Chapter 7 : MEN, WOMEN, CHILDREN AND PARENTS

The Australian boy is a slim, darkeyed, olivecomplexioned young rascal, fond of Cavendish, cricket and chuckpenny, and systematically insolent to all servant girls, policemen and newchums. His hair is shiny with grease, as are the knees of his breeches and the elbows of his jacket. He wears a cabbagetree hat with a dissipated wisp of black ribbon dangling behind.

Sport plays a central role in growing up male in Australia. By implication it has some corresponding negative significance for growing up female. … The bonding of males through sport has been so strong that the culture of sport has excluded women … Sport contributed significantly to the making of the Australian male, far more than has been recognised by Australian historians, who have emphasised constructions such as the bushman, bushranger and soldier.

For young boys, sports still chiefly provides their role models. They may not ever wear the baggy green, but boys can admire the grit of Steve Waugh. Kids who don't play sport may by the nerdy generation. Yet many unsporting boys still watch sport. Few would suggest Bill Gates is their hero.

School harnesses competitive sport to develop school spirit and sense of community and belonging. Competitors learn how to operate as members of a team and come to understand the discipline required for each team member. They learn to play within a set of rules. Endeavouring to do one's best at all times is cultivated. The ability to think and act strategically and tactically is practised.

Sport, where many boys learn their values, is in danger of being wrecked because its ethics are being eroded by a win-at-all-costs attitude and locker room mentality that demeans women and encourages immature behaviour, such as binge drinking. “At the moment, I'd say no sensible parent of a teenage boy would let him play rugby because the physical risk and the values are so shonky that it's irresponsible.”

I love all sport. I love playing it, watching it and talking about it with my mates.

The beach was the most scared place of all. Boy's boards came before everything. It was waves before babes. They were faithful to the sea and were faithful to them.

Missing the entire under-8s [season] because I was too shy to sign up.

Over our short history, sport has been viewed by educators as a vehicle to convert boys into men, whilst governments and social reformers have promoted sport as a tool for developing and displaying Australian nationalism.

This need to act out a vigorous, successful masculine role through sport is impressed very early upon Australian boys. They are told that they must not be crybabies, must stand up for themselves, must not show too much interest in things which Australians are unmasculine; they must take their sport seriously and try to be good at it.

My favourite lesson at school was PE, put it that way. I just loved my sport, loved my football. We'd play before the bell rang, at lunch, after school. That sort of thing.

I think playing with balls is the most tangible form of enjoying and proving physical skill. It's simple. When my brother and I used to walk to school with other boys, as we came to each telegraph pole, without even saying anything everyone would bend over, pick up a stone and throw it at the pole, seeing who'd hit the bullseye. Without interrupting the conversation. Bang. Bang.

Knuckles is the toughest game there is. Hold your clenched fist against another boy's fist and count one-two-three. The fastest boy brings his knuckles down on the other's knuckles as hard as he can, causing immense pain. Drinking ink can kill you. Filling your mouth with water and wiping away any trace of it and then going up to someone and spitting it in their face is a form of surprise attack. Wiping snot on someone is another form of attack.

They could barely catch the ball or throw it back. I realised I was looking at a bunch of boys whose dads never played catch with them. This was a middle-class school in an affluent suburb.

- Cricket coach after working with eight-year old boys (2003).

Why do boys play with balls? Probably it's the first thing they've got hold of when they wake up.

- Ted Whitten, AFL legend (1990s).

[Australian sport] ... constitutes and reproduces heterosexual men's power.

Remember last Saturday when my team was playing and both of you were sitting and watching. Well, I hope that you won't get mad at me, but you kind of embarrassed me. Remember when I went for the ball right in front of the goal trying to score and fell? I could hear you yelling at the goalie for getting in my way. It wasn't his fault, he was doing what he was supposed to do. Then do you remember yelling at me to chase the ball. The coach told me to cover my man, and I couldn't if I listened to you, and while I tried to decide what to do they scored against us. Then you yelled at me for being in the wrong place. You shouldn't have abused the coach for replacing me at half-time. He is a pretty good coach, and a good bloke and he knows what he is doing. Besides he is just a volunteer using most of his spare time to help us kids, just because he loves sports. And, the neither of you spoke to me the whole way home, I guess you were pretty sore at me for not getting a goal. I tried awfully hard, but I guess I am a crummy soccer player. But, I love the game, it is lots of fun being with the other kids and learning to compete. It is a good sport but how can I learn if you don't show me a good example. And, anyhow I thought I was playing soccer for fun, to have a good time, and to learn good sportsmanship. I didn't know that you were going to get so upset, because I couldn't become a star.

