This was published 5 years ago
Kalyn Ponga is the very embodiment of Australia's sporting identity
By Malcolm Knox
Take your pick: Ponga was a prodigy, period - he just had to make a choice. Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:
Kalyn Ponga is the man for this particular moment in Australian sport.
Not only is he making his debut in Origin rugby league this weekend, but Ponga is a symbol of the uniquely complicated role of sport as an expression of Australian identity.
As a prodigy in at least six different sports, Ponga, by realising his potential in one, has erased his possible futures in the others. Seven years ago, when Ponga was a 13-year-old and you speculated on where he might be on the weekend of 23 June 2018, you could just as easily have predicted that he would be representing Australia in the FIFA World Cup in Russia as playing for the Wallabies against Ireland in the Lansdowne Cup decider in Sydney.
He might have been rescuing the Brisbane Lions at the Gabba or the Australian cricket team at Chester-le-Street. Instead, thanks to an extraordinary multiplicity of talent and the freedom to choose within a sporting culture that offered choice on his terms, Ponga will be turning out for Queensland at Homebush.
In Australia, talent buys so many opportunities that the difficulty is deciding which paths to ignore. In another world, for a sublimely gifted ball-playing 13-year-old on the streets of Sao Paolo, or Tangiers, or Seoul or Brussels or Lagos, one sporting career path would have taken natural precedence above all others.
Decisions, decisions: Kalyn Ponga is an immensely gifted league player, but as a child was a prodigy in six sports. Credit: NRL Photos
The FIFA World Cup offers a glimpse into how different Australia is from the rest of the world. Here are dozens of countries expressing their unified purpose through a single sport. They have their own Kalyn Pongas, and their names are Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Paul Pogba and Eden Hazard. Their national commitment to football is full-time. One nation, one dominant sport.
Australia, meanwhile, fronts up in Russia with a passionate section of its population behind the national team, a floating majority taking a casual interest, and more still with their attention on how their city, suburb or school will fare in some intensely local pastime. Where Australia once had ‘our Dawn’ and ‘our Don’, now the possessive pronoun may only be used ironically. No sport, or sporting team, speaks for us all.
There are advantages. At the very least, on a weekend like the last when Australia’s international teams all lost, our patchwork sporting culture gives us an out. Kalyn Ponga personifies the Great Australian Excuse. If only we focused on the one sport, we would be unbeatable! See our boys valiantly tackling the world in Russia?
Too much sport is never enough: Socceroos supporters during the clash World Cup with France, which was played at the same time as a Wallabies Test.Credit: AAP
Well, the guy who might be the best soccer player of this generation is instead tackling giants, with his arms, in an exotic regional game in western Sydney. Sure, the Wallabies lost to Ireland, but Ireland were able to pick the best of their best, whereas the potential union player of this Australian generation spends most weekends getting beaten up by leaguies in Newcastle. At thirteen, Ponga was winning national golf championships. But instead of winning the US Open for his country, he is focused on winning for Queensland.
The excuses multiply when you consider the diaspora of Australia’s young talent. Our cricket team would be doing much better if a stand-out junior player of his age, Isaac Heeney, wasn’t playing Aussie Rules for the Swans. If you had a unified Australian football culture, Greg Inglis and even Dustin Martin would be Wallabies carving up the Irish and then the All Blacks. We would be winning Wimbledon if an amazing young tennis player called Steve Smith hadn’t chosen to play cricket. Or not. Imagine a national soccer team with a playmaker as composed as Cameron Smith, a winger as mercurial as Billy Slater, and a goalkeeper as impassably agile as Ben Simmons. Count yourself lucky, world, that Australia decided to let you off.
For the poor couch-bound viewer trying to keep up with all this, meanwhile, our sporting promiscuity manifests as code confusion. Why aren’t the Australians just belting their way up the middle? Right, we’re watching soccer. Knock-on! No, this is AFL. Why is the clock running while everyone’s standing around doing nothing? Settle down, we’ve got the rugby on. What a mess they’re making of video reviews of refereeing decisions! Oh right, that’s every sport.
Although some of us enjoy the variety of entertainment on offer and don’t consider ourselves partisans or advocates of any sport at the expense of any other, the present moment does raise the question of whether Australia has the resources, in talent and finances, to sustain so many different sporting efforts at a professional level. The shopfronts are all aglow this weekend, but nobody would pretend that any of these professional codes are bristling with inner health. Football’s domestic competition is again in that swing of the cycle where it is struggling as a going concern. Union’s problems are exhaustively documented and fretted over. Cricket? Take a couple of players out, and mighty Australia are suddenly in the bottom rank of international teams. Even those corporatised media sports, the AFL and the NRL, are fighting declining or flat audience numbers.
Advertisers support professional sport, but the more the advertisers understand about where their dollars are going the more their dollars will flow away from spectator sport (unless they’re selling pharmaceuticals, retirement living or superannuation). Leaving aside the open question of whether Australia can continue to supply enough talent to fill enough national teams to remain competitive, enough leading sports are battling financially to suggest that we won’t be able to afford them. Our Olympic Games output is a bellwether for all sports. The earth is rumbling, and in twenty years we will be looking back on 2018 as the last days of sporting lifestyles that were unsustainable.
What does this mean for Australian identity? Many people lament the end of the monoculture, whether in sports or elsewhere. They look at the World Cup and see nations that express themselves as unified forces, with football as the glue. The only country that compares to Australia’s sporting diversity is the United States, which did not qualify for this World Cup. If they could draw from a pool that included LeBron James and Tyreek Hill, they might not just qualify every time, they might never be beaten.
Me, I think there are worse outcomes. Sport is about so many things other than national glory. Considering the way sporting nationalism is misused by malign political forces, our fragmentary, have-a-go-at-anything sporting culture is something to be proud of. Take Kalyn Ponga. He is a Queenslander by virtue of growing up in Mount Isa and spending his adolescence in Mackay. But he was born in Port Hedland, Western Australia. His father is Maori and for five years, as his prodigious talents emerged, he lived in New Zealand. He is more SBS than Channel Nine, but then most of us are. We just don’t acknowledge it. (And one thing’s for sure: we’re still more SBS than Optus.) The diversity we have created has a certain beauty, and if it results in Australia not being an international powerhouse in global sports, then that not the worst that could happen.