Eureka Street - Jul-Aug 2001

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July/August 2001
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July/August 2001
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Eureka Street cover

Also this month:

Promising the world: Juliette Hughes interviews Labor Shadow Environment Minister, Nick Bolkus.

The name of the game: Amanda Smith and Tim Stoney dissect Australian sport.

Literature under arms: John Sendy goes in search of Rolf Boldrewood.

Travel bent: Peter Steele reviews Holiday Business and Mediterranean Journeys in Time & Place.

Flash in the Pan: Reviews of the films Series 7; Moulin Rouge; Russian Doll; The House of Mirth; The Crimson Rivers and The Sacred Stones.

Back to the front page

The name of the game

Is it profit? Or sportsmanship? Entertainment or business? Amanda Smith examines the state of the sports that are part of the pulse of Australian life.

‘On an ethical level, there are also clear ways in which sport is not an exact parallel with business. Our expectations of ethical behaviour in sport are not the same as our expectations of ethical behaviour in business. This relates to the uncertainty of outcome that’s fundamental to sport, and what happens when that uncertainty of outcome is denied.

The biggest front-page story about sport last year was the cricket match-fixing and betting scandal: Hansie Cronje and his mates on the take, involving some thousands of dollars (and, of course, the saga of corruption in cricket continues). In my recollection, the equivalently huge front-page story concerning a comparable scandal in the corporate world was when Nick Leeson ripped off Barings Bank. The amount of money involved there was squillions.

A matter of corporate fraud only gets this kind of major public and media attention when it involves enormous amounts of money, and/or is a very strange story. The Nick Leeson affair was both these things. Whereas a whiff of corruption in a sport, involving comparatively small amounts of money, always gets huge attention. The difference is that we expect, or at least we’re unsurprised by, unethical behaviour in the dog-eat-dog world of business. In sport, it is genuinely shocking to discover that a player could also operate as a rogue trader.

Nevertheless, there are many worse things that happen in this world to get upset and angry about than discovering that a game of cricket has been rigged. Why then does it seem so bad when a cricketer pockets a few thousand bucks to throw a game? In part, it’s the sense that if you can’t even trust a game of cricket to be fair dinkum any more, then what can you trust in this world?’

—For Amanda Smith’s full article, please see Eureka Street July/August 2001 print edition, available by subscription and at bookshops and newsagents.

Photograph by Bill Thomas

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