Sport has played an immense role in Australia in the socialisation of men and women, in discourse within and between sexes. It has been influential in dictating attitudes towards the body and desirable body shapes, and it has also, of course, enhanced male misogyny and female oppression. Studying sport provides many insights into what it is to be male and female in Australia.

The history of women' involvement in sports is long, illustrious and almost completely ignored.

Women faced many barriers that restricted their participation in sport as it had in politics, particularly when sport occurred in public space. Well into the twentieth century the medical profession exerted considerable influence over women's participation in physical activity. At first strenuous physical activity was thought to place unbearable strain on women, potentially damaging their capacity to fulfil their future roles as child bearers and nurturers. The involvement of working-class and rural women in hard physical labour was clearly not considered in this view.

We become familiar with the names and faces of Australian sportsmen and are rapidly coerced into a culture that clearly values male sports and achievements at the expense of their sisters.

The adult woman did not have much leisure.

Women are outnumbered by more than three to one among registered sports participants in Australia.

Most women think there is too much sport on television. Seven out of ten - both men and women - want more women's sport on TV.

For years I've heard the snide connotations from blokes and I tell them the same thing; it's not true. I have a wife and two children. Would I spend all this time away from them to help a bunch of raving leso's?

Women's sport rated just 1.2% of total television time while men's events were 72.8%. Mixed sporting events rated 26% of time. Newspapers gave 4.2% of coverage compared with 83.7% for men's events.

Sport in Australia , as in many other nations, has been a prime means of gender-fixing; a way of socialising the populace into sex-based social roles; a method of informing, even dictating to both men and women how they should behave on and off the sports field. Thus for most of the nineteenth century, and perhaps even into the twentieth, almost half the Australian population was excluded from sports participation by virtue of its gender.

Girls will know that they cay play their own sports, often excel in them but that generally women's sports – as with all their recreational activities – are denied the status accorded to men's.

- Anne Summers in Dammed Whores and God's Police (1975).

Girls who hung around sportsmen were understood to be asking for it. If they caught a competitor's eye, there was a good chance of wham! bam! but none whatever of a thank you, ma'am.'

- Feminist writer and academic Germaine Greer on her experience as an interpreter at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games (2003).

Women in this country have always been a lot more gutsy than the men. Women have been the hardest working segment of the nation that had to work its way up from colonial status. They worked longer hours and they worked harder than men ... I think the ability of Australian women to endure explains a lot of our Olympic success.

It was suggested that it produces angularity, hardens sinews, abnormally develops certain parts of the body, causes abrasion and imparts disfigurement.

... ask almost any would-be sports woman whether she has been subject to discrimination, limited opportunities, reduced time for sport, lack of encouragement, stigma and often ridicule, or whether she believes she has had a fair go. Most would soon tell you that life on the sports field closely mirrors life off it.

When I first became interested women weren't even allowed to touch a horse on a racetrack.

Women don't wreck hotel rooms and they don't get hopelessly pissed and bash people.

Netball now had an identity, a soul, a pedestal for so many players across the country to aspire to. The Australian team became instant heroines, stopped in the streets, restaurants and airports by back-slapping fans, including men, who had also tuned in, perhaps at first watching over the shoulders by their netball-playing wives and daughters, but soon drawn in by the athleticism and professionalism of the players and the sheer excitement of such a close contest.

I honestly believe that the major reason for Australian netball success has been the fact that it has been run and led by women. Business is controlled by the old boys' network. Our female athletes are the most successful in the world, but they don't have the same social standing as their male counterparts.

We look for people who can contribute something special and fit into the team. Your off-court harmony has an effect on your on-court performance, and if you come to a point where you can't make up your mind you take the one that's happy go lucky.

Once the ball is in play, the opposition rarely do what you expect them to do. In every situation, something else happens. In preparation for this, we have to make the players better decision makers, and give them the authority to do it. Give them the opportunity. Help them to make that critical decision for themselves and the team. Increase their capacity to decide. In the end, they have to play, you cannot do it for them.

Despite the formal aims of the education system, generally girls have access to fewer sports than boys; girls' sport is not as highly valued by the school as boys' sport, and as a consequence receives less support from teachers; girls do not have equal access to facilities; and the resources available to them, particularly financial support, are less than those available to boys. In all these areas, there is a need for change at this level of educational policy if girls' sport is to reflect the basic principles of the education system.

