I wish I could understand what all these references mean. Who are the Swans? I'm serious. I am an Australian who knows nothing at all about football or any sport for that matter. I also don't
want to know, except to say that though I am uninterested in football, I am very interested in what Lloyd Swanton has to say so would like to contextualise his remarks.
I can guess that when he expresses his support for "The Swans" he is either talking about a Sydney or a Melbourne team. But which is it? And which of the genres of football that he refers to do they play? I'm serious people. I just DON'T KNOW (I could Google but this is much more fun, and Google will mean I will have to sift through - holding my nose - too much of what is to me vile sports information).
Hi Mark, sorry to have led you down the garden path. This blog really should stick to discussions of matters relevant to the world of
golf jazz.
My remarks were relevant to the discussion in that, for historical reasons I don't pretend to fathom, the two rugby codes are the most popular in Qld and much of NSW, but for everywhere else in Australia, Aussie Rules (aka Australian Rules, Australian Football, AFL), is the dominant code. So it can be a real point of difference between someone growing up in say, Brisbane compared to someone from say, Perth. They are very different games (despite AFL having evolved from rugby union), and few of the stories enshrined in one code will mean much to anyone in the other.
Now. As Tim pointed out, the (formerly South Melbourne) Sydney Swans were the first "interstate" team, attempting to make inroads into the Sydney market, said to be one of the most competitive in the world, with four major football codes all attracting a following. (The fourth one being soccer.) They won the national premiership in 2005, after a 72-year hiatus, the longest in the long history of the game.
Their style of play was, and is, characterised by some as "ugly", (as if, ludicrously, a professional sporting team has obligations to aesthetics that override their sole purpose, that of winning games), and by some lazy journalists (and often in the same sentence as the "ugly" reference), as displaying traits of Rugby League, virtually attributing it to some malign element in the Sydney drinking water.
To me there was a suspicion that for some southerners, despite their professed love of the game and desire to see it flourish nationally, it really rankled to see a Sydney team win the flag, and all the petty Melbourne/Sydney rivalries came to the surface, sometimes expressed in the unsupportable grievances outlined above. it is to these things that I was referring.
It's funny, as a creative muso, my position is almost always that, compared to the creative arts, Australian sport attracts way too much attention, funding, support and so on, to the ultimate detriment of us as a nation. The attempt (as mentioned by jec, which as he/she explains, was behind the heading for his/her original posting) by the tabloid media to set up Eno and Tiger Woods as opposites was depressingly familiar. I believe talent can be used to deepen our understanding of the human condition, or it can simply be used to win matches each weekend.
But I truly love Australian Rules. Seeing it for the first time on television in the 70s (up until then, it was impossible to see the game on TV in Sydney) was an epiphanous experience for me.
I should add, this was before I had discovered the quite astonishing chick-pulling powers of needlessly complex jazz/rock fusion played by daggy practitioners with bad dress sense. And when a team finally based itself in Sydney, well that was about as good as it gets.
I keep this part of my life compartmentalized, but I must say I often do see some echoes between the challenges facing a team and their coach on game day, and those that we face as improvisers and composers. In a nuts and bolts sense, composing and improvising are really about solving problems, allocating resources, and dealing with obstacles. You might be surprised to discover similar and other echoes Mark, if you spent some time getting acquainted with the game. I'd be happy to sit you down in front of a telly with a few beers and explain the finer points. But, as I say, ultimately, sport is about nothing but winning, at its best is a stage on which great human dramas are played out but in and of itself is never more than a stage, and compared to artistic expression, lamentably one-dimensional.
