Whatever the legal outcome of Sam Kerr’s London trial, her reputation is irreversibly damaged by the law of in vino veritas. The half-minute of police bodycam footage showing an intoxicated footballer deriding a police officer as “f—ing stupid and white”, while doing a cheeky hip-hop head isolation move over the rim of her mobile phone, speaks longer and louder than a decade of image-repair PR. Kerr has implied that the police are running the case to embarrass her, and whether she’s right or wrong about their motivation, she’s spot-on about the impact.
A sportsperson’s image is built in many ways, but it has two foundations: the way they express themselves on the field, and the curated output of PR (interviews, books, advertisements, social media posts, public appearances and so on).
The unscripted indiscretion, if evidenced, can bring down that edifice in a moment. Shane Warne with those inflatable sex toys, footballers filmed with “white powder”, Tim Paine’s lewd text messages – regardless of the scale of the indiscretion, it gives the public what they think is a glimpse of their idol’s true character.
Kerr’s explanations, and her partner Kristie Mews telling the court she was “speaking her truth” in that police station, don’t make the PR situation any better. If anything, they increase the potency of the video.
The more verbiage around the incident, the more attention the footage attracts, as it seems to allow the public to cut through the blather and be judge, jury and executioner for themselves. Confronted with a sports world buffed and swaddled in corporate power, Josephine Public seizes any opportunity for agency.
Is this fair? We might ask ourselves if, obnoxiously drunk and embarrassed in a police station, any of us could show our true character. Doubtful. (And yes, we might also ask ourselves if we’d be in the station in the first place.)
Sam Kerr celebrates her winning goal in women’s FA Cup final.Credit: Nine
But for an international superstar, by the time the video is out on the loose, the train has passed the fairness station and is careering towards damage control. Kerr’s personal brand, the corporate brands she represents, and, the brand of a national team, the Matildas, are all suddenly imperilled by one night on the turps – as if the turps speak more honestly than all those brilliant goals, the joyous backflips, the ads, the interviews, the personal appearances, the selfies, the social media posts, the hospital visits, the chance encounters with random strangers.
And here’s where we get to a truth broader than in vino veritas. The larger the PR edifice and the more commodified the individual, the more lethal the potency of a few seconds of video. With every advertisement and every image, the more conditioned the public is to believe this is all an artificial construction and the greater their curiosity to get behind this mask and “discover the truth”.
This is even more aggravated at a time when the channels of official media have fragmented and athletes’ brands cultivate the expectation of “one-to-one connection” between the star and the fan. As the name becomes bigger, so does the illusion of intimacy. As the superstar becomes intergalactic, further and further from your humble little reality, their selling point becomes a personal connection with you. Kerr’s experience illustrates how far this impossible elastic can be stretched before it snaps.
There’s a subtle factor, in the Kerr video, that warrants a bit more reflection. It’s not part of the legal prosecution, but Kerr says, “I’m over this shit”. She comes across as intensely weary, not of police questioning but of something beyond that. What was she “over”?
Sam Kerr after her stunning goal against England at the World Cup.Credit: Getty
Here’s a theory. The commodification of male athletes has grown over a century since Babe Ruth represented Wheaties and Old Gold cigarettes and Don Bradman was the poster boy for Peter’s ice-cream and Elasta-Strap. Piece by piece, an industry accrued around male sports stars, converting them into walking billboards.
An Australian boy born in 1993, the same year as Sam Kerr, grew up in a sports landscape saturated with commercial male imagery and role models in team sports, from Harry Kewell to Adam Gilchrist to Steve Waugh to Chris Judd, as far as his eye could see. The male team sports hero as product had been entrenched for generations before that boy was born.
For a girl growing up at the same time, there were individual billboards such as Serena Williams or Cathy Freeman or Susie O’Neill, but team sports were yet to begin their ascent. The rise of women’s team sports as commercial products has happened in a blink.
In a decade, Australian women’s teams have gone from neglected and virtually invisible to the faces of breakfast cereals and sun protection, the lionesses of the illimitable world of podcasting. In that decade, women’s team sports have traversed the territory that men’s sports took 100 years to build.
Kerr is, in Australia and internationally, taking the wind at the front of that accelerated movement. We can easily forget how fast that change has been, and for a pioneer, how difficult it might be to adapt. In that light, we might get a closer understanding of what Kerr is “over”.
This is not to make excuses, only to provide context. In the 1990s, a girl who can kick a ball never thinks she’s going to be world-famous. Little more than a decade later, she’s public property on every continent. No boy with the same talents, on the same trajectory, had to cope with the surprise factor. No boy would have come into this role so unprepared.
Kerr is likely to lose the Matildas’ captaincy based on the damage that the police bodycam footage has done. Losing the captaincy is hardly the foremost of her concerns.
Her excuses for her behaviour, while they might help her in the legal contest, have compounded the PR fiasco. Fairly or unfairly, in vino veritas is the applicable law in the court of public opinion.
But if you look beyond the individual case, you see an industry that eats up athletes and spits them out, an institutionalised trade in human flesh, on a financial scale that only invites more of the “singling out” that Kerr says she is the victim of.
Are superstars paid enough for it? Are they trained well enough to deal with it? Do they even understand that they are suddenly, before they’re even grown up, responsible for hundreds if not thousands of jobs in a new industry of their personal brand? It takes a rare individual to come to terms with all of this in a few years. The chances are, a boy born in 1993 knew what he was letting himself in for. A girl had to learn on the run.