The notion of manliness, masculinity, courage, strength – all the things that are literally present on the playing field and are symbolic of what it means to be a man – can be found in sport.

Sport, ... can actually be the place for learning how to be racist, sexist, violent and unfair. Instead of being the ultimate “level playing field”, transcending grubby politics and a somewhat “trivial pursuit”, sport is Janus-faced. Such is the verdict reluctantly passed.

Gender stereotyping has long played an important role in both men's and women's sports. Boys who have been unwilling to play ‘manly' team sports – cricket and football – a have been defined as ‘wimps' and dismissed as effeminate. It is ironic that the reverse is true for women – and female who is keen to play cricket or football is immediately under suspicion of being a terminal spinster or, in more recent times, of being butch.

The great importance of sport in schoolgirl life should be at once recognised. Our girls need open-air exercise just as boys do, especially if they are doing good mental work. More especially they need the discipline of the playground which boys get, and which enables them to understand the value of co-operative effort in later life.

Australian females had legs like Clydesdales and arms that would not disgrace the discus throwers of the Ukraine.

And I believe promoting ourselves as gorgeous, attractive females gives us the edge because we all know what males think with! Don't we?

Playing grounds were nil. There was a kind of backyard in which the flood had ripped a large hole. To organize a game of rounders would have been impossible, but some of the energetic juniors invented a game involving one of our brother's hockey sticks and a tennis ball. The idea was to mashie the ball over the hole. Not very exciting, but I can remember quite a lot of fun, especially in recovering the ball from the bottom of the hole.

Indeed, sportswomen are considered fair targets because they do not live up to some individuals' idea of what women should do – principally stop at home. This attitude is quite in keeping with the supreme ego of the male. The idea that a woman might do something for her own enjoyment is incredible to him.

Motor racing is a hard sport, but it's not a butch one. There's no reason why women should not compete, their reflexes are as good as men's ... I've never had to sacrifice my femininity.

Here was a athlete of undiminished femininity, who smiled warmly and spoke softly, who ran lightly and jumped and threw with grace, who triumphed with modesty and who accepted her hour of happiness in the time-honoured women's way. She cried that's why the world applauded.

Attractive 28-year-old Brisbane jockette Pam O'Neill rode an immaculate race to win the $3000 Scarlet Novice Stakes, a feature race at Gosford yesterday. Mrs O'Neill ... took the eye with her upswept silver-grey hairdo before the race. But she returned almost without a hair in place on the winner.

We may all be equal, two arms and two legs, but ladies aren't as tough as men, they can't take punishment the way a man can and I don't think it's ladylike for a lady to fight.

Annette Kellerman did much to make women' swimming popular and socially acceptable ... [she helped] emancipate women from neck-to-knee bathing costume.

Two things I felt I had to prove as a young woman in the post-war period. One was that I was feminine and an athlete, and the other was that I was intelligent and an athlete.

The image of sport is important. I always tried to look as good as I possibly could and as feminine as I could. I'd play the game fairly, and with good sportsmanship. I would put myself out if I was asked to do something for the sport because I felt that a lot of people had put themselves out for me.

The Australians are physically much stronger than my players, and yet we are ‘rough' and they are ‘delicate little angles.'

Sometimes you might have a booger hanging out of your nose when you're running out of the surf, your cossie might be up your bum, but you can't worry about that. Pretend no-one's watching and do what you've got to do well.

We'd warm up outside the ground and as soon as the half-time whistle sounded we'd scamper on to the track; have our race and rush off again. All the time the officials were anxiously shouting: “‘urry up now girls, we haven'” got much time ...' The crowd wasn't exactly the best to compete in front of. They didn't know much about athletics so weren't very receptive and, of course, there was the usual ragging and catcalls from the drunks … Apart from this, we had to go to fund-raising campaigns all the time to raise money to send the Australian team away.

The woman who goes in for sports generally does it so strenuously or might it be more correct to say stridently, that she becomes too muscular and ungainly to ever attain the grace, ease and smoothness requisite for the ideal of feminine loveliness. Yet moderate sports are the ideal mode for keeping fit and young, provided one eats judiciously and cares for the skin and hair at the same time.

At this stage I am tempted to throw up my hands in horror and say that women should have nothing further to do with such a self-indulgent festival of masculinity. However, we do take part in sport in some numbers, and derive much pleasure, and I hope benefit, both physical and mental, from it, so I feel we must continue the discussion and analysis.

