A bitter taste? Todd Carney, masculine football culture and scandal

NRL player Todd Carney was swiftly sacked by the board of the NRL sharks after an image of him apparently urinating on his own person went viral.

The image, taken in the toilets of a Sutherland Shire nightclub, showed the player staging the urination prank for a photo.

The squeamishness of the public, media and NRL officials alike is, of course, not real disgust but the theatrical performance or pretence of disgust that is used to shame Carney in the context of scandal reporting.

Vulgar and distasteful? Yes-for a role-model, a celebrity, a public figure or even a private individual, not really something one might wish one's grandmother to see. At the same time, however, No-in a contemporary masculine party culture, boys do daring things, lads transgress boundaries as part of masculine jostling and joking, and a group of friends out enjoying time together do the unexpected in ways which produce shared humour that engages the group and bonds us as friends. There is nothing unusual about this kind of behaviour

Criminal and obscene? Compared with very recent scandalous events that involve the abuse of those made vulnerable in media coverage, such as the child sexual assaults of Hey Dad's Robert Hughes, or Australian icon Rolf Harris, or indeed Carney's own prior causes for being sacked such as drink driving, setting a man on fire and urinating on another man, there is no comparison. Carney was not exactly urinating without consent again on another person. It was, after all, his own urine and his own person. Just bodies and bodily fluids - a little abject but certainly not an act of violence.

The important question is not to ask whether or not the image was vulgar or offensive, since there can be no clear, reasoned, common shared response to this. Rather, it is to ask what are the conditions that make such an image 'scandalous' to the extent that it becomes a media story or the extent that it warrants a sacking from the club.

Understanding sportsplayers' off-field scandal

Whether football scandals centre on sex, sexual assault, violence, drugs, alcohol or gambling, they are almost always inflected by the culture of masculinity that is endemic to contemporary male team sports. However, the ways in which gender is the focal point of scandalous behaviours need to be teased out, as masculinity is often the unstated, invisible norm of football culture.

Many contemporary scandals involving footballers are produced through a combination of hypermasculinity in a culture in which masculinity as a facet of identity is in flux, the traits and stereotypes which allow footballers to be seen as local or national heroes, and the contemporary status of footballers as celebrities.

Together, these three elements form not only the backdrop through which footballer scandals occur, but are the framework by which both public and private behaviours, incidents and acts are converted into scandal reportage. That is, footballer scandals are not just the reporting of something unusual, vulgar, criminal or problematic, but are an 'effect' of the institution of masculine team sports in Australia.

Masculinity

It is telling that the site in which Carney's allegedly scandalous and supposedly vulgar image was taken was in front of a urinal in the men-only space of the lavatory. The behaviour that was photographed is only vulgar in the sense that it makes explicit some of the more hypermasculine, boyish, laddish behaviour that is-in perhaps a remarkably juvenile way-a representation of masculine toilet humour.

"It was just a prank," Carney told Channel Nine. "The boys have seen me mucking around doing it before," <  > indicating the way in which this is a performance for men, not a private fetish that has been revealed to an unsuspecting public.

The use of this humour for masculine bonding, however, is part of the same kinds of masculinity that are required of a high-profile footballer in Australia, whether in the NRL or the AFL or, indeed, any masculine team sport.

Increasingly, the discourse of footballer scandals have allowed the question of masculinity to emerge, with a number of commentators now often discussing the fact that teams involved in scandals are held together by bonds not just of teamship or mateship but, specifically, of masculine conduct that push on-field and off-field group behaviours from being relatively harmless bonding activities to actions which impact negatively on others and on the players themselves.

Masculinity scholars such as Michael Flood have provided some important accounts of the kinds of languages and behaviours men use in men-only circumstances, as well as in reference to women, in order to produce and reinforce group bonding. Understanding masculine team sports scandals from the perspective of men's bonding highlights the structure of the team and the ways in which its on-field tightly-knitted bonds-necessary for team performance and success-are built on behaviours and practices of bonding off-field which are not always palatable to all members of the public, are sometimes criminal (such as group-based assault of women) but have more to do with gender than with individual (mis)behaviours.

