I’d rather Eddie Nowhere than Eddie Everywhere

Imagine a world without Eddie McGuire – from Eddie Everywhere to Eddie Nowhere. Even John Lennon would admit “it’s easy if you try”. No boofhead antics as a badge of pride, no more using sport as the be-all and end-all of defining a person’s identity and no more offensive comments! Sometimes I think McGuire must have a fetish to always have a foot to put in his mouth whenever he speaks. From calling Western Sydney the “land of the falafel” (which must make his own neighbourhood of Toorak the “land of the lost”) to claiming men’s figure skating is “a bit of broke back” because the competitors happened to be men who skate, and by Eddie’s thinking obviously must be gay (which makes me think what would Brian Boitano do?) it’s time to give Eddie the shove.

Last Saturday night, Sydney Swans played Collingwood Magpies (for whom McGuire is club president) at the MCG and a 13-year old Collingwood fan was removed from the stadium for calling Sydney’s Adam Goodes an “ape” because he’s Aboriginal. Goodes has shown what a guy he is by not pressing charges, despite a mealy-mouthed apology from the girl who claimed that she didn’t know calling someone an “ape” could be racist. Eddie McGuire was also praised for being the first to apologise on behalf of Collingwood and facilitating a personal apology to Goodes from the girl.

But of course McGuire had to swallow both his size-10s again this morning. As omnipresent Eddie Everywhere – not just appearing on television and in the papers but radio too – talking with his co-host (and former footballer) Luke Darcy about the King Kong musical, McGuire said: “Get Adam Goodes down for it, do you reckon?”

Oh, good one Eddie. Sadly I can see how you’ve tried to make a “joke” there but instead became one yourself. Since Adam Goodes was called an “ape”, and King Kong is about a “gorilla” – there must be less than a millimetre between the dots joined in Eddie’s brain.

Eddie McGuire would have to one of the biggest hypocrites around, after yesterday claiming “you can’t discriminate about discrimination”.

How many more times can Eddie McGuire make an offensive comment and laugh it off as being a “bloke”? To give McGuire a taste of his own medicine, why don’t we tell him the most offensive jokes about his beloved Collingwood that we know? I’ll start with my personal favourite: “What did one truckie say to the other? Get out of Millane!” Not to mention the dozen or more rumours I’ve heard about dear Eddie over the years. Of course I’m skirting defamation here, so I’ll give you three clues: 1) Wife 2) Next room 3) Fill-in-the-blank yourself!

If sport is supposed to be the great social cohesive, where contrary to cliche they play the ball and not the man, then we haven’t learnt anything from Nicky Winmar taking a stand against racial abuse 20 years ago, the impetus for the AFL’s annual Indigenous All Stars round.

In a perfect world, Eddie McGuire would be nowhere.

UPDATE:

McGuire has again proven himself to be an ardent hypocrite:

“I stand for equality. It’s everything I stand for… I will be eternally  disappointed by what I said,” McGuire said.

How many hours until McGuire starts with the “I’m not racist but …” schtick? Taking all bets!

I Knew I Was Right – Eddie McGuire, omnipresent hypocrite

From pleb to sleb.

“A celebrity is a nothing but a nonentity who got lucky,” wrote Kathy Lette (don’t ask – there was nothing else to read and I was desperate). Although looking at most “celebrities” you’d expect the luck to be long gone, drained and not even a few dregs caked on to the bottom of the barrel.

Ten years ago the whole “famous for being famous” thing hit the big-time with Paris Hilton, what with her sex-tape and describing anything she liked with a drawled “That’s hot”. Now we’ve got the Kardashians, and although I could, like everybody else, bag them, most of what I hate about them has been said before by people much smarter than me, so I’ll make it short:  They seem to promote illiteracy – last time one of them came here (I don’t know which, the one that doesn’t look like a bloke) Channel Ten had a news item on this visiting Kardashian that was titled, in the spirit of the Kardashians taking the letter K to levels not seen since the Ku Klux Klan, “KARDASHIAN KAOHS” – see, try to do a Kardashian and they can’t even spell the word “chaos” properly. The only positive thing I get from them is that at least the famous-for-being-famous crew has become a bit more ethnically diverse.

I think the best nonentity though was Kim Duthie, otherwise known as the “St. Kilda Schoolgirl”. What a fun January that was! In 2011, stories appeared of an underage girl attending a training camp in the US with the St Kilda Football Club. And that this girl (who had so far remained unnamed due to her age) had leaked photos of naked footballers arseing about in all their chest-waxed and pube-shaved glory (ugh!). Sure enough, pics were seen of Nick Riewoldt grinning and baring all and Nick Del Santo playing with himself – which prompted the joke about doing a nude calendar of the club, and having Del Santo as “Mr February – because it’s the shortest month.” It then transpired that she was sleeping with a player-manager, Ricky Nixon, and that she was going to have his baby (subsequently debunked when she was hooked up to a lie-detector). And didn’t we all taste a bit of sick in our mouths when we read that over breakfast? That a young girl was banging some fat old walking, talking beer-gut? Best of all was that Duthie was on Twitter and tweeting away without a care in the world, especially for legalities. One night a middle-aged female friend and I, high on Cab Merlot and dope, tweeted Duthie but sadly got no response: “Hey, when you banged Nixon how many times did you orgasm? NONE!” And then we got onto the maestro and puppet-master of slebs for no reason everywhere, Max Markson. “Hey Max Markson, when are you gonna’ get Duthie to kiss ‘n’ tell for a few bob?” Again, no response and after we sobered up and realised how stupid we were, we thought we’d sensibly leave the poor girl alone.

A week later my friend had one of her “cunning plans”, which usually involve something that would cause outrage to simpletons and be hilarious if all goes to plan. “I was driving from Richmond today and I drove past Carey Baptist Grammar”, the biggest private-school in Melbourne, “and Nixon used to teach P.E. there, so I thought why not go there at night and graffiti along the front wall HOUSE OF NIXON and a Pisces symbol? It’s right in the bible-belt and everyone’ll think it’s the sign of the devil!” How could I disagree with this? I took the next tram up to Kew and walked round the entire length of the school, sadly realising that even at night the road was too well-lit and virtually impossible to spray-paint one letter let alone HOUSE OF NIXON and a Pisces symbol before being caught. Oh well, better a cunning stunt then a … Yeah.

And yet after all this, Ricky Nixon still gets in the papers. Abandoning sports management for stand-up comedy (which of course bombed) and proposing marriage to his next pretty young thing in a McDonalds in Moe, of all places (you just know his honeymoon was going to be at the Best Western in Dandenong) – does anyone really give a shit?

As much as a celebrity may only be a nonentity who got lucky, I blame lazy journalists and lazy editors too. If you have the “power”, for want of a better word, to give the luck that can make or break, surely you have a duty of care to use it wisely.