Swan's lesson: one punch can kill Peter Hanlon | April 15, 2008
NO MATTER how many weeks the AFL Tribunal chooses to sit him down for, Barry Hall is lucky — bloody lucky, mate, to use the argot of a time when acts of wanton violence were commonplace on football fields.
Just ask the family and friends of Nigel Lee, killed by a punch from a man who jumped a taxi queue in inner-city Brisbane in 2005.
Or Matthew Stanley, who died from a single blow at a schoolies party in the same city the following year. Or, for that matter, the kid who hit him — whose "brain fade" will mean he spends the last half of his teenage years in a juvenile facility, having been found guilty of manslaughter.
Or Melbourne man Ben Thompson, brain damaged after a single punch to the face last June.
Or David Hookes.
"Young people must learn that one punch can kill … and ruin so many lives," Justice Roslyn Atkinson said in the Stanley case, one of several that led to the Queensland Government adopting a campaign of the same name last December.
Colleague Rohan Connolly wrote in these pages yesterday that it is a rare being who has not had a rush of blood similar to Hall's.
True, yet for the continued functioning of society — let alone football — within the bounds of acceptable behaviour, it is a good thing not everyone acts on them.
Football in 2008 revels in incidents such as Hall versus Staker, and we're all to blame. The television networks that pay obscene amounts of money for the rights to show the game. The newspapers that devote forests of space to covering it as if it is not merely the only game in town, but on the planet. The fans who devour every sound bite and sentence, eagerly filling talkback radio airtime and the cyberspace of internet chat rooms.
Staker's eyes had barely stopped rolling in his head on Saturday night when it was touted as potentially the biggest story of the season. Yet it could have been so much bigger, and so much darker. Just imagine if Staker had been seriously hurt. Or killed.
It's not as if the game does not have precedents. John Greening was a 21-year-old on the cusp of superstardom when he was put down behind play in 1972. He did not play again for two years, and only 13 times after his return. Jim O'Dea's penalty was a 10-game suspension, and a lifetime of reminders.
There are many things about football of yesteryear to pine for. But even if recent events indicate little has changed regarding the treatment of women in this most male of domains, the game is far better for the ills — racism, for one, thuggery another — that have been actively driven out of it.
When Leigh Matthews broke Neville Bruns' jaw with an infamous round-arm right at Princes Park in 1985, he was deregistered for four weeks by the VFL for conduct unbecoming, faced a criminal charge of assault, pleaded guilty and was fined $1000. The book 100 Years Of Australian Football noted that the police investigation "ended the polite fiction that football assaults are somehow legal and that police and the law are prevented from invading the field of play".
That Staker will not pursue the matter criminally is another cause for Hall to give thanks; a NSW Police spokesman confirmed that the Eagle would only have needed to make a complaint and the matter would have been investigated.
My colleague dreaded the cries of "what about the children" that Hall's left hook would prompt. But little eyes and ears watch and listen, and little brains conclude that what the big people are doing must be OK. Which makes reinforcing the message all the more important, no matter how big your brain: one punch can kill.
