As a writer I was pleased that the All Blacks defeated the Wallabies in Saturday's Rugby World Cup final. Before the game the Australian team was described in the Australian press in terms so inflated that they made John of Gaunt's orotund encomium of 'this happy breed of men' look skeletal. This was warfare to equal Marathon, Waterloo, Gallipoli and the Battle of the Bulge. An Australian victory, and the whole English language might have gone pop.
But the Wallabies had their heroes whose running, passing and kicking styles and haircuts will surely be imitated by small boys in rugby-playing Australia. And no doubt they will come under scrutiny as role models. It is natural to assume that gifted sportsmen and women influence the behaviour and attitudes of children, and so to demand that they be good role models.
Most conversation about role models focuses not on what we should expect of them but on their failures. When players are found drunk, stoned, abusive to umpires, speeding in cars or harassing at parties, they are execrated as bad role models.
Good role models are defined by what they don't do. They are never in the media for the wrong reasons, offer no opinions on public issues, do not criticise the administration, the press or sponsors, are ferocious competitors who lose their identity in their commitment to the team. They are good corporate men.
Some sportsmen, however, confer on role models a much richer meaning. Adam Goodes and the rugby hero of the hour David Pocock (pictured), for example, refuse to separate sport from life. They attend closely to the ethical dimensions of the big issues of their day. They call out unethical behaviour when they meet it on the sporting field and make a strong critique of their society.
Goodes exposed racial prejudice and abuse among Australian Rules crowds, and Pocock homophobic language among rugby players and supporters.
Pocock in particular has made his views clear. He covered over sponsors' signs on his shoes, suspecting them to be made by exploited labour. He and his partner have declined to marry until the introduction of same-sex marriage overturns what he sees as discriminatory marriage laws.
With a small farmer he chained himself to a bulldozer to protest against coal mining at Maules Creek. With other prominent Australians like Bernie Fraser and Peter Doherty he signed an open letter demanding a moratorium on new coal mines and the export of coal. He strongly criticised the London speech in which Tony Abbott urged Europe to push back people seeking protection.
Pocock and Goodes are compelling role models because they refuse to divorce sport from the other dimensions of their life. They model integrity between personal life, sporting role and pubic convictions. For their integrity they are prepared to pay a price, variously losing income from sponsorship, incurring abuse from those whose emptiness they expose and criticism from those who believe ethics should be kept out of sport and business.
Whether or not we agree with the positions they adopt and with how they embody their convictions, such models of integrity are clearly an enormous gift to society. The primacy of conscience is best commended, not by the privileges it confers on us, but by the costs we pay in its service.
The refusal of such sportsmen to divorce ethics from their sporting lives invites those who admire their sporting skill to reflect on the stands they take. What are spectators to make of Goodes' challenge to racial prejudice? What are they to make of Pocock's outspoken defence of the environment and criticism of coal mining? Or of his and his partner's refusal to marry in solidarity with LBGT couples?
They make space for us to reflect on our own response to large human questions. But that space also invites us to judge our own integrity — spectators to ask whether they can rightly boo Indigenous players; sponsors to ask if they can rightly produce goods in nations where workers' rights are not respected; bankers and government ministers whether they can discharge their duty to the environment while encouraging coal mining. The opprobrium that such role models meet may arise out of discomfort with unwelcome self-questioning.
Pocock in particular is an admirable role model because he makes us question the conventional image of the sportsman as a competitive individual whose entire world is his sport and who loses himself in the team or the nation and the pursuit of the flag, the cup, the ashes or the medals.
By all accounts a consummate team player, he is inspired by gratitude to others for their support and sacrifices. Because relationships come before self, team and country, he does not lose himself in them. Nor does he leave his ethical sense behind.
We should be grateful to rugby and Australian Rules for giving us two such good role models, and thank them for being so demanding of themselves and of us.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.