An innings

Now, I have nothing against David Hookes and I think it abhorrent that he died the way he did. However, the media circus that has surrounded not his death, but his post-death period, has been nothing short of cringeworthy. Yesterday was his funeral, and while I respect that he was a good cricketer and deserved an appropriate send off, I just find the emotive rhetoric rather empty. Sure, he will be missed and mourned by many people, including family, friends, teammates and players he has coached. I would expect them to be seriously mourning, to feel gutted, cheated, angry and above all, sad. But with lines like

IT was the place where, through his brash and larrikin style, David Hookes first captured the imagination of those who now mourn his death. Yesterday, thousands of those who looked up to him – and loved him – returned to Adelaide Oval to say goodbye,

...you can just feel the sensationalism dripping from every loaded word. On today's front page is a picture (taken at, or after, the funeral at a guess) of a set of stumps with a bat leaning on off-stump and a cap hanging off leg-stump. In front of them lie a few yellow roses and... get this... the bails from the stumps, one on top of the other. Get it? The bails are off... cos, y'know... he's out. A personal pet hate is the word 'larrikin'. I've always said that this is a word they bring out whenever someone dies who was

• a sportsman (not being sexist... it's only applied to blokes); or
• an arsehole (when they need a word which says 'pain in the arse' in a nice way)*

I don't think David Hookes was an arsehole. I think he was a good sportsman. I remember watching him make 100 off 67 balls. I don't want to remember the way the media has used his funeral as currency. What was in really bad taste was Ray Martin hosting his gutter-journalism ACA from the Adelaide Oval with, get this, a picture of Hookesy under his arm. What it does is exploit not only Mr Hookes but the grief felt by those closest to him. This is how the media works. They hand out grief as if it were sporting merchandise. People buy the replica shirts the players wear and when a player dies, they can get some of the replica grief in the tribute edition of the tabloids. It's not real grief, it just pushes the grief buttons of readers to sell more copies. But that cheap merchandise never lasts. Or does it? This kind of media saturation attempts to superimpose an outpouring of emotion onto the public's consciousness. All the media go on about it, then Johnny will want to say what a national treasure and a legend he was before he goes to the bathroom to wank over his Steve Waugh pin-up. The goal of the media is to turn this (or any such) event into something by which we mark time, as if in ten years we'll all be asking 'What were you doing when you heard David Hookes died?' Again, no disrespect but this is not one of those events. Sep 11, 2001 was. A State cricketer/coach isn't. Sorry, it's just not. *If little Lleyton died tomorrow, they would definately use the word 'larrikin'