High Sobriety (29 page)

In 2007, when Geelong won their first AFL premiership in 44 years, it brought back those memories as I watched Loretta and the other friends who had stuck with the Cats through decades of heartache embark on a week-long bender. A year later, I was lucky enough to watch Hawthorn win the flag. Having missed the glory days of the 1970s and 1980s, I hadn't known success as a Hawks fan; since I'd been following them, there were lean years with many woeful performances, and I'd begun to wonder if perhaps I was a jinx. When we won the premiership, the celebrations went on for days. I drank beer by the barrelful and sang the club song until I was hoarse.

Grand-final day in Melbourne is one of my favourite days of the year, regardless of who's playing. For a week leading up to it, the city's buzzing as footy fans wear their colours and prepare to enjoy an epic battle between the season's two best teams. On the day itself, it's okay to crack open a beer at 11.00 a.m., and drunkenness is excused and expected. In ten years of living in Melbourne, I've never experienced the day sober. Even when I was pulling pints at The Rose Hotel, I got on the sauce as soon as I knocked off, catching up quickly with mates who'd been on it all day. Last year there were two chances to get wasted, after the drawn grand final forced a replay. I took full advantage of them.

This year will be different in two ways. The expansion of the league has seen the fixture move from the traditional last Saturday in September to the first Saturday in October. Perhaps more noteworthy to me is the fact that I'll watch the game without a beer in my hand. I've survived the home-and-away season without craving a drink. It's actually been quite liberating not having to queue to buy crap beer in a plastic cup. My abstinence even inspired one of my match-day friends, Sophie, to give up booze for a couple of weeks. But at the preliminary final against Collingwood last week, I doubted whether I would make it through the finals series without a drink. Few had given us a chance against last year's premiers, but halfway through the third quarter, we were on top and dominating. Suddenly, a berth in the grand final was a real possibility. As I chewed my nails and watched through half-open eyes, I was gripped by a vision of Hawthorn captain Luke Hodge standing on the dais with the premiership cup in his hands. How could I not get drunk if we won the flag?

There's something about sporting triumph that just merits alcoholic acknowledgement. Maybe it's because it can be so emotionally draining to achieve it that a boozed-up celebration is the only way to release that tension. Or maybe it's about bonding with friends over a mutual passion. In Australia, it might be due to the weather. Sunshine always makes beer taste better.

But on a structural level, it's much more than that. Alcohol is the lifeblood of every major sport in this country. Whether it's the AFL's 100-year-old partnership with Carlton Draught, the Australian cricket team spruiking VB, or the Formula One Grand Prix partnering with Johnnie Walker, Australian sport is saturated with booze. Of the $119 million spent on advertising by the alcohol industry in 2008, a quarter was linked to sport — Foster's alone spent $20 million in direct deals with the AFL, the NRL, and Cricket Australia. Sporting heroes have become mobile billboards for alcohol companies.

Of course, the industry flatly rejects claims that they use sport to promote excessive drinking, and say that their advertising only affects a consumer's brand choice, not how much they drink. Indeed, I have to say that I'm continually amazed by how convivial the atmosphere is at the football, despite free-flowing beer (albeit mid-strength). It's rare to see people really wasted, and even on grand-final day there are few arrests. There's more violence on the field than in the stands. But I find it hard to believe that alcohol companies have any interest in encouraging moderate drinking. For instance, it's difficult to reconcile Foster's claim to be responsible corporate citizens with their VB promotion in which they gave away a talking doll of former cricket star David Boon (famous, as we've seen, for knocking back 52 beers during a flight from Sydney to London). Programmed to respond to electronic triggers during television coverage of the VB-sponsored one-day series, the doll's favourite catchphrases included, ‘When are we going to the pub?' and ‘Boony wants some beer.' By the end of the 2006 promotion, more than 200,000 talking dolls had been given away with slabs of VB. Not long after, half-yearly results revealed that Foster's had enjoyed its highest beer sales in a decade.

For many Aussies, these promotions are a laugh. It's harmless fun. And while they might be tempted to buy a slab to collect a Boony doll, it has little bearing on how much they'll actually drink when watching the cricket. Just like the MCG's notorious Bay 13, where rowdy fans get pissed, start Mexican waves, and sledge opposition players, these promotions are all part of the fun of the game. It shows that we're a nation of lovable larrikins who don't take ourselves too seriously.

