Big bucks and the triumph of Wests Tigers
BY JAMES VASSILOPOULOS
In a nation dominated by the ruling class, where sport is a commodity ruled by big money - more like a Big Mac on wheels than an athletics contest - sometimes remarkable events, like the triumph of underdogs, occur.
European soccer is particularly commodified - it seems that every capitalist has their own team. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi owns AC Milan. Is it any surprise that Chelsea, owned by Russian capitalist Roman Abramovich, is leading the Premier league this season?
The Wests Tigers rugby league club - a merger of the Western Suburbs Magpies (based in a poorer part of Sydney) and the Balmain Tigers - won this year's grand final, but they were never meant to. They were the second favourites to come last. Midway through the season they were coming 12th and were at 150-to-one odds to win. Most footy clubs cheat the salary cap - a measure to try to neutralise wealth differences between clubs - but the Wests Tigers were $500,000 under the cap. The club only bought two new players.
The Tigers last won the premiership in 1969 and the Magpies last won in 1952. Even coach Tim Sheens gave them no hope in winning when he said that "I actually thought we'd go backwards". Putting all this together, the Wests Tigers seem less like your normal underdogs and more like St Bernard's underdogs.
Making the victory even more remarkable, for one year the Western Suburbs Magpies were effectively kicked out of the competition and waged a successful campaign to get back in, much like the more well-known case of the South Sydney Rabbitohs.
The teams that squared-off for the grand final, the Wests Tigers and North Queensland Cowboys, both had a significant number of Aboriginal players and players of immigrant origins. Sport is one of the only ways many Indigenous people can escape from the devastation of their lives and get respect from a racist Australian society. North Queensland had at least four Aboriginal players, including player of the year Johnathan Thurston. Laffranchi, Farah, Skandalis, Galea and Halatau - respectively Italian, Lebanese, Greek, Maltese and Maori -, all played for the Tigers.
Working-class people love their sport. They love the community, the action, the adventure, the speed, the surprises, the passion, the crowd, the aggression, the noise, the beer and the meat pies. I remember going to one of my first rugby league games when I was about seven. We lived at Auburn and the home ground of the Western Suburbs Magpies was in the adjacent Lidcombe Oval (then, grounds were named after suburbs, not sponsors). My brother, a neighbour and I snuck away from home to go to the footy. We crossed over railway lines and walked in dark, echoing sewers to get to the ground. We snuck in for free and we watched the Newtown Bluebags play the Maggies in the wet, quicksand-like mud. After the game we ran onto the field to touch our rugby gods on the shoulders, as they panted like chain smokers, steam rising from their torsos. Of course when we got home we copped a beating.
Roy Masters, ex-coach of Western Suburbs and currently a Sydney Morning Herald writer, wrote an article in 1988 called "Forget footy, this is class war", discussing the tension in the 1980s between the Manly "silvertails" (a team based in Sydney's wealthier north shore) and working-class Wests "fibros". I remember going to see the two teams play in the '80s and for many years there was a guaranteed all-in brawl. Manly could buy our players and often win the game, but at least we would win the all-in brawl!
There are so many commercial aspects to rugby league that shows the control of the rulers. Sport is a business subordinated to the development of a market. The grand final was showed at 7pm to maximise revenue for Kerry Packer's Channel Nine, despite fans wanting an afternoon start. The game was played not at Homebush Oval but the Telstra Stadium. If you're keen, you can purchase a framed picture of the Wests Tigers for a cool $495. Any fan-controlled game that emphasises democracy above the market, participation above elitism and community above television rights would need to be fundamentally different to today's.
At least our team can win in sport. Often in our daily lives we lose. Right now we can lose a lot when PM John Howard is launching the biggest broadside on our working conditions since colonisation. Metaphorically speaking, if the Wests Tigers can win a grand final then maybe one day we can kick out this rotten Howard government.
[James Vassilopoulos is a long suffering Western Suburbs Magpies supporter and now a happy Wests Tigers supporter.]
From Green Left Weekly, November 9, 2005.
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