Greg Baum is chief sports columnist and associate editor with The Age
What to do about those St Kilda footballers who last weekend revealed themselves not to have evolved since before most were born, since a time when Tony Shaw said he would use a racist epithet every week if he thought it would gain his team an edge, a time so long ago it can be found only by carbon-dating?
Some of the startling impact of the AFL womens competition was planned, some surely serendipitous.
Phil Tagell doesn't remember the king-hit, but when he woke up in hospital, cranial fluid was oozing from his left ear. He was told how close he came to "doing a Hookesey". That was more than eight years ago, but he lives with some of the legacy still, including dulling of his senses of smell and taste.
Footy reached one watershed at Etihad stadium when the AFL staged its first Good Friday match and a crowd of almost 43,000 came to say alleluia, and the young and winless Kangaroos so nearly crested a horizon of their own when they ran the Western Bulldogs, the reigning premier, to within one kick, the last of the match.
I could fill this column with an appeal to the better nature of some footy fans. But what would be the point?
The Callum Mills rushed behind drama at Etihad stadium on Friday night foregrounded a matter that is causing some muttering and lost sleep around the AFL.
Fake news has been with us longer than you might imagine.
Another bastion of male exclusivity has fallen. On Tuesday, the Carbine Club voted to break with 55 years of tradition to admit two women. They are Peggy O'Neal, the president of Richmond football club, and Nicole Livingstone, an Olympic silver medalist in swimming and now a media figure.
Now that James Brayshaw has hung up his two most prominent caps, at Channel 9 and as chairman of North Melbourne, he admits that having several of them jammed on his head at once took a toll that he hopes he can remediate.
Andrew Bogut is a formidable basketballer, who played a manful role in Australia's gallant tilt at the windmills in Rio. He is also, more than most sportspeople, socially engaged. I could say, quirkily, doubtfully, provocatively engaged, but he would say the same of my world view.
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