But public-health experts don't find it funny. They argue that much of the industry's advertising is trying to shore up brand loyalty in a new generation of drinkers. When a giant inflatable pot of Carlton Draught floats across the MCG on grand-final day — as it did in 2008 — casting a colossal shadow on the hallowed turf, kids would be forgiven for thinking that beer is an essential part of their footy experience. The television adverts for the ‘official beer of the AFL' are similarly hard to ignore: they're often movie-style, big-budget productions, designed to make you laugh and make such an impact that you'll be talking about them with your friends the next day. Arguably, these ads are just as likely, if not more, to appeal to middle-aged men as kids. But what worries the public-health lobby is growing research that shows early exposure to this type of advertising desensitises children to alcohol and increases the likeliness of underage drinking. The effect appears to be more pronounced when those ads feature their sporting heroes. If Michael Clarke's wearing the VB logo on his cap as he takes a wicket, or the Wallabies are sharing a rum and Coke with a seven-foot-tall talking polar bear, that's got to be cool. The potential to glamorise booze and encourage underage drinking is the reason that alcohol ads are banned during children's television viewing hours (that is, before 9.00 p.m.). But here's the rub: live sporting events are exempt.

It's a loophole that critics say alcohol companies are exploiting to bombard children with advertising during events they know they'll be watching. This is exactly the type of marketing that my alcohol-industry contact denies is designed to reach a young audience of potential drinkers. A study conducted by the Cancer Council in April 2011 found that 116,000 children under the age of 17 tuned in to watch the Bathurst 1000 V8 Supercars event; in two hours of race coverage, they were exposed to alcohol messages 106 times. They saw ads for Jim Beam, XXXX Gold, Jack Daniel's, Sirromet wines, and bottle-shop chains BWS and The Bottle-O. The images were on the podium, on the track, plastered over the cars, and popping up as on-screen graphics — and all were shown before 8.30 p.m. Leaving aside the appropriateness of partnering hard liquor with an event showcasing fast cars, it does seem that this exemption is a peculiar anomaly for a product that our political leaders claim is turning young people into violent delinquents.

The Australian Medical Association, the Greens, and the Australian Drug Foundation are among groups that want to see alcohol advertising kicked out of sport for good. They want a federal government buy-back of the estimated $300 million that alcohol companies spend on sports sponsorship every year. But each time a ban is raised, the major sporting codes have come out swinging. In a joint submission to a 2007 Senate inquiry into alcohol harm, they claimed that up to 23 per cent of all sport revenue comes from alcohol sponsorship, warning that a ban would decimate community sport and send many grassroots clubs to the wall. Likewise, in 2009, when the Preventative Health Taskforce recommended an end to alcohol companies sponsoring sport, AFL boss Andrew Demetriou said that a ban would ‘cripple football'. It's the same argument that cigarette manufacturers used to oppose a ban on tobacco sponsorship in the late 1980s. But the sky is yet to fall in — clubs have found new sponsors.
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*As it turns out, in June 2012 sports minister Kate Lundy announced a deal with 12 sporting codes, including soccer, basketball, netball, swimming, and cycling, which saw the organisations share $25 million in government funding in return for agreeing to end all alcohol sponsorship arrangements and to promote responsible drinking. Australia's biggest sporting codes — AFL, cricket, and rugby — did not sign up to the deal. Around the same time, the AFL extended its sponsorship deal with Carlton & United Breweries for another five years. Under fire for wowserism, health minister Tanya Plibersek said that a lot of sport depended on alcohol sponsorship, and that the government had ‘no intention of banning alcohol advertising'.

In France, where there's been a ban on alcohol advertising since 1991, rugby union's European tournament, the Heineken Cup, was renamed the H Cup to satisfy broadcast regulations. American brewer Anheuser-Busch, which secured world sponsorship rights to the 1998 World Cup in France, tried to have the ban overturned to allow its Budweiser brand to be displayed on pitch-side hoardings. The French government refused to make an exception. The brewer was forced to sell the advertising space, and a new sponsor was found in Japanese electronics company Casio, proving there are alternatives to liquor when it comes to sponsorship.

