The Price of Immortality
By GoodBloke
30 August, 2007
goodbloke@sportsfix.com.au
Well Well…
Andrew ‘Joey’ Johns.
The legend himself.
Just what the hell are you up to pal?
You’re a 33 year old man going to a day club in Londondoing pills with your son at home in Newcastle.
A disgrace doesn’t even begin to sum you up.
You are an embarrassment, but you know that already.
You have washed away your career, but I guess you are figuring that out too.
But honestly, for me personally, I have completely dumped you, and everyone else like you.
Sure, now that you were finally busted you have played the ‘I have a problem’ card preemptively to try and get the public on your side.
Well I’m not interested mate. You don’t get to carry on taking drugs for over a decade and then try and skirt around the issue, claiming that you have depression. Maybe you do maybe you don’t, but to me it all just seems a little convenient.
I’m not convinced that you are sorry, just sorry that you got caught. A decade of use tends to show someone that has a flagrant disregard for the rules and for the law. This isn’t a one off error in judgment. It’s calculated, compulsive behavior.
It all just smacks of a PR exercise to try and get people to feel sorry for you. A guy that ‘forgot’ about a pill in his pocket is a joke, a guy that has a ‘problem’ is courageous. You knew this, so with no other option you decided to take the easy way out. Now that there was no more room to lie, to hide your compulsive addictions.,
You had no choice but to front up.
He was on the footy show talking about his problems. Some people might call this courageous.
I wouldn’t.
It is pathetic. There is nothing courageous about fronting up and telling people what you did. It is expected. It is the very least the guy could do for disgracing the code, the fans, the sponsors and anyone else with any other investment in the game – financial or emotional.
I just hope that the example of your fall from grace Andrew can be used by current players.
See boys, even if you don’t get caught during your career and get banned from collecting your precious pay cheques - everything you have ever achieved in the game can by wiped away by one incident. All the ‘greatness’ and adulation can be gone tomorrow. Your legacy erased.
And that is what has happened for Andrew. Every premiership trophy he lifted, every accolade he collected, every try he set up with a perfectly time passed, every 40/20 he kicked off those golden boots…all gone.
Every time anyone remembers ‘Joey’, the immediate denotation will immediately be ‘the druggo’. The history books will no longer read ‘Immortal’, but addict.
The concern for me is that if the ‘Great Andrew Johns’ can succumb to temptation, what hope for the rest of them? It just shows you how insidious drugs really are, with trouble lurking around every dark corner of every nightclub. That young men are so easily corrupted is deeply concerning, not just for sport, but for society in general.
The thing about Johns or any other player from any code that takes drugs -or does something idiotic for that matter - is that they think they don’t owe the game anything. They think there are no consequences, They think they’re bigger than the game in some instances…
Well you know what? You aren’t.
You are meant to be heroes to kids. Veritable Supermen.
The thing players don’t realize is that their actions affect more than their own fortunes when they do something idiotic. Forget club image, or brand personality, I’m talking about history.
Every time any player pulls on the jersey of any club in any code, they are pulling on a piece of history. Every joe average that has screamed for that club over a century, every player that has spilt blood in classic grand finals owns a piece of that joint history. The current player is playing for that – and that is an honour and a privilege.
It is also a duty. One that shouldn’t be ignored lightly.
Players come and go. The game is enduring. The fans will always be there, forking out their hard earned, generation after generation. They deserve the right to know that the current crop of players will preserve the fabric of the history they have created together, in tandem with the players, through the vehicle that is the game.
That history isn’t there for some wanker player to piss all over because he wants to go and ‘get loose’.
Andrew Johns complains that he had it tough. Sure he had a high profile and that can have it’s own challenges, but every kid dreams of captaining the Kangaroos. You lived every kid’s dream since 1908 Joey.
You lived your dream…and you have ruined it.
Sweet dreams in retirement.
You won’t be missed.
How sad.
Love GoodBloke.
