Let’s be real here. Nobody actually likes driving. It angries up the blood. All that going and stopping and merging and yelling and everyone else on the road not knowing what the rules are. It’s a nightmare. So normal people would be forgiven if they have the odd lapse in judgment and get themselves into a prang. That’s fine. Happens to everyone. You can’t control how other cars move. Except, y’know, usually there’s people in those other cars and those other cars are moving.
Buddy Franklin, the Sydney Swans $10 million man, got himself into more car trouble overnight, after he managed to crash into four parked cars. This comes on the heels of a previous incident in which teammate Dan Hannebery crashed Franklin’s luxury Mercedes that he’d loaned to the Swans midfielder.
Franklin, in this instance, was driving girlfriend Jesinta Campbell’s Jeep, in a really skewed version of paying it forward. We assume now that within a month or so, Campbell will return the favour by pushing coach John Longmire’s family Commodore off of Waverley Cliffs.
Both Police and the club have confirmed that no one else was in the car with Franklin, nor was alcohol a factor in the crash. So the cause remains something of a mystery. Though our gut feeling is that he was having ‘Nam-like flashbacks of the 2012 Grand Final, which must be a constant nightmare now that he’s wearing the red and white colours of the enemy.
Nonetheless, Buddy, a man who moved to Sydney to escape the media spotlight, is sure as shit doing a bang-up job of staying in the news. Kind of the equivalent of the casualty-of-last-night dude on the train who at 9am is still chewing his face off, whose method for getting people to stop staring at him is to shout at the top of his lungs “STOP STARING AT ME.”
Buddy has been issued a fine from Police for negligent driving, but he won’t be required to front the courts. Franklin was unhurt in the incident, and is still expected to take his place in the Swans side as the attempt to arrest their disastrous early season form in Saturday night’s clash against Melbourne at the MCG. Which they should win. But given the fact that I’m tipping them, they’ll probably manage to cook that too.
Photo: Mark Metcalfe via Getty Images.