Boyish bonding behaviours, such as Carney playfully urinating, become scandal not because we are concerned or shocked by the behaviour, but because the image reveals the kinds of masculinity performed by high-profile players.

National heroes

At the same time, high-profile sportsplayers whose off-field behaviour scandalise the public-or the press-are also national heroes in a sense.

Although national heroism and the traditional links between sports and communities has usually been built around teams, today's national, high-profile sporting hero involves a more individualised performance as a national 'product'. Part of that product has been the stereotypical signification of the national hero through the theatrics of Australian 'larrikinism' which emerges through a history of Australian masculinity and is part of the context of sports.

As a white, Anglo-Saxon form of 'being Australian', it is similar to the more British for of sportsplayer laddishness. The larrikin has been described by scholar Katrina Jaworski as being marked by a flaunting wittiness, willing engagement in physical and verbal violence, licence to exceed conventions, charisma, roughness, romantic attachments to the working class and a commitment to drinking alcohol in public spaces.

In combination with sporting achievement as well as the centrality of sport in the national imaginary, then, the individualised footballer becomes more firmly representable as an Australian national hero, thereby receiving spectacular, individualised media coverage and available for the sort of reporting that can result in scandal. The larrikinism of footballer masculinity becomes, however, not the focal point of scandal but scandal's excuse

Celebrity

In order to appreciate the cultural context in which sportsplayer off-field scandals become both thinkable and broadly excusable, a third area to be considered is the production of sports and footballers as celebrities, arguably emerging from the increasing professionalisation of high-profile team sports within a media management framework.

he idea of celebrity is not new, although it is only with the increasing massification of media that we see the rise of the notion of the celebrity as a person who has been positioned or is viewed to possess the quality of being able to attract attention.

The celebrity status of high-profile sports players in produced by the media machinery of sporting organisations, clubs and leagues which promote their sports not as a game but as a brand. But because celebrity status can attract attention not only to the sporting prowess of the brand's stars but to their misdemeanours, slip-ups, crimes or boyish transgressiveness, celebrity is always a risk-hence the harsh disciplinary environment in which sportsplayers find themselves and the regimentary controls over their private, non-sporting lives.

Scandal emerges where discipline fails-and that can sometimes be a discipline that wrongfully enslaves a sportsplayer by insisting on control of every portion of their private lives despite knowing that those lives have become 'interesting' because of the celebrity status that was actively produced by clubs, leagues and institutions.

Carney, in this sense, is the victim of the celebrification of his life and yet the failure of controls over how he conducts that life. Joking around with his own urine only becomes scandal and then a sackable offence because the very institution which 'made him' felt it could not 'control him' according to their own standards and their own public relations goals.

Bodies and Behaviours

While the reaction of the board of the Sharks is undoubtedly related not to where Carney was putting his bodily fluids, but to the fact that this was the latest strike from a player who had, in the past and while at other clubs, been convicted of drink driving offenses, scandal reports of him having set a man's pants on fire and allegedly urinated on a man in a Canberra nightclub, was implicated in a vandalism spree in Goulburn-all of which might be said to be more offensive and dangerous (to others) than urinating on himself.

However, the focus on the image, and the fact it went viral has nothing to do with public disgust or outrage over his laddish urination prank.

While Carney needs to be accountable for his own actions, his off-field behaviour becomes scandal not because he has made some stupid choices or done things that make him look a fool, but because he himself is the product of the expectations his sport places on him to become a masculine, nationally-heroic larrikin celebrity-available to scandal and expected to perform in scandalous ways.

He would be right, perhaps, to be concerned at a sacking over this image by a club that hired him after his-more justifiable-prior sackings for genuinely unethical behaviour. In other words: accountable, but perhaps the institutional machinery of the sport ought to be scrutinised too for the kinds of players it produces, the kinds of hiring decisions it makes, the kinds of practices of off-field bonding the game demands of its players, and the PR-led disciplinary environment it has built.