Dr steward in collingwood8/25/2023 Judy Manchester was the hygienist, his mom and his wife Kathy worked at the front desk. Robert Reid left another practice in town and opened Collingwood Dental Centre at 60 Hume Street. Failing all that, try not to be a dickhead. In this sport, in this country and at this point in our history, it’s worth reflecting on what it means to boo an Aboriginal footballer. There’s no need to microwave your membership or bemoan a world gone soft. If you boo Stewart on Friday night, and you boo Franklin into retirement, the tone, the impact and the context will be completely different. When Goodes was booed, the sentiment from his fellow Indigenous players was the same – when you boo him, you boo our people. It may initially come from the same witless place but it’s rarely received the same way. A boo directed towards Joel Selwood is freighted differently to one at Franklin. The next best thing would be to accept that not all boos are the same. For the people running the game and driving this narrative, a good starting point would be to admit what this is actually about: not letting history repeat.įor the rest of us, the ideal scenario would be to stop booing. That’s how vexed this issue is, how much of a mess it is. On the flipside, there’s the danger that we’re going to police booing to within an inch of its life – that every time a Tom (Papley, Stewart or even Browne) is booed at the football, we’ll be sending them bouquets and psychologists the next day. The fear now is that a whole new category of booers will emerge: “You’re calling me a racist and telling me how to behave? You, a football club, are telling me to support an Indigenous voice to parliament? I’m pushing back, this is my tiny rebellion.” But the echoes, the battle lines and the potential tinderbox of the Goodes affair are all there, being tiptoed around. “I haven’t got much to say,” he told reporter Tom Browne, the son of the Collingwood president, who travelled 700km for the comment. He’s always been a solar but mostly silent superstar. He hasn’t been forced to beg for our restraint, the way Goodes had to. We are nowhere near that point with Franklin. There was a really clear point where, as a footy fan, an adult, a voter, possibly a parent, you had a choice – you could continue to boo this man, to humiliate him, denigrate him and drive him out of the game, or you could stop. Goodes, like Franklin, had a swagger about him that rubbed the usual suspects the wrong way. In which case it doesn’t really matter why Collingwood fans booed Franklin. It’s about administrators, clubs and journalists who are terrified, to the point of overcorrection, of making the same mistake again. Surely it’s about an outgoing chief executive and a wider industry that completely misread the situation and left a champion footballer and a decent man at the mercy of the horde. But as noble a sentiment as that is, surely that’s not what this is about. “Don’t disrespect a champion,” has been the theme. We’ve had carefully worded statements, “whataboutery” and moral grandstanding. If the booing itself was infantile, the reaction has been heartening, depressing, bewildering and all too familiar. The AFL is all too happy to whip us into a state of frenzy, to burst our eardrums, ply us with booze and treat us like imbeciles, and then reprimand us via press release when we act accordingly. When you go to the football, you’re treated as a consumer, not a spectator. Maybe, and hear me out, if you treat people like children, they’re going to act like it. Maybe it was resentment: “He gets paid obscene money, he has a beautiful wife, he’s everything I’m not. Maybe certain sections of fanbase simply thought they were doing their bit. The way Collingwood fans rally behind their team is incredible, it was definitely a factor in their Anzac Day comeback. Maybe they were trying to be the “19th man”.
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