Riddle me this: you’ve got two $50 notes in your pocket. You’re sauntering down George St, and you spy two people, each apparently sleeping very rough. One averts their eyes but smiles in doing so; the other snarls and then spits at you.
Do you (a) give all the money to the first person, for they’re surely friendly; (b) divide the donations equally because that’s the Australian way; or (c) shove all the folding stuff in the jar of the second person because maybe they need the help even more than you could ever hope to know?
It pays to be judicious vis-à-vis the wars in which you rage. Caution exacts dividends.
I have sympathy for Australia’s national netball team, the Diamonds. What began as solidarity fuelled by a belief in a righteous cause has devolved into a debacle replete with carefully crafted “messaging” from all corners.
The unadulterated odiousness of the late Lang Hancock’s twisted thinking no doubt is the anathema of netball, but here’s the rub. At the risk of aiming a bazooka at Bambi; the sport of netball isn’t likely to become anything much more mega-gigantic than it presently is.
Almost certainly, netball won’t ever become an Olympic sport, no matter how earnest the petitioning becomes in advance of the 2032 Games. That’s due to a conglomeration of factors, including that it’s a team sport which would take up comparatively a lot of athlete quota spots. Also, men’s netball isn’t a sport of anything beyond Mickey Mouse international significance. The IOC won’t admit new single-gender sports.
Netball has more than 400,000 registered players, including Donnell Wallam, Australia’s newest Diamond, but struggles to convert that dominance into revenue.Credit:Getty
Thus, the “World’s Biggest School Sports Carnival” of the Commonwealth Games represents the biggest stage on which netball is ever likely to feature. That’s the reality for Australia’s Bambi; the last sport which should be allowed to wither alone in the forest.
Throw in that, quite unlike rugby league or Aussie Rules, netball simply isn’t fortunate enough to have the commercial and financial support of a behemoth governing body. Contrastingly, there’s no existing mega-billions broadcast rights deal, and broadcast partners to leverage to create a stage for the growth of the sport.
Can you imagine for a second how different Netball Australia’s fortunes, monetary and otherwise, might be, if its governing body could do for netball what the AFL has been able to achieve for AFLW since its inception in February 2017.
A cursory inspection of Netball Australia’s audited annual reports for the past four financial years shows player registrations well above 400,000 (even during depleted, COVID-affected years) but revenues never reaching higher than $30 million. In the past two completed financial years, Netball Australia has reported multimillion-dollar deficits; the two years before that, surpluses of less than $100,000.
The takeout: despite enjoying total player registration numbers, at the participation level, that sports like rugby league could only ever dream of, netball can’t wash its own face. And it likely won’t be able to soon.
Netball’s most elite players no doubt desire to become and stay fully professional in exchange for their blood, toil, tears and sweat. It’s questionable how they can.
On this whole Gina Rinehart-Netball Australia circus; frankly, any sporting organisation doing deals with Hancock Prospecting might be compromising on their values. But the same goes for breweries, sports betting companies and fossil fuel power companies. The reality though, is that player activism here has done much more harm than could’ve been contemplated two weeks ago.
The Diamonds and Donnell Wallam together have every right to stand up and be counted for what they believe.
Wallam’s Diamonds teammates stood with her but also must understand that such actions can have consequences in a professional environment.Credit:Getty
But standing on principle comes with cost. And spare me the absurdity of individual exemptions from wearing sponsors’ logos, where an exempted player still attains all the benefits of the sponsorship of the collective.
Professionalism is a symbiotic arrangement. Athletes can’t be professionals in a money vacuum, where there’s no prizemoney and no sponsors and a dry bed where once there were rivers of gold. #GoWokeGoBroke maybe, maybe not. But without serious money, professionalism is but a mirage.
Professionalism requires compromise. Professionalism means not always being able to have everything exactly as you would prefer, and one must cut one’s coat according to the abundance of one’s cloth.
Cold, hard sponsorship money for a sport like netball is hard to come by in any market. In the present economic times, coupled with the actual circumstances of Hancock Prospecting’s departure, replacing $4 million in annual sponsorship revenue is tremendously more fraught a task.
Any potential sponsor looking to follow in Gina Rinehart’s footsteps would have reason to be wary.Credit:Bloomberg
Any prospective sponsor of Netball Australia would, of course, be wary now. Big sponsorship opportunities for netball might be rare.
Wallam, and the teammates who supported her, shouldn’t be forced to refrain from taking a stance, however they should have to live with the consequences of standing for something. Because that’s what professionalism demands. The inescapable conclusion is that Australia’s netballers didn’t go about things professionally. The public shouldn’t ever have known anything about this.
But Rinehart shouldn’t have to apologise for the sins of her father. The hundreds of millions she’s pumped into First Nations communities and causes during the past three decades is representative enough of her own views, and the distinction which should be drawn between her and the previous generation.
But as much as the Diamonds players have copped fierce heat for taking a stand — in turn becoming the architects of their own misfortune — we must question whether Rinehart’s decision, to yank the sponsorship once faced with the justified opprobrium of the Diamonds players, passes scrutiny.
In actuality, one is compelled to ask: if Rinehart truly had the best interests of netball singularly at heart, wouldn’t she have sponsored Netball Australia anyway? Because wouldn’t that be the magnanimous and generous gesture? Wouldn’t that have been the apology of all apologies, for the despicable sins of the father?
It’s a biblical copout for Hancock Prospecting to represent that its sponsorship offer to Netball Australia was pulled for reasons connected with not wanting to exacerbate the fracturing of the sport. Spare me, please.
If Hancock Prospecting truly was in the business of sponsoring deserving sports organisations for entirely philanthropic means, the visionary decision would have been to double-down on the offer as opposed to pulling up the rug. Pump $30 million in and prove what you say about wanting to pay sports in Australia better.
Sure, put whatever conditions you like on that sort of arrangement because what netball’s elite players have done these past two weeks is amateurish. None of this should have been agitated anywhere other than behind closed doors. If anything, the whole episode shows just how badly Australia’s netballers NEED someone like Rinehart in their corner.
If Netball Australia is the embodiment of the second person sleeping rough on the street and Rinehart was the person walking by with $100 in the pocket, then the second person should have got the whole of the loot.
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