A Question of Heartby Wanda Jamrozik (The Weekend Review, July 15-16 1995) Rugby league is a game of masculine sacrifice, mateship and obsession with the male body. It is also aggressively homophobic. In the midst of this, gay pin-up and Manly player Ian Roberts has chosen his own path. Wanda Janirozik reports The deli was on Oxford St, just around the corner from my boyfriend's place. We were up there all the time, getting milk or half a dozen rosetta rolls ora handful of olives. But in 1987 the smallgoods weren't the only attraction - it was the presence of a young man behind the counter that dragged us back to the place at every possib1e opportunity. He was pretty damn gob-stopping to look at too, in his T-shirt and jeans, and crisp grocer's apron. He had the happy air of a big kid dressed up for the afternoon (when I grow up I want to be a... shopkeeper!) and loving every minute of it. Huge, of course, by normal standards, but by no means over-muscled. He had neat, short hair and a friendly smile, and he served his customers with quick, deft movements and an eagerness that, allowing for the brutal translation you'd expect from the league, did indeed resemble the way he conducted himself on the football field. Best of all, he didn't seem to mind when we nonchalantly tried to draw him out about his Other Life, over there at Redfern Oval. I recall one conversation about a troubling groin injury that was then threatening to bar him from State of Origin consideration. ("Boom Souths forward during the late 1980s," says The Encyclopaedia of Australian Rugby League Players, "showed immense promise despite a constant groin injury.") Managed to get through it with a straight face too. It's funny when you look back - he was so neat, so fabulously well-groomed, almost glistening. Beautiful nails, I remember. But at the time we didn't think anything of it. Didn't even speculate. We were accustomed to the carnival aspect of Sydney's Oxford Street, I suppose. It was part of our everyday life. It's amazing how thoroughly leather men, gym clones, yuppies, derros, trannies, all dissolve into scenery when they're your neighbours. Just folks, after all. So a rugby league star behind the counter of a delicatessen didn't seem so peculiar, not when the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were out there flogging condoms from "Gilligan's Island",. the island of parched grass in the centre of Taylor Square, every other day. The forwards are the core of a rugby league team. In the rich slang of the game, it's "the engine room" - they do the really hard work, confronting the opposing players, one on one, in a gladiatorial contest without excuses. For all their sweat and blood, they're seldom rewarded with anything so glamorous as a try-scoring opportunity. That sort of thing flows naturally to the backs, the fancy-pants players who regularly finish a game without so much as a grass stain on their jumpers. Roberts, even more than most, works incredibly hard, especially in defence. He'll launch tackle after bone-crunching tackle as if driven by the pulse of an invisible clock, each one made not just to slow the opposing player down but to drop the bastard in his tracks; he seems indestructible on days like that. Indestructible, plus something else that must make rival coaches sigh and wish he was theirs - Roberts has a special eagerness, a willingness to throw in everything he possesses, time and time again. Watching him, there are passages of play when you can practically hear the pounding of his heart, feel the crack of sinews, shudder at the impact as flesh and bone collides with flesh and bone. Just about then, when you know his lungs have got to be burning for air, the team switches to attack and he's sprinting out of the defensive line to collect the ball and take it up against all comers as if nothing can stop him. Discerning rugby league audiences know all about what propels a player in the Roberts mould. The word they use is "heart" — a quality immediately recognisable and highly prized among the men of the league. Heart is what separates the champions from the merely good players, the legends from the ruck of the skilled and talented. Heart is what it takes to go on throwing your body on the line, not just when your team's winning and everything's running like clockwork, but especially when you're down, too far down to have a chance of scoring the points in time, and you're maybe carrying an injury and it's hurting like hell, and everybody around you is crumbling. That's when it really shows.
This concept of heart is central to the spiritual cult of rugby league. League is, above everything, a game of masculine sacrifice. In league, mateship and struggle against the odds have been elevated to the status of virtual fetish objects. The brilliance of point-scoring backs is respected and admired, but league fans reserve the real depths of emotional connection for the blood-stained warriors, the battlers. The game's best-known images, its most repeated stories, do not deal with the artistry of victory but with the nobility of suffering endured. Hence the iconography of the Winfield Cup, Australia's premier rugby league trophy, a statuette of two exhausted, mud-splattered players in a manly embrace. The emotional tone echoes that of Simpson and his donkey: mateship among the ruins. Hence, also, the heroic status of John Sattler, the Souths captain who, in the 1970 grand final against Manly, had his jaw broken early in the game but, concussed and bleeding, concealed the extent of his injuries and refused to leave the ground, ultimately leading his team to victory. A famous newspaper photograph shows him being chaired from the field on the shoulders of his players, his mouth full of blood and broken teeth, his eyes rolling upwards in delirium like a latter-day St Sebastian. That Ian Roberts has not just survived but actually thrived in this testosterone-and-tears-soaked world is remarkable. Because buying a delicatessen on Oxford Street is only one instance, and by no means the most extreme, of the gap that separates him from the mob of league players. To put it mildly, the culture of rugby league does not encourage individualism. Yet Roberts is an individual. He is different. He is his own man. And as he has matured, as a player and as a human being, he has cared less and less who knows it. The rumours about Roberts began circulating relatively early in his career. In some quarters, after all, just being sighted on Oxford Street is tantamount to riding on the front float in the Mardi Gras parade, wearing a pink frock girdled with the slogan "Glad To Be Gay" while lip-synching to Stand By Your Man. Owning a small business a couple of doors down from Taylor Square virtually ensured Roberts would be the subject of gossip, not to mention the target of more than his share of ribbing