The proper response to the death of Adelaide AFL coach Phil Walsh at the hands of his son, is one of silent compassion. A father has lost his life. A mother has lost her husband, a sister her father, and have gained the knowledge that their son and brother killed him.
We can feel for them, include them in such prayer and hope we are given, but words adequate to describe the loss do not come easily.
Greek tragedies on similarly horrific themes evoked terror and compassion. They took their audiences into silence, beyond easy response. But before silence the tragedians had to struggle to find appropriate words.
Sometimes people who work in football and other professional sports also need to find words to speak of tragedies. That is inherently difficult because popular sport is an image of life and mimics life in its words. Games become a matter of life and death; players are variously warriors, artists and workers; clubs are nations and tribes, with their initiation ceremonies, their elders, their flags and their economy. They flourish, they fall ill, they recover their health. Some, such as South Sydney, even die and return to life.
Because football and other large sports are an image of life, they are safe spaces in which loss is never final and youth is never lost. Words come without cost, with no need for exactitude. But occasionally, as in the death of Philip Hughes and Phil Walsh, real life breaks into the image. Death and horror have to be grappled with. When only easy words lie at hand, they find expression in language that is a little archaic and sacral. People are slain or sacrificed; they are victims. Their lives are described as a battle or a struggle.
Others will find words to emphasise that, although an image of life, sports are not divorced from life. They have the resources to deal with whatever life brings. Like the military, they form the character required to face tragedy. Sport is so important in the community that clubs are prepared to shoulder the burden that tragedy lays on it.
All these words reach towards connection, towards understanding. If they often seem hollow or over-reaching, it is because the abrupt intersection of life and its sporting image is so disorientating.
The difficulty of finding words that do justice to life when it breaks into sport is also central to a recent book