Sport
The media’s willingness and the public’s desire to hype elite athletes perpetuates a circus of transactionality in which simply being admirable is not enough. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
The transactional nature of sports reporting
Have you noticed how easily reporters devalue the words “interesting” and “complex” when applied to the modern athlete? These adjectives are now so frequently bestowed that a cynic might assume their use has become habituated.
The bar for what’s considered interesting is now so low that an athlete’s brief fondness for ketamine can qualify them for the description. To be thought of as “complex”, one need only use TikTok to sell dubious vitamin supplements or confess belief in the existence of Big Foot.
To justify the endless (and corresponding public appetite for) personal stories about athletes, the average reporter must elevate garden variety narcissism into a rich eccentricity. “Interesting” and “complex” is the perfume you apply to sad little gossip columns derived entirely from the banalities of someone’s social media feed.
These casual degradations of language are just one small casualty of the ceaseless churn of sports gossip. So great and prolific is the media’s commitment to detailing salaciousness, it’s better for the individual reporter to think of their invasions of privacy, or professional commitment to writing thin and inconsequential shit, as providing complicated insights.
ChatGPT is a witless accomplice, as it reflects back to us our own work. Its analysis of a 2024 piece on former Australian cricket captain Michael Clarke offers this: “His candid admission of lifelong struggles with what he believes to be obsessive-compulsive disorder, contrasted with outward flamboyance (cars, tattoos, designer clothes), offers insight into a layered, introspective side of Clarke—suggesting complexity.”
Of course, there are mastheads – such as Daily Mail Australia – that have no interest in attempting justification. Their commitment to titillation and the industrialised appropriation of others’ work is at least so shameless that there’s little effort to exaggerate their subjects’ “complexity”.
The putative romance between Geelong’s talented, handsome and previously troubled star Bailey Smith and “influencer” Tammy Hembrow was manna from heaven for the Daily Mail – and for many other outlets.
The mere sight or sound of the word “influencer” dangerously elevates my blood pressure. I admit this reluctantly because so common are “stories” about them that I am effectively confessing to having an “interesting” heart condition and “complex” feelings about my profession.
As it is, I can only feel pity for the reporter who must mechanically excrete “stories” about alleged romances between athletes and “influencers” – and preferably ones enlivened by titillating images of the couples.
In fact, as the existence of the Daily Mail testifies, these stories matter little if they are without images of the couples. “Tammy Hembrow shows off her huge bust in a wild outfit…” was the Daily Mail’s headline last week about Smith’s new girlfriend.
I’ve no idea what Hembrow does, but I’m certain someone has, or soon will, describe her as “complex” and “interesting” too, in exchange for an interview.
If we wanted more, I tend to think we’d have got it by now. But the people have spoken. We want blanket coverage during footy season, no matter how thin the blanket. We want predictions, scandal, tearful apologies. We like to be informed about players’ spells in rehab or mental health clinics so we might better burnish our sympathies or disdain. We like to be kept in a more-or-less permanent condition of moral excitement and disgust, where one’s inner life is sustained by projections of defensiveness and indignation.
In other words, many fans are passionately and weirdly possessive – something most athletes will privately confirm – and this passion upholds a decent quantity of sports commentary.
For the majority of players who aren’t narcissists, there’s little incentive to complain about journalism or the fan appetites that sustain it. Almost all athletes understand that their privilege is so broadly assumed, any public description of the ordinary hardships of their profession, or any complaint about the irrational aggression of fandom, will be considered unforgivable ingratitude.
It’s a strange place to be in. Public concessions of “mental health issues” are now common and largely met with sympathetic media coverage. Yet this has neither quelled the public’s interest in the personal lives of players, nor lessened the reluctance of players to describe their professional lives with any specificity. They understand they’re conscripted into the fantasy lives of millions – and to correct their position, much less object to it, is to court fury.
Fans and reporters alike want to have their cake and eat it too – we’ll write gossip columns about players’ mental health, then make sure to commend their eventual disclosure without acknowledging that the media’s interest might have contributed to the very thing being disclosed. Descriptions such as “interesting” and “complex” then serve as minor gifts, an unacknowledged quid pro quo for public confessions, however slight or unexceptional. To exaggerate the divulger’s virtue is an old trick of reporters to encourage more divulgence.
You might think that any public disclosure of mental injury, however vaguely described, is proof of individual courage and a newly enlightened culture. Sometimes it is. And sometimes it’s only proof of the transactional relationship between media and the athletes they write about. Reporters might decorate their successful intrusions with words such as “brave” and “complex”, just as athletes might launder abject behaviour with words like “mistakes” and “personal issues”.
The average journalist will argue the public importance of just about anything; the sly athlete will appeal to public sympathies; while the average mental health advocate will celebrate the significance and bravery of any public disclosure.
And each party will variously pretend media habits don’t contribute to the poor health of players in the first place; or, conversely, that this new age of confession and reflected public “sympathy” hasn’t created for athletes an easily exploitable climate whereby poor behaviour might be sanitised by platitudinous appeals to mental health.
There’s progress here, I guess – but there’s also a circus of transactionality. In my experience, progressive advocates of, well, anything, are marked by vain optimism and an irrational faith in abstractions. There is an unwillingness to consider the incentives that define the world of those they’d like to appoint as ambassadors to their cause.
The world of a professional athlete is severely prescribed in many ways, contractually and socially, and we might better think about how we – the public and media – contribute to those prescriptions.
Are we interested in the practical life of the athlete? Or merely their capacity for sex, symbolism and scandal? How might an athlete behave, and publicly speak, given the prevailing conditions?
Never mind the exaggerated applications of “interesting” and “complex”. There are players who are simply admirable and made more so by their reluctance to celebrate that fact. Those whose virtues of commitment and modesty are displayed every week for years and who want little or nothing to do with the bullshit that surrounds their gifts. There are many examples, but I’m thinking now of the Western Bulldogs’ Tom Liberatore and the Fremantle Dockers’ now retired David Mundy.
Gifted, tough, discreet. Admirable virtues, but not ones we tend to amplify in the media. We prefer the “interesting” and “complex”.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 13, 2025 as "The brand plays on".
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