Tasmanian Times

HOW WAS IT that Rod Laver. Ken Rosewall et al won so many big tennis tournaments without pumping their fists and screaming C’MORN at the top of their voices?

Isn’t it incredible that leg spinner Bill O’Reilly took so many wickets without also bonking everything in sight and then sending the victims a text message applauding his performance?

How did Shirley Strickland win Olympic finals without shoving dangerous illegal substances down her throat or her veins? Fancy Murray Rose daring to swim and win for Australia without a coach, manager, public relations advisor, corporate investment consultant, legal advisor, masseur and ... ?

However did the great Dave Sands survive as a boxer without screaming like a demented banshee every time he saw a reporter? What was Jack Dyer doing living in a Richmond back street instead of a South Yarra penthouse?

Of course the answer to all those questions, when we view sport from a contemporary standpoint, involves money. We need to remind ourselves that, these days, when watching a Test match, AFL grand final or Wimbledon final we are not watching cricketers, footballers or tennis players but business people whose business happens to be playing cricket, football or tennis.

True, they don’t all make fortunes but the big business people in tennis etc. do make fortunes and the strugglers make hardly any money at all but that is the way of the world in commerce and elsewhere. Ask the owner of your corner store. It all sounds very Darwinian to those of us born into the age of amateurism in sport but it is a fact of life in which the likelihood of reversal is more than remote.

Then too there is the greatest self-perpetuating, self-enriching, self-indulgent clique on the planet called the International Olympic Committee. They own the best brand on the planet and they know it. However, I fear that every four years these worthy citizens and their carefully selected successors will be seen increasingly to be presiding over a massive international drugfest.

Corporate jet

This is likely to be so because the drug testers will always be a couple of steps behind the drug makers and takers who are directed by an obvious financial imperative — the makers’ products will ensure a Manhattan apartment, corporate jet and hideaway in the Caribbean for the athlete and similar goodies for the retinue of trainers, coaches and other leeches who feed off such phenomena.

The only spike in this process would be if the athlete concerned turned green and grew a couple of extra appendages before adequate funds had been amassed.

So yes, sport has changed and not in my view for the best but, equally, I recognise that change was inevitable. Indeed, everything changes — it has been ever thus — and, inevitably, money has been central to the process of change, in sport and elsewhere. And to come completely clean, I readily concede I still love watching sport, especially at the elite level.

However, there is one dimension to this personal catharsis that merits special attention. I refer to the preciousness of injury nomenclature as revealed or directed by the AFL in post-match media reports.

For a few years now, media reports on AFL matches, teams, injuries, post-match drunken brawls and sexual frolics by champion players have been featuring under ‘Injuries’ the words “Osteo Pubis”, with an indication in brackets as to the expected duration of a player’s absence from the team. This is alongside the traditional sprains and strains, rips and ricks, breaks and bruises, cuts and cartilages and other wounds that make match and training reports evocative of bulletins from the Crimean War.

Osteo Pubis does not feature in my Oxford Dictionary of Current English. However, osteo is there on its own as denoting “bone”, as a prefix, as in osteopath for example. And pubis is also there, as the “bone forming front of each half of pelvis”.

None of this, however, was at all helpful in explaining precisely what the two words taken together — Osteo Pubis — mean as a football injury, as detailed in Monday’s match reports. So, to whom does one turn in such circumstances?

To one’s friends, of course. I therefore approached about half a dozen friends, all of them former players and keen followers of the game. What, I asked, is this football injury called Osteo Pubis and why didn’t it happen when we were playing football, a few decades ago. I even asked if it was that bit of bone just above the nether regions and, if so, why does it now get in a footballer’s way and be subject to injury, rather than hide happily under one’s jockstrap as it did in days long past.

The response from my friends was a cacophony of silence. Half a dozen wise, widely travelled, worldly men and good, long-standing mates replied with blank looks. They either don’t read the match reports or thought I was talking dirty.
I was not, however, to be diverted and I took the matter down — or perhaps it should be up, at least in money terms — to the player level. Those who have fallen to the Osteo Pubis epidemic have included a number of key players, especially ruckmen and other onballers.

Is it catching?

Indeed, I wondered if it could be catching, given that these players see a lot of each other on the field, often with close and continuing body contact. Moreover, if the media is to be believed, the Osteo Pubii of these players would certainly be known to lot of other people, including their mothers, their team mates and their wives and/or girlfriends.

Indeed, I think I may have shaken a female hand that may well have rubbed a soothing balm on a damaged pubis of a champion of yesteryear. I shall check. That said, and despite the recent media popularisation of famous footballing pubii, at least when in social mode, my efforts to get close to any of those involved — players, team mates, wives, officials, cheer squad or stray supporters — proved futile. Not a word, not a glimpse, not a quick touch. Nothing. No pubii. And nor was any information forthcoming. The mystique of Osteo Pubis remained hidden behind a curtain of silence.

It was at this point that one of my daughters — an earthy lass who may well have seen a pubii or two in her time — intervened to suggest that perhaps Osteo Pubis is the Repetitive Strain Injury(RSI) of the new millennium. You remember RSI? You know, when everyone had a limp wrist or floppy finger on those week days when the public golf courses halved their green fees.

But, upon reflection, I dismissed that theory because the analogy between RSI and Osteo Pubis is imperfect — AFL footballers like playing football every week at senior level because it accelerates the coming of the Toorak mansion, the Porsche and the designer clobber.

Back, then, to the bush where wisdom is dispensed with stoical understatement in an argot all of its own. “Mate, its that bone — sort of a shelf — on top of ya block and tackle”, asserted Suds, playing coach for a decade back in the sixties and seventies, three flags and B&F twice. His explanation made impeccable sense and I asked why it didn’t happen in previous eras. “Damned if I know. Probably because they didn’t protect ‘emselves like we did.” “Yeh”, added Paintpot, expansively. After a beer or three that seemed as good an explanation as I was likely to get, anywhere.

It all reminded me of W. S Gilbert’s observation about a billiard sharp who ...