JOHN: ….In the old days a sports magazine used to have a sportsperson on the front. Betty Cuthbert hurdling – a bit of Betty, a bit of hurdle. Nowadays you've got a supermodel on the front, in the nude, smoking a bloody cigar. There might be a synergistic relationship between Linda Evangelista's lower alimentary canal and sport of some kind Bryan, but it bloody eludes me.

Women have less opportunity to play sports than men, they are given less encouragement and less financial and other inducement to do so and in many sports the attributes required are in direct contrast to those which may currently expect and value in women. The facilities for and status of women's sports are almost always inferior to those of men … inferior performances of women have usually been attributed to biological reasons which, in time have been used to justify the financial and other discriminations.

Christmas Time is the season for family round games and when our boys and girls are tired of tennis and cricket and such active sports, they are glad to form a family circle and join in some pastime, which will provide plenty of fun without much physical exertion.

The way children are taught and trained will greatly influence the dispositions for amusements and they may be so disposed that they dislike pleasures that are of a pernicious kind, and only like those that are not injurious. The time of childhood is the time when the character can be most easily formed for good or for harm.

Mums and dads, big brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts can be seen on any Saturday morning taking the little Australians to sport. Four- and 5-year olds going to swimming, 7- and 8-year-olds in their smart, new uniforms off to the local oval for footy or cricket; little girls going to gym-basketball, their bigger brothers and sisters crowding the buses and trains heading for their chosen pursuit.

Backyard cricket is how we all started playing our sport. I remember the days of playing it out the back with the three brothers.

- Australian cricket captain Steve Waugh on his first introduction to cricket (2003).

In summer there was always the beach. We would muck around playing games of tennis, golf and cricket on the sand, we would go swimming in the ocean and we would devour the food Mum had packed in the picnic basket. When we weren't at the beach, our backyard was the site of our sporting battles. It was usually cricket or football but we would play other games as well. My mum gave up on the garden in the end because we were always trampling it in search of a cricket or soccer ball.

- Soccer player Johnny Warren in Sheilas, wogs & poofters (2002).

Australians might take physical activity seriously from the spectator viewpoint at least, but we have been unwilling to enforce it as part of our children's education. A 1992 Senate inquiry into physical education and sport education found it was in serious decline, particularly in government primary schools. Pupils were unfit, lacking basic motor skills, while schools battled for resources, their teachers often inadequately trained to handle PE.

I think that girls should be able to play with boys of their own free will. I am disappointed that I cannot play any more. I really do not know what I will do in the future but I still want to be known as the rugby girl.

- Roisin Batch of Brisbane after playing her last game of Rugby Union because of a rule that said that girls could not play in boys' teams after they turn 11 (2003). In a similar situation 14 year old Cara Di Benedetto was informed that she would not be allowed to continue playing with the boys in an AFL junior competition (2003). She said, “I will be really upset, shocked and hurt. It is my life. I don't want to play in a girl's team.”

I believe it is considered a feature of colonial children that they do not show the same love of games which their contemporaries in the old country exhibit: they undoubtedly are disposed to cluster in little knots, when their play seems to consist of talk; but my observation would lead me to suppose that the want of any rational game is the cause of this in so small degree; and that when teachers have taken the trouble to cause the material to be provided, and to instruct the children in its use, colonial children play as vigorously as any. Apart from the importance of the physical education, many virtues – such as self-denial, self-reliance, patience, forbearance, and the spirit of co-operation, can be developed and practised by good games.

The education system, both state and private, has played a key role in structuring the way sport sets up social orders and power structures. For a very long time sport was a compulsory subject. (It still is in many schools.) Little mercy was accorded to those who would rather study than play. They were herded out to imbibe the social lessons sport was thought to offer. The emphasis was on competitive achievement rather than simple enjoyment of physical activity.

... a weedy individual ... a cramped mind devoted to sport.

Sport should be given a core subject status and taken as seriously as English and science, because knowing how to use your recreational time is a life skill.

Schooling should be the 4Rs - reading,'riting,'rithmetic and running.

Our children, lured by the television and the computer screen, are markedly more overweight and under-exercised as a generation than their predecessors.

The time is rapidly approaching when there may be no such thing as junior sport because, in the face of limited legal protection, the risks are just too great for the coaches and the players.

Children are no longer involved in ‘spontaneous play' such as kicking the football around the backyard.

There was a threat that junior sport in Australia may become confined to a very small and privileged section of the population, without a high level of financial and emotional commitment by families.

