Book review - David Hill's The Fair and the Foul

Let's cut right to the chase: no one needs to buy David Hill's The Fair and the Foul, and no one needs to read it either. I can only think of two kinds of people who would end up reading this book:

1. Older Anglo-Celtic Australian males who received this book as a Christmas or birthday present, to be read on holiday or during a long train trip from regional Australia to see a city-based medical specialist.
2. Australian soccer people who hate David Hill.

Your correspondent clearly falls into the latter of these demographics, and thus my copy was sourced from a university library. Yes, David Hill will probably get a lending rights royalty in addition to his cut of whatever Victoria University paid for the book, but I'm trying to minimise the damage as much as possible without resorting to treating a bookstore like a public library.

Anyway, this book's problems are numerous. Hill flits between thematic and chronological approaches, occasionally inserting personal anecdotes. This prevents a coherent narrative emerging, while also undermining the book's sense of purpose; it's a real mess of a book, often little more than a bunch of populist generalisations which zip by. And as Tom Heenan points out in his review, there are far too many factual mistakes for a book which aims to be on at least some level an authoritative reference to Australian sport, regardless of its generalist scope. (though Heenan's review also has a key mistake, claiming that Hill was chairman of Soccer Australia from 1987-1995)

All of these failures point to slack editing. The book has an index and reference list, though it does not include a reference for the one quote that I really wanted to chase up on behalf of someone else.  There are even moments where Hill feels the need to explain things which don't need explaining: after quoting cricket writer Gideon Haigh's assertion that Australian cricket authorities in the 1970s were a conservative gerontocracy, Hill goes on to say what Haigh meant by that statement.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that Hill spends much of the book talking about the heroes and villains already familiar to most Australian sports fans with some historical knowledge, a few themes carve an accidental course throughout Fair and Foul. Hill tells us that Australians are often too forgiving of their sporting heroes when they screw up; that Australian sporting clubs and bodies, when given the choice between money and ethics, will almost always choose the former; that in the battle between those seeking to professionalise sport and those seeking to keep a sense of antiquated 'purity' alive, neither group had athletes' best interests at heart.

Hill also pulls up a great unspoken thread of Australian sport - that of the interaction of class and sport. There are the egos of men like Alan Bond and Kerry Packer, the immovable elitism of amateur sporting bodies, and the uncaring administrators of football codes who disregard the emotions of fans as being a burden to progress. Then there are the athletes themselves, especially those from working class or disadvantaged backgrounds, for whom having talent is not enough, and who have to overcome barriers of class in order to reach the top.

As much as these threads and others like them are inherently interesting, they go largely unexplored. In detailing the folk heroes/legends of Australian sport up to the end of its amateur era in the 1960s and 70s, Hill never explains what if any relevance that era has to contemporary audiences. Do Australian sports audiences care for the Lithgow Flash and Les Darcy, or for Herb Elliot and Harry Hopman? One of the great Australian sporting truths is that what appears to be a shared national sporting culture is often anything but. Across gender, race, class, and geographic boundaries, the Australian sporting experience is, if anything, an incredibly fractured one. Individuals or teams which manage to escape the confines of their particular demographic are the exception, not the norm.

Despite the way they disrupt whatever narrative momentum he manages to create, Hill's personal experiences are the highlight of the book. Whether you love or hate Hill, he's had an interesting life, and a large part of that includes his proximity to sport. For Australian soccer fans, Hill's controversial tenure as chairman of Soccer Australia comes first to mind, but Hill was also a good rugby league player (offered a place in North Sydney's first team squad, he opted to play second tier instead), was president of Norths for three years, was involved with the anti-tobacco push in sport, and in broadcast deals as part his tenure as chairman of the ABC.

Among the worthwhile sporting nuggets Hill provides are his being invited to Kerry Packer's private television room - the one that had global satellite feeds, and from which Packer programmed Channel 9; the insights into the hold the tobacco industry had on Australian sports bodies through the 1980s (with clear parallels to the gambling industry today); being invited to a big cricket shindig because the organisers have him mistaken for a more prominent and successful namesake; and that the process of getting Terry Venables to become Socceroos coach started with an English backpacker who was working as an admin temp at Soccer Australia.

