and had a walk-on part in an unfunny sketch. I couldn’t believe they were having this guy on the show and not interviewing him. When I commented along those lines to the person who booked and researched guests, her reply was ‘He’s a Pommy runner or something, isn’t he?’. This was a tipping point for me. I’d become increasingly uneasy about the show drifting away from its sports roots. Hardly anyone left on the team putting it together cared about sport. Libby was more interested in costumes and song-and-dance numbers than keeping up the sports flavour. I felt that, if we let the sports theme go, we were just another comedy/variety show in a crowded field. The idea that I’d had enough Live & Sweaty took root, but I had to finish the 1994 season. It had stopped being fun and the long hours on Fridays were getting harder to hack. Still, I wasn’t desperate to escape until Mike Gibson decided to give Elle a less-than-glowing review in his regular column.
Libby had been the guest speaker at an Australian Women’s Forum ‘Man of the Year’ lunch. I had attended it, as had my Hard Coffee producer, Rachel Kerr, who was seated at the same table as the Telegraph 182
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columnist. ‘I think Gibson’s going to write something scathing about Libby,’ Rachel confided to me as we headed back to Triple J. ‘She didn’t get any laughs from him and he was taking notes.’ This didn’t sound promising, so it was with some trepidation I turned to Gibson’s opinion piece in the next morning’s Telegraph. ‘Elle McFeast is the thinking man’s Roseanne,’ he’d written. ‘She’s overweight, she talks dirty and she’s got appalling dress sense.’ Most of his article was about the ‘Man of the Year Award’ itself, which was a gong for the best naked male pin-up of 1994. I thought his passing appraisal of Libby was a backhanded compliment. I breathed a sigh of relief. Not exactly a whole-hearted endorsement, but not the blowtorch to the belly I’d feared. And, realistically, what could she quibble about in that assessment? As it turned out, all of it. ‘Did you see what that man said about me?’ she howled as we sat side by side having our make-up done that Friday night. ‘Yeah, he described you as the thinking man’s Roseanne,’ I chipped in, hopefully. ‘That wasn’t bad.’ I floated the backhanded compliment theory. ‘But he said I’m overweight, I talk dirty and I’ve got appalling dress sense.’ I’d just heard Libby’s opening monologue for that night’s show, featuring a string of menstruation gags; she was sitting there wearing a red frock with a bodice made of some mesh-style material with big daisies sewn all over it; and there was no getting around the fact that she hardly cut a sylph-like figure. I very nearly said: ‘But isn’t that the act?’ Instead I turned it over and over in my head—the perfect excuse for silence having been presented to me by the make-up artist needing my mouth kept still while he applied lipstick. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that Libby misjudged the appeal of her alter-ego. Did she really think Elle was popular because she was sexy, cerebral and stylish? I’d thought all along that the brilliance of Elle was that she mocked all expectations of women in television. She pretended to be a glamorous sex-kitten while romping around in overdone frilly frocks and heavy 183
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? boots, making crude jokes and doing stuff like licking tomato sauce suggestively off french fries while talking to footy players. If she thought this worked on some other level, I needed out and I needed out quickly. For the next several weeks I felt like I was carrying around a box of explosives and just had to tread carefully until I could put it down somewhere safe, then run like hell as far away as possible. And I very nearly managed to do that. But one final and unexpected development meant that, instead of making a clean getaway, it all blew up right at the end.
I’d made it clear to everyone during the last couple of months of Live & Sweaty in 1994 that I wasn’t going around again. I didn’t bother expressing any dissatisfaction, just pleaded tiredness and too many other demands. As well as Hard Coffee and my newspaper column, I’d also returned to working on the sidelines on ABC-TV’s Saturday rugby league games in 1994. When Live & Sweaty finished its season in early October, the general feeling was it would continue in 1995. Fine by me. I never for a moment felt my exit would bring down the curtain on the show. I’m really not sure what did, but by early November there was talk of a Live & Sweaty Christmas Show that would also serve as a farewell program. I was unsure if I wanted a part in it. I didn’t know if I could face tiptoeing across the eggshells one more time. And I wasn’t thrilled it was being pre-recorded early in December and would go to air close to Christmas. We had never pre-recorded Live & Sweaty before and we had certainly never done a Christmas special. Departing so far from what the show had always been didn’t seem a good way to send it off. Maybe it was pride that pulled me in. I was the only cast member who had never missed a show over its four-year run. I thought it would be a shame to miss the very last one. So I agreed. Not long after this, I was contacted by a woman called Jacqui Culliton with an extraordinary request. She wanted me to sing at The People’s Choice Awards, which were being launched as a 184
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competitor to the Logies by Woman’s Day in late November and were to be televised by the Nine Network. Jacqui was the producer of Doug Mulray’s TV comedy/variety show Mulray, which had run on the Seven network earlier that year; she was now in charge of this massive production to be telecast live from the State Theatre in Sydney. I was surprised she even knew I’d ever been a singer. This tidbit of information, it turned out, had come her way via the Mulray show. Doug, who’d also had a misspent youth singing in a rock band, had wanted me to sing with him when I’d appeared as a guest on his show, but I’d declined. Appearing with the amazing Doug made me nervous enough without agreeing to revisit something I hadn’t done for more than ten years. Besides, I figured people would view us as an older and nastier Ernie and Denise, and that gave me nightmares. At times I’d found it annoying that I was never asked to do any singing on Live & Sweaty. Elle was at it all the time, and yet I was the one with the background of slogging around pubs and clubs for ten years as a singer. But then I’d remember John Paul Young telling me that there was nothing that made real musos laugh more than former hacks who insisted on revisiting their unsuccessful rock band days when they became famous through TV or radio. This weighed heavily on my mind when Jacqui asked me to do The People’s Choice Awards. On the other hand, she was pleading. The musical production number had already been arranged; dancers from the stage show Cats had been booked and the piece choreographed. It was all about sport and was to precede the presentation of the awards in the TV sport category. The piece was predicated on the singer being a female with some connection to sport. The reason she was in this major jam was because, after everything had been organised, the person they’d booked had cancelled. That person was Elle McFeast. ‘I don’t know that Libby would be happy about me stepping into a number designed for her,’ was my initial reaction. Jacqui countered that Libby was hardly in a position to complain, given that she’d passed up the opportunity. 185
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? So I ended up in November 1994 singing a medley of sports songs live on national television at The People’s Choice Awards, which were compered by Kylie Minogue. And, as if that isn’t bizarre enough, it turned out the main song, ‘Maybe I’m Mad About Sport’, was written by the swimming coach Laurie Lawrence. I even donned a Tina Turner outfit for a burst of ‘Simply The Best’. I felt like it was the biggest risk I’d ever taken. I can’t dance to save my soul, and lumbering around on stage alongside dancers from Cats was quite daunting, but they were tremendously supportive. My main fear was tripping on my long dress and falling over. I didn’t do that and I think I only hit one dud note. And yes, it did surprise the hell out of everyone. Including, as it turned out, Libby Gorr. At the post-awards party I was inundated with reports from people in the audience who saw Libby get up and leave while I performed. After that, I just had to get through my final episode of Live & Sweaty—the Christmas special. When we gathered in the studio, I was told there was no time for Libby and I to rehearse and our paths didn’t cross before the cameras were rolling. It came as a complete surprise to me when Libby launched into a rave about how proud she’d been of my performance at The People’s Choice Awards. She even rolled some footage of it. It didn’t ring true for me but, in front of a live audience and with the cameras rolling, what could I say? As it turned out, it couldn’t have mattered less. When the pretaped show went to air a couple of weeks later, my segment was cut out entirely. So it was Merry Christmas and Goodbye from the show that had started out Live & Sweaty and ended up Pre-recorded & Nasty.
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14 A dog of a year A dog of a year
The reception area at Triple J’s Sydney studios in Ultimo has a distinctive décor. It’s lined with corrugated iron painted with Mambo motifs and, back in 1995, it also boasted a pinball machine that guests could use while they were waiting to be collected by whoever it was they were there to see. One day in November of 1995 I got a call from the receptionist telling me there was an old man waiting in reception for me. It was clear from her tone that she didn’t mean an old man in Triple J terms—i.e. one over 35—but an old man. I was due to meet Lynne Anderson, the marketing manager of the Bulldogs rugby league team, in the coffee shop downstairs around that time, so I figured I’d check out who my unexpected visitor was on the way through the foyer. There, perched awkwardly in a hot-pink chunky chair, was the recently retired CEO of the Bulldogs, Peter ‘Bullfrog’ Moore. Amongst the Mambo motifs and radical posters, wearing a blazer and tie and not availing himself of the pinball facilities, he looked as uncomfortable and out of place as ever I had been in a football dressing room. ‘I heard you were having lunch with Lynne,’ he announced in his semi-mumbling, stage-whisper style. ‘Thought I’d invite myself along.’ 189
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? This was followed by a cheeky grin and a ‘Didn’t want to miss this meeting’. I was getting together with Lynne, Peter’s daughter, to talk about the possibility of me taking on the role of media manager for the Bulldogs. I should have known, as soon as the master negotiator appeared, that the chances of me saying ‘No’ were almost nil. Not many months before, Bullfrog had phoned me while I was on air at Triple J to tell me he was standing down as CEO of the Bulldogs, a post he’d held for 25 years. He wasn’t giving me the scoop—it was hardly Triple J news anyway—and it was to be announced in the media the next day, but he thought that, as a Bulldogs supporter in the media, I should hear it from him. He told me he was handing over to Bob Hagan. I didn’t know Bob personally, but I remembered him as a one of the big names from the Canterbury side that played the 1967 grand final. The Moore influence looked set to remain strong at Belmore. Peter was retaining his seat on the Football Club board; Lynne was the marketing manager; her husband, Chris Anderson, was head coach; his other son-in-law, Steve Folkes, was on the coaching staff; and his youngest daughter, Tracey, worked in Accounts. It was no secret that Bullfrog, in his final years as CEO, had been battling an uprising. A faction had pushed to overthrow him in favour of Graeme Hughes, the brother of Football Manager, Garry Hughes. The Bulldogs had boasted two famous sets of brothers in their 1970s golden era. The Mortimers—Steve, Peter and Chris—were one and the Hugheses were the other. In the mid-90s the Mortimers weren’t part of the club administration, but the Hughes clan were in the thick of it: football manager, Garry, was the eldest; Mark, the middle brother, was Bulldogs junior development officer; and Graeme, after developing his profile as a sports commentator in the media, was never far away from club politics. Just to complete the Hughes thread running through the club, Garry has three sons—Glen and Steven were in the club’s senior playing ranks and the youngest, Corey, was coming up through the lower grades. 190
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Coming into the job via Peter and Lynne put me firmly in the Moore camp, rather than the Hughes camp, but I didn’t really know what that meant at the time.
Nineteen ninety-five was a tumultuous year for any number of reasons. On the football front, on the first weekend of the season, the story broke that a renegade competition was being formed, backed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited. It was to be called ‘Super League’ and the club I supported, the Bulldogs, had agreed to be part of it. At the end of May my mother was told she had, maybe, three months to live. She had been diagnosed with bowel cancer; surgery, chemotherapy and radiation had failed to arrest its spread. She only lived two months, dying at the end of July. In August my Hard Coffee co-host, Ian Rogerson, announced he’d accepted a lucrative offer to go to Triple M and host the morning show with Alison Drower. Our former boss at Triple J, Barry Chapman, had previously been poached by Triple M and, while he was offering Ian the nine-to-noon shift on air with a new partner and money maybe four times what he was earning at Triple J, I was being offered the gig as Triple M Sydney’s sports reporter. I preferred to stay at the ABC. But, when my contract at Triple J expired in November, they said they had ‘nothing to offer me’ and I was shown the door. Now, the last part of this jigsaw was not actually in place at the time when I met Peter and Lynne for coffee. I was still at Triple J but, as a soon-to-be 40-year-old at the National Youth Network, I knew my future there was limited. I didn’t expect to be dumped quite as unceremoniously as I was, but that’s another story. Super League was, indirectly, the reason we were meeting. The new competition was due to start in early 1996. The Bulldogs, along with two other Sydney teams—Cronulla and Penrith—as well as most of the non-Sydney based teams—Brisbane, Canberra, North Queensland, Perth and Auckland—were leaving the established Australian Rugby League competition. Two new teams, Adelaide and Hunter, were being added to the mix and they were forming their 191
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? own premiership. It was a concept that had passions running high throughout the sport, with fans in particular deeply divided over what was happening. In essence it was a battle between media moguls, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, about the pay television rights for the game. When the big boys start throwing their weight around in your house, the furniture gets smashed; and that’s how it was to be in rugby league over the next few years. Entire books have been written about what went on, who did what and why; I’ll restrict myself to explaining what it was like in the trenches working for the Bulldogs.