Children's favourite part of the school week could be under siege with ‘untrained, unmotivated teachers and a lack of sporting facilities' posing hurdles for the school sports afternoon. Insufficient expertise, lack of interest and expertise on the part of non-specialist staff who were expected to take responsibility for a group of students on one afternoon a week, problems with transport and financial constraints, lack of local facilities and lack of relevant choices for students all see to be issues.

“The danger is that too many parents are looking for reflected glory in their children's sporting achievements. The kid's ability is often manipulated purely for the status of parents.” he [Mr. Michael Cleary, NSW Minister of Sport] said, “It has become a question of 20c [cents] a try and a clip under the ear for a missed tackle.”

I remember school sports day. Best day of the year … the excitement and thrill of the competition, seeing what you could do and being good at it and trying to win your race. I get that feeling watching my daughter run in the school sports … The achievement, the look of striving on kids' faces, it brings me undone. I feel a joy in it, I get overcome with the joy of it. I stumbled on the local school sports day last week and watched all the kids' faces as they crossed the line. The tears were streaming down. Maybe it's the innocent pleasure, such an innocent thrill.

God was kind to me, I was brought up in a family which loved sport. When I look back to my childhood I can't remember the smell of Farex or Aeroplane jelly, though they were part of my daily fare, but the scent of linseed and liniment remains ever with me, as does the feel of a Dally Messenger football and a shiny red Kookaburra cricket ball. The sounds of my childhood also remain. I can still hear my cousin shouting ‘forward pass' when I was heading for the line with no one to beat; the crunch of the six-stitcher as it smashed against Dave Thompson's nose on the makeshift neighbourhood pitch; the sound of the six-stitcher crashing through the window of the old wizened widow who lived in Churchill Avenue (she never returned the ball). And I remember the voice of my brother calling, ‘I'm not playing any more,' and storming into the house after I had made 763 runs in the backyard Test match, then bowled him out first ball for a duck and failed to enforce the follow on.

Over the past two generations we have become progressively a nation of spectators. There is still an almost obsessive coercion of reluctant students into team sports among many independent schools in Australia, particularly the Catholic ones. At the other extreme, the changed climate in State secondary schools has produced an increasing number of students and teachers who cannot be coaxed towards any interest in organized physical activities. Compulsory participation in some sport or exercise has been completely abandoned in great numbers of State schools. Numerous students seem to find more fascination in adventures with beer, tobacco and marijuana.

Participation in sport is a basic right of children, and is a desirable feature of childhood experiences for it is an important vehicle for influencing present and future enjoyment in physical activity.

More than 36 per cent of 13 to 18 year schoolchildren do not play organised sport. Another 20 per cent are in danger of dropping out.

My mum always said I was born under a lucky star. I think I was fortunate that I had doors open at the right time because I think there probably are kids with talent for whom the doors don't open, and there aren't the right people to help.

It was like a great big picnic. Play the game and then muck around for the rest of the day. I don't remember much about netball, but I remember those toffees. You always had to make sure you saved one for the trip home.

Most coaches will tell you that the early burnout of potential champions usually can be put down to one thing: the parents – people who place too heavy a burden of expectation on their children to achieve. Such parents have no idea they are doing this to their children. They think their involvement in their children's sporting lives is just called support.

There is some community and professional concern that sedentary activities, such as watching television and playing computer games, may be taking the place of physical activity in Australian children's lives.

Unfortunately, however, sport in some schools is now becoming less structured and with ever-increasing pressures being placed on teachers, many of them are no longer willing or able to carry out voluntary extra-curricular roles as coaches and sport co-ordinators.

Sport plays an important role in the lives of young people. Sport is their favoured leisure activity and young people have well defined views of the values that participation in sport has for them and they are engaged in quite a wide spectrum of different types of sports. Additionally, these young people have quite firm ideas on what would encourage them to become more involved in sport and what they see as currently discouraging their involvement.

Sport is the only area where the pursuit of excellence is not only tolerated but admired. ‘Twas ever thus. I well remember the way the swats were despised at school, whereas any fool who could kick or hit or dive or run was regarded as a demi-god. This reflected the prejudice of the group against the individual. Intellectual pursuits were essentially introspective and personal and, therefore, attracted such pejoratives as "smart arse." Whereas in the sporting arena, excellence was something achieved in the context of the team. A team with which an even larger group could rapturously identify. And even if your sport was individualistic, at least you ran or swam on behalf of one of those anachronistic school "houses."

