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LOVE, SEX AND
FOOTBALL
James Moloney
Sport is an
important part of Australia’s popular
culture.
Watch out! John Cleese as
Basil Fawlty will spring from the nearest doorway
complaining about “the bleeding obvious.” But if this
statement seems so obvious, why has sport not featured
more prominently in our literature for the young?
After writing my most recent novel, Touch Me I think
I know why. Sorry boys. Sport on the page is deadly dull
and I have thousands of words hacked from the early
drafts of Touch Me to prove it. More of this later. But
for now, back to sport as popular culture, the life
blood of our people, a national obsession and the only
thing that makes many boys get out of bed in the
morning.
I was a boy once, myself, and when the
State of Origin Rugby League series is held each year, I
become one again. I am not the only man who finds
himself animated by a boyish enthusiasm once he starts
talking about sport. We could justify all this by saying
that sport is good for people. It means physical
exercise. But who are we kidding? Exercise! Fitness!
Bah! What really gets our blood racing is the sporting
contest, sport as a celebration, sport as intoxication -
a release from the humdrum of workplace and classroom.
Peter MacFarlane presents a wonderful picture of
Australian football as celebration in his book More Than
a Game.
In writing Touch Me, I wanted to tap into
that same celebration of contest to show that there is a
heartening innocence in the competitiveness that boys so
often exhibit. When the reader first meets the main
character, Xavier McLachlan, he is racing his best mate,
Scott, to finish a set of bench presses in the weights
room at school. There is no artifice, just a ferocious
determination to win that brings to mind the purity of
the original Olympian ideals. Unfortunately, that
competitiveness can be corrupted when adult egos come
into play and that is what happens in “Touch Me.”
Writing about sport, as I thought boys might like to
read it, did not work, however. It is always a mistake
to consider your audience too strongly. The important
thing is to write what you want to say and tell the
story that compels you. You would think that after six
YA novels, I would have learned this. But no. I insist
on going about things the hard way. What I eventually
had to admit is that no matter how central a sport, in
this case Rugby football, might be to the lives of the
characters, no sport can sustain a story through its
intrinsic appeal alone. Have you ever read every word of
a newspaper report detailing the events of a football
game or tennis match? No, I haven’t either. In a
Viewpoint article last year, Simon Higgins wrote,” ...
every time I try to emphasise technology in a story, it
backlashes with twists about the human
condition.”
For technology, read sport. Novels cannot
be about a sport, only the players who take part. As a
librarian I wished boys could understand this and stop
asking me for novels about sport. They were asking me
for books that gave them the same sensations as playing
the game. But novels can’t do that. They are about the
human condition. It was not the editor (a female) who
carved all the detailed descriptions of play, tactics
and the rest from Touch Me. I did it myself because such
passages were simply holding up the main game, the story
of Xavier McLachlan and the unusual girl he falls in
love with.
Xavier is in his final year at St
Matthew’s, a private boys school where Rugby is king.
There are any number of such colleges in Sydney and
Brisbane and though I deliberately fudged which city it
is, there may be some on both sides of the border who
think it is their school. For the record, it is an
amalgamation of at least a dozen schools, including one
in Melbourne. The colours are blue and white, but heck,
I had to choose something!
Xavier expects to win a
blue jersey as part of the First XV. His identity and
self-esteem are deeply rooted in his footballing ability
which has not previously been challenged so when this is
called into question, it seems his life is falling
apart. Believe me, for some boys it is that serious. To
make matters more difficult for Xavier, I introduce him
to Nuala Magee.
While conducting workshops in a
Melbourne high school, I came across a girl in lipstick
and make-up. “How do you get away with it,” I asked.
“Oh, the teachers catch me but a few times I’ve made
it through to three o’clock,” she boasted happily.
She was a big girl, what my father would call
statuesque, but she wore oversized slacks and jumper
which gave her a strangely intimidating size and seemed
out of place with the carefully tended face. I gathered
she was something of a champion amongst the girls but
her motivation seemed to have more to do with stirring
up the boys. Why? I asked myself. Had some boys given
her a hard time?
Thus was planted in my mind the seed
for the character, Nuala Magee. Nuala has been given a
hard time, an experience that would crush most girls but
she has the kind of determination they don’t laud on the
sporting field. How she exacts her revenge is something
that forces Xavier to see himself in a new light and
reassess what true courage might be. There is a third
character, Alex Murray, who contributes to this
reassessment. Alex and what happens to him is loosely
based on a boy I once knew and when you read his story,
you will understand why I remember him so
well.
Xavier himself has been in my mind for a
decade. In as much as I was a Rugby player at school, a
member of a Premiership winning First XV, I suppose
there is much of me within him, as eventually I had to
admit to myself there was at least a part of me in Dougy
and in Carl Matt. (Or do I say that now only because I
cannot conceive of their invention out of pure
imagination) But Xavier’s dislocation is my own and I do
remember with a clarity that frightens me, even though
it was thirty years ago, how I feared losing my place in
the team because with it, I feared I would lose my place
in the world.
Still, no matter how much the
character may resemble the author emotionally, the
clever writers make sure this character undergoes
experiences very different from their own. It is a
mistake to create an intense, barely disguised
autobiography then call it a novel. Touch Me is most
certainly a novel.
It is a novel about stereotypes,
both male and female and how they are perpetuated
through sport and in life without thought or challenge.
More than this, it asks why those stereotypes are
perpetuated. Who benefits? Who is afraid of breaking
free or seeing others break free?
It is conducted
within the microcosm of a school where team loyalty and
school spirit can be foisted on boys as nothing more
than a herd mentality that conveniently avoids a deeper
responsibility to the self and others as individuals.
Not that this book attacks boys schools. In Brother
Allbecker, the no-nonsense deputy and Ms Delaney, the
English teacher, I have been careful to paint a positive
picture. It is the insidious influence of the Old Boys
in areas of narrowly defined tradition such as winning a
First XV Premiership that can harm the boys - all in the
name of making them men to be proud of, naturally.
But what kind of men should we be proud of? Sport
only knows one kind.
Xavier tries to break free of
traditional stereotypes but he soon discovers why they
are so powerful and what awaits those who step outside
the circle. In fact, he gets off lightly in the
circumstances. The hardest barriers he has to break lie
inside himself and his perception of manly courage, for
the worst thing about stereotypes is how easily they are
internalised by the young. So Xavier thinks he knows
what courage is. Footy has defined it for him and he has
always judged himself by the measuring stick that
football provides. But at a time when he seems to be
slipping, when he can no longer measure up against the
standards he has set himself, he finds a new kind of
courage called for, a kind that none of his friends seem
to value. There are no rule books, no coaching sessions,
no drills. Unlike too many sporting stories, this one
does not end with the hero returning to the bosom of his
team to give his all for some higher purpose.
I do
not think Xavier McLachlan is the only adolescent boy
taking this journey without maps, (to steal a phrase
from Graham Greene). Perhaps some of them will take
heart from his story.
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