Such Is Life!!!!

What do you Think!!!!!

Not watching it.

I think it is a wake up call to:

the justice system and the AFL internal policies which give people too many chances and is geared completely toward the rights of the offender, rather than giving swift punitive action in order to correct errant behaviour. Anyone who has trained a dog or child knows that giving more and more chances leads to worse behaviour, not better

society who allow the whole system to treat drug use as a health issue and allow us to embrace crap like "harm minimisation". Drugs can destroy your life. Period

and a major wake up call to people who believe in legalisation. "Oh prohibition hasn't worked so legalise it"
If drugs were legalised would Ben still have ruined his career? Of course - people will still be overcome by the desire to get high

So Logman - do you want your kids to think that as long as they are a high achiever, they can work hard all week and then write themselves off on drugs as a reward?

Regardless of if they want to be role models, or if they should be role models, it is a fact of life that they are in the public eye.
Using your logic, police officers can get as high as they want off-duty and then go to work straight and it is OK.... as it is in private and not affecting their work.
Is that OK?

Mostly good.

I like Cousins and although shocked and gauled by his acts and stupidity I don't for a second believe he is a bad person.

Cousins is an all-time great and funnily enough one of the gentlemen of AFL.

Having said that I agree totally that footy and sports people in general should not (neccesarily) be role models. Sure as icons of fitness - the level of health, fitness and success they strive for are to be looked up to - but as a role model we should be looking more to people out there who actually affect you and the people in your life. They probably are frumpy, maybe even fat and daggy as fk middle-agers or pensioners.

These days I don't blame the players for being bad role models either. Why aren't we teaching our kids (or ourselves) to look up to better examples - not just someone who is a good lookin chap and very kn good at footy.

I guess you could be cynical and think Cousins is doing it for self-promotion etc, but I think it is the most confronting and affecting show in some time. I could imagine it being good for my kids to see it (if they were old enough). I can't see anything negative about showing this and having kids/parents watch it together.

Interested to see tomorrow's ep.



EDIT: Sounds like it was a tough gig there mineral. People who work in rehab etc should be looked up to rather than sports people, but that's not how it works in our shiny media fed society.

Everyone deserves a chance, and having it quietly dealt with, if they fk up (more so if in the public spotlight). IMO having a zero tolerance or exposing a 1st time offender wouldbe more harmful and most likely lead to self destructive behaviour than attempting to steer back on track. That goes for sporting and non-sporting people alike.

Such is a washed up meth junkie.

Opinions aside of how drug addiction & addicts should be treated, how the AFL or other sporting establishments handle this, I reckon Gizmo's spot-on.

The smug look on his face as he 'reminisced' about the 'fun' he had whilst on the benders say it all...

...It's a shame that such an athlete & hard-working, driven team player can have such contempt for the law, his teammates, his own life & most importantly, his family!

I love the bit where they talk about when we went off to LA and took off on a 6 day bender with two blonde hotties...

"Oh, they were fun times", he says with a wry smile and a bit of a laugh, "until i woke up in the ambulance".

No remorse in that one, he'd do that one again if he had his time over (I probably would too).

i sort of wonder with his comments on his 5 day coke bender in LA with two girlfriends "Good times....................................until I ended up in an ambulance" quote Cuz, that he would do it all again. Maybe second episode he may concede he ran off the rails?

I think Cousins is actually saying that he was kidding himself that that was acceptable and his way of justifying his extreme actions. He is not attempting to say to anyone that this is the way to live your life. Rather he is fessing up about his stupidity and denial.

Yes - it bothers me that his trademark cheeky smile appears at seemingly inappropriate times (who knows what has been said/edited eiether side tho?). Honestly tho, who wouldn’t have a wry smile remembering a bout of bedroom olympics with the blondes? No doubt marathon ice fuelled rompy was part of the equation and attraction (just hope he didn’t barf and keep on running).

Remember - some of this footage was shot a long time ago, when he probably thought he was safely on the wagon (but as we know he fell off numerous times) so his level of denial and/or deceit wavers throughout the doco.

