It’s not just a game, it’s OUR game

 
The Crowd Roar Guru

By Mick from Giralang, 7 Dec 2009 The Crowd is a Roar Guru

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“You can acquire a house, but you can’t acquire a home. Because a home is not built of bricks and mortar, but love and memories.” The Castle, 1997. When Bud Tingwell delivered these unforgettable lines, he encapsulated the injustice perpetrated on a working class family by a huge, ruthless corporation.

But his words also neatly summed up the titanic struggle for control of rugby league that was embedded in the culture and traditions of millions of Australians.

It is richly symbolic that this iconic Australian movie came out at the height of the bitter Superleague war.

Like Daryl Kerrigan, the men and women of rugby league had built a sporting home, nourished with love, a foundation that allowed future generations to flourish.

But the rugby league family found itself in the road of forces that had no empathy with tradition, no respect for loyalty and contempt for those who had shed blood, sweat and tears to create, nurture and develop the greatest game of all.

For News Limited it was a simple formula. It wanted the pay television rights to a tradition of blood and thunder that is sport’s most photogenic game. It wanted “product” for its new-fangled subscription services. It would pay whatever it took to get it.

“Tell ‘em they’re dreamin’” scoffed the league loyalists. They had sadly underestimated the tenacity of their opponent. Fifth columnists were recruited, huge contracts offered in the dead of night, friendships rented, and longstanding servants of the game who sought nothing but its welfare were turned into the darkness.

In 1997 rugby league was staring into the abyss.

Men with more money than sense thought rugby league supporters could be bought, traded and discarded like shares on a nightmarish stock exchange.

When the Great Crash came, and two rival competitions were fashioned from the wreckage, supporters born of generational investment of heart and soul, leapt from the skyscrapers of their despair. The two competitions were pale imitations of what went before them and support for the great game dwindled until it was on life support.

There was to be one final indignity.

South Sydney, whose nickname was taken from the men who sold rabbits on the streets of Redfern to keep families together, was labelled “expendable”.

The foundation club of the cardinal red and myrtle green fell victim to the machinations of the Superleague war and was eventually kicked out of the newly unite competition.

The club was born, survived and thrived in some of the meanest streets in Australia; it could produce men who played grand finals with broken jaws; it could win more premierships than any one other team; it led the way in nurturing the talents of indigenous youth.

But it could not survive the pony-tail, braces and ear-ring set which inhabited the shiny boardrooms that were the new power bases of rugby league, the faint, comforting aroma of a Tooheys was a million miles away.

The Rabbitohs were deemed not to meet an artificially devised set of “criteria” which took into account everything except that which football supporters hold most dear — passion.

Passion for that intangible treasure of sights, sounds and smells that bring supporters back, irrevocably, to a place and time they forever hold dear.

But then something miraculous happened.

Passion took on the corporate monolith, and won. The Rabbitohs were reinstated.

Technically, it happened in a sterile court room of the Federal Court. But try telling that to the 80,000 people who had rallied for Souths in the streets. They knew where the battle had been won.

Perhaps in those salt-of-the-earth masses was the genesis of a process that many hail today as handing the game back to the people.

The much touted independent commission holds the hopes of rugby league supporters in its yet-untested hands. Whatever the great game’s fate, there is an optimism it will at least be back in the hands of those who care for it most.

Some are fearful that News’ premature departure will leave the game without the financial firepower and business acumen it needs to survive and prosper. They should heed an Old Jungle Saying: Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Or as Daryl Kerrigan would have told the retreating forces: “Hey, bad luck! Ya dickheads!”.

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