Alex McKinnon has right to be angry, doesn’t deserve public backlash, writes Paul Kent
Paul Kent The Daily Telegraph July 07, 2015 12:00AM
A LOT of people got what they wanted Sunday night. And then turned when it didn’t suit.
For 15 months Alex McKinnon has worked on his broken body, mostly in private, while we waited for the story to explode in a ball of triumph and feel-good emotions.
It was going to be simple, heartwarming. An inspiration, and when it finally came out he would make us all feel better about ourselves for a small moment before we went back to our lives and he went back to his recovery that never ends.
Little did we know of the whole story. How close he came to death that first week after breaking his neck, with pneumonia, or his desire to die so he would no longer be a burden on those he loved. Or his private anger at Cameron Smith.
Given the sensitivities of his injury much of Alex’s story was kept confidential. Almost the entire media gave him the professional courtesy of revealing his story, at his discretion.
I did not know Alex before his accident. I met him after watching one of those Knights’ updates and figured there must be days of great boredom in hospital and so I burned some sports documentaries onto DVDs and went to the Royal North Shore Hospital, unannounced.
I told the nurse I wanted to drop them off for Alex McKinnon.
She came back five minutes later.
“Alex is just getting dressed but if you can wait ...” she said.
Scott McKinnon, Alex’s father, came out and as Alex dressed we sat in the sun and talked and I began to hear how lucky Alex was to be alive along with the rest of it.
And so it finally came Sunday night on 60 Minutes.
Most tuned in expecting the sporting cliche, the feel-good story.
Instead they got a dose of reality.
“Is he still debating? Is he f...... serious?” McKinnon says when he sees Smith arguing with the referee over whether there should be a penalty following the tackle that left him a quadriplegic.
“Wouldn’t you just shut up?”
The game was held up almost 10 minutes while McKinnon was stabilised and stretchered off.
The scene angers McKinnon’s supporters and provokes those backing Smith, who argue he could not have known the seriousness of McKinnon’s injury, into violent defence.
With each hour since, public opinion increasingly sides with Smith. McKinnon, it seems, did not fill the narrative like they would have preferred.
Others, unable to defend Smith by blaming Alex, blame the third person in the conversation, 60 Minutes.
It was media “commercialism” and “sensationalism” when, in fact, it was what they wanted all along.
An honest story. Alex, unvarnished.
It makes the backlash hard to understand.
It seems, having been robbed of the right to walk, people now want to rob Alex of the right to be angry about it.
Our values now seem so out of whack that we comfortably allow ourselves the right to be angry at McKinnon for his comments about Smith, but do not believe McKinnon has the right to be angry at being left a quadriplegic.
Good grief.
So viciously is this battle being fought on a new front, the point has been lost.
Whether you agree with McKinnon or not he is entitled to feel how he feels. They are his emotions.
Yes, this is unfortunate for Smith, who surely is also carrying some burden.
Everybody who knows Smith knows he made a mistake and would be struggling.
“On the night,” Wayne Bennett told 60 Minutes, “I’ve got to assume he just got it wrong.”
Bennett knows, like we all do, that Smith is a very decent man. But even good men make mistakes, and good ones correct them.
Some months after McKinnon’s injury a text came through on his phone.
It was Jordan McLean apologising, and McKinnon told Liz Hayes he did not need McLean to say sorry.
“I now he’d be sorry,” he said. “I’m not angry.”
While McKinnon was still angry at the time the text came, McLean’s efforts allowed him to reach closure.
Sunday’s night’s anger at Smith is an acknowledgment that he feels Smith has failed there.
Melbourne has since put out a statement saying the Storm players tried several times to visit McKinnon when he was hospitalised in Melbourne.
Given he was fighting to save his life, and then stop himself from wanting to die, it’s understandable they were denied.
Yet where that leaves us is a community in need of help.
We have become a society without empathy, our anger expressed in 140 characters or less. With each angry reply few realise that, no matter which side we end up on here, we all lose.
It’s understandable 60 Minutes was not what we expected and many are disappointed at missing their feel-good moment.
It is also worth remembering, though, that fate ran off with Alex McKinnon’s “happily ever after ...” in round three last year, and nobody more than him is entitled to feel how he feels.
