‘Running towards the fire’: Tony Armstrong’s most personal project yet

In the year since he hung up the suit and tie and said goodbye to breakfast TV, Tony Armstrong has remained a fixture on screen. The Logie award winner has hosted everything from an ABC series about invasive species to the Eurovision Song Contest. But in End Game, things get more personal.

Ten years since echoes of racially motivated boos and media attacks tailed AFL champion Adam Goodes to the end of his storied career, not much has improved for athletes from minority backgrounds. And for Armstrong – a Gamilaroi man who was an also-ran footballer before becoming a celebrated host and presenter – it isn’t enough to just bring our attention to the enduring problem of racism online and on the field. End Game, a three-part investigative series premiering on October 21 on the ABC, sees him go to the ends of the earth to find a solution.

“This is probably the biggest piece I’ve done on any of this,” Armstrong says of the three-hour series. As a broadcaster, he was frequently put into a position to report on racist incidents on-air, and he uses his social media following to show the insults hurled his way from ignorant trolls online. In March, he shared a satirical comedy sketch about Furore, a (fictional) “grammar app keeping racists safe online by helping them spell their outbursts correctly”.

“I think you need people being funny and taking the piss to lower people’s guard. That then opens up a dialogue,” he says of the different tactics he’s used to comment on the racism he experiences. “One [approach] intellectualises stuff and offers solutions, whereas I think comedy softens people up and gets them ready to talk about it.”

Despite the years of goodwill he’s banked up with the latter, knowing “what Australia’s like” has him feeling nervous about the reception to the more sincere and serious nature of End Game.

“I think if you and I were to sit down and have a guess at how things are going to play out [in response to the show], it’d be generally, overwhelmingly quite positive. But I’ll have to tell myself not to listen to that smaller percentage that are very loud and sort of callous and racist. That’s how I see it all unfolding, and I guess that’s why I’m nervous.”

The series sees Armstrong connect with athletes across codes and continents to discuss their experiences with, and responses to, racism. Among them are Brisbane Lions premiership player Callum Ah Chee, Australian cricketer Usman Khawaja, former Manchester United and England captain Rio Ferdinand, and Madison Hammond, a Black and Native American player in the National Women’s Soccer League.

It’s Hammond who raises the idea that being a public figure comes with a sense of social responsibility. Armstrong knows it well.

“It’s a feeling that being great at your job isn’t enough,” he says, adding that he “would probably feel like [he’s] letting people down” if he didn’t use the platform sport and News Breakfast had given him to advocate for something bigger than trophies.

For as much as athletes from minority backgrounds are heckled to “shut up and play” or “keep politics out” of their respective games, the pressure to be a spokesperson for their community is just as great.

It’s an expectation Goodes knows well, and one that has weighed on him since he was named Australian of the year in 2014. In the eyes of Armstrong, Goodes went from being a hero to an on-field adversary (“Not that he saw me as a foe,” Armstrong jokes), and eventually, his teammate and friend. “Now we’re family. He cares how I’m doing away from the screen.”

Goodes appears in End Game as a kind of weathervane, taking the temperature of the room and checking in with Armstrong about whether he’s up to the challenge. The cost of sticking your neck out for the greater good is high, and he knows that better than most.

“He hasn’t spoken about any of this stuff, and I was actually really worried about him,” Armstrong says of the choice to restart a conversation that Goodes consciously ended. “I didn’t want us to be so flippant and lazy that we just go and ask Goodesy to reopen his trauma. And so that’s why you see him very deliberately in a mentor role, which is kind of what he is for me in life anyway. That’s a crazy sentence to be able to say.”

In every conversation with every person he meets, Armstrong is collecting ideas and solutions that can lead to the change his show’s title suggests. There’s talk of a players’ coalition to show strength in numbers, and the widespread adoption of existing AI technology that filters harmful language before public figures can see it themselves – something that’s framed as so simple, effective and quick to set up you have to wonder why it’s taken us so long.

There’s some real-world, real-life outcomes that are falling out of [this], which I’m very proud of.

Tony Armstrong

By the series’ end, Armstrong chats to current senator and former Wallabies captain David Pocock about the progress of an e-Safety Bill that’s “just sitting there in parliament”, and takes it all the way to AFL CEO Andrew Dillon. “There’s some real-world, real-life outcomes that are falling out of it, which I’m very proud of,” Armstrong says. “Now we just need people to bloody watch it.”

A moving moment in End Game sees Armstrong chatting to Jamaican cricket commentator and former player Michael Holding at his home in the Caribbean. Stripping away the TV-friendly optimism, Holding remarks that the progress they dream of “isn’t going to happen while [he’s] alive”. For all his camera-ready smiles and charm, Armstrong feels similarly cynical.

“You stick your head up for as long as you can, fighting a fight, and then you go, ‘You know what? That’s it. I’m out. I tap out. That’s too much for one person. Who’s next?’

“There’s always people who are fighting … but I felt like it was my turn to pick up some rope and some slack, and do it for as long as I can. However that looks: be it a combination of this and comedy, running towards the fire, calling it out. I’ll do it for as long as I can until I emotionally can’t.”

By then, he hopes, there’ll be even more voices to share the load.

End Game premieres at 8.30pm on October 21 on the ABC and iview.

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