Hawthorn is not like anyone else

Hawthorn is not like anyone else

GuyWhoLikesSport

The AFL is in a constant state of the meme of the guy holding hands with his girlfriend, while looking over his shoulder at another woman.

Over his girlfriend’s head should sit the text “over a century of tradition and the most intoxicating spectator sport in the world” while over the other woman’s head it should say “louder music and more American stuff”.

To that end, AFL house has had the inspired idea of getting rid of a finals series that works quite well and that nobody has any real issue with and helpfully adding a “wildcard round” just like, you guessed it, the NFL.

See, the junkets are worth it!

Also like the vest wearing “visionaries” in Silicon Valley, the AFL is pushing an entirely unoriginal and uninspired under the guise of “innovation”.

As an aside, every “innovation” makes things worse, I’m thinking specifically of the new Microsoft Teams update.

I’m aware this is a corporate complaint but why am I not in the bottom right of the screen like before?

Anyway, I can’t fathom why the team that finishes tenth should still be alive.

What is the point of the regular season if everyone lives forever? There can be no happiness without sadness.

At some point the games before September have to matter, otherwise you risk NBA-ifying your product and making the regular season practically irrelevant.

My favourite example of the AFL’s embrace of everything American, as an aside, was how excited they were when Pat McAfee took a fleeting interest in the AFL over COVID. The way that they fawned over McAfee taking a mild interest in footy when there was literally no other sport going on in the world was so embarrassing.

It was like the dudes who reply to Instagram model’s thirst traps with comments like “beautiful inside and out”.

Anyway. in the spirit of embracing the decaying empire of the day, the United States, AFL house must absolutely love Hawthorn who have taken a decidedly American approach to their recent success.

They’re loud, they’re brash, they talk shit, they’re unapologetically full of personality. I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing. I love it.

But Jesus is it different.

They remind me of the Memphis Grizzlies team that lost to the Golden State Warriors in the 2022 Western Conference semi-finals.

That group, like this one, was also loud and brash and they went after the great teams with genuine self-belief.

They saw LeBron James in their path in the playoffs and said “I poke bears”.

Ultimately they beat LeBron’s Lakers and then went into Golden State and took it to the eventual champion Golden State Warriors before losing in six, but undoubtedly they got in the Warriors heads in the process.

The ego of that Grizzlies team, uniquely young and specifically American, was in the room long before the team was.

The Warriors, who were established champs, clearly viewed that level of ego as entirely unearned.

Like that Grizzlies team, Hawthorn’s play style behoves the ego.

The Hawks have a gen-z effortlessness to them with the way they nonchalantly move the ball by foot, dropping the ball into the smallest of buckets as they transition the ball from defence to attack.

They’re exceptionally set up from stoppage and always seem to take easy options to get the ball outside where they’re most comfortable.

They make footy look easy.

It’s not that they don’t try, they do, sitting alone as the very best defensive team in football over the last five weeks (though that number is probably inflated by bad kicking by opponents), it’s that they don’t seem like they have to try.

Natural excellence is intoxicating.

Also like the Grizzlies team, they have a villain.

Floyd Mayweather famously talked about donning the “black hat”.

It was his way of saying he played a villain to sell tickets and PPV and he did it proudly. Dillon Brooks wore it for Memphis.

Jack Ginnivan wears it for Hawthorn, at least in the eyes of Collingwood supporters.

The footage of him walking back to his old cheer squad hitting them with the Steph Curry “night night” after playing the very best game of his career with the highest personal stakes outside of a Grand Final was perfect.

It was what would have happened if Dillon Brooks could walk the walk.

It was also one of the most hostile acts from a player to a crowd, short of jumping into the stands like Ron Artest, that I can ever remember.

Definitely the most hostile act that I can remember from an Australian athlete.

It was perfectly Jack. It was perfectly Hawthorn.

Unlike the Grizzlies team, Will Day probably isn’t going to film himself with guns like he’s an NRL playing in the same room as a teammate getting intimate with someone.

Other than a wayward superstar, I can’t get the similarities out of my head.

Eventually the tide of public opinion will turn on Hawthorn, like it did on Memphis, like it does on everyone.

If they don’t win this year or next, they will be derided as having an unearned arrogance.

They will be attacked and vilified, they will do something that someone will say has “crossed a line”.

But for now they’re still fun.

After they beat Collingwood, the Hawks brigade of young stars posed for another selfie that was captured by the TV camera.

You could hear them singing Kendrick Lamar’s song “not like us” as they broke the pack.

In this country, nobody is like them. Nobody that I can remember ever has been.

They’re like an American team of scrappy upstarts.

It’s not a surprise that it was the AFL official account that posted them.