End Game, with Tony Armstrong, (3 episodes, Barking Mad Productions, ABC 2025)
Professional sport involves a Faustian pact where athletes are offered fame and wealth in exchange for porous boundaries between public work and private life. Increasingly, fans and haters alike intrude upon the latter, especially of late via social media. Athletes of colour are a particular target for the sadistic abuse of racist trolls behind the mask of the internet. The result, amongst other things, is a toxic, unsafe workplace for many professional athletes.
The corporations who run professional sport have done as little as possible to combat the structural nature of this racism. In the new ABC documentary End Game, retired AFL player and now media star Tony Armstrong painfully describes how this racist abuse impacts himself and others. In End Game Armstrong takes it upon himself to search for solutions. He travels the Anglophone globe to try and learn from athletes, sport organisations, businesses and governments. Across Australia, United Kingdom and the United States, these parties are responding.
Since British colonisation, sport in Australia has been a key vehicle for providing entertainment for the population, reproducing a British way of life, and ‘civilising’ people perceived to lack moral character. So Indigenous athletes are alienated in a dual sense in that their labour is exploited for profit and enriches a dominant White culture they may never fully belong to.
Unsurprisingly, End Game cites research that suggests spectator racism is still rife in sport and that the situation is getting worse (see ‘Spectator racism in three professional men’s football codes in Australia: Observations from White spectators’, in International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 2024). Armstrong seeks answers from England and the US. In London, for example, Armstrong is impressed by Signify, a technology business that works with sports organisations to monitor online hate and implement measures to protect athletes. Armstrong introduces this to the Brisbane Lions football club, who agree to trial the program.
Armstrong also foregrounds the actions of contemporary athletes in Australia, including Muruwari cricketer Ashleigh Gardner, former AFLW player Akec Makur Chuot, ex-Socceroo Craig Foster, and cricket player Usman Khawaja. Tellingly, Khawaja references the pressure he faced from the International Cricket Council over his recent on-field activism and media interviews promoting universal human rights. But End Game doesn’t point out that this was in response to an ethno-nationalist state waging genocide.
All these athletes agree with Armstrong’s suggestion to form a Players Coalition, comprising current and former Australian athletes across sports, to challenge racism in Australia. It is an important initiative that once again points to the at best apathetic approach of sporting organisations in these lands that opt for easy symbolism over the work required to combat structural racism.
So it is a little surprising that Armstrong does not delve into the historical links between sport and white supremacy, nor the stories of those who fought against it, like Sir Doug Nicholls. After all, by using his public profile to challenge racism, Armstrong is following in the footsteps of other Indigenous footballers, including Nicky Winmar, Michael Long, and Adam Goodes, among others. Sir Doug, for example, travelled to Sydney in 1938 to speak at the first National Day of Mourning on the 150th anniversary of the invasion of Australia.
End Game itself also rarely theorises racism beyond the interpersonal level. An important exception involves a discussion of the racist stereotypes that still proliferate through the media. But again, the historical and systemic foundations of such dehumanising caricatures remain unaddressed.
Perhaps in the post-referendum impasse, a Players Coalition can harness the nation’s love of sport to chart a path forward. It seems, however, that the current tendency towards outsourcing solutions to experts who lobby for change instead of mass participatory actions leaves those seeking change kicking against the wind.