Peter Fitzsimons puts the boot into ‘eggheads’ who sneer at sport. But are there any examples of this species left? As a leftwing intellectual, I move in fairly ovoid circles*, and I haven’t run across a good example of an anti-sport sneer for at least a decade. The big line in recent years has been “What about us?” claims for equal time. Feminists have successfully shamed the TV networks, particularly the ABC, into covering netball as heavily as football (give me WNBL any day, but each to their own). Meanwhile, the egghead lobby is trying the same thing, arguing that we should be cheering just as loudly for our gallant Aussie solar energy researchers/heart surgeons/postmodernist literary critics as for the Wallabies and Kangaroos. As we’ve seen in the blogosphere, if anybody will be sneering at Sunday’s rugby league grand final, it will be the more bigoted followers of AFL and Union.
*Yes, you can draw a circle on an egg