FFS, Eddie
I met Eddie McGuire once. He was hosting a game show and I was on the game show and at the end he gave me a fake cheque and it was pretty great. He was very nice. Like, a really lovely fellow to chat with. I found his company quite amiable.
So it’s a shame, isn’t it.
I do have sympathy for Eddie McGuire, and in the past I have even defended him when others have condemned him. Although to be fair at other times I have condemned him when others have condemned him, I like to mix it up a bit.
But goddamn, Eddie, having sympathy for you is a really tough, thankless task, and you are not making it any easier.
For example, I did have some sympathy for him after the recent Caroline Wilson brouhaha because I thought some of the commentary on him was slightly disproportionate to his crime. But on the other hand, as I wrote at the time, he behaved like a total freaking dick, and while it’s entirely possible to feel sympathy for total freaking dicks, it’s neither easy nor pleasant. And that feeling of “He’s horrible and what he did was horrible but possibly slightly less horrible than someone else thinks it is” is a complicated and annoying one.
That’s it in a nutshell: being sympathetic to Eddie McGuire is annoying. As hell.
And he keeps making it worse.
I felt a bit sorry for Eddie after he fucked up horribly with Adam Goodes. This is because I genuinely believe — I could be wrong, I’m not a mind-reader, but I do believe — that he was making an attempt at a joke with basically the precise opposite meaning to the one he ended up making. That is, he tried to make an anti-racist joke, and he failed, because he is very very bad at making jokes — I mean, he’s just awful at it, he’s been trying to be good at it for a few decades and he’s never got any better — and also because he is the kind of rich white guy who is a lot less vigilant about what comes out of his mouth than he should be. And I am not surprised Adam Goodes was hurt badly by it: I would have been too. But I felt sympathy for Eddie because I didn’t think his intentions were bad and I thought, again, there was a lot of commentary that wasn’t fair to him.
But here he is commenting on it again, and bringing up painkillers, and the point here is one that needs to be made no matter what you think of what he said back then. Whether you’re an Eddie fan or an Eddie hater or somewhere in between, this must be said:
Eddie, what the FUCK do you think you’re doing?
He’s a grown man, he’s seen a lot of life, he’s worked in the media for thirty years or so, and the question must be, in what possible way did he think mentioning prescription drugs would help him? In what world is he dwelling, that he thought raising the subject would be a smooth PR move?
I’m not saying the painkillers didn’t affect him. For all I know he was zonked off his gourd and seeing flying sheep circling his head while he said it. But for the love of god, how is this particular excuse ever going to play well, and how can anyone have ever thought it would?
This is why it’s hard, Eddie. This is why it’s hard to feel sorry for you. Because your mouth seems to have a direct connection to whatever part of the brain is responsible for baffling stupidity, and you don’t seem able to sever that connection.
How can anyone defend a guy who’s so comically inept at defending himself? The rights and wrongs of someone’s public statements seem to fade when he goes around blaming those statements on painkillers as if that’s going to make all the Eddie haters do a 180.
Essentially, my message is this: FFS Eddie, pull yourself together and start thinking. You were so nice when I met you: it’s so dispiriting to see you being such an imbecile in public.