I have long suspected he is an obsessive character having watched his running/barfing/running routine. This makes him a perfect candidate for addictive behaviour in every facet of life. Throw in early celebrity status, good looks and talent and in this modern age a saint would probably be tempted.

Ultimately it is pretty easy to sit back and criticise but I reckon there but for the grace..


If you think Cousins is a bad role model for kids, then look past our cultural obsession with sport, and teach ya kids that there are better examples to follow. Stop blaming an individual's behaviour for influencing your kids if you are not going to provide better examples.

How come there is two logmans?

I have had many very near misses in life (cars, motorbikes, rips etc) and each time my life flashed before my eyes i nearly fell asleep.

Nah.. lucky for me I had a passion to learn and study what is now my profession and a decent (but hardly perfect) moral compass.

I used to run with a pretty 'fast' crowd in younger years and was lucky/smart enough to see thre trash others made of themselves and their lives. And that includes friends, rellies, workmates. It is easy, very easy to do, and can happen to anyone at any point in their life.

Not just illegal drugs either, alchohol has caused the most damage I have seen. Gambling, ice - even 'harmless' ol perfectly legal tobacco (my mum has emphisaemia and still smokes despite it killing her own parents!) can take hold of someone's life.

Sobering.

Cousins might be in a little trouble with the cops now...after showing him using?!?

Its crap .........sick of these sporting superstars getting treated different to the ordinary athlete.
Cousin's and Joey Johns both p!ss me off. My sons played a lesser known sport for Australia, attended 2 world cups and numerous other national and international events at great cost financally to us and them....they where drug tested randomly, and had to stick by the rules they couldn't even take sudo whatever for a cold. If they were caught with drugs in there system they would have been banned full stop..The media would have made a feild day out of it. I heard on the radio this morning about some poor bastard who's inhaler had been wrongly labeled and now has to cop a 6 month ban because of prohibited drugs in his system .....but these 2......... everyone around knew they were on drugs and they got away with. Don't tell me how brave they are coming out and speaking out and all that Bullsh!t. The only lesson to come from this ... play a mainstream sport be good at it ....and you can take drugs and do what ever you like ....everyone will cover up for you and when your playing career is over there is a future in TV and magazines.......3826 me! Grrrr. Cousins might be a great footy player but he is no 3826in hero!!.

He should have been banned for life once tested positive and the media should be shot for making such a big deal of it all, IMO

Hey dusta - i went to school with Dean Capobianco (Capobiwanko was apotential medalist runner some yrs back and a big-ish name in West Oz).

Similar story exactly as you have described. The guy was a total tool and dumb as a hole in the ground. He got away with absolute murder in school - but then again that's ok coz he won all the track medals and captained the school footy team to victory yada yada.

Capobiwanko really was a stoopid tool, but equally blame were the teachers and culture, that from early high school encouraged him to believe he was differant to everyone else and that the rules just didn't apply to him.

Same later on in his employment. For a while he brought prestige to the bank he worked for so out came the deluxe easy ride career.

The diff is Capo got busted (twice from memory) with grow juice in his system and was suspended/shamed out of the sport eventually.

Now Cuz (apparently) didn't take the grow juice etc but he did believe the rules didn't apply to him.. because they didn't!

The Eagles, his school, the media, his fans.. everyone treated him as 'above normal' and some kinda demi-god coz he was an all-time great in footy. They covered his tracks (no pun intended) and made it easy for him to operate outside the rules.

Most human beings would find that level of special treatment pretty seductive I reckon.




For the record (and I am an Eagles fan from 86') I do believe the Eagles (and other teams) of the 80s 90s were on the juice.

Chuck a 17 yr old already being treated as a superstar, and also with an addictive personality, into that environment. Make him think he can bypass all the rules and the end result is what we see of Ben Cousins today.

Sure he has to wear the blame for his own actions of course, but as much as it may seem envious to us the treatment he has had/still gets, it was obviously a poisoned chalice.



If one good thing is coming from the doco it's that Cyrenian House is getting a fair bit of publicity. The folks that work there and wipe people's noses/arses when withdrawing are the sort of folks we should admire as much - if not more - as sportspeople in our society.