Words, Dominic Cadden 

Back home you might have thought commitment to the local footy team was a big thing. Then you moved to sports mad Perth, which demanded sporting bigamy – AFL, soccer, basketball, cricket, surfing. Then there’s Melbourne, the self-proclaimed ‘sporting capital of the universe’ situated at the scrotum end of the world, where too much sport is never enough.

At first glance, Melbourne is a rather bleak, flat, European-style city filled with wine bars, trams and poncy street art, even the ubiquitous European sewage-brown river trickling through it, with no beach for miles. Climatic conditions aren’t ideal for outdoor pursuits, with a typical weather report reading, ‘morning drizzle followed by a heatwave, changing to sleet and heavy frosts by early afternoon. Minimum 6 degrees, maximum 38.’ Yet we’re talking about a city that has a walkway joining its CBD to a ‘sporting precinct’ the size of Belgium, home to a grand slam tennis tournament, the largest cricket ground in the world, Olympic and Commonwealth Games venues and the Australian Grand Prix, which the city stole from Adelaide in 1992 with threats of an armed invasion.

You’re probably sick of seeing men in tight shorts jumping their crotches into each other’s necks as they use a retarded rugby ball as an excuse to elbow and punch each other. You’re probably even more fed up with the mong-like drone of former players in the media. But in Perth you have two Aussie Rules clubs in the national competition. Melbourne has nine, which means that in the entire state of Victoria you can’t turn on a TV without seeing a match or some ex-players who’ve been given a job on a lifestyle or football show in order to keep them off the cocaine and out of paternity suits.

Thanks to sport, however, Melbourne has the lowest per capita rate of violent crime of any Australian capital city (albeit with a few major gun massacres, which can be traced to a distressing boilover in the footy results). This is because employment options in professional sport (including teams in the national basketball, rugby league, soccer and cricket competitions) keep many of the ‘suss’ population well-paid for little work, thus curbing their instinctive urges for petty theft, drug-related crime and rectal rape. That said, there is a two-week period every year between the end of the Aussie Rules/rugby league season and the cricket/soccer/basketball starting when good citizens batten up their homes, hide all prescription medicines and padlock the belts of their trousers before leaving the house.

Now back to the sport (as usual). Currently, the future of the Australian Grand Prix is under threat unless it caves in to Formula One’s demand to become a night race. But you can be sure that even if it means having German-speaking bondage mistresses as track marshals and turning off all the electricity to outer suburbs such as Frankston, Dandenong and Moe to power the lights, Melbourne will make it happen.

Just a short walk away from the Albert Park track is the Melbourne Cricket Ground. ‘The G’ is so large that its Great Southern Stand holds more seats than the entire Sydney Cricket Ground, and 14,000 more than Lords. It can handle over 100,000 spectators (it used to be over 121,000 before the safety Nazis took over), making Twickenham look like a village theatre for mime. It is, in a sense, the St Peters of Australian sport, home to cricket, Aussie Rules, soccer internationals, the 1956 Olympic Games and rugby internationals, even though rugby isn’t even played in Victoria. If The G hosted crocodile wrestling tournaments with Tibetan monks, they’d still pull in 80,000.

The overriding grip of competitive sport in Melbourne is such that at the height of the city’s gangland wars, there was an internet site with previews of match-ups, for and against stats on each gang’s slayings and a tote book for bets on mode of death for prominent players. Yet for a scene that revolves even more around drugs, bling, ‘colourful identities’ and horses’ heads, you need look no further than The Melbourne Cup. The world’s premier two-mile race for thoroughbreds, it’s known as ‘the race that stops a nation’, but by now you’ll know that all it takes to make an Aussie workplace stop and liquor up is a temp’s birthday. Still, with $5.5 million in prize money, the race attracts horses from Dubai, Japan, the UK and Ireland, as well as contracting international celebrities as sure as a horse contracts equine flu. This makes The Melbourne Cup a major ‘fashion event’, which in Victoria is an excuse for a public holiday so people can attend the race or gala events dressed in hats styled into the form of a miniature chicken-processing factory or somesuch. You can’t even imagine what the ladies wear.

Such is the sophistication of the event that Australia’s premier sports commentators, HG Nelson and ‘Rampaging’ Roy Slaven, are behind a push to introduce ‘celebrity shooters’ to the event – i.e. hiring well-known personalities to ‘put down’ horses that are injured or fall over three lengths behind during the race. Sure it’s progressive, but why not? This is the city where Shane Warne first brought cricket ‘scoring’ into the telecommunications age.

In Melbourne, the future is bleak for the non-sports fan. Many are tested for homosexuality, then shipped off to Sydney. The rest are destined to zombie-walk the heroin-paved streets of Fitzroy, seeking shelter in the many goth and emo clubs between the hours of 1am and 7am – the only time they may be safe from Melbourne’s endless live sport. But if you love sport, Melbourne will welcome you like a banished Perth footy star guilty of punching team mates in the face, evading police and frequent drug binges. So, are you game?