The Trauma of the Tiger

"The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces."

-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath most likely never heard of Australian Rules football. Even if she had, I doubt she would have found the pursuit lofty enough, the weekly winter ballet of bodies and leather and screams and talkback radio diatribes not worthy of deep intellectual thought.

She did, however, manage to articulately surmise the life of a supporter of the Richmond Football Club in 2010 with the above quote. She accurately conveys the Trauma of the Tiger. The Bell Jar, Plath’s poignant and revered semi-autobiographical novel, tells the tale of Esther Greenwood’s descent into the world of mental illness, her sicknesses, her loneliness, and her attempts at suicide. The novel was Plath’s only extended work of prose as she committed suicide the same year The Bell Jar was published.

I have found myself thinking a great deal about Sylvia Plath lately. I dare say many Richmond fans have though the vast majority I spend my Sunday afternoons in the outer at the MCG with are more in tune with Tim Sylvia than Sylvia Plath. We all feel the desperation, the hopelessness, the despair of Plath in her final years.

These are dark days at Punt Road. Though, truth be told, the sun rarely shines over Tigerland.

Barracking for the Richmond Football Club is what any decent medical professional would call a sickness and not a passing one at that. It is a permanent, chronic illness and it will stay with all those who wear the yellow and black until the day we die. There is no known cure and treatments for pain prevention are nonexistent. It is a squalid, brutal, horrifying affliction only made worse by the fact parents willingly pass it onto their very own children, bestowing such terror and hurt on infants, young and as pure as the driven snow. These kids stand no chance and few have any understanding of the lifetime of disappointment, sadness and despair that awaits.

As Plath notes of her own sickness, the trauma of living in Tigerland hits in waves. It oscillates between the dull ache of perpetual futility and the unbearably sharp stabbing pain of dashed hope, hope that every last Tiger fan promises they will never buy into again but one in which they inevitably do only to see it dashed again.

As astonishing as it is to believe considering the hapless nature of the Richmond Football Club over the last three decades, 2010 has been the worst year of the lot. It makes the tragedy of George shooting Lennie in Of Mice and Men look like an episode of Wings.

It is not as if any sane Richmond fan went into 2010 with any semblance of hope. The year had been billed as a rebuilding year before it even began. The beloved Matthew Richardson announced his retirement in the offseason and the Tigers faithful would never again get to see their flawed champion play his heart out. Other big names like Joel Bowden and Nathan Brown were shown the door when a broom was swept through the top end of the club. A new coach was in town and while everyone was pleased that the dreadful Terry Wallace era was over, a new coach meant a new beginning and a new beginning meant the need for patience and plenty of pain. The club line aimed to lower expectations but even the Tigers hierarchy couldn’t prepare us for what was to come. This would be nothing like last year when the club recruited Ben Cousins after a big finish to 2008 and the MCG was sold out to the season opener against Carlton and for once the Tigerland faithful believed that perhaps our time had come. That hope was, of course, quickly dashed but those infant days of 2009 were heady days for Richmond barrackers. In spite of history and reputation, we all held on to that swirling notion of hope.

There was no such expectation this year. Yet somehow the pain is more brutal, the smell of death more pungent, the load of disappointment more back-breaking. It is a hollow feeling knowing that there is a very real prospect of spending an entire winter without a win, caught at the crossroads of history with dead-ends in every direction. It is Pleasantville in reverse, a nightmare that won’t end.

No team has gone winless in a season since Hawthorn in 1950 and in an era of talent equalisation bought about by the draft and the salary cap, the prospect of a winless season is as impossible to believe as it is ghastly to realise that it is a very possible outcome for your very own team.

Dealing with all that seemingly isn’t enough though. As if it isn’t bad enough watching a team bereft of skills, watching a team play soft, watching overrated and overpaid cats like Brett Deledio and Richard Tambling shirk the task each and every week, watching handball after handball when all you want is a kick, watching a fullback who can’t kick the ball into play and a ruckman who can’t win a hit-out, watching the ball die at half-forward each and every time and if by some miracle it doesn’t then the shot at goal will be inevitably shanked. We have to deal with the jokes, the mocking, the pity.

There is a certain sharp edge to the self-loathing of the Richmond barracker this year.

It is not surprising that the connections between the Richmond Footy Club and the Catholic Church have been historically strong. In a sense the Tigers captures to a tee the Irish Catholic traits of guilt and loyalty. We stay true and barracking for the Tigers seems right, an evening up of the ledger for all the fun and vice we indulge in. It is the Catholic equivalent of karma, a kind of sadomasochistic tradition that allows Tiger fans to believe that something good in their life is just around the corner because it sure as hell ain’t happening out on the football field.

This year it is meaner though, a real ugly side to life as a football fan. Being caught in the crosshairs of history breaking mediocrity does that to people though.

We were all at our worst last Sunday. It was the worst of Richmond defeats, the one all Tigers hate the most: the one where we get close. It is simply par for the course that Richmond get flogged. We had taken seven brutal beatings in a row. We were in it at half-time against the Demons and we had a shot at three-quarter time against the Crows but by the time the final siren sounded the Tigers of old were far from strong and anything but bold. We were bleeding from every orifice while every organ was grinded into dust. Not so against Hawthorn though. For the first time this year our hopes had risen, only to be dashed yet again.

I was standing in Bay 10, where the hearty men stand and drink beer and those sensitive to foul language are advised to stay away from. Richmond fans were mocking those in yellow and black but the first negative word from a Hawthorn fan and the Tigers fans united and shouted down those idiots in brown and gold. We keep the hatred within the family. We keep a united facade when confronted. Those Hawthorn fools with splintered asses from the bandwagon they all jumped on in the eighties and have never gotten off sang silly songs about Cyril Rioli and Jarryd Roughead and they bitched and moaned about every goddamn decision. They didn’t take too quietly to comments about Buddy being a drug addict though and they got a little quiet when the Tigers got within a goal deep into the final quarter.

Those last few minutes were somewhat of a blur but we all know how it ended. It was the same finish to nearly every Richmond story. The final siren blows. The Tigers are on the wrong end of the scoreboard. The opposition song starts up. The Tigers faithful curses themselves for believing yet again. We flow to places like The London, The Mountain View, the All Nations and, for the very desperate, The Royal to drink ourselves to numbness among our own.

Even a perpetual optimist like Richard Simmons would be reaching for the noose, the scene is that depressing. Think Requiem for a Dream for a recovering junkie after a bottle of whiskey.

Barracking for the Tigers is a sickness. And it is with those afflicted for life. It is the Trauma of the Tiger.