Super League required every club to have a media manager. After the end of the 1995 season, Lynne contacted me and asked if I’d do her a favour and draw up some job specs for the role. I was happy to oblige. The Bulldogs had turned out to be an inspiration in an otherwise hideous year, winning the 1995 grand final in breathtakingly unlikely circumstances. Four of their biggest name players—Jim Dymock, Jason Smith, Dean Pay and Jarrod McCracken—had broken ranks and gone to court to have contracts they’d signed with Super League overturned. But, as the club was tearing itself apart in the courts, it paradoxically found form on the paddock and came back from a depressing midseason slump. Having just scraped into the finals, the Dogs went on the rampage, carrying everything before them and eventually beating favourites Manly 17–4 in the grand final. If ever there had been a season during which the Dogs were going to lose me as a supporter, 1995 was it. The club had switched home games to Parramatta Stadium because the ARL was planning to set new minimum home-ground standards that Peter Moore feared Belmore wouldn’t meet. He believed the ARL was considering the possibility of asking the Bulldogs to relocate interstate and he didn’t want the unsuitability of Belmore to be used as part of the case supporting that relocation. His original plan—to make the NSW rugby union ground at Concord the Dogs’ new home stadium—had fallen through at the 192
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eleventh hour and Parramatta Stadium had been the hastily arranged fall-back position for 1995. Although I understood the rationale behind the move, Parramatta Stadium seemed to me a soulless place to watch football. I’d had season tickets at Belmore since 1979. When I’d moved to Newcastle in 1990, my mother kept up the season tickets and took friends with her to the games. We’d resumed our regular outings to Belmore in 1992 when I moved back to Sydney. The fact that Parramatta didn’t feel like ‘home’, my bewilderment about the club’s decision to switch to Super League, and their unimpressive form all conspired to make it hard to care much about what was happening with the Bulldogs. But the main reason it was hard to care about football was that Mum was dying. Mum’s devotion to the Bulldogs had developed so gradually, I’m hard pressed to say when it all actually started. In my childhood she had never been part of the Spillane family football outings. She told me that when I was a baby she used to go, but I always assumed she stopped because she didn’t really like it that much. It was only after she died I figured one of the reasons was that, from the time I was eight, I had prevented her. Dad had just the one Ladies Guest Pass to the SCG so, after I became old enough to need it, Mum and I couldn’t both go. Besides, she would have had my younger sister, Donna, by that stage so I guess it was just easier for her to stay home. She separated from my dad when I was 18; she then moved to Canterbury, not far from Belmore. I took to visiting her after Bulldogs home games. The routine was to go to Belmore, then head over to Mum’s for dinner and the match-of-the-day television replay. Eventually she started coming to matches with me and, once she got into the swing of it, there was no holding her back. She worked in administration at the University of Technology in Sydney and her office there was decorated with Bulldogs paraphernalia. Early in the 1995 season, even though she was having radiation treatment, she still went to the games. But as the Super League rift widened, Mum became disillusioned. At the same time as it got physically harder for her to attend games, 193
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? the voices criticising the clubs that had gone with Murdoch became louder and angrier. Mine was one of them. ‘Trying to buy rugby league is like trying to buy Christmas’ I recall writing in my newspaper column in one emotional outburst against what was happening. It must have been early July in 1995 when Lynne Anderson rang me at home and asked if Mum and I would attend a season ticketholders’ information session about Super League. I was surprised to hear from her personally. Although I’d once interviewed her for my SunHerald column, Lynne and I were really just acquaintances. I wasn’t interested in hearing the club’s justification for their decision to go to Super League but, rather than say that, I gave her the other reason we wouldn’t be attending: Mum’s condition was declining rapidly, she could barely get out of a chair. Lynne was sincerely shocked. It hadn’t been long since she’d seen us at Parramatta Stadium, and Mum had looked quite well then. It was hard for me to grasp too. In May it had seemed far-fetched that she was dying. But by July it was clearly imminent. Family means everything to the Moores. It’s a cliché used to caricature Canterbury, known (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) as ‘The Family Club’. But it’s also a fundamental fact for the Moores. Lynne told me she had a number of things she wanted to talk to me about, but it could all wait. She asked if I’d give her a ring when I felt I had the time and the inclination to talk. A day or two later I got another phone call at home. This time from Peter Moore, who’d never before phoned me at home. ‘Lynne told me about your mother,’ he said. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I couldn’t think of anything. He asked if she was conscious and able to communicate. When I told him she was still sharp as a tack mentally, he asked whether perhaps he could phone her. I knew she would be delighted; as she was no longer able to get out of the house, she had the phone beside her at all times and was relying on it for company. I didn’t tell her to expect Bullfrog’s call; I thought it would work better as a surprise. Trouble was, when he did call, Mum happened to be expecting one of her former workmates, Bruce Ramage, to ring. Bruce, who kept up good-humoured banter with her until the end, had been ribbing her about sitting around in a big chair all day. He’d 194
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given her a fake tiara and taken to calling her ‘Your Majesty’. So Mum answered the phone with ‘Hello, Buckingham Palace—Elizabeth speaking’. When she found out the caller was Peter Moore, she was shockingly embarrassed. (Or, as she put it to me, ‘I nearly died of embarrassment’, which I told her was a totally inappropriate phrase given the circumstances!) Bullfrog took the joke in his stride, although he confessed it threw him a bit as he was expecting a more sombre conversation. Mum was over the moon to hear from the patriarch of the team she followed and she told me then that, whatever happened with Super League, she believed Peter Moore was a good man. His call had shored up her wavering support for the club. At that point I started to feel ashamed that I’d been wavering in support as well. I decided I’d support the Bulldogs regardless of what competition they played in and who they upset doing it. They’d earned my loyalty by brightening up Mum so much at such a difficult time. Sadly, the last game Mum saw the Dogs play was a Saturday game televised on the ABC, one of their low spots of 1995. They were beaten 18–14 by Wests in an awful game at Campbelltown. Working on the sideline for the ABC and in a miserable mood, I wrestled with the temptation to send my mother a cheerio. I didn’t, for fear she’d interpret it as me believing she wouldn’t last another week. That was what I believed. And it turned out to be right. She died that week. The Bulldogs proceeded to win eight of their next nine games, the last of which was the grand final. At full-time in that match, after I’d done my TV interviews, I shed the only tears I’ve ever shed over a football result. It made me remember, ironically, how Dad had told us when we were kids that, if he ever caught any of us crying over a football match, he’d ban us from going to games. It was also the last football match during which I worked on the sidelines—the ABC was painted out of the live television broadcast picture the following year with the arrival of pay-TV.
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? It was against this background that I sat down to have coffee with Lynne and ‘Bullfrog’ at the ABC in November 1995. Lynne told me they had been so impressed with the media manager job specs I’d written that, before they offered the job to anyone else, they wanted to offer it to me. Bullfrog spent some time explaining why he supported the club’s switch to Super League as he knew I hadn’t been in favour. He always maintained he wasn’t involved in the original negotiations with News Ltd, that he’d been kept out of the loop because of his personal friendship with ARL chief Ken Arthurson. The approach to the Bulldogs, he insisted, came via the Canterbury League Club, which set up a meeting with the players and coach. Once his players and coach had signed with the breakaway league, Bullfrog declared he had no option other than to support it. I do understand the concept of ‘plausible deniability’ and, even as I heard him out, I figured it was a possible subtext. But I also knew, if that was the tack he was taking, he wasn’t going to be persuaded to drop it, even off the record, for my benefit. He told me how, when word of News Ltd’s interest in the game first surfaced, Kerry Packer had addressed a meeting of the ARL chief executives and chairmen and threatened them with personal financial annihilation if they entered into negotiations with the rival media mogul’s company. Bullfrog was not a man easily intimidated, but he was canny enough to know exactly how a threat sounded when it wasn’t hollow. Anyway, he also believed the new competition had the guts to address what he believed was the biggest looming crisis in the game: too many clubs in Sydney. Peter had often told me how impressed he’d been with the set-ups in Brisbane and Canberra, how the onecity one-team organisations were going to be hard to beat while Sydney teams—competing for crowds, sponsorship dollars and facilities—were ultimately going to keep each other weak. I didn’t find this concept difficult to grasp. My dad had long been saying the same thing. Believe it or not, I remember sitting up one night with Dad and my brother Brad, not long after Penrith and Cronulla entered 196
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the competition in the late 1960s, combining the inner-city clubs into what we called ‘super clubs’. I wasn’t led to believe the road ahead for the Bulldogs would be easy. Both Lynne and Peter were sure it would be difficult and that was why, they said, they needed someone at the club who knew the media and loved the Bulldogs. I was tempted. I’d enjoyed being media manager for the Sydney Kings basketball team in 1988 and only left because in 1989 Bob Turner became coach. Being Bob’s media manager was a bit like being the bass player in Paul McCartney’s band. I’d managed to combine being the Kings’ media manager with a job in radio, so I knew it didn’t have to be either/or. The Bulldogs didn’t want me full-time and were happy for me to keep my Triple J job, which presented no conflict of interest as I was doing no rugby league there. But my Sun-Herald column was a different story. I couldn’t write rugby league for a major media outlet and at the same time deal with the media on behalf of one club. Especially when that club had ties to an opposition media empire. That weighed against me agreeing. ‘Imagine how proud your mother would be to know you’d ended up working for the Bulldogs,’ countered Peter. ‘Whoa!! No wonder you get the players you want,’ I responded, recognising the attempted manipulation, but also unable to deny the truth of the comment. I told them I needed time to chew over the offer—which, by the way, was not attractive in a financial sense. I phoned my old friend David Waite who was ‘in between coaching jobs’ at the time. After leaving Newcastle I’d kept in touch with David. He’d proven an invaluable sounding board for my newspaper columns on rugby league. There was never an angle on the game he hadn’t turned over in his brain a thousand times so, when I thought I had a good topic for a column, I’d often phone him and test my theories—always getting an honest answer. I knew his time as a lower-grade coach at Belmore had left him with a certain cynicism about the Dogs and I half expected him to tell me to steer clear of involvement. But he didn’t. In a long conversation with David about rugby league the previous year, he’d 197
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? asked if my interest was based more on the personalities involved or what happened on the field. I told him it wasn’t either. What fascinated me most, as a long-time spectator, was what made teams special. Over the years I’d seen clubs that didn’t necessarily have the best players turn into the best teams and I wanted to know why that happened. He laughed and told me it was only what every coach wanted to know too. When I told him about the Bulldogs offer, he said that, if I still wanted to find out what pieces had to come together to make a football team tick, then working at Belmore would be a good way to get an insight. He also volunteered that I’d be a terrific person to have in a football office and that the Bulldogs were smart to offer me the job. By way of returning the compliment, I told him that, if St George were smart, they’d hire him to replace Rod Reddy, who’d just resigned to go to Super League. He made some comment about the rugby league grapevine suggesting it would be a waste of time applying because the Dragons wanted Warren Ryan. I said the rugby league grapevine was often wrong and he should apply anyway. Within a week or two of me starting in the office at Belmore, I got a call from David saying he was the new coach of St George. It turned out to be an interesting year to have a friend and mentor on ‘the other side of the fence’, although the fence wasn’t quite what we anticipated. St George were ARL and the Bulldogs were Super League, so these two teams were supposed to be playing in separate competitions. But that wasn’t how 1996 unfolded.
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15 Moored and ill-Hughesed Moored and ill-Hughesed
On 23 February, in a triumph of tragic timing, I stood in the Pumphouse Hotel at Darling Harbour with a group of Bulldogs players—including the captain, Simon Gillies, who’d been a high profile pro-Super League player spokesman—and listened to live radio reports coming from the Supreme Court. Justice Burchett had just ruled Super League could not go ahead. We were holding our media launch for the 1996 season and the media guys who weren’t at the court were there at the hotel clutching the Canterbury Super League Inaugural Season Media Guides I’d just handed out. There was no way I could’ve known when we scheduled our launch that it would be the very day the decision was handed down— and that it would go against Super League—but I still felt guilty about having the players there, getting the bad news while being watched by the media. Within a couple of weeks I was told by the club that distributing any more of the Media Guides (which were still accurate in terms of the player information they contained, even if the season schedule had been spiked) would quite possibly put me in breach of the Supreme Court ruling by Justice Burchett. As a club employee, I couldn’t use a Super League envelope or even wear a Super League t-shirt to my 199
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? local shops. We were back in the ARL, tensions were running high, and suddenly I was even dealing with a crisis management company. Up until this point I’d managed to get through life without knowing such an animal existed, but now former Super League clubs were being advised by one. It was in lieu of getting advice from Super League—who, of course, we were legally forbidden from dealing with. My time at Triple J had come to an end without warning when my contract expired at the end of November 1995. I’d taken a job as breakfast presenter at Kick-AM; luckily it was still on offer despite me having knocked it back several weeks earlier when Triple J, ignoring my pleas for a nod and a wink, refused to give me any hint I was on the way out. Kick-AM was a brief incarnation of 2SM with a ‘Cool Country Rock and Blues’ format. It was monumentally unsuccessful. As I fought a losing battle trying to make a go of my first opportunity to front a breakfast program on Sydney radio, I was also trying to get my head around the increasingly complex business of working in the mess that was rugby league. What’s more, I’d already discovered I was on the receiving end of some personal hostility within the club. In my initial weeks at Belmore I repeatedly found myself in the embarrassing position of getting information from the media, rather than dispensing it. For example, one afternoon I had three phone calls in quick succession from reporters wanting to interview our former All Blacks centre, John Timu. When I took the third call, I openly wondered why everyone was suddenly so interested in John. ‘Don’t you know?’ came the reporter’s voice back down the line. ‘He was named in the New Zealand Test team today.’ I didn’t know. I wandered down the corridor in the old wooden offices tacked onto the back of the grandstand at Belmore and asked Lynne whether there was some way I could be made aware of such developments before the media started calling me. She replied that this information should come through the football manager and that I should ask Garry Hughes’s assistant, Lisa, to copy me in on such correspondence in future. When I approached Lisa, she informed me matter-of-factly that I worked for the marketing department and 200
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marketing staff didn’t get that kind of information. I tried explaining that, as the media manager, I’d need it but Lisa was implacable. The divide between ‘marketing’ and ‘football’ wasn’t going to be crossed on my account without express permission from her boss Garry. Lynne arranged a meeting with Garry to address the problem. She explained that, as she and Garry were the heads of two different departments, she couldn’t just make him pass on ‘football related’ information to me, so she had invited chief executive Bob Hagan to sit in on the meeting. I should have realised then that this wasn’t going to be as straightforward as common sense suggested it should be. When I explained to Garry that I’d need information about the players so I could be at least as informed as the reporters who were phoning me (and, ideally, more informed), Garry responded with ‘But I don’t want you talking about football matters to the media’. Gobsmacked, all I could think to say was: ‘Well, what am I supposed to be talking to them about?’ I won’t pretend to remember Garry’s response word-for-word but the message was quite clear. He had no idea what I was supposed to talk to the media about. He had no idea what a media manager was. He’d been at the club for 25 years and they’d always got by just fine without one and he didn’t see why one was needed now. I looked at Bob, expecting a defence of my position and came up empty. ‘Well I know what a media manager does,’ I continued. ‘I was a media manager for the Sydney Kings. I used to talk to the media about basketball and I knew a lot less about basketball than I do about rugby league.’ Garry didn’t care how affairs were arranged in basketball—as far as he was concerned I wasn’t going to be talking to the media about football. Bob Hagan’s brother, Michael, had been appointed media manager at the Hunter Mariners so I said to Bob, ‘Well, perhaps you can ask Michael whether or not he talks about football to the media.’ Garry cut me off at the pass: ‘That’s different. Michael’s played the game.’ So there we were. Back to the old dead-end argument that I thought I’d heard the last of in the late 80s. I was furious. I told Garry 201
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? I was sorry I’d accepted the job and would leave as soon as possible. I was planning on writing a letter of resignation that night. As I was packing up for the day, coach Chris Anderson asked me to pop into his office. He motioned for me to shut the door and sit down. ‘So, I hear you had a bit of a run-in with Garry?’ he opened with the hint of a smile. ‘Did Lynne tell you about it?’ I asked. He responded with one of his typical quips about marrying the marketing manager so he could keep tabs on office politics. I told him how ridiculous it was to make me media manager and then tell me I wasn’t to talk to the media about football. I assured him I knew enough to know what I didn’t know. I wouldn’t be commenting on defensive patterns or rating individual player performances for reporters, but I felt I could handle the bulk of the enquiries—provided the football office was prepared to share information with me. However, if they wouldn’t even copy me in on a memo announcing John Timu’s selection in New Zealand’s team, there was no point me being there. Chris heard me out and then launched into a mini-dissertation about the nature of the Bulldogs. He told me that what made the club strong was that a core group had been there for a long time and were very tight-knit. The down side was that the tightness of the group made it hard for newcomers. ‘It takes time to be accepted here,’ he said. Then he laid out his proposal. He didn’t want me to leave, but he couldn’t force Garry to work with me. So the deal was I had his permission to liaise with the media on his behalf. If media wanted to speak to the football manager, they should speak to Garry; but if they wanted to speak to the coach, they should be put through to me. He said it was a pain in the arse anyway, taking calls about Matt Ryan’s hamstring or Mitch Newton’s ankle. I could filter calls, relay answers from him and, if anyone really needed to speak with him, I could set it up around his schedule. If I made his dealings with the media easier, he’d keep me in the loop with team news. 202
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In short, he was recommending we work around Garry Hughes, who in very basic terms was supposed to be the interface between the team and the front office. As the person in charge of the weekto-week needs of the senior and lower-grade teams—their training schedules and facilities, medical and travel arrangements and the like—his co-operation would have made life easier for me as media manager and his role in assisting Chris should surely have included keeping me informed. But Garry seemed to see himself as a keeper of information, not a distributor, so it was simpler for me to deal direct with the coach. And more fun. The conversation with Chris convinced me to stay at the Bulldogs. Of course it probably dragged me even further into the Moore v Hughes feud that was still bubbling under the surface. After a while Chris said he thought it would be beneficial for me to attend weekly football meetings, so I could hear first-hand about matters like travel, training, medical reports and disciplinary issues. Garry opposed it, but lost, making me even more unpopular. His standard answer to almost any question I had to ask was: ‘Why do you need to know that?’ I could have understood this attitude if I’d been connected with damaging leaks to the media. But I was the least of the Bulldogs’ problems. The League Club—that is, the management of the licensed club up the road in Belmore, who provided a sizeable amount of our funding—and the board of the football club leaked like sieves. If I’d had ten dollars for every time I was told to stay mum about something, only to find someone in management had opened their trap to the media shortly afterwards, I would have been on a Super League-size salary myself. One my staunchest allies at the club was the team manager, Allan Nelson. ‘Nello’ was a delightful grandfatherly type; Bullfrog had assigned him to me as a dressing room ‘buddy’ a couple of years before when I was working as sideline eye. Whenever I had needed information from the Bulldogs rooms, Nello had been my man. He continued that mission when I went to work at Belmore and was a godsend. 203
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? As team manager he was around wherever the first-grade players were; he looked after the minutiae of keeping the football team functioning, at training, on match days and on the road. He made sure the players had towels and drinks, for instance. He organised footballs and tackling bags for training, jerseys for games. He kept the dressing room in order. One player described him to me once as their ‘den mother’. Nello became my direct link to the players and a confidante. He was also a member of the football club board of directors and he warned me from the outset that he suspected another board member was leaking information to the media. Early in 1996, only months after I’d started at Belmore, a book clearly intended to damage the Bulldogs was published. Called A Family Affair, it was written ostensibly by Jarrod McCracken, one of the four players who’d left after taking the Bulldogs to court the previous year. One day Nello got me aside to tell me he’d read the book and was worried about some of the content. I tried to counter his concern, saying only people who wanted to think badly of the Bulldogs would listen to anything McCracken had to say. But it wasn’t this that was bothering him. According to Nello, some details in the book could only have come from someone who’d attended board meetings—in other words, information included in the book had to have been leaked by one of his fellow directors. I asked Nello did he have any idea who. He said he had a theory, but didn’t want to name names. The journalist who’d written the book with McCracken, Daniel Lane, was then working for Rugby League Week. It didn’t take me long to put two and two together. Monitoring his stories over a few months I found just one director’s name kept bobbing up in Lane’s stories. I went to Nello and told him who I thought the boardroom leak was and he told me I’d arrived at the same conclusion as he had. I’m not giving myself any great props here. Daniel Lane was hardly a Bob Woodward. He and his Deep Throat were so unsophisticated that often, when there was a damaging or critical story about the Bulldogs written by Lane quoting ‘an unnamed source’ at the club, 204
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there would be another article written by Lane elsewhere in the same issue quoting a director. The most dramatic example came in early 1997 when an issue of Rugby League Week had as one of its lead stories the sacking of Peter Moore as a director at Canterbury. The story was odd because, the night before the magazine hit the newsstands, Bullfrog had resigned from the board. The story made no reference to a resignation; it said Moore had been dumped in a coup organised by fellow directors. Even stranger was the fact that the board meeting had been Tuesday night and I knew Rugby League Week went to press Monday night. The article had to have been written in advance, with information supplied by someone planning the coup. The author? Daniel Lane. I went to Bob Hagan, presented the evidence and told him what I suspected was going on. He looked at me blankly. It was the kind of blank look you’d see on Charlie Brown’s face after he’d been outplayed by Lucy in a Peanuts cartoon. He was a good man, Bob Hagan. I liked him, but he seemed unable to confront the problems obviously building around him. I pointed out it was a bit rich nagging me about the media running negative Bulldogs stories when the source of some of the negative material was clearly a director of the club. More blank looks.