or ridicule from his fellow players. Roberts copped a lot from the yahoos but, to his great credit, he never seemed to feel the need to bite back, choosing to let the jeers and the insults wash over him, and trusting to his incredible feats on the football field to stand as the best possible riposte he could make. Then came a flat spot in his career. After riding high through the late 80s, the early part of the new decade after his switch to Manly proved disappointing. Roberts struggled with injuries but, worse, he seemed to lose his appetite for the game. That characteristic eagerness deserted him, leaving him looking lacklustre and suddenly ordinary. He'd gone off the boil. "He had bad injury problems," says Easts and NSW coach Phil Gould, who was a member of the Souths team in which Roberts made his first-grade debut. "He was always a really physical player and he started that way at a fairly young age. It caught up with him for a while there. I thought he needed a freshen up. He was overlooked in selection for the national team, a rejection that stung so much, he later revealed, that he considered an offer to play for England, the country of his birth. Things got so bad it seemed that even his until-then ironclad first-grade starting position might be threatened. Of course, form is one of the great ineffables of sport. The very concept is like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, an athlete's form being just the visible sum of a raft of hidden variables, sometimes unknown or poorly understood, even by the athlete concerned. It was only in 1993, after a return to form, that Roberts explained he had been distracted by the terminal illness of "a family friend". Faced with the awful reality of death, football had suddenly seemed inconsequential. But the trauma had eased with time and, helped by the return to Manly of champion coach Bob Fulton, Roberts recovered his appetite for football. By September 1993 he was again being spoken of as "the form forward" of the competition. In retrospect, it would appear that Roberts did indeed go through some kind of crisis during that time. "He might have had other things going on in his life, apart from football," Gould suggests. "It happens to a lot of players. They have financial problems or something else goes wrong. He just went through a period when, physically and mentally, he wasn't at his best." Certainly, since then he has seemed more sure of himself, no longer feeling the need to go through the motions of conformity as he had intermittently in the past. If the world was in any doubt about our man's new approach, a wakeup call arrived with clarion clarity early in 1995 with the inaugural issue of Blue magazine.
It wasn't the nudity that shocked the world of rugby league so much as the fact that Roberts had agreed to appear in a gay magazine. To do so was widely interpreted as an admission of homosexuality, something which the player himself resolutely refused to confirm or deny. How he chose to live his personal life, Roberts insisted, was nobody's business but his own. "Being part of a different group, being labelled as an outsider because you live your life in a different way from the 'norm' has put me in a position to look at things laterally," he explained when the tabloid press came calling. "When I was younger I wouldn't have dreamed of doing anything like this. I was worried about what other people would think or whether my family would be upset. Well, I'm 29 now and I think you grow through that stage of caring what people think." The point was he liked the photographs. ("Here I am and I have no problem with it!") He was proud of his body and he saw no reason why, if someone was interested in doing so, its beauty should not be celebrated. If only it were that simple. In fact, whether or not Roberts is gay is beside the point. But his apparent lack of homophobia is deeply challenging for rugby league and the men who play it.
It is no accident that anxiety about homosexuality should persist in a sport like rugby league long after it has, at least formally, ceased to be an issue elsewhere. It's a cliche to point it out, but the iconography of league, the way it eulogises masculinity and the male body, occasionally comes very close to or even coincides with homosexual treatment of men as sexual objects. One could be forgiven, in other words, for accidentally mistaking a Bruce Weber photograph for a shot from a Men of League calendar. Players are obsessed by the male body. They spend hours training it, disciplining it, observing their own and the bodies of their mates with quite fanatical attention. They go out on the field and touch each other with a degree of familiarity that would be considered inappropriate in any other circumstance. Then they all come in after the game and take their clothes off together in the locker room. None of which is to suggest that they necessarily are repressed homosexuals. Far from it. But you don't have to spend much time around them to see that, on the whole, the best they can come up with to deal with the contradictions of their position — the fact that they live, in a sense, in a sort of gay heaven — is a shrill, sustained state of denial. When in doubt, overcompensate. Ian Roberts, on the other hand, has risen above all that. A glamorous shot of his head and torso filled the windows of Oxford Street's Frontier Aviators clothing store during the weeks of the Mardi Gras festival last summer. He even attended the Mardi Gras Fair - we know because a photograph of him there appeared in Sydney's leading gay newspaper. Where another league star, Andrew Ettingshausen, won damages from a magazine for the pain and suffering he endured when it published a photograph in which readers could make out his penis, Roberts took $500 to pose for another publication and then gave the money to the Camperdown Children's Hospital. You have to admire a man who could arrive at a solution as elegant as that. No doubt there is some truth in the oft-heard theory that Roberts could survive in the potentially hostile territory of rugby league at least partly because he is a forward, and is therefore big and strong enough to dissuade all but the most reckless antagonist from having a go at him. He might not be homophobic. Heavens, he might even be gay. Whatever, the rest of the boys in the league long ago must have figured out that they're just going to have to go on living with it. "It's time I let people know there's a different side," Roberts saId at the time of the Blue media circus. "Everything I've ever done revolved around football and, even though it's taken more of my time and energy, it's not the only thing." Because the thing is, nobody, but nobody, with a brain in their head could possibly, even for a second, accuse Ian Roberts of being a sissy. On the contrary - he's all heart. |
