Timothy Boyle is a sports columnist with The Sunday Age
Sport. It's not all about the dough. Pizza, that's another story. Sunday Age writer Timothy Boyle played for Hawthorn with Sam Mitchell. Here, in the first in a regular series of interviews they team up again to make pizza and talk football, strengths, limitations and comedy.
Sentimental favourites overcome a perennial hard luck story: AFL media columnist of the year Tim Boyle's analysis.
Sportspeople are either interesting in their prime because they are at their athletic best, or in their twilight because they've managed to last until circumstance and history rise around them and create a story.
So, another year of Geelong and Hawthorn, and another year of Sydney.
It would be appropriate in these pages to write about Wimbledon, or the Euros, or the local football, but what fills the various screens in my life is all in the form of aggressive opinion and semantics, not in sports action. The foremost contest in the world at this moment, even within our local sporting context, is one of ideas, ideologies and allegiances.
As a white man in Australia one can admit easily to a state of ignorance about the experience of racism. But we should include in our stated ignorance any knowledge of the blood-run feelings that inspire acts of defiance from black athletes like Muhammad Ali, or the gestures of Adam Goodes on the MCG.
I saw Travis Cloke's brother, Jason, at a petrol station in the winter of 2006. That was the year he was delisted from the Collingwood Football Club. We'd just played in a VFL match at Box Hill and Jason lined up beside me before a tiny crowd on an oval that overlooked an intersection. Later at the station he was leaning against his car, watching the pump on auto-fill with his arms crossed in the wind.
When Damien Hardwick and Brendan Bolton defended their respective players against media criticisms this week, they were in a sense dismissing the word of some commentators, whose voices are today immutable and have even begun to set the agenda in the football world.
It is not my desire to write about the private lives of Billy Brownless or Garry Lyon, but every sporting scandal is now a public tornado that before it ends gathers a range of voices that are sometimes more captivating than the story itself.
On a rainy day at Waverly Park in 2009 I saw John Kennedy Senior standing next to a brass statue of his younger self.
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