A Report from the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Recreation and the Arts has found, to its displeasure, that physical education is "in danger of being phased out in State schools". Some no longer employed PE teachers, in others sport was down to one hour a week, and too many children were leaving school uninterested in sport. This is great news. Not only does it mean that a minimum of school time is wasted on physical activities but it also raises the refreshing possibility of a generation of children starting their adult lives free of the great Australian obsession. The hours I was forced to spend in physical education activities at school were the most boring and profitless of my life. For years I stretched my arms up and out to the whistle of a variety of gym instructors who were convinced (like the singing and elocution teachers we also had to endure) that their discipline alone would save the world. There was Mr Kelly of the tiny brain and enormous biceps (why wasn't he at the war?); Mr Flanagan, whose mind was as narrow as his shoulders were broad; and Mr Rice, of the famous Melbourne gymnasium Weber & Rice, who, at 60, still held the world's chest expansion record. They forced us along parallel bars, pushed us over long horses, tumbled us across gym mats and drilled our flabby or gangling bodies in robot formations that flowered each year in the Gymkhana - where we performed in coloured singlets under lights in the school yard, forming human patterns of the kind Stalin used to smile over in Red Square .

Sport was part of the school's totalitarian determination to leave you with nothing, to make even your body its own. The school is the perfect hunting ground for theorists, manipulators and lovers of power. They have the buildings, they have the boys and they play at being God. They can build model societies, ant-farms that function like clockwork, a thousand Pavlov dogs trained to stand or pray at the sound of a bell. It's the failures who foil them - the no-hopers, who assert humanity's intractability and bring their careful topiary to nothing.

The lack of competitiveness encouraged by some schools was in sharp contrast to the way Australians approached sport and the way society glorified its winners.

Playing sport is an integral part of growing up in Australia . The majority of our young people are active participants in sport, whether it be in the schoolyard or backyard, the local park or in organised competitions. If children find their involvement enjoyable and fulfilling, they are more likely to continue it into their adult lives and the chance of lifelong participation is greatly increased.

The danger is that too many parents are looking for reflected glory in their children's sporting achievements. The kid's ability is often manipulated purely for the status of parents. It has become a question of 20c [cents] a try and a clip under the ear for a missed tackle.

Attend any under-14s team sport on a Saturday morning and the effects of parental indifference are clearly visible, or is that invisible? Children in clean uniforms clutching their $2 game fees and a cold drink appear as if from the ether. Involvement-shy parents have expertly dropped them off and disappeared at least until the final minutes of the match. Others have strolled off across to the far side of the oval as as not to be press-ganged into helping.

Mum never showed any interest. She never said I couldn't play football. She didn't show any interest in watching football. Sure, she asked if we won and all that kind of stuff.

Mum and dad were happy that I'd found a sport I loved because they thought sport was good for a child, but they never pushed me to train hard.

Each Saturday you can hear the ugly parents before you see them. Men live out fantasies of being a top sportsman by visiting their inadequacies on their sons. Bawling out how they should play the game and go in harder, calling them a fairy or poofter gives them a reason to hang up their boots when they're seven. In winners' culture, participation is not seen as enough. It needs to be.

Parents and teachers have played a pretty mindless role in harping upon sporting enthusiasms the only true badge of character. Perhaps the last and least-recognised form of social harassment and discrimination in this country is the scorn heaped upon youngsters without sporting tastes or talents.

If I'd won, it would be a really nice ride home. If I hadn't, by the time we got ten minutes from the house, we'd be having an argument. Finally, I said to my mother, if he didn't cut it out he just couldn't come to matches and if he insisted on coming I wouldn't play … so he cut it out and it was fine.

- Tennis player John Newcombe.

I'm not sure what the other parents think of me. I think they'd find the constant volume, this moron on the sideline screaming his guts out … I'm obviously out of line because I'm not the coach. That should be the coach's job. But I can't stop. I don't want to.

- Self-confessed 'ugly' sideline parent, Steven Kay (1998).

Part of the problem with sport today is that parents want the kids to be what they weren't and are trying to live through them. There's a difference between encouraging and standing behind versus pushing, and when the kid gets old enough to make a choice, they give it away because they've been pushed so hard.

- Squash player Heather McKay.

This f****** bitch doesn't like the way our kids play. We should have made your f****** son bleed if you think that was rough.

- Unnamed coach of an under-sevens rugby league team in Sydney. A Sydney court heard of a vicious fight between two mothers at the match (1997).