But if working for the Bulldogs had been all banging my head against the management brick wall and dealing with the confusion of Super League versus ARL politics and legalities, I wouldn’t have stayed. It was dealing with the players—and getting an insight into who they were and how they operated—that held me. Terry Lamb was one such player. One of my first duties as media manager was to announce the reemergence of ‘Baa’ from retirement. Lamb’s was an outrageously short retirement. The 1995 grand final victory had been hailed as a fairytale farewell. He was 34 years old and the grand final had been his 328th first-grade game—a full and famous career by anyone’s standards. He’d been promised a desk job at Super League but, even before Justice 205
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Burchett’s court decision put Super League on the backburner, Baa was back in the blue and white. In January 1996 the Bulldogs’ last legal recourse against the defection of Jim Dymock, Dean Pay, Jason Smith and Jarrod McCracken from the club was dashed. It was a huge victory for the ARL and a damaging blow to Canterbury. Dymock and Smith had been the playmakers earmarked to fill the gap left by Lamb. It was too late to recruit replacements; Lamb and Chris Anderson knew that, without a seasoned playmaker, the Bulldogs were wasting their time in 1996. So Baa offered to go around for one more season. Terry was someone I’d developed enormous respect for over the years. The incident that had most influenced my opinion of him came moments after the Bulldogs lost the 1994 grand final to Canberra. To set up the story, you need to remember that 1994 was the year I returned to the sidelines for ABC-TV. In this second tour of duty I shared the sideline responsibilities with the irrepressible and incredibly droll John Peard. We’d developed a system for divvying up the workload between us that involved us choosing one team each before the start of every game. We usually did it on the basis of who, of the two of us, had the best contacts at the club involved. John had played for St George, Parramatta and Easts so, if one of those sides was involved, they were ‘his’ team and I had the opposition. If Canterbury or Newcastle were involved, they were ‘my’ team and John had the opposition. Obviously in the 1994 grand final Canterbury were ‘my’ team and John had Canberra. In the week leading up to the match we’d been told that, win, lose or draw, we would each have to interview the captain of ‘our’ team as soon as possible after full-time. A few days before the game I attended a grand final lunch at the Canterbury League Club, during which I sought out Terry to let him know in advance that I’d need a post-grand final interview. I explained I hated the idea of having to talk with him in the event of a loss, but that I’d have to do it. There was a bit of banter along the lines of ‘Shame on you, Deb, for even thinking about a loss’. I apologised 206
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for letting such an outlandish thought enter my head and he gave me his word he would make himself available. That grand final wasn’t a happy one for the Bulldogs. Lamb took a knock to the head early from Mal Meninga and was in la-la land for much of the match. It was one of those days where I had a lot of time to consider the prospect of interviewing the losing captain. When describing a one-sided match, it’s standard hyperbole to say the turning point was the kick-off, but that was really how it went. Canterbury’s Martin Bella dropped the ball from the kick-off, Canberra scored and the momentum never swung back the Bulldogs’ way. At full-time it was 36–12. As I approached Lamb for the promised interview, he was commiserating with a teammate. The glassiness of his eyes suggested he was still slightly concussed and the redness around the rims suggested he’d been, perhaps still was, crying. I felt like an intruder; so I turned and walked several paces away, where I stood looking in the other direction, explaining to my floor manager that it wasn’t fair to doorstop him right then. But before I could finish explaining why I’d walked away from my interview target, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Terry. ‘C’mon, Deb, I promised you an interview. Let’s do it,’ he said flatly, but without a hint of complaint. A lot of players would have pleaded concussion and ‘forgotten’ about the arranged interview, but the fact Baa honoured his promise, and went out of his way to do so, earned my respect. That respect deepened when I worked with him. Behind the scenes, the stocky little man was a tower of strength and treated office staff like part of the team—which not everyone did. His handling of antiSuper League callers was classic. It was amazing how many self-appointed defenders of the game rang, out of hours, to leave threatening and obscene messages on the football club answering machine about Super League. There would be dozens waiting each morning: swearing, shouting, slurring and spitting venom. Occasionally one of these foulmouthed belligerents would summon the courage to phone during business hours and launch a verbal assault on our receptionist. 207
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? If Baa, who was often in the office doing marketing work, heard Rosie battling to keep her professional cool with one of these idiots he’d shout out, ‘Put ’em through to me, Rosie.’ It only took the words, ‘Terry Lamb here, can I help you with something?’ and most of them became instantly polite, or suddenly remembered something else they had to do. To tell you about the moment where he astonished me most, though, involves having to explain that for many years I didn’t necessarily regard Baa as the knight in shining armour type.
The first time I was introduced to Terry Lamb was at the Rothman’s Medal dinner in 1985. These dinners were a fascinating, now obsolete, social phenomenon. Like the present-day Dally M Awards, or the AFL’s Brownlow Dinner, the purpose was to hand out the code’s highest individual award; but these were ‘men only’ affairs. Well, they were ‘men only’ until a handful of female journalists and ARL administrative staff started getting invitations in the 80s. No one’s invitation included ‘and partner’, so it was usually something like a couple of hundred men and perhaps four or five women. The evening always started out glamorously formal—everyone decked out in black tie and evening gowns—but within several hours a drunken brawl involving a handful of players and journalists at some seedy late-night bar was almost compulsory. Tales of previous Rothman’s Medal postaward punch-ups were told with folkloric reverence early in the evening at each new dinner. Derek White, my original ABC boss, gave me a stern lecture before I set off for my first Rothman’s. He advised I keep my wits about me, and not attempt to stay on the drinking pace with the ABC lads. I chose not to drink at all that first year and, when I saw how messy things got later in the evening, I decided not drinking would become my permanent match plan for the Rothman’s. Being sober was quite entertaining. I didn’t often get a chance to mix socially with players and club officials so how they behaved with several schooners under the belt was quite revealing. I discovered it 208
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only took a male-to-female ratio of about 40 to 1, and four or five hours of free beer, for me to become irresistibly attractive to some quite handsome footballers. My standard reply to being propositioned at these dinners was: ‘Give me a ring during the week when you’re sober and there aren’t quite so few women around.’ But I only developed that response after the first year. In 1985 I wasn’t quite so cynically cool when I felt I’d been propositioned. I was insulted. Late that evening I was introduced by a mutual friend to Terry Lamb. This friend had quite a reputation as a prankster—although I didn’t know that at the time. He told us that he and a group of highflyers at the dinner had booked one of the hotel’s executive suites (the venue was the Sydney Hilton) and were adjourning there for a private party. He handed Terry the key and said ‘Most of the others have already gone ahead, I’ll meet you and Debbie up there shortly’. Now, I didn’t know whether this was a set-up that Terry was in on, or whether he was as surprised as me to find that, when we opened the door, there was not a soul in the room. I didn’t stick around long enough to assess his reaction—although I do remember him laughing. Suddenly realising I was alone in a hotel room with a star footballer, I shrieked something like ‘Oh no you don’t!’ and bolted out of the room and back down to the ballroom. I was so embarrassed that I avoided both Terry and the man who gave us the key for the rest of the night—although I made sure Mr Executive Suite saw that I was back in the ballroom within minutes of leaving it. For a while I felt unsettled by this incident whenever I had to interview Terry, but his demeanour towards me never changed and he was always cheerful and polite. Eventually it seemed easier to move on and pretend it had never happened. By the time we came to be working together at the Bulldogs, it was ten years past and I assumed it was something he’d probably forgotten.
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? On Melbourne Cup Day 1996 I had a whole series of problems converge. Most were personal, although there’s no doubt my nerves were frayed by a season of ARL versus Super League politics. It had generally been an unhappy year. The Dogs had gone badly on the field; I’d been sacked as breakfast presenter at KICK-AM; I’d briefly taken a job as a sports columnist with The Australian and then resigned because the editor kept dropping humorous pieces I wrote, saying he ‘didn’t understand them’. Before I’d departed The Australian, though, I did get a chance to write about horseracing. I’d lost touch with the sport of my early teens over the years, but on return to the track I fell in love with a Bart Cummings-trained gelding called Saintly. So, on Melbourne Cup Day 1996 I was beside myself because Saintly was in the Cup. I’d been spellbound by him since the Rosehill Guineas in the autumn. He was such a beautiful, intelligent, relaxed horse that he almost had an aura. I’d stand in front of his stall and just watch him. Sounds crazy, but I wasn’t the only one. I once bumped into a fellow journalist on stall-watch. He confessed he did the same thing whenever Saintly raced in Sydney. One of my friends called him ‘the zen horse’ because he looked like he was meditating before races. My modest gambling habits hadn’t changed. I only had ten dollars each way on Saintly to win the Melbourne Cup, but I’d been spruiking him to everyone for so long it felt like I had more riding on it than that. The race itself was a dream—he never looked like losing. I was elated. Within minutes of the race ending my mobile phone rang. It was one of my problems on the other end of the line. A married man I’d foolishly fallen in love with was calling from the track at Flemington. He’d taken his wife on a Melbourne Cup trip in an attempt to patch up their marriage. ‘You’ve said Saintly would win this for so long, I just had to call and say congratulations.’ ‘Well, I had to get something right this year,’ I offered with what I hoped was the right mix of bitterness and flippancy. I’d stepped out of the function room at Canterbury League Club, where I was attending a Cup lunch, to take the call. After ending 210
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the brief conversation, I returned to where I’d been sitting with a group of colleagues and found the table vacant. My handbag was where I’d left it but my betting slip, with Saintly’s name on it, had vanished. At first I thought it was a practical joke, but no—someone had pilfered my winning ticket. It was only worth about $100, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. I knew it looked stupid crying over a lost betting slip, but it was more than that. I felt I’d been literally robbed of the first small victory I’d enjoyed for months. I was embarrassed about behaving so emotionally in front of players, officials and sponsors, and decided I’d better make a speedy exit. Before I could get out the door, Baa stopped me. ‘What’s the matter?’ I told him, apologised for being a drama queen, explained that it was the latest in a long line of things to go wrong and said I felt miserable and wanted to go home. ‘Will you be all right to drive?’ I nodded, teary-eyed. ‘Before you go, I bet I can make you laugh,’ he suddenly chirped. ‘Not right now you can’t. I promise you.’ He stared at me for a moment, then said with a grin, ‘Rothman’s Medal, 1985.’ ‘You bastard!’ I gasped. And then, despite myself, started laughing. ‘I thought you must’ve forgotten about that. You bastard!’ ‘Told you I could make you laugh,’ he said, smiled and walked off.
