Alive And Sweaty
The Age
Friday September 30, 1994
The message was clear: renounce all vices, join an expensive gym, and you too could live to be 90. Then we rediscovered televised sport.
Getting their first sniff of mortality in the '80s, a lot of baby boomers found themselves forming enclaves at suburban gyms. At my introductory session, a group of new members warmed up to gether on a row of electronically programmed ``exercycles". Among the distracted faces were those of a developer who lost his dodgy empire in the crash of '87, and a TV personality whose show h ad just been hijacked by a younger, slimmer woman. The realisation that we were all middle-aged, or older, led to some desultory laughter over the contrast we presented with a group of weight trainers working out in front of us.
Uniformly beautiful and clad like superheroes, the young men and women seemed not to hear our clattering machinery and self-conscious jokes.
When they looked into the wall mirrors, they app eared not to see us reflected there: all those hot faces showing envy, nostalgia, lust, regret. They were lost in minute examination of their own perfection, muscle by muscle, a process that g ave them an air of impenetrable satisfaction. Sighing, the stationary cyclists pedalled on into the future.
WHEN THE media-fired fashion impulses that spawned a million Madonna look-alikes came to bear on sport, kids everywhere wanted to ``be" Michael Jordan, or Jane Fleming, or Trevor Hendy or Pa t Cash or Steffi Graf. When the Me Decade gave birth to the Me Too Decade, the California-bred fitness boom got its early momentum from the same vicarious yearnings.
Inspired by the likes of Jane Fonda, older wannabes saw that they too could have ``sexy" bodies and live to be 90. All they had to do was renounce all vices, join a gym and fill the resultan t hollow feeling with ever more exercise. As Fonda perceived, it was a truly golden era for image marketing: a time when reconstructed drunks would pay a dollar for bottles of ordinary water; when shorts and T-shirts were rejected as exercise garb in favour of complex layers of designer Lurex; when 40,000 foam-flecked joggers wearing more than $3 million worth of imported running s hoes contested Sydney's annual City-to- Surf ``fun" run; when weight-loss groups ``power-walked" comically about the suburbs; and householders rose at dawn to ape the movements of televised aerobics.
Many of us lacked the will or the patience to persevere with all this, which is why gymnasiums continue to reap handsome profits from the unredeemable fees of backsliders. Happily, it was a lso a decade in which sport boomed as televised entertainment, creating new roles for legions of ``expert" spectators.
I became a rugby league expert in 1984 (having previously had no interest in team sports), thanks to the influence of a learned fanatic called ``Crusher". He persuaded my eight-year-old son and I to watch that year's State of Origin series between Queensland and New South Wales, and it was wonderful - partly because we live in Brisbane, and Queensland that year posted its fifth s traight victory since the series began in 1980, but mainly because of the spine-tingling talents of Wally Lewis.
Guided by Crusher, Nick and I learnt the joys of underdog parochialism, and the nuances of play that gave an understanding of Lewis's tactical brilliance. By the time the Brisbane Broncos j oined the Winfield Cup competition in 1988, we were hooked. Not on violence, as non-fans assume, but on those sublime moments of synchronised grace when an attacking team does everything right at a speed that seems impossible.
At such times, expert spectators may actually experience in their veins some inkling of the euphoria they see on the faces of the athletes. It's not exactly participation, but it beats the hell out of old movies.
These days, alas, ``King" Wally has retired and Queensland's domination has ended, this year's series going 2-1 to a NSW pack whose youth and skills suggest little joy for Queensland support ers in the 1995 season. Even worse, the Brisbane Broncos - premiers for two consecutive years - were knocked out of the 1994 Winfield Cup competition by North Sydney, at a point in the semifin als when two more victories would have earned them a hat-trick. This would have infuriated Sydney's one-eyed League writers and commentators, whose rationalisations of past defeats have provid ed much pleasure north of the border.
League diehards see Australian Rules football as basically incomprehensible, characterised by lots of jumping and ``fights" in which protagonists cuff one another about the ears like frisky kangaroos. Yet the Australian Football League has had more success than the NSWRL in expanding the code nationally, with teams from Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth now well entrenched in the competition. Next year, seeking a similarly broadened support base, the NSWRL will include new teams from Auckland, Perth, north Queensland and Brisbane.
The fitness juggernaut did wonders for the anti-smoking movement, which was good news indeed for the health of humankind. But some reformers, high on fashionable morality, have become a dan ger in themselves. Several years ago, a woman crossed the courtyard of an outdoor cafe in Sydney to demand that another diner extinguish his cigarette. She called a waiter, who pointed out tha t smoking was permitted, and that traffic emissions from the main road a few metres away, and the cafe's position under a flight path, might be more reason for concern. But the woman was incon solable, shouting, ``Smoking under any circumstances is a violation of my rights!" IN THE late '80s, drugs of a different kind were the subject of a Senate inquiry. The investigation was sparked by a Four Corners television report alleging that performance-enhancing drugs were used within the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS). The inquiry found this to be true, but only in isolated cases and without AIS approval.
