The homoeroticism of league has never been fully explored by Australian sports writers and certainly not by its official TV commentators. Nearly all of them former players, they constantly refer to other players as ‘big units’ and ‘hard men’, marvelling at the size of their arms and thighs while seemingly oblivious to any sexual connotations.
This becomes glaringly apparent on The Sunday Roast, Channel Nine’s midday hour-long round-up of the footy week and that day’s games.
It’s meant to be the jokey counterpart to the more serious Sunday Footy Show and is, even by league standards, pretty lowbrow. It also invariably provides a great perve at least once a week. Yesterday, it was the four (relatively old) panellists discussing the rampant tattooing going on among footy ranks. To illustrate this bewildering – to them – trend, they provided locker room footage. We love locker room footage:
Apart from this sort of titillation, The Sunday Roast also has Mark Geyer, a.k.a. ‘MG’. MG was, in his heyday, a ‘hard man’ known for his intimidating demeanour and love of biff. He got suspended a lot.
These days, the 6’5” MG appears on the Roast – often as a source of amusement to his fellow panelists due to his propensity to say stupid and/or inappropriate things – as well as the sports news pages. His Hardman column on the ninemsn website is, in his own words, a celebration of the “brute with a profound presence on the footy field”.
My favourite incarnation of MG, though, was as the spokesbloke for Advanced Hair Studio. The company has employed several balding sports identities to flog their ‘strand-by-strand’ technology with the beautifully simple slogan, “Advanced Hair – yeah yeah”.
But only MG made it sound like a come-on.
If you look closely, you can see a tiny shiny spot on his head; evidently he’s still getting work done:
1 comment:
A lot of those NRL players are sexy to view. It is only when most of them open their mouths to speak that the mystique is broken.
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