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16 Not-so-super friendly fire Not-so-super friendly fire
In October 1996 the full bench of the Supreme Court overturned almost all the original findings against Super League by Justice Burchett and made it possible for the breakaway competition to go ahead. Canterbury’s pre-season preparation for the Super League season was to culminate in a trial match against Penrith in Coffs Harbour on the New South Wales mid-north coast. The pressure was on to win hearts and minds to Super League and so Lynne Anderson asked me to set up as much pre-match publicity as I could. Although the north coast media showed initial resistance to the Super League concept, the club took out some strategic advertising and that opened up the lines of communication. In fact, the response built to the point where there were so many media and public relations commitments in the region that it was going to be difficult to coordinate them from Sydney. The possibility of me travelling with the team had never been broached before but I was worried that, if I lined up all these appearances and then wasn’t on hand to make sure everyone turned up on time, fully briefed and dressed appropriately, the end result would be negative publicity. Lynne agreed it made sense for me to go to Coffs. Bob Hagan didn’t seem thrilled. He told me I could go, 212
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but I’d have to drive myself because they wouldn’t pay my airfare. Eventually Lynne must have worn him down because I did fly up there for the last few days before the game. Bulldogs’ trips to Coffs Harbour in subsequent years have gone down in the annals of sporting infamy, with rape allegations twice being investigated by police. Team bonding and pre-season trips in rugby league have become euphemisms for drunken, predatory group rampages. My pre-season experience in 1997 with the Dogs in Coffs Harbour couldn’t have been more different. The players arrived at the hotel shortly after me. They’d come direct from several days in a fitness camp at nearby Lennox Head. I watched bemused as they poured off the team bus, checked in and then re-appeared quickly, swarming all over the hotel sporting facilities. I was in the bar overlooking the hotel grounds with a few of the officials and expected most players would be joining us there, but instead they hit the pool, the beach, and the tennis and basketball courts. I was surprised that, given free time after days of hard-core fitness work, this was what they did. Chris Anderson joked that he didn’t know what was wrong with modern-day footballers—they would ask if they could borrow the team bus to go to the movies. ‘In my day we would’ve gone to the pub,’ he said. I wasn’t with the players every waking hour of the Coffs Harbour stay, but I saw them several times a day—training, doing media work and at meals—and no one seemed seedy from burning the candle at both ends. There was no banter about boozing or picking up girls. I was genuinely impressed with how hard they worked and how cheerfully they carried out the myriad media and promotional appearances. Meal times were interesting. The regular hotel menu did not apply. The team’s dietician had drawn up a catering plan, which the hotel followed, and the players ate separately from other guests. Lunch and dinner were buffets of salads, pastas and fruit; breakfast was cereals and fruit. This was similar to the daily team lunches at Belmore Bowling Club. Going to the ‘bowlo’ for lunch was not an opportunity to sink a few beers with a steak sandwich. It was a place where a buffet of 213
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? salads, pasta and fruit was served. Rugby league is often pilloried as some kind of sporting backwater, yet I was surprised to read years later that Arsenal, a multimillion dollar club in English Premier League soccer, only introduced controlled team meals like this in late 1996 with the arrival of Arséne Wenger. Wenger was considered, in some quarters, a crackpot because this was so far from the norm in English soccer. What irritated me about the Coffs Harbour trip wasn’t the behaviour of the players but the officials. Incredibly lukewarm initially about my presence on the trip, they became accepting when they realised I could be pressed into service as a chauffeur. I had to drive this director to the airport or drop another into town; or ferry one to the golf course and then return to pick him up. It wasn’t objectionable work, and the men were pleasant enough to me, but I had a real job to do which was being interrupted to facilitate their socialising. I resented being treated as a ‘girl friday’. One of the great rorts of rugby league clubs is this pandering to directors. I was always told, even though there was legitimate work for me to do, that the club couldn’t afford to have me travelling with the team, running up extra airline and hotel bills. Yet directors— often with wives in tow—were all junketing to their hearts’ content. A director like Nello was earning his keep, working as team manager, but the bulk of them were expensive hangers-on. This attitude wasn’t pure sexism; it was like a tribal elitism. At the Bulldogs this generation of men, mostly retired players, felt they were genuine members of the tribe and people like marketing staff, male and female, were interlopers. There was an element of the Peter Pan complex involved too, I suspect. By ‘hanging out’ with the current team, these older men stayed connected to the most vital time in their own lives. Footballers undoubtedly develop a more heightened sense of kinship and common purpose than most of us experience with group activities. I imagine it’s like the bond shared by troops who have been to war together (not that I’m fond of analogies between war and football). They get used to being apart from family, friends and everyday realities. 214
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So excluding others helps them to re-create that ‘apartness’ that made them feel so special as players. The reason I suspect it’s a ‘re-creating the past’ impulse is that I never felt it was so strong among the active players. With no need to cling to something still part of their lives, I felt they were less preoccupied with keeping others on the outer.
Coffs Harbour gave me my first inkling of how ingrained the opposition to Super League was—even though the courts had ruled it legal. During a visit to Woodlawn, a high school at Lismore, the players were told some students had notes from their parents specifying that they weren’t to meet any Canterbury players because they’d signed with Super League. My belief that tensions would ease once the actual football began was perhaps naive. I thought most fans would get on with supporting their own team in whatever competition they contested and that ultimate victory would go to the competition that could attract desperately needed new supporters to the sport. With teams in Auckland, North Queensland, Adelaide and Perth, it seemed to me Super League was in a much stronger position to do that. The ARL teams were in places where they’d been marketing to an existing audience for some time. I was acutely aware how rare it was to meet anyone in Sydney who’d recently become interested in rugby league, yet I was always meeting people who’d just been to their first basketball game or their first AFL match. The marketing and media philosophy of Super League made sense to me. Sports lovers who were dismissive of rugby league saw it as a simple, violent game played by men with thick necks and thicker minds. I’d railed against this cliché for years. At last, there was a push to raise it above the biff-and-barge status quo and promote it as a game demanding skilled, fit athletes. The theory was good. Trouble is, as someone who stayed with the ARL once said to me, ‘Super League had the right game plan, but the wrong team to execute it’. 215
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There were several crushing disappointments from my point of view regarding Super League. A key one, which affected me day-in and day-out, was its poor relations with the media. You didn’t need to be Einstein to figure that Fairfax newspapers were going to be difficult to deal with, given that Super League was owned by their main opposition, News Ltd. In media manager conferences before the season, we were assured key stories wouldn’t be leaked to News Ltd newspapers. But they were. This wouldn’t have been so bad if, in exchange, we’d been getting the rails run from News Ltd papers that everyone accused us of getting. On the inside, it didn’t feel like they were on our side at all. The memo about the grand Super League philosophy of promoting the game and the athletes never seemed to have arrived at the desks of the Daily Telegraph rugby league writers. Negative stories, gossip and scuttlebutt still seemed their preferred angles. And just because a journalist worked for News Ltd didn’t mean he necessarily agreed with the concept of Super League. Several of the journalists I dealt with admitted, off the record, they thought what had happened to the game was wrong. One even said he’d been told he wouldn’t be getting a pay rise because News Ltd had overspent on Super League. But the biggest disconnect between the theory of News Ltd supporting its ownership of Super League through its newspapers was that in Sydney, where the battle had to be won, the national nature of the competition didn’t fit the parochial nature of the Daily Telegraph. The ARL essentially had a Sydney-based competition; the Telegraph was a Sydney-based paper and the mainstay of rugby league coverage. It continued to focus on Sydney teams, and the ARL had more of them. I wanted to tear my hair out, after one of the biggest upsets of the Super League season, when Brisbane were beaten by the struggling Hunter Mariners in a Friday night match. The Telegraph’s back page the next morning was devoted to reports on an ARL game between two Sydney clubs. I could understand the logic, and even admired their independence, but, given the hammering we were understandably 216
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getting from Fairfax and Packer outlets, I felt we were being pretty poorly compensated by News Ltd media. When the ABC secured the rights to televise Super League’s match of the day on Sunday evenings in 1997 and I was appointed its host, I came under another kind of ‘friendly fire’; this time from Media Watch and its host, Stuart Littlemore, who insinuated that some kind of Murdoch conspiracy had got me the gig. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It wasn’t Rupert power, but rather girl power that, for once, proved decisive.
When I first met Geraldine, or Gerry, O’Leary she was a producer’s assistant at ABC-TV Sport on the Saturday rugby league telecasts. We weren’t especially close then but we got on because she was easygoing, funny and a genuine rugby league fan. It was Gerry who got me back on the sideline for ABC-TV in 1994. She’d left sport, worked elsewhere in the ABC, climbed the ranks to producer and eventually migrated back to the sport department. On her return she unashamedly campaigned for the prestigious job of producing the league coverage, at one stage going into the office of the Head of Sport, Rory Sutton, holding two footballs at her crotch saying ‘Look, I’ve got the balls— give me the job’. Nineteen ninety-four was the most fun I had working on the sidelines. Gerry was efficient and, more importantly, she kept a sense of fun bubbling through each game. On a live telecast almost everyone wears headsets or earpieces that allow you to hear the producer. While male producers would bark instructions, or shout complaints, Gerry could often be heard giggling at the commentators’ remarks, dropping one-liners of her own, or even cheering the on-field action. Live television is riddled with pitfalls—there are always glitches and dramas—but she never lost her temper or got rattled. She always sounded like she was having the time of her life. And she was. But her dream job encountered an unexpected interruption. Not far into the season she found she was pregnant. While delighted that she and her partner were to be parents, she was a bit miffed about 217
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? the timing—the baby was due in September, which meant she wouldn’t be in the van for the 1994 grand final. Gerry didn’t get her old job back the following season. One male staffer actually said to me: ‘That’s the trouble with giving big jobs to women—they just turn around and get pregnant.’ But she returned to the sports department and, in late 1996 when the Head of Sport took long-service leave, she pushed for a stint in the top job. Originally she was offered six months as deputy to the Head of Sport, but she dug in and convinced management to allocate the top job in two three-month terms. She got one of those three-month terms. While she was acting Head of Sport, she pulled off a deal that brought Super League to the ABC. She knew the commercial freeto-air networks were being lobbied to show a Sunday Super League game, and she guessed rightly that none of them would pay what Super League wanted. So she phoned the man negotiating television rights, the industry heavyweight Ian Frykberg, and offered almost nothing except a national audience and the tradition that was associated with ABC rugby league. Her audacity paid off. The ABC ended up with a game on replay each Sunday evening leading up to the seven o’clock news. Plenty of people, like Stuart Littlemore, saw this as an undesirable acquisition—an unhealthy promotion of Rupert’s product. Gerry saw it differently. She knew that, with the advent of pay-TV, ABC Sport was demoralised and being squeezed out of even the leftovers that other free-to-air networks didn’t want. What use was a television sports department, she argued, with no sport to cover? Super League gave ABC a high-profile sport and, of the two competitions, it was the only one that was in any way national—an important consideration for the national broadcaster. Me being offered the job hosting the coverage had nothing to do with my role as a media manager for one of News Ltd’s teams, as suggested on Media Watch, but everything to do with the fact that for once there was an ‘old girls’, rather than ‘old boys’, network in play. It was a female friend of mine calling the shots. Even more crucially, I was the only member of the previous ABC-TV commentary 218
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team that was available. Warren Boland and Peter Jackson had taken jobs at FoxSports and John Peard, the only remaining musketeer, was such a close personal friend of the ARL’s John Quayle that it wasn’t likely he would be front man for the rival competition’s telecast. The downside of the deal, from my point of view, was that Gerry’s dealings with FoxSports had so impressed their management that they poached her. Scurrilously, Littlemore suggested the job was her payoff for placing the nasty Murdoch-infested competition at the ABC. Gerry, a career ABC employee who’d started there as a teenager and agonised over the decision to leave, was hurt by the Media Watch accusation. As a connoisseur of bitchiness, I loved Littlemore’s Media Watch and couldn’t believe I’d finally made it when its host started blazing away at me. It was odd, though, watching myself exposed as a Murdoch lackey, despite all my time with the ABC. They hunted down my name in a Super League Media Guide, proving I was working for Canterbury. You had to hand it to that crack research team. The question I would have liked to put to Mr Littlemore was what he thought of all the men before me who’d managed to be ABC commentators and at the same time been on the payroll of various football clubs—like Artie Beetson, Peter Jackson, John Peard. Were they guilty of conflict of interest too? Or, because they were men, did they have more legitimate reasons to be associated with football clubs? The Sunday afternoon Super League program was hardly a runaway ratings success. But if you think it’s something I regret, forget it. Yes, it took a momentous and unhappy alignment of planets for the circumstances to arise, but I was hosting a national rugby league program and in no lifetime was I going to pass up that opportunity.
Nineteen ninety-seven, the Year of Super League, proved another disappointing one for the Bulldogs. They just scraped into the finals, only to be knocked out by Penrith in the first game. There were offfield dramas too. The one that made most headlines was an eruption of crowd violence at Belmore on a night when the theme had been ‘Multiculturalism’. 219
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Lynne Anderson had made a quantum leap for rugby league when she took over as marketing manager, by actually researching the demographics of the area in which the team was based. It wasn’t that extensive research was needed to prove that the area was dominated by people of non-English speaking backgrounds, it was just she wanted to know who needed to be included if the club was to be strong on its home turf. Once armed with the information, Lynne put out feelers to various communities in the area and had a couple of successful multiculturally themed days at Belmore, with ethnic groups showcasing their traditional music and dancing, and the costumes of their countries of origin. One Monday night game, against Penrith, was set aside for a multicultural celebration. Unfortunately it was a tight game and the Bulldogs lost. A controversial refereeing decision went against us late in the game, right in front of an overly excitable bunch on the hill, where there were plenty of Lebanese flags flying. When the postmatch media conference concluded, we were told to stay inside the grandstand because gangs of thugs were running amok and had even thrown a brick through the windshield of a police car. It was a disgraceful episode and, although there were no serious injuries, it did the club untold damage. Worse still, it unleashed on us the usual suspects, who were looking for a stick to beat multiculturalism with—like radio right-wingers Alan Jones and Stan Zemanek. We were accused of ‘bringing it on ourselves’ by encouraging ‘these people’ to come to our games, and we even had some alleged supporters tell us we should ban Lebanese from attending Bulldogs games. This last suggestion, seriously proffered in letters and faxes, always fascinated me. I wanted to ask the proponents how they envisaged it working. Should fans be asked to present birth certificates at the turnstiles? If so, did they need parents who were Australian or was being born here good enough? What about if they had one Lebanese parent? Perhaps we were to just filter out anyone who looked Lebanese. One ‘fan’ even suggested we sack Hazem El Masri because he was attracting Lebanese Muslims. 220
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Getting to know Hazem was one of the real pleasures of my time with the Bulldogs. He gave me a perspective on the Muslim faith and Muslim people that I might not have otherwise had, a perspective that’s come in handy given the world events of recent years. Hazem’s ‘arrival’ roughly coincided with my own. He’d won a lower-grade player award at Belmore the year before I started working there, and then made his first-grade debut early in the 1996 season. A local kid, who’d played mainly soccer until his final year at Belmore Boys High School, Hazem came from a strict Muslim family and a more respectful and polite young man you could not hope to meet. When he had his first trip away with the club for a game in Perth, he told me it was the first time he’d ever spent a night somewhere other than under his parents’ roof. Although the team was booked into quality accommodation, his mum packed him meals for the time he’d be away. I used to ‘ghost’ an article for Hazem in the local Arab language newspaper El Telegraph. That was a surreal experience. I’d meet with him every week and we’d compose the article in English; then we’d send it off to the editor, who’d send us a copy of the paper with the article printed in Arabic. The printed text would include the occasional apparently untranslatable term in its original English, like ‘State of Origin’ or ‘Rod Silva’, which never failed to make me smile. Once I asked Hazem if he was happy with the way the column was turning out and he shrugged. ‘I don’t read Arabic,’ he admitted. ‘But my father says it’s good.’ One of the most remarkable demonstrations of Hazem’s strength of character and devotion to his faith came each year during preseason training when he had to observe fasting for Ramadan. The Muslim religious period required him to go without any food or water between sunrise and sundown for a period of weeks. I’ve heard of other professional Muslim sportsmen coping with Ramadan, mostly they are in northern hemisphere professional sports like soccer or basketball. In those countries they’re fasting in winter—between a 221
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? much later sunrise and a much earlier sunset. They aren’t dealing with pre-season training sessions in summer heat and, trust me, preseason training is where the hardcore fitness work is done. There were times when Hazem would cycle from Belmore to Campbelltown and back, close to 100 kilometres, in 35-degree heat without so much as a sip of water. But he never pleaded for sympathy or special consideration. He used to set his alarm clock for half an hour before sunrise each day so he could eat and drink as much water as possible to ensure he stayed hydrated during such sessions. We often talked about his religion, as I didn’t know much about Islam and was deeply curious. I remember telling him how Ramadan reminded me of Lent as it used to be practised by my strict Catholic relatives. Much in Hazem’s reserved demeanor and sheltered upbringing reminded me of the strictly religious Christians I’d encountered in my convent-school childhood. We talked a lot about the crowd problems that beset the Bulldogs and how he felt about the blame being laid on the Lebanese community. When there had been media headlines or talkback scare-mongering about ‘the Lebanese’, he said there was a fear and loathing on the streets of the area. He described how people would give him a wide berth when he was just walking along the footpath. If he went into a shop and stood next to someone waiting to be served, they’d move to the other end of the counter. He said he hated feeling people were scared of him, but for some young Arab men that could be a thrill. The media scare-mongering played to their feelings of notoriety and self-worth and hurt the rest of the community. He helped me understand that problems at football games really had nothing to do with the Bulldogs and everything to do with what was happening in the area that was the Bulldogs’ heartland, suburbs like Belmore, Lakemba, Campsie and Bankstown. It was easy for fans to say, every time there was crowd trouble at a Bulldogs game ‘Do something about it!’. But everyone was low on practical specifics. Police and security were increased, video surveillance used and national flags banned. Eventually the Bulldogs moved their home games to the Olympic complex at Homebush, partly because 222
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those stadiums were easier to keep secure; but then the violence erupted outside the ground—on trains, at railway stations or at away games. The more violence there was, the more the media stirred the bigotry and the more these thugs felt they’d made the big time.
