Lies And Muddied Pies: The Collingwood Fallout

The Age

Saturday August 9, 2008

Carol Nader - Carol Nader is social policy editor

The Shaw-Didak affair raises issues that go beyond football to workplaces in general and the culture of not dobbing in your mate.

EDDIE McGuire's face, flushed with humiliation, said it all. With just one lie, his boys had dumped him in the proverbial. Much of the fallout this week from the latest tale involving footballers behaving badly was predictable. The collective rolling of the eyes. The inevitable debate about whether footballers should be looked upon as role models. Questions about the "culture" of football clubs. And, dare we say, schadenfreude as the club spectacularly imploded. ("If you drink and drive, you're a Collingwood footballer," one letter writer sniggered in The Age.)

But Heath Shaw and Alan Didak's drunken car crash last weekend has also presented more interesting questions about the club's moral code and how their bosses have dealt with the pair.

A young man, Shaw, breaks the law and potentially endangers lives by getting behind the wheel after having quite a few drinks. He later blows almost three times the legal limit after crashing into parked cars. The club's penalty? A mere fine by Collingwood of a few thousand dollars. Then it emerges that he lied about the identity of his passenger. Suddenly his punishment is elevated to a suspension that spans the remainder of the season. Didak, who turns out to have been the mystery "mate" in the car with Shaw, cops the same deal. If the punishment dished out to the pair is any guide, it seems their biggest misdemeanour was being economical with the truth.

Collingwood chief executive Gary Pert explained the dishonesty factor while being hammered at a media conference this week: "When you have two of your players looking the president, the coach, their own teammates in the eye and actually lying to them, it really destroys the essence of the club."

Shaw and Didak, as "employees" of the Collingwood Football Club, have paid a high price for their big night out. But what confirmed their undoing was lying to their boss and letting him publicly repeat their lie, leaving him looking plain silly.

In football, as in life, it's one thing to stuff up; it's an entirely different matter to get caught fibbing about it. And when the lie is to your boss - be it a club president or a chief executive - it seems that things will inevitably end badly.

A recent unfair-dismissal case illustrates just how dangerous it can be. When Telstra employee Carlie Streeter was sacked last year after a drunken post-Christmas-party sex romp, she took her case to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. It found that her sacking for having sex within hearing distance of colleagues was unfair. But Telstra appealed and a full bench of the commission this year overturned the ruling, saying Telstra had a right to sack her because of her dishonesty during the company's investigations.

Whether your "office" is a football field or takes a more conventional form, lying in any workplace can be a sackable offence, says Stuart Kollmorgen, workplace relations partner at law firm Deacons. For instance, if a worker is using a company car and has an accident and the employer needs to know what happened for insurance reasons, the employer has a right to ask reasonable questions. "If you're investigating a matter and the employee lies in the investigation process, then that can amount to serious misconduct justifying dismissal," he says.

But the seriousness of a lie is inevitably compounded by how public it is. Chris Hickey, associate professor in education at Deakin University who researches and writes on AFL football, says this can apply to all sorts of workplaces. Senior executives who publicly lie about their role in dodgy deals or insider trading, for example. Or, he says, a politician who publicly lies and is backed by the prime minister. Or young footballers who drink and drive.

Across Melbourne each weekend, there are any number of men and women out drinking, getting behind the wheel and getting busted. Their stories don't make the news. Their crimes probably go unpunished by their employers. In many cases their bosses are oblivious. It is different when you are in the public eye.

"When you're standing in front of millions of people and carry out the lie, the fallout is likely to be pretty heavy," Hickey says. "If my lie becomes public, I think that's when it becomes an issue. The lie itself probably happens many times a day in many workplaces."

Of course an elite football club isn't your average workplace. Football clubs seem to operate under a different moral and behavioural code to other workplaces, says Associate Professor Matthew Nicholson from the University of Ballarat's school of human movement and sport sciences.

"I think they're scrutinised more, but unlike any other workplace they do have far stricter behavioural conditions placed on their employees," he says. "And they're not like any other workplace because nowhere else do you find 650 young men being paid anywhere up to half a million dollars. That's not typical of any other workplace, having this group of young men who have a lot of fame and fortune and adulation and at the same time having so much expectation on their behaviour."

Nicholson says many would probably argue that even stricter behavioural standards should apply to footballers, because - like it or not - they are role models for children, and because they have been given tremendous opportunities. It may be a little unfair to thrust such a massive responsibility on footballers when they are essentially just young men. But the flipside is they get big bucks compared with other young men and they get a lot of support from their clubs to help them not just as athletes but in their personal development.

"If you were to think of an 18, 19 or 20-year-old apprentice plumber or electrician, they're earning nowhere near that amount, they're learning their trade and they don't have all those personal development programs to help them through," he says.

The football environment, with the scrutiny involved and sponsorships at stake, elevates the obligations of the football "employee" to a different level than those of a more typical employee. "It's not going to put a typical employer at a reputation risk if you're convicted of drink-driving," Kollmorgen says. "But if you have a particular sponsorship relationship, then it might cause problems for the employer."

The spotlight glare of professional football also exposes another fault line in the debate about fibbing in the workplace. How does the ignominy, and worse, of getting caught lying to your boss weigh up against the robustly Australian injunction against dobbing in your mates?

Shaw, keenly aware of the PR problems Didak had already created for his club, could at least console himself that he had done the right thing by his mate (if not his employer). In a profession where the notion of mateship is elevated to a calling, perhaps this is unsurprising. "Players have to put themselves in harm's way physically for each other on the field of play, and breaches of trust damage the very culture that they're trying to build, and that culture is one of selflessness and sacrifice," says Matthew Nicholson.

"It is a strange workplace. It's like no other because very few workplaces are places where people put themselves in physical danger . . . often risking their own bodies for their mates."

It is that mateship on the field, says Chris Hickey, that can get them in trouble off it. "That's the tension. They're trained to look out for their mates, to defend their mates, to do all of those things, but simultaneously they're asked to be cautious, be prudent with their decision making," he says. "Some of the very instincts they carry as footballers work against them in other contexts."

AFL premiership coach David Parkin called them "sacrificial acts" - the little things a footballer does to be a good team player. The notion of putting team before self is drummed into footballers' heads. "It's an automated response," he says. "I must sacrifice, support and protect."

Parkin says the great Australian trait of mateship exists "whether it's good, bad or indifferent". Many men, he says, would agree that telling lies to save your mates is acceptable. "I'm not saying I agree with that, but that's how Australian males think."

But in truth, Shaw was never going to come away from last weekend's bender unscathed. In trying to protect Didak, he had crossed another line. He had betrayed the rest of his teammates - and nowhere is lying to the boys a greater crime than in the masculine bastion of the football club.

Shaw might have thought he was performing the ultimate sacrificial act in trying to shield his mate. But soon after he sobered up, he may have wondered whether it was worth the trouble. Little lies have a way of leading to bigger ones.

Carol Nader is social policy editor.

© 2008 The Age

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