Ricky Stuart a man among men
By Paul Kent | November 25, 2008 11:00pm
RICKY Stuart is a good man who is in need, it seems, of a weakness. If he confessed to being a drug addict, as Ben Cousins did, then public sympathy would settle gently on his shoulders.
If he claimed he turned to drinking because he was racially abused, as Andrew Symonds did, we would save a warm hug and a welcome back for him.
If he ripped off the shirt and let it all out, claiming all of the above on top of a gambling addiction and several failed marriages, we would adopt him as our flawed hero. As we did with John Daly.
Instead, Ricky hates losing.
Let's hang him.
Stuart is one of the four headliners in Australian sport at the moment and his offences are the least destructive but the most vilified.
The criticism has been all one way, with prejudice. Meanwhile, everybody is calling for Cousins, the poor kid, to be given a second chance.
Symonds has already been given his.
Daly, again, is all of the above.
Yet because Stuart refuses to break, refusing to admit to a failing, they go after him even harder. Nobody is defending what Stuart did.
What he did was wrong.
He will admit that when the time has come. At the moment the exact allegations against him have not been revealed and he has received legal advice not to comment until all the evidence has been gathered and he knows what he faces.
At the end of the day, it was a shot at a referee made in the frustration of a losing World Cup final.
Cousins became a drug addict through nothing else but living the life of excess. There was no tragedy.
No life-changing moment, for instance, where he turned to drugs to help him through the battle.
He was simply too weak to say no to the drugs and the easy women and the long, long nights that had no dawn.
Symonds is different. He was always a prat. He was such a jerk at the Normanby Hotel on Sunday night that Kangaroos players distanced themselves from him.
It took no more than 15 minutes to figure him out.
Yet he is the beneficiary of a carefully crafted image that sells him as a knockabout Joe, even though those who know him stagger at his treatment of all us "nuffies" in the public.
Cricket Australia has worked hard on Symonds' image, particularly when it had to. Never strong enough to be accountable for his actions, he claimed he was "tired" when he shoved a fan with his bat.
He claimed it was stress from the Monkeygate scandal that led to him ignoring the meeting that saw him sacked from the Australian team in Darwin. Truth is, his rude and arrogant behaviour had gone unchecked for years and the only difference this time was that he had turned on his own.
Yet a campaign was launched and Symonds was recast as a victim.
It worked brilliantly until Sunday.
The tide is turning on Cousins as well, now that his willingness to return to footy is apparently not as transparent as the confession that provoked all that public sympathy.
Yet Stuart remains the focus of most vitriol. Stuart, who never succumbed to the weakness of drugs or alcohol.
Who has never reached back into his past to resurrect a failing that could be twisted for public sympathy.
On Monday, his family flew to the Gold Coast to finally have their holiday. He didn't join them.
Instead, he flew from Brisbane to Canberra for a charity golf day he was committed to.
With the media waiting, the easy answer was to pull out late but promise to send a signed jersey or a few tickets or even just a raincheck.
It would not be hard to imagine some of the others mentioned in this column doing just that.
Stuart arrived and instead of fishing for sympathy, he abruptly told the media to back off - whereupon a cameraman suddenly grew a backbone and yelled: "F . . . off, you loser."
There are men, and there are men
