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

"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.