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Apart from being supreme professional athletes, Sonny Bill Williams, Israel Folau, Karmichael Hunt and Sam Burgess have all branded themselves high above their respective sports, whether they know it or not.
This quartet were only kids when converts Wendell Sailor, Mat Rogers and Lote Tuqiri left the NRL for the big money being offered by the ARU in the early 2000s.
As rugby league fans, they probably didn’t realise what the defections meant for the sporting codes in the long-term.
Sure there had been players switching codes long before 2002. One of the most famous names in either league or union, Dally Messenger, was the man who helped spawn Australian rugby league in those early days after leaving the amateur code.
But money today has a different definition to the one it had way back in 1907. Today, it is just as much about image and ‘getting your money up’, to steal a tragic American line.
But this is not a ramble about the career intentions of Williams, Hunt, Burgess or Folau. They have every right – if they’re good enough – to play any sport they damn well choose.
Gone are the days where we think we can banish them from the NRL forever just because they pick another sport. We can all agree that copious amounts of money has been involved in all these players’ deals, but you can’t keep them out of the game. They are marquee players with marquee names and boost any competition they’re in.
But should we be putting extra money aside just so they can come back down the track?
You can hear the player managers laughing all the way from their palatial mansions. From next season NRL CEO Dave Smith has been given discretion to throw whatever he sees fit at superstar free agents.
If this isn’t a Pandora’s Box, what is?
Rugby league should always welcome these men back and especially so considering the extra money on the table from the billion dollar TV deal.
But even more to get the likes of Folau and Hunt back? Burgess and Williams haven’t even left yet but now we’ve basically told them that if they want to come back they can do so for an even larger chunk of the pie?
Put it this way. The same year Williams ducked out the backdoor on the game, gun fullback and future Dally M Medal winner Ben Barba was making his debut for the club Williams had just left.
When Folau and Hunt took those monster contracts and left for AFL in 2011, rookies were making their mark in the NRL. A few blokes called Daly Cherry-Evans, Gareth Widdop and Shaun Johnson. You might have heard of them?
And then there is Burgess, who leaves for English rugby at season’s end. While we say sayonara to him we welcome Luke Brooks, Anthony Milford and Roger Tuivasa-Sheck as superstars of the future, just to name a few.
The money is already there if they really want to play in the NRL. Why should we fight this invisible threat when all we are really doing is playing into the hands of those who dare leave in the first place?
Dave Smith might as well just start handing out blank cheques to anyone who threatens to leave or publicly shares their love of another sport.
We have to remember that we, the sport of rugby league, are the creators of these players. Not the other way around. We will continue to produce superstars as long as we don’t forget who runs the show.
A superstar is created from the womb of opportunity and if we continue to worry about guys like Hunt and Folau, we will destroy the conveyor belt that makes our game great.
One media outlet broke the news of the salary cap changes with the headline, “The empire fights back” in a reference to a sporting Star Wars.
Doesn’t ‘The Empire’ get blown to smithereens?
NRL officials need to stop worrying about what’s happening over the fence and worry about their own backyard, our backyard.
The stars of tomorrow will thank you.
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