Deputy PM's son lands election night knockout blow
Deputy PM Richard Marles found his attention divided on Saturday night. That's because there was a co-main event taking place in Logan City, Greater Brisbane: his 29-year-old son, Sam Marles, was the star of the Eternal 95 Mixed Martial Arts fight.
We were going to make analogies about the brutalities of political bloodsport on election night but thought that a little too obvious, even for us.
The clash of events required some deft multimedia handling by Marles on perhaps the most politically important night of his career, but you can't be member for Corio, deputy prime minister and minister of defence as well as being dad to four kids without mastering the juggle.
Marles expected the fight in the welterweight division about 10.30pm, so he joked with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during the week that Labor had to claim victory well before then. But the fight was shifted earlier and took place as media outlets were calling victory for Labor.
Marles scrambled to get the fight up on his iPad, and Labor supporters in the room took his subsequent whooping as evidence that Labor had just won an avalanche of seats when, in fact, Marles was cheering on his son.
And what a fight it turned out to be, said Eternal MMA chief executive Cam O'Neill, who praised young Marles as 'the kind of athlete every promoter wants on their card – tough, skilled and composed under pressure'.
'It was a knockout night for the Marles family – Sam in the cage, and Richard at the polls,' he said.
Marles told CBD: 'There were a couple of events taking place on Saturday night: the election, the Cats' triumphant win over Collingwood and Sam's massive win in Logan.
'He knocked him out in the third round – it was the biggest fight of his career and I know how hard he had worked for it, and so as a dad I couldn't have been happier for him about what he achieved on Saturday night.'
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