But these moments are few and far between, and their scarcity only serves to make them feel at odds with the rest of the book. Even worse, the fleeting nature of these personal reminiscences means that the chance for reflection and insight on Hill's behalf is almost non-existent. For example, while praising himself for the Venables adventure, Hill fails to mention that Venables also cost Soccer Australia its Coca-Cola sponsorship (Venables signed up with rival beverage company Schweppes).

As for the book's soccer content, it's largely limited to two chapters, one about our more recent world cup qualification history, the other about the game's status as the 'sleeping giant' of Australian sport. The 'sleeping giant' chapter spends much of its time focused on Tony Labozzetta and Marconi, and the outcomes of the Bradley report, Stewart inquiry, and NSL task-force report. There is almost nothing new here, and frustratingly considering his proximity to that era, almost nothing you can't find in more depth elsewhere, such as in Ross Solly's Shoot Out. Neither does Hill mention the ABC's abandonment of the National Soccer League part way into its broadcasting deal while Hill was ABC chairman.

Most gallingly for those of a particular political persuasion in Australian soccer, Hill does not apply the same set of standards to ethnic soccer supporters as he does for rugby league fans. Hill reiterates that his expulsion of Heidelberg United, Parramatta Melita, and Brunswick Juventus from the national Soccer League in the mid 1990s was necessary for soccer to shed its dead-weight of ethnicity to move forward into the mainstream. Hill points out - not without merit - that if the 10,000 strong crowd protesting that decision had actually turned up to games, the clubs and the game would have been healthier (or at least have made it harder for Hill to argue for the removal of those clubs).

But when rugby league's Super League war and and its aftermath occurs, Hill is much more sparing of the feelings of the fans of some of rugby league's struggling clubs. (as a rugby league novice, I found Hill's explanation of how the Super League war played out from beginning to end to be a useful primer on the subject). For his own side, Norths, which ended up in a disastrous merger (and later de-merger) with Manly, the blame is placed entirely on Norths' board at the time. For South Sydney, who were expelled from the league at the end of the ARL/Super League split, Hill addressed a crowd of (apparently) 50,000 Souths' protesters telling them to not give up the fight for reinstatement to national competition.

Why he was more supportive of Souths' fans than the ethnic soccer supporters is for the reader to infer. But a look at Souths' average crowds since the Rabbitohs' return to the national competition in 2002 shows no significant increase in attendances. Of course the situations are not exactly like for like - rugby league had a media profile and corporate support that could be exploited whereas soccer in its ethnic setup did not - but there's scope to see inherent contradictions in Hill's support of one group and not the other.

Hill finishes his book by comparing the future outlooks for the four football codes. For everyone other than the AFL, he foresees problems. Rugby union's crowds and player pool are, as they always have been, incredibly limited, and its dependence on very select demographics continues to stifle its chances of increasing its national footprint. Rugby league's player pool, even in its working class heartland, is under stress, its crowds have been slow to increase, and when combined with league's tiny global footprint, rugby league is an increasingly difficult position. This is notwithstanding Australian rugby league's healthy income from its broadcast rights (and unhealthy cowering to those broadcasters in terms of fixturing), and its willingness to make changes to the game to increase its attractiveness.

For soccer, while the A-League has manifest itself as the league that Hill wanted but could not create in the 1990s, its status as a backwater in terms of soccer's global empire holds it back. Meanwhile Hill has almost nothing but praise for the AFL, the most stable, wealthy and progressive of the Australian football codes, unencumbered (apparently) either culturally or economically by its limited global reach.

Despite some interesting if largely unexplored narrative threads, and the occasional interesting personal anecdote, The Fair and the Foul is content to rehash the usual stereotypes of Australian sports history and culture, This probably fits in with Hill's oeuvre of populist history writing - I've not read his other history books - but the book adds little to update or challenge assumptions about Australian sport. Should Hill ever decide to write a proper sporting memoir, going into detail about his experiences in rugby league and soccer as a player and administrator, and his dealings with various sports while chairman of the ABC (Fair and Foul includes a good one about lawn bowls, the ABC, and a Mazda sponsorship), that will be a book worth reading. But for now he seems content to faff about with disposable output.