The ‘us versus them’ gulf inside the club was widening too. Coach Chris Anderson and football manager Garry Hughes were not even on speaking terms. As results continued to disappoint, Garry had called aside one of the senior players and told him Chris’s tactic of using a flat line in attack was flawed and that he believed the side should go back to standing deeper in attack. The player, loyal to his coach, reported the conversation to Chris, who fronted Garry and told him that tactics were not the preserve of the football manager. Garry submitted his resignation, but Bob Hagan refused to accept it. The catch was that, while Bob didn’t accept the resignation, he also did nothing to mediate the situation. As an aside to the tactical debate I can’t help adding that during a conversation with Warren Ryan that season, the coaching guru happened to make the observation—and I promise you it was unsolicited—that he thought Anderson was onto something with the use of a flatter line of attack. Ryan, who was far from chummy with Anderson, explained that, with the defensive line now back ten metres, the old principle of standing deep in attack so that the ball runner could build momentum before hitting the defensive line was pointless. He thought Anderson was one of the few coaches who’d twigged to it. The feud between Chris and Garry was kept quiet, but oddly enough another rumour kept surfacing in the media: That Chris had agreed to leave the Dogs and join the franchise being formed in Melbourne. Throughout the 1997 season, as Super League and the ARL conducted their separate competitions, negotiations went on behind the scenes to bring the warring groups back together into a unified competition. One of the deals being hatched to bring this about involved 223
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? Super League boss, John Ribot, being set up with a new franchise in Melbourne while the other non-Sydney Super League clubs, Hunter Mariners, Adelaide Rams and Perth Reds, were shut down. Off the record, Chris admitted to me that Ribot had offered him the job in Melbourne, but he hadn’t accepted it. He hadn’t given an answer. He told me it wasn’t the kind of decision he’d make during a season, certainly not during a season when his team was still in contention for the finals. Yet, with monotonous regularity it was reported that Anderson coaching Melbourne was a done deal. There was even a hideous story floated that Chris was leaving Sydney because he was having an affair and he couldn’t possibly maintain his job at the Bulldogs while cheating on Bullfrog’s daughter. This was insidious and Chris asked me to see if I could find where the stories that he was leaving were coming from. Understandably none of the journalists who were running the story would name their sources, but a few indicated that the stories were coming from within the Canterbury organisation—the League Club it seemed was deeply involved. ‘Looks like someone’s trying to tell me something,’ Chris said with a bitter chuckle when I reported this to him. On the night of the loss to Penrith in the elimination final at Belmore, which marked the season’s end for the Dogs, there was a scene in a bar at the Canterbury League Club. Garry Hughes’s son Glen got drunk, abused Chris and wanted to fight him. Glen was angry because he’d been on the bench, but never got onto the field. Nello told me about it because he figured it was such a public confrontation that it was likely to reach the media. Eventually the story turned up in Rugby League Week, written by Daniel Lane with an anti-Anderson spin on it quoting an unnamed source. Elsewhere in the same issue one of the directors was quoted saying what an excellent first-grade coach Steve Folkes would be. The day after the League Club incident, Chris announced that he’d taken the Melbourne job. He confessed to me the confrontation with Glen had almost had the opposite effect on him. ‘Made me want to stay and fight the bastards,’ he snarled, then added with a rueful smile, ‘but when I sobered up, it looked different.’ 224
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The postscript to the criticism of Chris’s flat-line in attack came less than two years later, when the Melbourne Storm won the grand final using the tactics that had caused the final rift between him and his football manager at Belmore. In retrospect I often wonder why I didn’t exit the club when Lynne and Chris did. I remember saying to Bob Hagan and club president, Barry Nelson, when they asked if I’d stay, that I would ‘as long as the people who caused this don’t benefit from it’. Barry told me he had no idea what I was talking about. I mentioned again that club politics were being played out through leaks to the media, but they both shrugged as if it were unimportant. When, five years later, someone from within the club leaked the information that exposed the Bulldogs salary cap rorting and ended the careers of both those men, I had little sympathy.
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17 The oasis that turned out to be a mirage The oasis that turned out to be a mirage
If I had left the Bulldogs at the end of 1997, I would have missed the roller coaster ride that was 1998. I wouldn’t trade the experience of being part of a club involved in grand final week for anything— except of course for the same experience with the week ending in a grand final win. 1998 marked the start of a new era for the club and the sport. The ARL and Super League had hammered out a re-unification deal in 1997, so by 1998 the split in the game was over and we were playing in the new National Rugby League. We also had a new head coach. Steve Folkes, who’d coached the Canterbury Super League reserve team to a grand final victory in 1997, was the obvious choice to replace his brother-in-law Chris Anderson at the helm. An intensely apolitical character, Steve was probably ideal for the immediate postSuper League era. If it made any difference to him who was running the competition, or indeed the club itself, he never let on. I always got the impression that to Steve a rugby league competition was a rugby league competition was a rugby league competition. He was the type who’d rather cycle to Wollongong and back than sit in a meeting 226
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with anyone about anything so, really, he just got on with the job of coaching the football team. If there were any Super League withdrawal pains, or regrets or recriminations about what had gone down, I don’t recall them being front and centre at Belmore. Then again I was being kept so busy, maybe I just didn’t notice. Early in 1998 the Canterbury League Club announced they were backing the bid of a new franchise seeking entry into the National Basketball League, the West Sydney Razorbacks. Ultimately I was appointed the team’s media manager, which added considerably to the complexity of my working life. I was delighted, even though it meant I would be rolling straight off the back of a football season into the basketball season towards the end of the year. The reasons behind our involvement in basketball were a little murky. Canterbury League Club was pushing for the construction of a new sports stadium complex at Liverpool and they wanted the Razorbacks based at this stadium. Plans for what eventually became known, or notorious, as ‘The Oasis Centre’ had been floating around for as long as I’d been at the club. It was the pet project of the League Club chairman, Gary McIntyre, who subjected the football club staff to presentations from the pulpit involving Powerpoint slide shows, scale models, artists’ impressions and reams of rhetoric about economies of scale, multi-sport platforms and the truckloads of money that would be made from what would effectively be a Canterbury casino adjacent to this sporting wonderland. My immediate boss, Alison Morris—a former New South Wales Rugby Union marketing manager, who’d replaced Lynne Anderson at the end of 1997—kept advising me to stay clear of the Liverpool stadium business. A no-nonsense woman, who’d easily pass as a double for CJ Cregg on The West Wing, Alison herself was resisting being drawn into its politics and not purely because she hated going to meetings where McIntyre insisted on calling her ‘pet’. Liverpool was, she maintained, League Club business, not Football Club business. There were community lobby groups being organised to combat the stadium plans, some of them apparently financed by other rich licensed clubs in the outer south-west, and while we were 227
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? providing marketing and logistical support for the Razorbacks and Bulldogs, we simply couldn’t buy into doing public relations and media liaison on the Oasis project as well. McIntyre and his cronies kept trying though. Fortunately I was no longer around when this vision splendid came horribly unstuck.
Even though the Bulldogs didn’t win the big one in 1998, their run through the finals was extraordinary. In a ten-team finals system for the 20-team competition, the Bulldogs finished ninth. Every week they had to play elimination games against teams that had finished ahead of them if they were to reach the grand final. And during most of those games they danced dangerously on the brink of oblivion. They came back from 12–nil down in the first week, against St George, to win 20–12; their only ‘easy’ win was 23–2 against an injury-riddled Norths, in week two; in the third week, they trailed Newcastle 16–nil before scoring 28 unanswered points to win in extra time 28–16; to top it off, they reached the grand final by giving arch-rivals Parramatta an 18–2 start with 11 minutes to go. They caught them with three minutes remaining, took the game into extra time and won 32–20. Dogs fans were just dizzy with the drama. And it had been a season where the Dogs had specialised in drama. The biggest headline before the end-of-season surge had been the shenanigans of the lovelorn Solomon Haumono. Now that in itself was an episode to make a media manager think about writing a book.
Solomon was a sweetheart. Not the sharpest tool in the shed, but a big, handsome, softly spoken Tongan man whom nobody at the club disliked. He’d been signed by Chris Anderson from Manly at the start of the Super League season. Although Manly contested (successfully) the defection to Super League of another of their players, Jack Elsegood, they released Solomon without complaint. Chris later said they must have known exactly what they were doing. 228
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‘Solo’ was the son of a former heavyweight boxing champ from Tonga, who’d moved first to New Zealand and then to Australia to further his boxing career. Solomon’s dad loomed large in his life, as did his mum, who became famous for running onto the field one night at Belmore after her son was knocked unconscious in a tackle. The sight of Mrs Haumono sidestepping director, Arthur Coorey, just inside the boundary fence on her mercy dash was a highlight of my time at Belmore. Had Mr Coorey’s reflexes and lateral movement been up to the task and he’d reached Mrs Haumono, my money would have been on her to break the tackle anyway. Solomon was a worry in many ways. A lot of basic life skills seemed beyond him. A member of the coaching staff would usually pick him up and deliver him to training to make sure he got there; he used to bring his household bills into the office, where the girls would tell him how to make payments. I knew early on he was a disastrous quote waiting to happen. While I was compiling information for the team media guide regarding send-offs and suspensions, I’d asked on a player questionnaire: ‘Do you have a record at the judiciary?’ Solomon asked whether he really had to answer that question. ‘Well, the media can check the records anyway,’ I explained. ‘It’s just part of making the job easier for them.’ He nodded sheepishly. ‘OK. Well one night I had a fight with my girlfriend. I punched a glass door and she called the police.’ ‘Oh my god, Solo,’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s not what I meant. I meant the rugby league judiciary.’ I made a note to myself to try to shepherd this guy away from interviews. But there was no protecting him once he decided to go AWOL mid-season and travel halfway around the world to see his ex-girlfriend. Everyone at the club knew that Solomon was heartbroken about English model Gabrielle Richens returning to England. He’d tell anyone who’d listen how beautiful she was, how he adored her and how much he missed her. Sometimes he’d sneak the use of an office phone to make a long distance call to speak with her. He shouldn’t have been doing that but, like I said, he was a sweetheart and the girls in the office were suckers for a romantic story. 229
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? When it came to being suckers for a romantic story, the girls in the office—it turned out—had nothing on the media. When Solo failed to show for a training session mid-season, no one, including his friends or parents, could find him. Initially there was some alarm, but it soon emerged that he’d done a runner to visit Gabrielle in England. The media went into a frenzy. It didn’t hurt that the story gave them lots of excuses to run raunchy images of Ms Richens. It was an eye-opener being under the big top when this threeringed circus got going. Solomon was suddenly ‘a star Bulldog’, rather than a player having a mediocre season, and Gabrielle was talked about as if she was a super-model, rather than an extremely attractive woman who’d been trying desperately to break into the serious modelling ranks. For days it was almost impossible to get anything done at Belmore—the place was simply crawling with reporters from alleged current affairs shows and women’s magazines. At first the players and coaching staff found this amusing, but after a few days it became tiresome. For coach Steve Folkes—never one with much time for reporters anyway—this was a perfect example of everything that was wrong with the media. Here was a player who’d done the wrong thing and left his team-mates in the lurch; but he was being treated as a folk hero, the footballing Romeo who had given up everything for the woman he loved. Ironically, in one television interview Steve gave (probably through gritted teeth), while he was declaring for about the millionth time that all he could do was deal with the players who were present, not those who weren’t, you could see Darryl Halligan in the background of the shot, practising goalkicking. At the time Darryl was on the verge of setting a new world record for the most number of consecutive successful goal attempts, but his achievement was being overshadowed by the Solo silliness. Eventually the spotlight got so bright that it attracted Anthony Mundine. ‘The Man’, then playing with St George, announced he’d personally travel to England, find his friend Solomon and bring him back. Solomon duly returned, with Gabrielle in tow, and went direct from a secret hiding place to the Nine Network’s Footy Show for an 230
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exclusive interview. When he eventually presented himself at Belmore, he was relegated to park football by officials who were heartily sick of the whole saga. Possibly this ungrateful reaction goes part of the way to explaining the grief Mundine went out of his way to cause our club at the end of that season.
