Australia, sometimes you embarrass me.

A few weeks ago I'd never heard of Jarryd Hayne. Now this guy they call the "Hayne Plane" is turning up on all my screens and I resent it. Seriously, I'm supposed to care that an Australian footballer has gone to play football in the US? I'm supposed to be excited because he's had a couple of exhibition games for the San Francisco 49ers and he might - MIGHT- get picked for the team?

Apparently Hayne was a superstar at the Parramatta Eels and grew up at Minto. For all I know he might be a perfectly nice guy and good luck to him.  His was probably one of the names that's droned out from the TV on Friday nights and into my rebelling ears as I retreat from the drolleries of someone called "Rabbits" Warren. While my usually mild-mannered partner erupts in bursts of disgust or delight watching a bunch of boofy blokes rumble a ball around a field, I have time to ruefully reflect that a big part of the reason I married him was that he showed no interest whatsoever in football.

This was in stark contrast to my footy-mad father and brothers. Football took over our house all weekend, every weekend - the playing, the watching, the re-staging every move, from their own games and from the televised ones. Married life offered the sweet promise of a football-free zone. Ripped off: since joining a footy tipping competition several years ago, my husband has become hooked. Worse and worse, football weekends are reaching back into Thursdays, thanks to some very unwelcome programming by the NRL marketeers.

So far I'm holding out pretty well. At least I'm still a Jarryd Hayne novice, having dismally failed the Herald's "How well do you know Jarryd Hayne?" quiz. Is knowing the answers going to be a citizenship requirement now, on a par with knowing about Donald Bradman? And we're expected to know about Hayne not because he was a gun footballer in the National Rugby League (two Dally M awards, thank you SMH quiz) , but because he padded up for gridiron and ran 117 yards in his two exhibition games to date (thanks again, quiz)?

I don't know much about football but I know enough to know that until about yesterday, American football was regarded among league and union fans here as not just incomprehensible but also somewhat ridiculous. Helmets? Face cages? Shoulder pads? Gimme a break. Here, at least, was something we could sniff at the Yanks about.

But the Hayne hysteria has put on embarrassing display our historical inferiority complex.  Cultural cringe was bad enough when we assumed the British arts were better than our home-grown product. Thankfully the days are gone when "what do you like about Australia" was the first question we asked visiting artistes from the UK and the US. I hope, I really hope, that the American press now ask Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman and Hugo Weaving what they like about America. But how much progress have we really made when the measure of our star athlete's success is whether they can get a run with a US team?

I accept Hayne is a superb athlete and I'll take the word of my colleague Peter FitzSimons that he has fabulous ball-running abilities. I'm as much a sucker for the "local boy makes good" yarn as the next person.But if or when my countrymen at Hayne's first real game for the 49ers start up the inevitable call of "Aussie Aussie Aussie", I'll have the earplugs in before you can shout "Oi oi oi!".