Established in Canberra in 1981, the publicly funded institute's primary role was to reverse a slump in Australia's international sporting fortunes. The intensive coaching programs and sports-science methodology worked sooner than expect ed: after managing just five medals at the Montreal Olympics in 1976, and nine at Moscow in 1980, Australia upped the tally to 24 at Los Angeles in 1984.
The Senate inquiry into drugs in sport led to random drug-testing of all athletes on AIS scholarships and coincided with stricter and more uniform testing procedures throughout the world. T he illegal trade in anabolic steroids was big business in the '80s, especially among body builders, some of whom seemed intent on updating Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, with themselves as the h apless ``monster".
A 1988 TV news report showed Senate inquiry members questioning a prisoner called Nathan Jones at Brisbane's Boggo Road Jail. He told of turning himself into an ``experiment" by injecting up to 100 times the medically recommended dosage of steroids each week. Over two years, the Gold Coast teenager grew 15 cm taller to 208 cm (6 ft 10 in), and increased his weight from 83 kg to 1 28 kg. During the same period, when he experienced ``rages that made my hair stand on end", Jones committed a series of armed robberies and was jailed for 12 years.
He had a reputation as a cell-wrecker who'd thrown police and prison guards about ``like rag dolls", but what haunted news viewers that night was his appearance. At 20, clean-cut and polite, Jones had the face of a frightened boy attached to the body of a dangerous giant.
What induced this awful ``experiment"? Jones told me later he'd been a sailboarding instructor before deciding to make a career of body building. At that stage, with steroid use widespread even at Olympic level, he didn't think twice about getting on the ``juice".
``The other body builders said I'd look awesome with extra height and weight," he said. ``They said the judges would really admire me."
During his trial, the court accepted medical evidence that steroid abuse had influenced Jones's actions. Residual ``rages" affected him for more than a year, and he faces long-term risks of liver damage, kidney tumours and prostate cancer. Now paroled on a work-release program, and drug-free, Jones hopes to become a gridiron player on the American pro-football circuit.
A FRIEND with a small cruising yacht occasionally needs crew for short coastal passages. This means three or four of us living in close quarters for up to a week, with the usual bickering o ver favoured bunks, snoring, cooking duties, etc. If conditions are favourable we sail through the night, taking rostered watches. The 11-metre steel yacht has computer navigation and an autom atic pilot, so there is usually little for the watch to do but check bearings and keep an eye out for other ships.
On such a night, about 30 nautical miles off central Queensland with a following breeze, I was jolted from my reverie in the cockpit by a woman's voice calling a greeting. She was at the he lm of her sloop just behind us; being fibreglass, and fast, it had closed rapidly from behind. In the few moments before she drew out of earshot, the young woman shouted that she was sailing a lone from Brisbane to Cairns.
I was impressed: being a speck on an ocean is one thing, but being there alone - with every act and decision potentially fatal - takes a rare breed of sailor. Because blue-water sailing is, by definition, ``unseen", its increased popularity among women has gone largely unnoticed. But no-one who admires courage is likely to forget Sydney's Kay Cottee, whose 189-day, 25,000 nautica l mile solo voyage in '87- '88 made her the first woman to circumnavigate the globe alone, non- stop and unassisted. Aged 34 when she completed the marathon, Cottee was named Australian of the Y ear and made an Officer of the Order of Australia.
ON A per-capita basis, Australia is among the most successful of sporting nations. This has been both a blessing and a curse, for while physical achievements help build a sense of national identity, they can also lead to the sort of chest-thumping that gives winning a bad name.
In this sense, the healthiest development of the decade has been the sort of social commentary introduced by Rampaging Roy Slaven and H. G.
Nelson. Since 1986, when the pair launched This S porting Life on the ABC's 2JJJ, Australian sports fans - pound for pound the most obsessive on earth - have been plucked from a caricature of their own making. The lifeline, of course, was lau ghter, the only sane response to all those decades of monotonous, self-congratulatory blather that passed as sports commentary and comment.
A few years after journeymen actors Greig Pickhaver (H.G.) and John Doyle (Roy) began their manic flensing of sport's sacred cows, the theme spread to ABC-TV via Live and Sweaty. Hosts Andr ew Denton, and later Elle McFeast - supported by various ratbag ``experts" - showed that it's okay to laugh at sport because sport is essentially dumb (even though we love it), and that by let ting it languish so long in the hands of the humourless we have robbed ourselves of a lot of fun.
Frank Robson is a staff writer.
© 1994 The Age