This time around, history really might view it as a proud day for the Collingwood Football Club.
Eight days on from his catastrophic, denial-filled response to a report which identified systemic racism at the club, and 23 years from claiming Collingwood’s top job, Eddie McGuire stood down.
Fighting back tears, McGuire said the words that nobody in the football world thought they’d hear: “Today, effective immediately, I step down from the presidency of the Collingwood Football Club.”
For a large portion of the 15 minutes that followed, McGuire read defensively from a dizzying list of the club’s progressive credentials — foundations, charities, committees, projects, funds.
And fair enough, too. In McGuire’s time, Collingwood has certainly done plenty for those in need.
But, like during his disastrous performance of last week, McGuire couldn’t help himself once all the boxes had been ticked: “This is why I say we are not a racist club — far from it,” McGuire said, indignantly. At Collingwood, there were only “systemic problems” and “problems with our processes”.
History will suggest that such displays of pig-headedness were what lost the Collingwood players, many of their fans, the media, and eventually McGuire’s own board.
There were less obvious clangers, too. The words that immediately followed confirmation of McGuire’s resignation went like this: “From the moment I became president of the Collingwood Football Club on my 34th birthday back in 1998, my sole motivation was to heal, unite, inspire and drive a new social conscience, not just into this club, but sport and the community in general and build an organisation that would be a place for opportunity for all people.”
It was a nice tribute to himself, certainly, if a little at odds with recent revelations. The problem was, McGuire being McGuire, it bore little resemblance to actual events of September and October 1998, when he assumed control of Collingwood.
Because McGuire’s “bloodless coup” to depose the dithering Kevin Rose — “one of the greats of the history of this club”, McGuire called him on Tuesday — came with no such platform.
When he signalled his intention to join the board at the time, McGuire told reporters: “It’s not a situation where anyone is running on any big tickets or any grand plans.”
Yet his true intentions were soon clear: “Collingwood needs to look at itself as no longer a football club but a major player in the sports and entertainment business.” And McGuire said then of healing the club’s factions: “There are still people fighting at Collingwood about what their grandfathers said. It’s worse than Northern Ireland.”
In those times, the toughest questions McGuire faced came from journalism colleagues querying the apparent conflict of interest arising from his combination of media and football roles, a criticism that never went away.
McGuire’s response became a template: He had the integrity to do both jobs because, well, he said so. Indeed, until recent times, he remained his own integrity committee, operating in a world of no consequences.
On the night of his coronation, his 34th birthday, McGuire quoted Shakespeare and John F Kennedy, promising to make Collingwood “a leader in the business of football”. Unquestionably, he achieved that.
But if the words “social conscience” and “opportunity for all people” were uttered, they went unrecorded. Instead, McGuire grandly described his ascent to the throne as Collingwood’s “moment of truth”.
Now, others can have theirs heard, and not before time.
And not before decades of McGuire twisting every tricky scenario back into his and Collingwood’s favour. On Tuesday, again, the nadir was his self-pity: “People have latched onto my opening line last week and, as a result, I’ve become a lightning rod for vitriol …”
In truth, the lightning rods for vitriol have been those who dared complain or fight back against the racism they have suffered at the hands of Collingwood and its people — Adam Goodes, Nicky Winmar, Gilbert and Adrian McAdam, Joel Wilkinson, Robert Muir and others whose stories are yet to be told.
And foremost, Héritier Lumumba, only the most recent and most egregiously wronged party in this affair — a man who chooses not to personalise what he’s suffered because he sees himself as a minor player in a global resistance spanning hundreds of years. He has been underestimated and undermined at the peril of those who have discredited him.
On Tuesday, McGuire thanked Mick Malthouse, one of Lumumba’s old coaches. The vision of Malthouse he had in mind cannot have been the 2013 version, who in the wake of the Goodes affair said: “Eddie is not the victim in this. The victim is — listen to what [Lumumba] has said, listen to what Adam Goodes has said.”
Some still refuse to listen. Up until hours before McGuire’s departure, Lumumba was the subject of deplorable smears by powerful Melbourne football identities. He will face continued assaults on his character — public ones by the anonymous internet trolls who have hounded him since social media’s earliest days, private ones from people in football.
Which all rather proves why the report needed to exist in the first place.
For those reasons and plenty more, there should not be crowing about McGuire’s departure, as tempting as it might be for his critics to indulge in schadenfreude. Nobody should kid themselves that his stepping down signals anything close to an end point in Collingwood and football’s confrontation of its dark past and lacklustre present.
In 1998, when McGuire took direction of the club, among the bones of contention was the oldest story in football: a crisis of confidence in the coach. At that time, it was Tony Shaw. Indeed, he lasted only a year of McGuire’s tenure.
Here in the present, the opposite is true. As McGuire falls on his sword, Collingwood’s current coach, Nathan Buckley, sails on, curiously unexamined for his central role in Lumumba’s ugly departure from Collingwood and his embarrassing non-return.
Buckley once urged Lumumba to “see what we have become”. But what is that, exactly?
