The emergence on Friday of fresh allegations of harassment against former North Melbourne player Tarryn Thomas has clarified what lies at the nub of this whole saga, and it is not about when and where Thomas plays AFL football again. If these latest allegations prove true, that conversation is over.
Return to play should not be a reward for good behaviour, by which we mean the minimum standard of behaviour expected of the rest of us, a civil standard that authorities civil and sporting have spent the last couple of months imploring all of us not to walk past when breached.
Tarryn Thomas at the time of his first suspension from North Melbourne.Credit: Justin McManus
Playing AFL footy is a privilege Thomas once had, and was being held in reserve for him, and he has now foregone. Jimmy Bartel grew up with domestic violence and went on to win a Brownlow Medal, and on this, he is adamant. “At some stage, the privilege has got to run out,” he said on Footy Classified recently.
“Forgiveness, try again, try again, is not working. At some stage, we’ve got to go in a different direction,” Bartel said. “Throw your arms around him, support him, educate him – but you don’t have to do that at AFL level.”
If this was ever about football at all, it’s not now. The fact that Thomas is a footballer is incidental to his issues as a recidivist. There may be explanations – not to be confused with justifications – in his upbringing about how and why he treats women as he does. There may be complications in his life.
But it is not the job of his club or the game alone to sort those out, and certainly not by holding out the prospect of kitting up again under its auspices. When North Melbourne sacked him in February, that should have been the end of it.
No club could have been better placed to attempt to rehabilitate Thomas than North. President Sonja Hood’s life work has been in community welfare. And North tried. As CEO Jennifer Watt made clear in her circular to her counterparts at other clubs – revealed this week by The Age – Thomas was put through four rehab programs without success. Beyond that, North struggled to find further resources within footy.
Of course, North tried. As a footballer, Thomas was near enough to their best. Here’s the problem. A football club, because it handles several scores of young men in a highly stressed environment, necessarily does a lot of welfare work. But it is not a welfare organisation, it’s a footy business. It might be able to rescue a young man from momentary youthful intemperance – for the gain of both – but it can’t redeem a backslider.
Brad Scott.Credit: Getty Images
The same is true of the wider AFL. With the best of intentions, it lends its name and weight to good causes in the only way it really can, by words and gestures. So it was last weekend that every match was preceded by linking of arms of all players to pull footy’s focus onto violence against women. But it can only do so much. It has a footy competition to run.
This is the context for Brad Scott’s comments on the importance of giving players like him a second chance when his suspension expires. Scott coached the teenaged Thomas in his first year in the AFL. He has a personal acquaintanceship with him.
“As an industry, do we just wash our hands and say we’re done with him?” said Scott. “Or do we help him? I’d prefer to sit in the help camp.”
Scott’s sentiment is understandable at a human level. But in his own words, this is an industry, and most industries would have washed their hands of Thomas by now. He needs and must have help – more help – but as the allegations against him mount that help cannot be to provide a path back into AFL footy any time remotely soon, or else it begins to look like a restored privilege.
Here’s another way of looking at it. Imagine that Thomas had proceeded to have a 200- or 300-game career before this suite of allegations of harassment of women emerged. It’s safe to say that he would be stripped of whatever honours he had earned.
If the record can be set straight retrospectively, it only makes sense that when possible it should be made straight from the start.
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