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MASCORD: Why doesn't rugby league honour its past?

16th July, 2015
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The Team of the Century celebrations were great, but they were one of the few times league embraced its history. (AAP Image/Alan Porritt)
Expert
16th July, 2015
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As a reader of The Roar’s rugby league content, you probably know more about the history of the game in Australia than the average fellow in row 47 at ANZ Stadium tonight.

But compared to an American who reads The Roar’s equivalent sites there, how do you think you would fare? Or to an Englishman who does the same?

It’s Heritage Round in the NRL and as good a time as any to assess the relationship between the game in Australia and its past.

On NRL 360 last night, Ben Ikin spoke about the experience of doing a tour of the Melbourne Cricket Ground – and even visiting the media box – compared with going to ANZ Stadium or Allianz Stadium.

He said the displays at the MCG imbued him with enthusiasm for cricket and AFL – even though he knew little about the latter. He lamented a lack of similar reverence at the Sydney venues.

It seems to me that, in the popular consciousness, rugby league history started with the great St George side of the 1960s – and largely because they get a mention in weeks like the one just gone each year.

Dally Messenger – our equivalent of WC Grace or Joe Dimaggio – is recognised mainly as the person after whom the Dally M Award is named.

The reason rugby league split from rugby union – or even that it did – is only vaguely understood by the average fan.

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Compare this to the countless hallowed touchstones in American sports that most people can recite.

The 1951 Frenchmen, the 1963 Kangaroo Tour, the Battle of Brisbane and the Rorkes Drift Test. Somehow these rugby league yarns have failed to be passed on by the game’s media, and by word from generation to generation.

In 2015, they conjure up images of dusty old books. League aficionados know about them, but most rank-and-file spectators don’t. Compare this, then, to England, where they remember the birth of the game in 1895 as a social movement against the overlords from the south.

English rugby league fans still think of rugby union the way Queensland Origin fans think of New South Welshmen. They are still trying to get even.

(Speaking of which, you could be forgiven for thinking there was no interstate rugby league before 1980).

I have a theory as to why this is so.

In the same way that the origins of the United States have left some unusual marks – like lax gun laws – the origins of Australia as a penal colony have left us with some cultural peculiarities.

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One is a lack of respect for authority, for the establishment – a lack of respect for respect itself. We are forever in the moment, dismissing pomp and ceremony at every turn.

Rugby league is more prone to this than other Australian sports because: a) it is based in Sydney, the site of that first colony and still and individualistic town; and b) because it has predominantly been a sport of the working class, which has the least respect for airs and graces.

Rugby league publishing is full of player biographies, but not of the serious tomes that AFL inspires.

And as they say, those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it.

The ARL Commission is making an effort. The museum at League Central is great, the Heritage Rounds do a great service.

But when I was a kid, I read Malcolm Andrews’ ABC of Rugby League and pretty much memorised it. Somewhere along the line – blame self-important media identities from the nineties onwards if you wish – the will seems to have disappeared from the next generation.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media today has been reduced to giving people what they want – as dictated by ‘metrics’ – and completely abandoned the responsibility of educating.

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In an era when everything is recorded, we may end up remembering far less.

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