Any Thought on The Storm
Before I begin, let me say that I am aware that readers aren’t exactly hanging out for my views on the Melbourne Storm fiasco. That would be like wondering what Brendan Fevola thinks of the early works of F W Murnau. The fact is, as soon as I start to hear anything about ‘the footy’, my ears glaze over the way they do for most people when the waiter starts reading out the specials, or that bloke from Price-Waterhouse starts describing the Oscars’ voting procedure. Last week, a friend spent ten minutes trying to explain the Storm business to me and I didn’t hear a word. When he asked me for my opinion, I had to confess that I’d spent the last minute thinking how cool it would be if there were a football venue called ‘The Waldron Cauldron’. In my radio work, I’ve always been teamed with someone who knows something about sport; Gleisner, Molloy, Wilson, and yes, even Kavalee, have done the heavy lifting in that department, leaving me free to find spelling mistakes in old movie credits and bang on about why the ABC still hasn’t screened Alan Partridge.
But, in the grand Australian tradition of not letting the fact that you know nothing about a subject stop you from voicing a strong opinion about it in a public forum, here’s my two cents (keeping in mind that, these days, two cents gets rounded down to nothing).
As I understand it, the team that won two of the last three rugby league premierships didn’t actually win them at all, because several of the players were being paid slightly more than people thought they were. This, according to The Age, is ‘the biggest scandal in Australian sporting history’. The worst example of cheating ever. But, does being paid slightly more than people think you are actually help you win a game? I guess the only way to find out would be to stage the same match twice; first with the players being paid $360,000, and then with them, unbeknownst to the crowd, being paid $390,000.
No doubt I’m leaving out some important piece of the equation – something to do with fairness and ethics – but just in terms of whether it actually made them play better and therefore win those two premierships, I’m sure there must have been, at some point in the last hundred years, bigger examples of cheating? I thought it was cheating when you paid a team more and they lost the game.
Every night for the last week, the TV has been running over with grown adults in football scarves, bawling their eyes out over the ‘betrayal’.
‘So you feel that the team have let you down?’
‘Too bloody right. It’s a disgrace.’
‘And that they don’t deserve those two premierships?’
‘Nup. They need those two wins stripped away.’
‘Because?’
‘Because…[choking back tears]…they were being paid slightly more than we thought they were!!!’
The biggest scandal in Australian sporting history? Wasn’t there once a horse race where someone painted one horse to look like another? I thought that was the biggest scandal in Australian sporting history. Actually, come to think of it, it doesn’t sound like that big of a deal. Maybe I’m remembering it wrongly. Maybe it was a car they painted to look like a horse.
But this whole salary cap affair does make me wonder what life would be like if the professions I work in were held to this standard. The TV ratings system, for example, might collapse if it were discovered that Daryl Somers were secretly being paid more than the bloke who plays Plucka. Those timeslot wins to Masterchef could be stripped away, seconded to Underbelly, if it came out that Matt Preston had received bonus payments in the form of an off-the-books set of ladles and a contra tureen.
I myself have experienced the exact opposite of the Storm players’ current predicament. Back in the mid-nineties, a magazine reported what it claimed was the wage I was being paid by a then-successful radio network. In fact, the figure was several hundred thousand dollars more than I was actually being paid, resulting in several calls from relatives across the Tasman wanting to know when their new cars would be arriving.
For the record, being paid more money never at any point made the jokes any better. All being paid more does is make people hate you more. Not a problem if you’re, say, Kyle Sandilands, but trickier when you’re the so-called ‘everyman’. It’s not easy to remain the battlers’ knockabout mate when you’re being floated on the stock market. I recently heard one breakfast host tell a self-deprecating story about how he’d lost his three-thousand-dollar watch!
In conclusion, I cannot definitively say whether being paid more money actually improves one’s ability to perform a task. Perhaps, for example, if I were being paid to write this column, it would have had a funnier ending.
Probably not, though.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Most recently, he directed new episodes of ‘The Librarians’, which returns to ABC1 on October 13.
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