Here, alcohol experts say we're five or ten years away from such a ban. In a nation obsessed with sport, I'd say it will be much longer. It's hard to imagine what an AFL season would look like without alcohol promotions. There would be no Crownies at the Brownlow, no big-budget beer ads on grand-final day, and 12 out of 18 footy clubs would be looking for a new sponsor.

This season, with drinking removed from my football experience, I've started to notice how insidious these promotions are. Tuning into radio station Triple M, I notice that commentators regularly count a player's match statistics in beer. ‘He's not great in the Carlton Draught long-kick department,' James Brayshaw says, in all seriousness, to his co-host Garry Lyon on their Saturday-afternoon live commentary. ‘No, he's only had three Carlton Draughts for the whole game,' Lyon replies. This word-substitution, part of a sponsorship deal with the brewing giant, might occur a dozen or more times in a two-hour broadcast. When every kick, handball, and goal is measured in beer, what does that say about alcohol's place in competitive sport to a kid who tunes in?

Footy culture is blokey, and I suspect that the idea that sport and drinking are inextricably linked to masculinity is planted in boys' minds from an early age. The more you drink, the more of a man you are. Young men can't fail to notice that some of the most talented AFL players of the modern era — Ben Cousins, Brendan Fevola, and Wayne Carey — have been party boys. But if AFL is seen as a macho sport, where alcohol and testosterone-fuelled bad behaviour are all part of the package, arguably rugby league is even more so. Earlier this year, following a series of alcohol-related incidents involving players from the Sydney Roosters, former league star Wayne Pearce said that the binge-drinking culture was the biggest blight on the game. He warned that the sports stars' behaviour threatened to damage the reputation of the game by sending the wrong message to supporters.

Involvement with local rugby union and league clubs forged a pattern of heavy drinking for 39-year-old Brent, a
Hello Sunday Morning
blogger from Brisbane. When we talk on the phone, he tells me that he had his first beer in the changing rooms at 14, after watching his father play. ‘They'd won something, and there were beers going around. Dad gave me a beer, and I thought I was pretty cool. They used to do shotguns, where you stick a key in a can and you have to scull the lot — whoever got the best player did shotguns. When you won trophies, you'd drink beer out of trophies. It was just what everyone did back then.'

By 17, he'd begun playing rugby himself. A big night on the town was obligatory after the game and after training. Some of the clubs he played with were sponsored by local bars or hotels, and instead of giving the team money for the privilege of having the bar's name on their shirts, the publicans paid them in free drinks. Once a week, the team would descend on the venue to drink their bar tab. Away matches were also swimming with alcohol. ‘Every bus trip I've ever been on, for any club I've ever played for, we'll always get booze for the bus trip home — and the longer the bus trip, the more booze you get. You also tend to stop at pubs along the way. I went on a rugby trip in Grade 12 and we were drinking in pubs on the way back. The bus driver and coach were organising our booze when we were 17 years old, so it gets bred into you pretty early.'

He continued to play rugby (league and union) into adulthood, hanging up his boots a couple of years ago. Even in his thirties, the rituals were the same. ‘Last time I played was in Mount Isa. We played teams that came from out of town, and after the game we had boat races: you have four or five players in your teams, you nominate your best drinkers, and it's like a relay, so you'll drink a beer and slam it down, the next guy will drink it, and you try and beat the other team. But in Mount Isa, we'd do it with shots of absinthe. You might have a can of beer and a shot of absinthe, and you've got to knock that back, and the next guy goes, and you just try and drink it faster than the other team. The team that finishes first wins.'

Another drinking game popular on trips away was the 100 Club, where players were challenged to drink 100 beers in 100 minutes. Everyone got an empty glass and had to fill up the glass of the teammate next to them. Every minute, someone shouted, ‘Drink!' and players had to finish everything in their glasses. If you made it through 100 minutes, you became a member of the 100 Club. On a team trip to Bali ten years ago, the results weren't pretty. ‘What happens is, you fill up the guy to the left of you, and you might do that for ten minutes, and then he'll fill up your glass. You can fill it up as full as you like, but you know he's going to have a chance to get you back. And if you can't drink, or if you throw up or you urinate, then you're out. It starts with guys just pouring shots of beer, but towards the end it gets messy and people start filling up glasses, and the last 20 minutes can get a bit full-on. People throw up. They can't handle the volume of beer.'