When Bulldogs forward Barry Ward walked into the office on the Monday morning following the Bulldogs elimination final win over St George, I told him I was going to wash his mouth out with soap. There had been allegations in one of the Sunday papers that he’d made an obscene and racist comment to Anthony Mundine during the match at Kogarah. I was hoping he was going to tell me he hadn’t used the term ‘black cunt’, as he was reported to have done, but he owned up right away. ‘You know what’s weird though, Deb,’ he added immediately. ‘It wasn’t Mundine that I said it to.’ Big Bad Bazza recounted what had happened. There was heavy sledging between the sides (other players confirmed this) and during one of these ugly exchanges Robbie Simpson, an Aboriginal St George player, called Barry ‘a fat cunt’. He’d unfortunately countered instantly with ‘Yeah, and you’re a black cunt’. Mundine, Barry assured me, was nowhere in the vicinity. Video replays of the incident indicated that Mundine was, indeed, well out of audio range. Now, the fact that one of our players had directed this kind of racist slur at anyone was not something to defend. But what was truly bizarre was the way Mundine talked to the media about it—about how Barry had insulted him, how hurt and angry he was, and how the NRL was morally obliged to take serious action against Barry. In one of his many interviews on the issue, Mundine said he’d been so outraged and offended that he’d wanted to find Barry right after the game and fight him. This amused Barry no end because, at the end of the game, Mundine had walked up to him, shaken his hand and said ‘Well played, Relfy’. Robert Relf was another Bulldogs forward who played in the game and Barry said he remembered Mundine’s 231
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? comment precisely because he was a bit miffed the St George star didn’t even know who he was. Barry was digging in his heels about apologising to someone whom he hadn’t insulted. Meantime the NRL contacted both clubs and both players, asking them to refrain from making public comment until the matter had been fully investigated. Barry complied, but Mundine continued to take every opportunity to grandstand. He’d even walk straight out of mediation sessions organised by the NRL after being instructed not to comment, and give doorstop interviews. On television Barry was the surly guy growling ‘no comment’, who kept walking. He got hate mail and death threats. It seemed the NRL didn’t know what to do with such a hot potato. They fined Barry heavily, but released a statement saying they’d found him a ‘truthful witness’. The implied comparison was there for those who knew the real story. Several weeks later, on appeal, they reduced the fine considerably.
Grand final week is one of the wildest atmospheres you can imagine in a workplace. And hectic. As our opponents were Brisbane Broncos, the Bulldogs were the focus of the entire Sydney media contingent. It seemed every rugby league reporter in town and half of the non-league media was beating a path to our door—or dialling my mobile phone. Early in the week long-simmering strained relations between myself and Garry Hughes boiled over. After a training session attended by a huge media contingent, I asked Garry at what point in the week he wanted sessions to go behind closed doors. He casually informed me he’d told some of the media that morning ‘that was it’. For the first time I totally and openly lost my temper with him. ‘You imposed a media ban?’ I gasped. He gave me a self-satisfied look and nodded, saying: ‘I told them that would be it for the week.’ ‘You can’t just do that,’ I shrieked. He told me it was quite normal for a club to impose a media ban during the week of a big game, to allow the players to focus on 232
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preparation. It was an insult he should even tell me this—of course I knew there would be a media blackout at some stage, but I’d expected we’d discuss the timing. That was it. I was in full fly-off-the-handle mode. I told him he was so ignorant about the media and so full of hatred for it that he was the last person who should be making such decisions. How could I tell anyone who’d not attended that morning’s training that they’d missed their last opportunity of grand final week? You couldn’t impose a media ban without warning. My tirade was so loud and so peppered with four-letter words that the entire office stopped and gawked as I stood flailing my arms in the doorway of his office. It wasn’t a pretty performance, but it was the culmination for me of a couple of years of total frustration. He’d embarrassed me on so many occasions by either making arrangements with media and refusing to tell me about them, or by making commitments for players that clashed with pre-existing media appointments I’d made for them. One time he sent away from training a television crew that had my promise of access to a player. When I fronted him about it, he gave me some spiel about how ‘In my day TV crews just turned up to training and took their chances; if they didn’t get any interview, bad luck’. I tried explaining how cutbacks at all television stations had made allocation of TV crews incredibly problematic. His response was just a shrug and a ‘Well, that’s their problem, not ours’.
Garry Hughes had a Miss Havisham-like attitude to the media, still seeking vengeance because some reporter had used a misquote to make him look bad early in his career. He repeatedly cited this story as justification for any ill-treatment he dished out to the media. There were many times when I felt the media treated the Bulldogs—and rugby league in general—unfairly, unethically and arrogantly, but I spent most of my time at the club trying to convince players and officials that the way to deal with bad journalists was to help the good ones. But Garry was firm in his belief there had not been anyone 233
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? decent in the media since Frank Hyde and Alan Clarkson retired. ‘In my day . . .’ was his typical opening line in response to so many situations. Once, when I had a major problem with the allocation of a broadcast line into a radio commentary box and sought his help, all I got was the story of how ‘in his day’ Frank Hyde used to do radio with a fold-up table and a really long lead that ran from the grandstand to the sideline, and the club didn’t have to worry about it. A quaint story that did nothing to help with the problem at hand. I believe an attitude of extreme media loathing eventually seeped through the whole club. It found a willing disciple in coach Steve Folkes, who was by nature introverted; a man of actions rather than words. By the time of the salary cap and Coffs Harbour rape scandals of the early 2000s, the prevailing club mindset seemed to be that the media was responsible for all their woes. And while they refused to accept responsibility for their own errors, they continued to make them.
In that grand final week, eventually, after Alison Morris went in to bat for me with Bob Hagan, the deadline for media interaction with the club was extended. But my confrontation with Garry had been so savage I wondered if I’d signed my own death warrant at the club. It was undoubtedly the beginning of the end. Grand final day itself, like all of life’s big occasions, was a blur. The Bulldogs were also in the lower-grade grand final that preceded the main game and some of my favourite players were involved in that match, including Hazem El Masri, Duncan McRae and Robbie Mears. The team, coached by Terry Lamb, continued the comingback-from-the-brink theme by trailing Parramatta 22–nil at half-time and winning 26–22. It had begun to feel like you couldn’t stop a Bulldogs side from coming back from the dead, even by driving a stake through its heart. Unfortunately first grade went against the trend. The Dogs led 12–10 at half-time and it was the Broncos who poured it on in the 234
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second half, completely shutting us out for a 38–12 final score. I didn’t feel as deflated as I expected to, but the sight of the devastated players after the match was heartbreaking. I didn’t join in what I expected was going to be a long and torrid night at the League Club. There was talk of head-shaving being the party-trick du jour, and I didn’t fancy that. But also I had to prepare for a stressful week ahead. I was back in the basketball business, and the season was about to start.
I threw myself immediately into my work with the Razorbacks, who were a tremendous group of players. Derek Rucker, the captain, was a media manager’s dream. A college-educated American whose father had been a football commentator, Derek understood the media, was a polished speaker and was regarded as one of the best-ever US imports to the NBL. John Rillie, my favourite, had a sense of humour that was as lethal as his three-point shot. He kept me fully armed with anecdotes about team-mates and other players in the league—and didn’t mind telling a joke or two against himself either. He had me laughing to the point of tears when he described his physical condition after the team’s first session with the Bulldogs’ tough fitness trainer, Billy Johnstone. A lanky type with pale arms that had all the muscle definition of a spaghetti noodle, Rillie recounted that, after one hour of weight training with Billy, he almost couldn’t get home. He didn’t have the strength left to lift the handle on his car door and, during the drive, he had to pull over and rest for a while because his arms hurt too much to steer. The basketball season started in early October, but I’d been working on pre-season publicity since around July. At the time we’d started with the Razorbacks it appeared the Bulldogs weren’t likely to make the finals, let alone be still alive into the last week of the rugby league season. The longer the Dogs stayed in the finals series, the further back preparations for the Razorbacks season got pushed. It was enjoyable but frantic. 235
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? To keep me on the hop even more, the Bulldogs started planning their intended move to the Olympic Stadium at Homebush. That required attention; the Razorbacks required attention; the Football Club annual report booklet had to be compiled; and by now I was running websites for both the Bulldogs and the Razorbacks. By early January 1999, pre-season football preparations were on me again. At this point I was still fending off requests from the League Club to help them generate positive publicity for the Oasis Centre and the League Club was demanding I write reports on the football and basketball teams for their own publications. Eventually I went to Bob Hagan and asked if I had to do work for the League Club because I already had enough on my plate. He told me there was nothing he could do about the League Club demands.
In early January 1999 I was called into the marketing manager’s office one evening when we were the only staff left in the building. Alison was furious. The Razorbacks had given a school basketball clinic at Lansvale and I’d arranged for local media coverage. For some inexplicable reason the players had used Sydney Kings basketballs. Photos had been taken, team management was embarrassed and I was going to carry the can for the cock-up because I hadn’t notified them that media was expected. At this point I’d had a gutful of trying to juggle a dozen things at any one time. I told Alison I assumed the Razorbacks would never be stupid enough to use Kings’ basketballs at any public function. Her retort was that it was my job not to assume anything. I couldn’t believe I was the one being chewed out over this and in frustration I offered to resign. Alison’s response shocked me. She told me it might be a good idea for me to get out before the football board finally got their way and had me sacked. I’d known for some time I wasn’t popular with the board. I was frequently having to deal with ridiculously trivial complaints from these men. The most aggravating came whenever my name was mentioned as a Bulldogs spokesperson—which wasn’t often. I’d be 236
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accused of seeking publicity for myself. This made me spit chips. I’d given up the back page of the Sun-Herald sports section to take their job, and yet they thought I was getting cheap thrills out of seeing my name in print. By this time I’d been sitting on the Board of the Greyhound Racing Authority of New South Wales for a year, advising them on media and marketing affairs; yet officials in a sport where I had a much better grounding insisted on treating me as some kind of junior office-girl that needed to be kept in line and threatened. ‘I thought as long as I had Bob’s [Hagan] support at board level I was OK,’ I said, a little shaken. ‘I wouldn’t count on Bob standing in their way for much longer,’ Alison offered frankly. And so there it was. After three amazing years, I had now resigned as media manager of my beloved Bulldogs. And the straw that had broken the camel’s back? A few Sydney Kings’ basketballs. When I thought about it, it was ironic—it had been the media managing experience I’d picked up at the Sydney Kings in the late 80s that had indirectly led to me getting the job at Canterbury in the first place.
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PaRT IV A woman of the world and the web
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18 Meantime, in the real world Meantime, in the real world
When I resigned as media manager from the Bulldogs, in early 1999, I didn’t cut all ties with the club. I offered to maintain what had become my pet interest—the website. As far back as 1997, out of frustration with the mainstream media and their apparent lack of interest in non-scandal related stories, I’d decided to build the Bulldogs a website. Every day I felt I had Bulldogs news and information that fans would be interested in, even if the mainstream media wasn’t. The internet offered an opportunity to communicate direct with our fans. The Bulldogs office was the most technologically regressive office I’ve ever worked in. I was shocked when I started working there to find, for example, that week-to-week records on the players—who played what game, how many points they’d scored—were written up by hand on filing cards that were kept in a box. Because they were initially expecting me to work without a computer, I bought myself a laptop. An organisation that kept its player statistics on bits of cardboard wasn’t going to pay to have a website built. So, when my daughter Jemima told me she’d learned at high school how to make a web page, I decided I should be able to learn too. Of course I created a 241
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? website that looked like something a high school kid would have built, but I kept it full of current club news. As the website ran from my computer, I could upload information within minutes of it coming to me in the office at Belmore, rather than send it on to some thirdparty web company being paid to do the job for us. By late 1998 I’d also designed and was running a Razorbacks official website, plus emailing weekly newsletters to a database I’d built up of supporters of both clubs. It was these services that I offered to continue providing as a part-time contractor after my exit as media manager—and the club accepted. Most of the club directors didn’t know a website from a Gameboy, so in cyberspace I was free from their interference. In late 1998 I’d been offered a spot as a panellist on the Triple M radio sport show, The Deadset Legends, for the following year. The show involved talking sport for a couple of hours each Saturday morning with Greg Matthews and Ray Warren. I felt I was selling my principles down the river by accepting money again from Austereo—the company that owned both Triple M and 2DAY-FM, and had shown me the door at 2DAY after Elly was born—but they were offering me almost as much money for two hours on a Saturday morning as I was getting for what was often a six-day week at Belmore. It made my exit from the Bulldogs less financially disastrous, but I’d been doing occasional stints presenting radio programs on Saturday and Sunday mornings at the ABC’s 702 for a few years, mainly over the summer holidays, and my new commitment to Triple M ruled out any more of that. The Deadset Legends was more fun off-air than it was on-air, where the typical Austereo format restrictions made it a join-the-dots exercise with little spontaneity. Argue for a few minutes on the sports topic du jour; stop for a Midnight Oil track you’ve heard a thousand times before; add a slogan, a time call; and then away you go again. But Greg and ‘Rabbits’ were hysterical off-air: Greg always looking shagged out from a big Friday night, relating stories of exploits that should have killed him; Ray, the hypochondriac, convinced that something was killing him. I always sensed that if his latest illness wasn’t going 242
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to finish him off, the shock of hearing about Greg’s lifestyle surely would. We’d split our sides laughing; then the microphones would go live and we’d run through the motions on-air, until the light went off again and the fun recommenced. After the one year, Triple M didn’t renew my contract, but that was fine because I wasn’t planning on staying in any case. Late in 1999 I’d agreed that in 2000 I’d join most of my ex-Triple J colleagues in the launch of Big Fat Radio, an internet radio station. The timing was impeccable. Just as we were about to take the world by storm, the Nasdaq crashed. We lasted a matter of months before the money dried up and we drifted off in ragged pieces like other bits of the burst tech bubble. After the demise of Big Fat Radio I took some part-time work at Australian Consolidated Press, sub-editing a basketball magazine that happened to be operating on the same floor as Rugby League Week. Because I was already there, I was asked if I wanted to help out with the post-season edition of Rugby League Week in 2000. That led to me getting a few days’ work a week on the magazine for the following season. So, I ended up spending 2001 reporting on league for the magazine I’d grown up reading. It was a peculiar, paying-my-dues-in-reverse kind of assignment. In all my years working in rugby league media, the one job I’d never done was the most basic one of attending a game and writing a match report. Suddenly I was doing it. It was a worthwhile, if belated, experience. One of those boxes that I got to tick and say ‘done it’. That year I became a grandmother when Jemima had her daughter Celeste. Gradually the idea of traipsing around dressing rooms talking to men half my age in various states of undress started to feel like the antithesis of growing old gracefully. I was working with some lively young guys at League Week who were tremendously accepting of me, but I couldn’t help feeling that, for them, it must have been like having an aunty in the office. Even though my colleagues didn’t seem concerned, I was still running the Bulldogs’ website. My sense of conflicted interest, whenever 243
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? I was called upon to write about the Doggies for the magazine, sat uneasily with me. Sure, the website role meant I had excellent access to information and I got through 2001 without feeling either role was compromised, but I had a sense of dread that, sooner or later, Bulldogs management would do something requiring me either to cover for them and keep my website job, or to write the truth and be forced to sever my ties with them unpleasantly. My instincts proved sound. I resigned as the website manager at the end of 2001. By mid-2002 the story that the Bulldogs had rorted the salary cap turned up in the course of a Sydney Morning Herald investigation into the increasingly shady dealings connected with the Oasis project at Liverpool. Then in 2003 a pre-season rape scandal at Coffs Harbour had the team in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. An even nastier and more publicised rape allegation resulted from their return to Coffs in pre-season 2004. I had no sympathy for the architects of the salary cap scandal. They were playing hardball that turned out to be a bit harder than they expected. In the last conversation I had with Bullfrog before he died, he told me he’d warned Bob Hagan that, if Garry McIntyre was allowed to get too close to the football club, he’d ‘take it down’. When the Bulldogs were stripped of their points in 2002 and relegated to the bottom of the table, I felt like I was watching a Bullfrog prophesy come true. The rape incidents upset me more. The media image of the Bulldogs players became that of heavy-drinking, sexist neanderthals. That wasn’t my experience of the Bulldogs guys at all and I got no joy from seeing them portrayed as such. I don’t know what really happened on either occasion in Coffs Harbour. Maybe there was rape, maybe there wasn’t. But even if there were no crimes committed, it seems there was unsavoury behaviour by a small group of players, who were then protected by the club closing ranks around them. As a result, no reputations were saved; all players were tarnished and those whose actions had brought public grief on the club avoided being held publicly accountable. The preference for looking the other way, covering up, denying and then 244
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blaming the media had finally seeped down into the very fabric of the club and rotted it. It was a media relations disaster and the fact that no charges were ever laid in either case didn’t make everything OK. The people I felt most for were those players who’d been far removed from whatever had gone on, but whose names were dragged through the mud anyway. How did they face their wives or girlfriends, or their families? How did they prove they were not among those accused? It was an abuse of the club’s legendary team spirit making them wear the accusations as a group. I’d love to believe nothing at all happened on either occasion, that the police were totally taken in, twice, by a couple of women with extremely vivid imaginations. But I’m not that naive. I’m acutely aware of the other side of this coin. Seeing the behaviour of some women around football players really did come as a shock to me. I’d hero-worshipped plenty of football players in my youth, but it never occurred to me to just hang around in their orbit on the off chance of screwing them. Or one of their teammates. Yet that appeared to be the ambition of dozens of women who loitered provocatively outside dressing sheds, at the League Club and around any public appearance the players made. Some of them might as well have had the word ‘available’ tattooed on their foreheads. Perhaps it was tattooed elsewhere on their anatomy. This in no way justifies the actions of any footballer who sexually abuses a woman, but it needs to be taken into account when trying to understand how and why such situations arise. Frankly, I was surprised at the restraint generally shown by players. At the end of 1997 I took Jemima to England with me on a trip we planned around the Super League Test series between Australia and Great Britain. She was 16 at the time and it was interesting to see how much she learned watching the behaviour of women around the Australian rugby league team. We stayed at the team hotel in Leeds and I was impressed generally with the players’ behaviour. It was the women who came out of the woodwork each night who were shocking. 245
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? ‘I could never humiliate myself by behaving like that,’ was her reaction after watching women gravitate around the team each night. On the last night, after the team had won the series and the partying got serious, the women became even more brazen—some asking players to autograph their bare breasts, presented in anticipation along with felt pens. If the players acted like sexual predators on that tour, then they must have been doing it very discreetly. The ex-wife of a philandering player once told me he’d confessed that often on trips away ‘the boys’ would go out drinking, spend the entire evening happy in each other’s company and then, if they felt like it, pick a woman to take to bed at the end of the night. They’d never so much as need to buy a drink for these women because they’d just lurk patiently nearby until such time as a player felt like getting laid. The woman who told me this story did not absolve her husband of blame for availing himself of this smorgasbord, but she felt that being surrounded by women with so little self-respect can give male sports stars a distorted attitude towards women. The ‘clubbiness’ of ex-players I believe contributed to the Bulldogs getting into so much trouble eventually. During my time at the club they had front-office staff who were dedicated, tertiary-educated Bulldogs fans, but these people were never encouraged to think of themselves as part of the club. Most of these staffers left in the leadup to the dramas of salary-cap rorting and rape allegations. When you’re left with a decision-making core of ex-players, they all work hard at identifying with the players. They can’t see how situations look to those who aren’t seeing it from the players’ point of view. Sure, knowing how players feel and building a support structure around those players helps a club in terms of football—and that was an aspect of club building the Bulldogs were great at—but it was counter-productive in terms of the organisation’s relationships with the community at large.
