If the cap Fitz, don't wear a fucking bandanna

Peter Fitzsimons is a former Australian rugby lock known best for being punched repeatedly in the head by Frenchmen, who has somehow managed to parlay this specious fame into a persistently shouty media career in sports and social commentary. In latter years he has become a self-caricaturing troll in a dreadfully affected bandanna who rails against the youth of today, other football codes, and fans of other football codes, in his various media commitments. His most recent column was a series of unconnected thoughts lambasting Generation Y (nominally the national-level sportsmen of Gen Y, but basically Gen Y as a whole) for being lazy, disinterested, unpatriotic and generally on his lawn at times when he was not prepared or willing to receive them on his lawn. Paul McCartney once said the Sex Pistols were another band playing Chuck Berry, etc etc etc.

Buried amidst the trololol and the young-people-what-even-are-they of Fitzsimons' piece is, it must be reluctantly conceded, a point struggling to make itself heard. That point was made best by the quoted diatribe of ARU boss John O'Neill, directed at non-performing Wallabies players following yet another All Blacks shellacking:

'Twenty per cent of you are letting down the other 80 per cent,'' O'Neill roared in the dressing room. ''That 20 per cent are the same 20 per cent who have their mobile phone in their hands right now. The same 20 per cent are the ones on the grog midweek instead of complying with the rules. So put your f---ing mobiles away. In fact, don't even bring them with you on match day. I'm your employer. I'm not your mate. You're getting paid for the privilege of wearing the gold jersey and representing your country. And you are letting us down.''

Thing is, they could get paid more for not wearing it, and they know that. Professionalism and patriotism are, if not mutually exclusive, then problematic bedfellows. Fitzy finally flirts with this point after many, many paras of sputum-flected faff:

One thought I have is that way back when the culture of playing for Australia was set, honour was pretty much the only thing you got out of it … so you honoured that. The jersey, the cap, the Australian blazer was everything, the stuff of dreams, so for whatever time you had to wear it, of course you gave it absolutely everything you had in you.
These days, a more important consideration is the immense riches on offer in sport, and given that those riches will flow anyway, is it really that important, to bleed to win?

The problem is generational, but not quite the way old man Fitz would observe it. The problem is not only is playing for your country no longer the only way to get ahead in your chosen sport (setting aside the point that you can now actually make a career in your chosen sport instead of fitting it in around work), the undying flag-waving nationalism which underpins the sort of motivation Fitz is talking about is an old-person thing. That simplistic idea of national identity - that you are one people under one flag who will live, breathe, fight, kill and die for said flag - is hardly relevant to The Kids Of Today. Fitzy's generation were brought up by the survivors of multiple world wars who did exactly that. This generation were brought up by Fitzy's generation, who have tried very hard to make today's Australia a fucking embarrassing place to be from, ruled by bigots and shitcunts for the benefit of idiots and arsehats. Generalising is always fraught, and kiss-the-flag-or-fuck-off fuckwittery still lives on amongst the stupid and inbred, but broadly, the monochrome view of national identity was dying amongst Gen X and seems largely gone in Y. (The X-Y boundary has been a moving target over the years but as a late-70s kid I know which camp I belong to.)

What also needs to be considered is the increased mobility and migration of populations. You can't be as dedicated to one nation and one flag to the exclusion of all others if you aren't solely of that nation. The much-maligned James O'Bieber's parents are South African and Kiwi. Do you really think he was brought up with any obsessive drive to fight, kill and die for Australia's version of the Union Flag Plus Additional Southern Cross? His situation is hardly unique, even if his hairdo fucking should be.

As for me, I still have edible marsupials on my passport, but I've lived in NZ for most of a decade and my kids will grow up to be Kiwis with a trans-Tasman mindset. The Wallabies are playing the All Blacks in my (and yes as a DCC ratepayer it's fucking MINE) stadium this weekend and my only real interest is that a lot of Australian currency gets channelled through the bars and hotels of the region. I'd never say I've toured the world and elsewhere, but the more you interact with the world, the more you realise a myopic nationalistic view is completely anachronistic, from a black-and-white newsreel era. And while we cling to that in sports, because it provides a frame of reference and a context for viewers to care about international contests, you can't tell me the twenty-somethings who play today are as invested in their personal sense of national identity as the thirty-somethings who played a decade ago, let alone the fifty-somethings who talk endless bollocks about it in the MSM. This is neither good, nor bad; it just is. And all the young-people-don't-get-it columns in the world ain't gonna change it.

Besides, rugby's for obnoxious cunts anyway.

Trololol.

The Doctor is OUT.