The global shame of footballer's dog prank
Martin Flanagan
November 13, 2010
AUSTRALIANS are said to lack a global consciousness, but an Australian who is likely to possess one henceforth is former Canberra Raiders NRL player Joel Monaghan.
Monaghan was photographed during the Raiders' post-season Mad Monday having what has been described as simulated sex with a teammate's labrador. For two weeks, the photo did the laps of Canberra's rugby league community until it met with an animal rights campaigner. A bizarre story then got more bizarre.
The animal rights campaigner - who launched the photograph of Monaghan and the dog into the twittershpere - tweets under the name Fake Wyatt Roy. Wyatt Roy is the Liberal Party's infant prodigy, its 20-year-old member for Longman. Former treasurer Peter Costello has said Roy could be leader of the party in another 25 years. Twenty-five years is a period of time unknown to Wyatt Roy. It is 25 per cent longer than he has been on the planet. Predictably, he is fighting mad about his name being used in relation to the Monaghan scandal and has released a statement saying that someone is trying to destroy his reputation.
The Monaghan story has gone around the world. It was one of Twitter's 10 biggest-trending topics on the planet. In Taiwan, you can watch an animated version of it. It went big in South Africa and New Zealand. One South African blogger wrote, "The world is laughing at the uncouth, unrefined, and uneducated country that is Australia." The London Guardian ran with the quote but noted it had also been published in Australia "in a remarkable act of self-flagellation".
There have been a torrent of jokes about it - for example, when will rugby league players learn that woof means woof? One blog site claimed to present animal rights ethicist Peter Singer's view on the subject.
By this time, the Canberra Raiders' sponsors were making ominous noises. Gary Sykes, the chairman of sponsor Canberra Milk, said of the incident involving Monaghan and the dog, ''It's not a good thing when you're thinking the public is thinking Canberra Milk."
It will be some time, I fear, before the words Canberra and NRL cause a carton of milk to pop into people's imaginations.
In my sports column last week, I described rugby league as unkillable, a word I borrowed from the American poet and fascist collaborator Ezra Pound, who used it to describe the children of a woman he didn't like.
Collingwood's Alan Didak took the AFL to extremes when he went on a night-time jaunt with a man later convicted of a callous murder but, over the past decade, the NRL has made the AFL look like a show the ABC would run on Sunday morning.
The NRL has had to deal with a drive-by shooting, allegations of gang rape, a traumatised woman revealing details of group sex involving one of the game's biggest media personalities - you would think, in PR terms, things could not possibly get worse. Then a player is photographed simulating sex with a dog.
The biggest difference between the NRL and the AFL is that women make up 49 per cent of AFL supporters. Women are now a definite presence in the AFL at club and commission level, as well as in the media.
Another difference between the AFL and the NRL is that the AFL acts as a central government, which rigorously monitors and manipulates the game's image. The NRL does not have a commission. The individual clubs are much more powerful.
What is most interesting to me is that, notwithstanding a run of bad publicity that a Hollywood film producer would be hard-pressed to invent, rugby league appears to be strengthening as a television game. I see it this way. The AFL is like the family entertainment show that comes on around 8.30pm. The NRL is like the movie that starts around midnight.
Monaghan's departure from the Raiders earlier this week was a sad affair. The club seemed sorry to see him go and there was talk of having him back in the future. Monaghan says he knows he'll have to live with it. We all will. Do you think New Zealanders, after a century or more of jokes about them having sexual relationships with sheep, are going to forget this?
Monaghan is hoping to get a place in the English Super League. I assume he understands that going to the other side of the world does not mean he's going to get away from what occurred. He'll have to go to Jupiter or Saturn for that.
Martin Flanagan is a senior writer.