During 2001, while I was writing for Rugby League Week and managing the Bulldogs and Razorbacks websites, I got the itch to return to my 246
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favourite branch of the media—radio. I took some part-time work at the ABC national network, NewsRadio. Originally I talked to them about doing sports presenting but, with Tim Flynn and David Lord on staff, the station already had two very senior and established sports journalists, so there weren’t many opportunities in that area. But I started getting called on as a casual news presenter. Since I first joined the media scrum in 1983 as a mere slip of a girl—well, a 28-year-old, in fact—I’d always chosen to shy away from news and current affairs. However, after dealing with Super League, The Greyhound Racing Authority, various kinds of boardroom politics, the Oasis project, Liverpool Council and the cut and thrust of media management, I had to accept that in sport I wasn’t avoiding what I thought I was avoiding anyway. It was time to face up to the big picture. Much to my own surprise, I had to admit that I found the big picture more compelling anyway than I’d previously imagined. In August 2001 I’d asked NewsRadio to take me off the casual roster for September because I’d be busy with writing about the rugby league finals for the Bulldogs website and League Week. But after the events in New York of September 11, the rugby league finals suddenly seemed provincial and irrelevant. I felt I’d been paddling around in a backwater for several years and needed to widen my horizons. A full-time job became available at NewsRadio late in 2001; I applied and happily walked away from sport, completely, for the first time in my media career. NewsRadio is a well-kept secret in the ABC’s stable of radio networks. It broadcasts to all capital cities and a growing number of regional centres, and operates on what it calls a rolling news format. No music (my one regret!), no phone-ins, no opinion—just news of every stripe: Australian news, international news, sports news and news news. When trying to describe it to people who’ve never heard it—which is often—I usually say it’s a bit like CNN on the radio. I was drawn to the format precisely because it was different from anything I’d worked in before. For my first several months at the network, my main assignment two or three days each week was to scour our international affiliates— 247
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? BBC World Service, CNN International, Radio Deutsche Welle, Radio Canada and so on—for feature-length news reports and/or interviews; I had to edit them where necessary, write introductions and pitch them to the executive producer. Mid-morning, after starting at 5 a.m., I’d take over as news anchor, read the bulletins and present some of the features I’d prepared earlier. Mostly on the other days I worked I’d present the Australian news segment each half hour, which involved monitoring and presenting to a national audience the main stories being run by ABC newsrooms around the country. The features editor work I found especially fascinating, given the state of international affairs post-9/11 and in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. It was a crash course in ‘welcome to the real world’ for a poor schmuck who’d thought Super League was a major drama just a few years before. The interest in world affairs sparked for me in that period of time hasn’t waned. I’ve become particularly intrigued with American politics and spend as much time following that now as I do sport. In mid-2002 NewsRadio’s original and very popular sports broadcaster, Tim Flynn, lost a long battle with cancer through which he’d stoically stayed on air for all but the final couple of weeks. His exit left a huge gap in the NewsRadio line-up and I was definitely reluctant to try to fill it. Initially I started presenting sports news just a few days a week. I was beyond wanting to be considered a ‘sports tragic’, but settling back into talking about it on the radio was like putting on a comfy old slipper. It’s now my main role at NewsRadio, but I do try to keep my horizons wider with stints as a news presenter from time to time. Sport’s not the only thing I do—and it certainly has not been the only focus of my career—but I guess, thanks to all those naked men in the early years, it’s what I’m best known for.
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19 Through the wrong end of the binoculars Through the wrong end of the binoculars
When I was a little kid, sitting up the back of the top deck of the Ladies Stand, one of my favourite diversions was to borrow my aunt Janet’s expensive binoculars and look at the playing field through the wrong end of them. For those who’ve never tried this (I had a lot of spare time on my hands at the football in those days), I should explain that the effect produced is exactly the opposite of looking through the proper end of the binoculars: everything seems small and very far off in the distance. Working at ABC NewsRadio since 2001 has allowed me to view my career—and some of the experiences I’ve been through in the past twenty-plus years—as if through the wrong end of the binoculars. Because I don’t focus on any particular sport, because I’m almost entirely studio bound and working extremely uncivilised hours and, I guess, because I’ve got pay-television at home, I rarely attend live sport these days. So I don’t mix much with players/athletes or other sports journalists. It gives me an almost artificial sense of distance between myself and the sporting coalface as it were. People often ask me if I’m bothered by that. I’m not. 249
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? With distance comes perspective, I like to think. And here’s how it looks from my perspective on the issues that have most affected my career. If you’d asked me 15 or 20 years ago, I would have predicted a real surge of women into the field of sports journalism, but it hasn’t happened to the extent I envisioned. Over the years I’ve heard from, and met, hundreds of young girls who declared their intention of becoming sports journalists, but still the field is heavily male dominated. It is overwhelmingly the men who become the editors, the established and quoted authorities, the ones asked to guest on the TV talk show panels or offer their opinions on radio. I’m not even saying there should be equal numbers of women and men covering high-profile sports—but I don’t see any reason why women covering major sports shouldn’t be represented in roughly an equal ratio to their numbers as spectators, viewers, merchandise buyers and punters in those major sports. I don’t have the statistical analysis to prove it, but my feeling is the ratio is a long way out. In saying I’m disappointed with the role women have today in the sports media, I don’t wish to denigrate the efforts of the women who are working in this area. I’ve got particular admiration for two of my contemporaries, Jacquelin Magnay and Kerryn Pratt, who are still involved and have really proven their worth in non-ABC environments—and, make no mistake, those environments are tougher for women. During the time I wrote this book I heard Kerryn doing commentary on men’s tennis from the US Open and marked that down as a significant achievement. While it’s not unusual for women to be asked to do commentary on women’s tennis, it’s still relatively rare to hear them treated simply as tennis commentators and used in both male and female matches. Conversely, there’s nothing unusual at all about hearing men doing commentary on women’s tennis. That simple fact tells me there’s still a way to go. But kudos to Kerryn for making a breakthrough. ABC Radio Sport has used some women cricketers as analysts during their Test match broadcasts in recent years, too. That’s to be 250
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applauded. But women as guest experts isn’t the same thing as having them as career commentators. When there’s a woman in the role of a Jim Maxwell or a David Morrow that will really mean something. As it stands, men who haven’t played a particular sport at the highest level get opportunities to be commentators, whereas women can participate, occasionally, on a limited basis, in sports where they have credentials and mostly just when women are playing. Women are working in the sports media—but they are doing it on men’s terms. A few become well known as TV presenters and, because they have pretty faces and are pushed to the front and accorded glamour status, it gives sports journalism a veneer of equal opportunity. This doesn’t mean women TV reporters and presenters aren’t doing a good job in what can be a demanding field, but most of them certainly aren’t given the freedom to be what many male sports presenters are on television—loud, unattractive, opinionated and aggressive or silly. It’s OK as long as everyone thinks they’re sweet. ‘The hostess with the mostess’ stereotype is easy for men to deal with. Have the little woman up front, easy on the eyes and the ego, and let her cross to the fellas who really know what’s going on for the expert opinions and a call of the action. If the little lady has been a swimmer or a tennis player or a netballer, ask her for an opinion once in a while, but it’s more important that she giggles at the blokes’ jokes than adds anything substantive. Of course, the flip side of the coin is that, for a lot of women, being ‘the hostess with the mostess’ is what they are entirely comfortable doing—they enjoy sport and are happy to be involved. I don’t kid myself that, just because I was one of the first women sports journalists in this country, I therefore have the right to sit in judgement of how other women play their career cards. This was hit home for me once when I asked Karen Tighe why neither she, nor fellow ABC sports broadcaster Tracey Holmes, ever pushed to do commentary, rather than be left in the host’s chair. After all, they had both ended up much more established at ABC Sport than I’d ever been. Karen looked horrified. Commentary was the last thing she wanted to do—and she said Tracey felt the same 251
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? way. I realised then that it was presumptious of me to be disappointed in other women because they didn’t aim for the benchmarks I’d decided were the real measure of women’s equality in the sports media. Still, commentary seems to be where the glass ceiling is set in sport. Several women television journalists have said to me over the years that they’ll know there’s equality in television news when they see an overweight, over-50 woman wearing glasses reading the six o’clock news. For me, when I hear a woman calling a footy grand final or a Melbourne Cup, I’ll know the last barrier has been knocked down. I should add—I’m not holding my breath.
One of the situations created by the heavy out-numbering of women by men in the sports media is that women who go into the field don’t get to work with many female colleagues and I think they miss out on the camaraderie that men enjoy in that sense. It’s not that women can’t be good friends with men, but I know from my experiences with Vivian Schenker at the Olympics, Gerry O’Leary on the TV rugby league, Karen Tighe and, at least for a time, with Libby Gorr on Live & Sweaty, it’s a more female-friendly environment if there are women who are your peers to learn from and discuss issues related to your work and your life in general. Again, there’s a flip side. Just because two women are sports journalists, doesn’t mean they necessarily get along or have much in common. In my very early days writing for Cricket Lifestyle magazine, when I’d sit in the press box at the SCG, there was one other woman journalist. She was writing for another cricket magazine and we always ended up being left to each other’s company because we weren’t part of the male clique. I don’t even remember her name anymore, but she and I were like chalk and cheese. She would turn up dressed in roman sandals and flowy batik dresses, looking like she had come direct from the beach in Bali which (thanks to Janet’s training) I thought was totally inappropriate for the M.A. Noble Stand. I don’t think I was convinced she really knew much about cricket either— it was almost like she’d got this cricket writing gig by accident. 252
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One evening, at the end of the day’s play, I’d arranged to meet my father in the Members Bar (where else?) and Ms Bohemia 1983 turned up there as well. I didn’t mention I was meeting my dad but she ended up in the same group as us, chatting and having a drink. I thought I’d introduced her to Dad, but clearly I hadn’t. After a while I saw someone else I knew across the room and darted off to say ‘hello’. Whoever it was, I brought him back to the group and did the introductions all round. When I got to ‘And this is my father, Ken’, my female sportswriting colleague suddenly remembered an urgent appointment and left in a hurry. Dad, ever the cool customer, didn’t say anything to me immediately, but later in the evening he said quietly, with classic understatement, ‘I’d watch out for that other journalist girl if I were you.’ ‘Why?’ I quizzed him, surprised that he’d offer an opinion. ‘As soon as you walked away before, she turned around to me and said “That Debbie Spillane’s up herself, isn’t she?”’ Suddenly I realised the look on my colleague’s face hadn’t been the shock of realising she’d forgotten an important engagement at all, but the horror of finding the man she’d just bitched about me to was my father. I thought it was hysterical. I actually felt sorry for her. Well, for a moment, then I got over it.
