The making of men.

Whether it be tussles on the footy field, the swing of a cricket bat or the strain of a triathlon, sport has always been front and centre of Professor Murray Drummond’s life.

Captain of the football and cricket teams as a teen in the late 1970s and early 80s, he “woke up thinking about sport and went to bed thinking about sport”.

“Sport was my life,” Professor Drummond says. “It offered me a way of expressing my identity.”

On the Mornington Peninsula south-east of Melbourne, scouts from an elite cricket training squad eventually spotted his swing and from there sprouted a promising future with the ‘gentleman’s game’.

But by the age of 19, the post-match changeroom shenanigans, a heavy drinking culture plus a badly broken nose eventually led him to walk away from the game he loved.

“I started to struggle with the (cricket) environment a little bit because I didn’t drink a lot, if anything,” he says.

“I was brought up to be respectful towards women and I was in an environment where the cricket subculture was quite masculinised.

“I moved away from it and became a triathlete. I became excited about triathlon because it was a new and emerging sport. I was heavily involved in that and competed in the Hawaii Ironman in my early 20s.”

Now in his early 50s, Professor Drummond is a father of two and has participated in several impressive sporting events over the years. It was these experiences that led to a fascination with gender and sport, and later pursuing a PhD in masculinity in men’s sport.

Educating others on the virtues of sport and exploring masculine sporting culture, gender, mental health and body image now forms the basis of Professor Drummond’s career as a research professor in sport, health and physical activity.

The Director of Flinders’ Sport, Health, Activity, Performance and Exercise (SHAPE) Research Centre is on a mission to challenge sporting environments to embrace difference.

“I’ve been arguing for the past 20 years that masculine sporting settings are not entirely healthy environments for young males,” he says.

“It (club culture) can certainly impact the way in which masculinity is socially constructed and it can impact mental health, the relationship men have with women, misogynist language, homophobic language, all those sorts of things.

“This notion of ‘boys will be boys’ and ‘whatever is said in the changerooms stays in the changerooms’ certainly needs to change.”