The AFL National Draft will be held today and while there’s a wealth of other drafts these days – rookie, pre-season, Essendon list top up after drug cheating suspensions are handed down – this is the only show that really matters.
We’re told that the draft, along with the salary cap, is the foundation stone of equalisation upon which the glittering edifice of our great game – “It isn’t like English soccer! It isn’t just the same four teams always winning it!” – rests.
This is entirely bullshit of course. The AFL draft is compromised beyond belief and that’s even now we’ve moved beyond the expansion drafts of recent years.
I could list the grievous inequities – priority picks, free agent compensation picks, certain teams having academies, even the beloved and actually pretty cool father/son rule – of this so-called model of equalisation, and I pretty much just did, but there’s no point getting too worked up about them, because that’s how drafts work and always will.
Outside of the sporting world, the draft is of course the American term for what we would call conscription. Its military usage can be defined as the state compelling its citizens, or subjects, to join that state’s armed forces, both inside and outside of peacetime.
The most recent iteration of the draft in both the US and Australia was during the Vietnam years. While both countries had sizeable, in relative terms, professional standing armies, and a surprising number of volunteers (such as the so-called coward John Kerry, victim of one of the ugliest smears in political history) to fight Communism in south east Asia before the domino effect reached irreversible velocity, the scale of the war required more than could be willingly found. Hence the expansion of the draft in the US and conscription in Australia from the existing levels of fairly relaxed “national service”.
The cultural memes of that time are still with us – burning draft cards at protests and the like. And so are the political memories. Such was the divisive nature of the draft, especially in the United States where African-Americans felt, not unreasonably, that they were sent to act as cannon fodder while middle class and rich white kids managed to escape the fun and games of the Tet Offensive, that it would take a very brave President, or a genuine threat to the homeland, to reintroduce compulsory military service.
(An aside, none of the key architects of the Iraq War, all of whom were of military age during Vietnam, ever managed to make it “in country” and face the sharp end of a punji stick: George W. Bush famously patrolled American skies for the Air National Guard, lest Charlie make a surprise paratroop attack on Dallas, poor old Dick Cheney got a medical out on the grounds of some arse polyp while creepy Donald Rumsfeld was already far enough up the Defense Department chain as to safely avoid combat.)
They weren’t alone. Hundreds of thousands of other Americans avoided the draft and going to Vietnam by a wide variety of means beyond family connections. Iggy Pop willed himself an erection in the showers on the first day of basic training and was happily dismissed on “mental grounds” while plenty of others simply ran for Canada, a savagely ironic twist on the Underground Railway given so many African-Americans, lacking the cash and contacts required to escape conscription, were being sent to the war.
Of course nothing has changed in this regard. Only those who can’t get away get conscripted in wartime. In Russia during the Chechen Wars of the 1990s and 2000s only the poor actually ended up doing their military service at the pointy end of things in what had to be the scariest place on Earth for a 19 year old reluctant soldier. Seriously, if you think Iraq and Syria are bad now, they are nothing compared to Chechnya circa 1999 – 2003. That was a hellhole for the Russian conscripts, mercilessly beaten and tormented by their own officers and facing a desperately cunning and vicious guerilla enemy in a landscape of gorges and the kind of forests that not only look they have fairy tale monsters living in them, but actually do, monsters with AKs and beheading knives that will literally send bits of you in a box back to your mother.
What is interesting about our footy draft though is that the terms of recruitment have changed. It is now the kids from middle to upper class backgrounds who go to the accompanying schools of that demographic that do best in the draft. Poor kids, kids from “rough backgrounds”, not so much. The difficulties of young men from remote indigenous backgrounds in adjusting to AFL life are well documented but the evidence also shows that if such talented youngsters are put into, let’s be frank, the whitefella system of education at an early age – like Cyril Rioli – they do just as well as if they’d been born in Camberwell.
I don’t have enough time or space or brains to go into the implications for the eternal debate over nature versus nurture contained there. Nor can I bothered going into the “one day a player will challenge the draft in court and it will come crashing down” argument largely because that can be summed up in one word: bullshit.
But we should today have a look at who is being drafted highest and why. In what is being described as a remarkably even draft talent-wise, factors like family background and the magically slippery concept of “character” come into play more than ever.
If conscription was traditionally a net that caught the poorest and most vulnerable, then our AFL draft is the reverse: the better educated and more stable your family background, the more likely you are to get a go at the brutal combat that is top league footy.
