And in Today's News....

You’ve heard it before - Australians are a sports-mad people. I know we’ve written it in this blog, and if you Google “sports mad Australians” you’ll get 229,000 hits (now 229,001 with this post). So I’m never surprised that a sports story is on the front page of the paper.

But last week was something else. Here’s what happened. A footy player, Barry Hall of the Sydney Swans, king hit another player in the middle of a match. “King hit” is Australian for “sucker punch”. Not sure why they call it a king hit. Maybe something to do with that famous pugilistic poobah, Don King? Or maybe Billy Jean? Anyhoo, it was captured live on TV and in lots of lurid photographs.

Since then both daily papers – The Age (lefty intellectual broadsheet) and the Herald Sun (Rupert Murdoch’s right wing tabloid) have had stories about Hall and his punch on the front page every single day, with banner headlines and lots of pictures. The stories do vary. Some are about Hall, some about the guy he hit, some about famous “king hits” in the past, sometimes they trot out a neurosurgeon to discuss possible brain injury, etc, etc. But come on people – isn’t there anything more important to write about? Australia have soldiers dying in Afghanistan, there’s a drought on, there are car crashes, and the police are having sex with transvestites in the station houses (no, I did not make that up). At a minimum, Brittany Spears must have done something in the last week!

But no, the king hit stories continued until Friday (a full week after the punch), when the Herald Sun finally led with a different story: they tracked down footy’s most famous female streaker somewhere in the bush of the Northern Territories and scooped an interview. You gotta give it up for the Sun, they found the perfect story: combine sports and naked women, and you can even splash a picture of the woman au natural on the front page to give us some historical context.

Good onya, Rupert.