A key problem women in the sports media have that men don’t is motherhood. (My talent for stating the obvious I always thought was one of my key qualifications for success as a sports commentator!) Combining any kind of career and motherhood is problematic, but women who have careers connected with sport have the specific problem of their jobs rarely being nine-to-five. Weekend work is commonplace, as are night-time events, and those kinds of hours make childcare arrangements a nightmare. Jemima and Elly, my two daughters, are from different marriages and it was very fortunate for me that both their dads, Roger and Greg, were (and still are) keen parents. Neither marriage lasted, and in each case my daughters have lived with their fathers, mainly because they 253
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? worked hours that were more compatible with childcare arrangements. They are both probably more patient souls, as well, but on each occasion the logistics of me being the live-in parent were a nightmare. Surrendering primary carer rights is a decision for women that carries with it a certain stigma. If your children don’t live with you— it doesn’t matter how often you see them—some people take this as evidence that you are clearly an evil woman who’s had custody denied, or one who is cruel and heartless. Men, on the other hand, can live separately from their children without this arrangement leading to speculation or suspicious sideways glances. Being a sports-journalist mum presents some challenges and funny situations. The task for me with each daughter has been different. While Jem took to sports watching with a vengeance, becoming a particularly obsessive basketball fan from a very early age, Elly has never been attracted to sport. Her passion is for dancing, which led her to cheerleading (much to her feminist-inclined older sister’s chagrin) and, during the years I worked at the Bulldogs, Elly was the precocious primary school-aged kid dancing with the ‘big girls’ out on the side of the field. Apparently she did absorb enough information to be the one to whom the older cheergirls would turn when a try was scored and ask ‘Who was that?’. She’d be able to say ‘Steve Price’ or ‘Luke Patten’ or whatever, but that was about as far as it went for Elly. While Elly generally resisted being dragged along to sporting events, Jem seemed to get right into most sports to the point where I remember wondering once whether it was messing with her mind. When she was a pre-schooler, I was driving her back to her dad’s place one night after she’d been staying with me for a few days and told her that I wouldn’t be seeing her for a couple of weeks because she was going on holidays with Dad. She was at an age where the word ‘holiday’ wasn’t familiar to her. ‘Where’s holidays?’ she asked, a bit confused. ‘You’re going to Queensland. Won’t that be fun?’ With that she burst into tears, saying ‘No!! I don’t like Queensland, I don’t like Queensland’. 254
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‘But you’ve never been there before,’ I said astonished. ‘I saw them in the football,’ she sobbed, inconsolably.
Covering sport after having children is one thing, but covering sport while pregnant is another thing again. That situation produced one of my favourite anecdotes. In 1989 I was at the Australian Indoor Tennis Championships at the Entertainment Centre, reporting for 2DAY-FM while seven months pregnant with Eleanor. I was phoning through summaries at the end of each match, and then attending the media conference to record some audio for use in station news bulletins. The first match I covered was won by Ivan Lendl but, by the time I phoned in my match report, I found when I got to the media conference that there were no seats left and I was standing up the back. I wasn’t feeling agile enough to squeeze my way through to the front of the room and crouch in front of Lendl, which was what other latecomers had done, so I missed out on getting his comments on tape. During the next match I came up with a brilliant plan. I’d get my husband Greg, who was with me, to go on ahead to the media conference room as soon as the match finished, set up the cassette recorder and then grab a seat in the front row, which he could surrender to me when I arrived after filing my match report. In theory this was an inspired plan. In practice it turned out to be rather embarrassing for Greg. What I hadn’t factored into the equation was that, with the winner of the second match being a much lower profile guy called Charlie Steeb, there wouldn’t be the same rush to the media conference room as there had been to catch Lendl. Greg duly turned up, set the 2DAYFM microphone in place and took a seat in the front row. As it turned out, he was the only person in the room when Steeb fronted. Greg, with no idea of what to say, just sat there, mutely, grinning at the German who, after a few awkward minutes said, ‘So, you vont to ask me something?’ ‘I’m just here waiting for my wife,’ was Greg’s enigmatic answer. Which apparently left Steeb looking deeply puzzled. 255
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy?
The ugliest and most potentially thorny issue for female sports journalists is sexual harassment. Obviously it’s not peculiar to the sports media but, while ever there is a perception that sport reporting is a ‘male domain’, there’s a school of thought that ‘It’s your choice— if you want to intrude on male territory, you cop what comes with that territory’. I plead guilty to initially taking that kind of view of the case of the American sports writer Lisa Olson. While reporting on American football for the Boston Herald, Lisa brought charges of sexual harrassment against players from the Boston Patriots after a locker-room incident in 1990. The case triggered a round of ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen’ kind of comments from the Male-Only Mafia types. There were suggestions that this was exactly the kind of trouble you could expect women to bring on themselves if they insisted on hanging around naked men in locker rooms. I remember thinking it was a shame this woman couldn’t have toughed it out rather than laying charges and provoking a whole fresh round of questioning of the rights of women to be in locker rooms. Then I met Lisa and heard first-hand what kind of harassment she’d been subjected to. It was hideous. She had been surrounded by a group of naked players pressing themselves up against her suggesting she touch them. One fondled himself just a metre away from her, asking if that was what she wanted. When approaches from her newspaper to team management couldn’t even raise an apology— which was all she originally wanted—she took civil action and eventually received an out-of-court settlement. But the headlines she made resulted in her getting death threats and obscene phone calls, being spat on at sporting events and having her car tyres slashed. The reason she worked in Australia in the mid90s was that she actually had to leave the United States to escape the campaign of hate against her because she’d had the temerity to ‘make trouble’ for sports stars. 256
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I spent a bit of time with Lisa and liked her. Knowing the extent of the harrassment she was subjected to made me feel embarrassed I’d ever doubted her right to make an issue of the incident, and I often wondered how on earth I would have dealt with treatment like that in a locker room and the fallout that followed.
My only experience of what I consider genuine sexual harassment came not from a sportsman but from a colleague who was, and remains, much respected in the media. What amazes me, in retrospect, was that my boss at the time found out about it very quickly and rather than take action against the man involved, he offered to move me to a job where I didn’t have to work too near the offender. My reaction was relief that the boss didn’t blame me for what had happened so, in an effort to cause as little trouble as possible, I stoicly refused the proposed change of assignment. I embraced it as a chance to prove I wasn’t a wimp. Originally I wondered if I’d been ridiculously gullible in allowing myself to be lured into a compromising position with the man concerned. Many years my senior, he was the last person I imagined propositioning me so, when he asked me for a lift home from an office function one night, I agreed. I had to drive quite near to his suburb anyway and, as we were to be working together on a project that was coming up, I thought it would be a good chance to talk about that. When I pulled up out the front of his residence, he told me I should come in because he had some research notes to lend me. Maybe alarm bells should have rung, but I really did have him pegged as the harmless uncle type, so I went in. He told me to make myself a cup of coffee and disappeared into another room. As I returned to the lounge room I got a glimpse of the room he was in; I realised it was his bedroom and noted that he was smoothing the bedcovers, which I thought odd. The French Open tennis was on television so I sat down and started watching. When he emerged from his bedroom he sat next to me on the sofa and then suggested I sit on his lap. 257
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? ‘You’re joking?’ I think was my response, followed rather swiftly by a dart for the door. He beat me there and literally blocked my exit, saying: ‘What do you think I invited you in for? Don’t think I’m going to help you if you don’t come across for me you bitch.’ The jolly uncle had vanished and a very nasty, threatening man had appeared in his place. I told him I couldn’t think of anything more disgusting than sex with him and he let me go. The reason word got back to my boss of the episode was that I confided in a male colleague, whose immediate reaction was ‘Oh no. I should’ve warned you about that’. Within hours another woman in the office approached me and said she’d heard about what happened and confessed she’d been through almost the same scene with the same man. This woman was the boss’s secretary and I think it was she who passed on the story to him. He was terribly apologetic and didn’t doubt the veracity of my account because he’d heard it all before. Some months later I encountered another woman within the organisation who’d been through the ‘Come inside for coffee, I’ve got some notes you might be interested in seeing’ routine. So there were three of us that I know about. Given the man’s long and, outwardly, distinguished career, I’ve often wondered how many others were put through this awful harassment and what it would have taken for management to address the problem. If he had physically assaulted me, perhaps I would have demanded more than a ‘Sorry about that, would you like to work with someone else?’. At the time I was more annoyed that none of the people who knew of the guy’s track record had warned me so I could have avoided the situation altogether. No one ever mentioned an official complaint and I certainly never thought of making one. Years later the willingness of everyone, including myself, to sweep it under the mat seems astonishing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I wish I’d taken action, though. Accusing someone of his stature of sexual harassment would have turned my career into a sideshow that would have been hard to live down. Sure, it might have made me famous for something other than going into 258
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men’s dressing rooms, but I think I’ll settle for the dressing room option, thank you very much.
I definitely look at rugby league these days very much through the wrong end of the binoculars. There’s a real distance between myself and the sport that I grew up watching and that played such an important part in my career. When I resigned my position as a columnist at the Sun-Herald in late 1995 to take the offer of the media manager’s job at the Bulldogs, the then editor-in-chief of the paper, Andrew Clark, tried to get me to reconsider the decision. He suggested that getting too close to the team might end up killing my enjoyment. Looking back on it, it was a wise prediction. At the time, though, I was sure that working for the club I loved would give me the kind of insight I’d never otherwise get into the game. I told Andrew that ultimately I’d be an even better rugby league columnist because of what the experience would teach me and I do believe I came away from Belmore knowing ten times more about the sport than I did three years earlier. The irony was I never again got the opportunity to write a column about rugby league. Sure, there were the match reports and news stories for Rugby League Week, but that was a long way from the opinion and analysis pieces I’d been writing for the Sun-Herald several years earlier. It’s an observation I make without bitterness, by the way. It just always strikes me as oddly perverse that, at the point where I felt I reached peak understanding of the game, my opportunities to use that understanding essentially dried up. On the other hand, I can’t say I strenuously pursued any work connected with rugby league after leaving the Bulldogs. Even the Rugby League Week work was a fluke, because I literally happened to be in the room when they were looking for someone. When I gave up running the Bulldogs website at the end of 2001 and then left Rugby League Week, I felt the time had come for me to move on from rugby league. I’d overdosed on it and, I reasoned, achieved everything that, as a woman, I could have realistically hoped 259
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? to achieve in it. I’d covered it for TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and the internet; I’d worked for a club, and met almost anyone and everyone connected with the game I’d ever wanted to meet. I’d known all too well that awkward pathos surrounding old men who clung to their glory days in the game when those days were well and truly gone, and decided that an old woman doing the same thing would be just as pathetic.
There’s no doubt the Super League experience took a toll on me as well. But not in the same way as it did on others. It was the sheer waste of money and enthusiasm and ideas that burned me. It wasn’t quite that I was sorry to see Super League fail—in many ways it deserved failure. In 1994, in my sports column for the Sun-Herald, I wrote about the Brisbane Broncos’ running battle with the ARL. They’d been at loggerheads with the governing body over a series of issues and I took a tongue-in-cheek look at all the things you could do with a football team if you freed them up from the pesky business of having to play in a competition. Unlike many Sydney league fans, I’d always been fond of the Broncos—I’d loved watching their flowing, attacking football. But I suggested in my article that Brisbane were so unhappy with how they were being treated that they were talking about starting their own competition so they could play only with their friends. That, I joked, would mean a one-team competition. It was just a gag. I’d seen passing references in Rugby League Week to the possibility that a totally alienated Brisbane might launch a breakaway competition. I didn’t think it a serious possibility. At that time I’d never met or spoken to John Ribot, the then chief executive of the Broncos, although I had a favourable opinion of him based on what I’d seen in the media and remembered of him as a player. So, when he phoned me out of the blue, I was quite chuffed. He, however, wasn’t in a ‘pleased-to-meet-you’ mood. He denied strenuously that Brisbane were considering forming a breakaway 260
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competition and demanded to know where I got this outrageous idea from. I said it was just written tongue-in-cheek; but he was having none of the ‘It’s a joke, Joyce’ defence. I simply couldn’t understand why he seemed so sensitive about it. When news of Super League broke, and of Brisbane’s key role in its formation, I realised what that phone call had been all about. Ribot had confronted me precisely because I did have it right—even if I was just joshing. As he and I had ironically ended up colleagues in that breakaway competition—he as the chief executive of the whole damn thing, and me as the media manager for one of the clubs and also the TV host of the ABC’s national Super League coverage— a conciliatory word might have been in order. But that conversation never happened, despite the fact we happened to share a cab leaving the celebration party the very night in October 1996 the courts gave Super League the go-ahead for 1997.
What disheartened me more than anything though was the terms under which Super League ended its breakaway competition. The abolition of clubs in Adelaide and Perth was a horribly backward step. I still don’t believe there’s a long-term future for a predominantly suburban Sydney competition, especially when media and business is becoming less local and more national and international. The nonsense about tribalism and tradition just doesn’t wash with me. The AFL has managed its expansion into a national competition without the whole fibre of the code falling apart. The old VFL teams South Melbourne and Fitzroy became the Sydney Swans and Brisbane Lions, and, despite some tough times financially, the AFL held its nerve and the sky didn’t fall in—although I’m sure there were some old innercity fans in Melbourne who believed it surely would. Sydney rugby league fans who were averse to change had help from the Packer empire sending its dollars in to battle Murdoch’s money— and they ended up preventing Super League from making some of the changes that could have eventually moved the game forward. 261
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WHeRe do YoU think YoU’Re goin’, LaDy? What most Sydney league fans fail to understand is that in Brisbane and Newcastle the status of the existing rugby league competitions in those cities was sacrificed when the Broncos and Knights were created and the top-tier competition was thus strengthened. (And make no mistake—there were naysayers in both Brisbane and Newcastle who fought the idea of their local competitions playing second fiddle to the ARL or NRL.) Sydney fans refused to make that sacrifice. But I honestly believe all they have done is forestall the day of reckoning and, in the meantime, allowed AFL, rugby union and possibly soccer free kicks that will eventually start showing up on the scoreboard. So, although I still watch some rugby league, I can’t help seeing it as a sport that’s condemned itself to a diminishing future.
These days I think of Arsenal in the English Premier League as ‘my football team’. I love the fact that a London team has a French manager and players from places like Brazil, Sweden, Ivory Coast and Germany. That to me represents sport being relevant in a world where we’re closer than ever to our neighbours and needing to work on what we have in common. And they play beautiful football. When I sit down to watch sport in my own time—and I don’t do it as much as I used to because I like to read history or politics or listen to music or watch movies as well—I’m really drawn to competitions like the European Champions League soccer, the grand slam tennis tournaments, the golf majors, the world athletics championships or the National Basketball Association in the United States. When I travel overseas or talk to friends on the internet, the conversation is about Roger Federer or Arséne Wenger or LeBron James. Not Willie Mason or Sonny Bill Williams or Andrew Johns. I know I’m not jaded about sport in general, because many of the things I still want to do in my life are connected with sport. I want to go to Wimbledon; I want to see Arsenal play live; I want to attend an NBA game; I’d like to take my grand-daughter Celeste to see her favourite sports star, Roger Federer, play. Hell, I’ve never even been 262
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to Flemington for the Melbourne Cup—or, even better still, for Derby Day, the Saturday before the Cup. For a kid who grew up obsessed with horseracing that’s a tragic gap in the CV. And, oddly enough, I don’t necessarily feel the urge to be at any of these events as a sports journalist. Well, I would like to attend an Arséne Wenger press conference, so maybe that event would require press credentials. But, basically, the equivalent of sitting up in the Ladies Stand enjoying sport with family or friends will do me nicely. And I promise you, I don’t need to see anyone naked.
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