I've always nursed a secret desire to watch the pole vault on acid. As a pimpled hellbilly kid I watched Australia thrash Pakistan, without Thommo, on the Adelaide Oval in 1972 and I have to tell you cricket never looked so good. I thought at the time it would have looked even more entertaining if the players had also been on the electric orange juice. The thought of pole vaulters trying the same trick is truly tantalising. I reckon they'd just keep right on going up and up and outa sight.
03 February 2016
PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT REQUIRED
Match fixing, pissed bogan sports heroes, the panting hackery and
performance-enhancing drugs
by PHILIP WHITE
Within a day of each other, two great Australian
sportsmen hit the chitter-chat last week.
One was Thommo, who'd struggled into a tux and popped on
a crooked pre-tied bowie to win something in a big room where he made a profane speech about being old and blind and how much he drinks and how little his dick
has become.
Everybody thought this was really funny.
With certain avuncular care he also mentioned how unfortunate
today's young professional cricketers are, being in the spotlight and on duty
24/7 all year round.
"Cricket was something I could do for fun," he
said, pointing out the differences time has brought. "We were lucky in our
day. We could play for fun."
At least I'd heard of Thommo. The other bloke was Mitch
Pearce, who might have been famous before somebody filmed him being a totally pissed
sexist bogan with hardly anything on, but I doubt it. He sure is famous now. The
bogan gang of the press hackery frothed on a great deal about how he pretended to root
a woman's dog while I thought his vile treatment of the woman, upon whose couch
he'd urinated, deserved much more derision and dissection. But the
media pack has dumb sexist tendencies too and it's popular to post nice safe doggie
shots on Facebook and Twitter so there you go: everyone barracked for the poor
woman's dog.
Like a big drunken muscly brute of a bloke can push himself
on a woman and attempt to kiss her or dribble on her or whatever coarse
intrusions he attempted, and that's pretty much ignored but if you pretend
coition with her little dog all the pundits go nuts.
Personally I thought that
from where I sat the pooch looked pretty safe given the apparent depth of
Mitch's imbibition. I doubt that his mighty sword would have cut any more
mustard than poor old Jeff Thomson's, but that's not the point. Anyway this
vulgar peanut wasn't a cricketer but he seemed to me to be a perfect example of
the sort of young professional sportsman Thommo referred to.
This more or less coincided with the 1.6 million hits -
it's over 2 million now - another coupla Queensland yobbos got for their vid of them interrupting a robbery with hardly anything on, en route from a boozy singlets
and stubbies party to a servo in search of noodles. They took the keys from the
crims' car and chased them up the street in bare feet. Everyone in the world
thought this was pretty funny, including me. The Americans thought it was
particularly funny. Two blokes in nothing but stubbies, without machine guns, stopping
a robbery.
It's just as well our heroes weren't sportsmen. These days in Oz, they
would probably have got hauled up to a tribunal.
Men being the operative word: it's as if sportswomen
never get celebratory and sexually cocky after a hard sesh on the playing
fields. I've innocently walked into a women's lacrosse team about four hours
after it won something big and I'm telling you I woulda preferred to get
undressed with James and Kane to tackle the Gold Coast robbers than been the
petite, perfectly-dressed blonde lady sitting quietly in the corner of that
bar. Those big tough drunken lasses gave her hell.
All sporting sexes could use some performance enhancement when it becomes to respectful, moral, role-model behaviour.
While we're on sport, this matter of match-fixing also bemuses
me. Of course people rig results. Of course some players will take a dive. They're
all narcissists with far too much money at stake.
I've always thought that it's
a big enough gamble getting out of bed in the morning without betting on dogs
or horses or similarly inane things like tennis or cricket. If I had the spare
readies I'd be placing my bets with a health insurance company but that's
rigged too, so I'd deserve to be screwed. In my book, all the poor punters who choose
to plunge on sport get what they deserve.
Which leads to performance-enhancing drugs. Given the
nature of all the above, and its inherent, hopelessly human vainglory, it's
just plain dumb to expect that competitive individuals will ignore science and
medicine to risk being slower than their rivals.
As it's virtually impossible to keep ahead of the
constant evolution of performance-enhancing drugs for the sports and athletics
fields, it's time we instead legalised the whole kaboodle. If it's cool and
advantageous to feed defence force warriors drugs to enhance their deadliness
in battle, let's have 'em. Let those sporting types and athletes who want to go
faster and harder longer take whatever they like: use them like lab rats.
Research. They'll discover things that could dribble down for use in the
general community much faster than whitecoats using innocent and unwitting monkeys,
rabbits and rodents in a lab.
I'll never forget watching Ben Johnson win the 100 metres
and I don't care what he took: using the wonders of modern medicine, he beat
'em fair and square. To me, his sin was no worse a matter of performance
enhancement than any journo who gulps down a handful of painkillers and four
coffees to ease the problems of a hangover in order to remember how to type and
talk and meet a deadline.
I've always nursed a secret desire to watch the pole vault on acid. As a pimpled hellbilly kid I watched Australia thrash Pakistan, without Thommo, on the Adelaide Oval in 1972 and I have to tell you cricket never looked so good. I thought at the time it would have looked even more entertaining if the players had also been on the electric orange juice. The thought of pole vaulters trying the same trick is truly tantalising. I reckon they'd just keep right on going up and up and outa sight.
I've always nursed a secret desire to watch the pole vault on acid. As a pimpled hellbilly kid I watched Australia thrash Pakistan, without Thommo, on the Adelaide Oval in 1972 and I have to tell you cricket never looked so good. I thought at the time it would have looked even more entertaining if the players had also been on the electric orange juice. The thought of pole vaulters trying the same trick is truly tantalising. I reckon they'd just keep right on going up and up and outa sight.
page from one of the 1972 diaries ... illo, text and photo©Philip White
As a professional who works daily with a desk covered in
wine I reckon I'm qualified to say that in my line of work wine is hardly a
performance enhancer. Unless one's tasting something rare and brilliant, one
tends to go further and further down. When the writer's block sets in, I find
strong spurruts a much better writing fluid than wine: vodka when it's hot;
whisky when it's not.
On the other hand, when I get my writing done in time to
do some actual editing, I agree with that torrid misogynist, Dr. Hunter S.
Thompson, who I think said booze is good for writing but not editing. A joint
is better for editing, but our stupid laws makes such an harmless act criminal.
Even a placebo can work if you're lucky. While we're in
the confessional, I might just as well recount a day when I'd been unpacking book
boxes and found a tiny paper parcel which contained what looked like a chip of
stale hash. As there was big editing to be done I tried in vain to set fire to
it ... regardless of the aggression of the flame I applied, it would glow, but wouldn't
catch. Still, I felt sure it was helping me, if only in a mild stale sort of a manner.
Eventually I noticed some faint handwriting on the wrapper. I'd been trying to
set fire to a chip of the famous Mundrabilla Meteorite.
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4 comments:
Have you still got the piece of famous Mundrabilla Meteorite? You must have been well into the edit when you tried to light it up !!
Blogger Kevin Hakney said...
Very good website. I liked it very much.
February 4, 2016 at 4:59 PM
[Kevin also put links to his business, which I have removed - Whitey]
I still have my piece of the Mundrabilla Meteorite, Milton. I doubt that I'll make that mistake again. To that avail, I have discarded all the loose chips. I wonder where that damn thing came from.
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