The year from hell for NRL

Sydney, February 20, 2002. Cronulla Sharks rugby league new recruites Matthew Johns (centre) and Brett Kimmorley (right) share a joke with Jason Stevens (left) at team training at the Sutherland Police Citizen Youth Club. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

Rugby league has enjoyed a marvellous year, apart from all the stories of hotel defecating, public urinating, girlfriend glassing, mate blaming, woman bashing, gang banging, sponsor biffing, player slapping, coach punching, street fighting, binge drinking, drink driving, pill popping, sexual assault, racial abuse, stimulant use, party drugs and defections.

The game itself, the actual playing of it, has been outstanding.

Some rate it the best quality season for years, full of exceptional skill, excitement, unpredictability and physical courage, all capped by a pulsating Origin series.

But all of that may be forgotten in years to come by those recalling this season from hell.

Off the field, it has been an utter disaster, even by league’s well-plumbed standards of unacceptable behaviour.

There are three main reasons why 2009 stands out as the NRL’s “annus horribilus”.

The negative stories have been unrelenting, they have featured some of the biggest names in the game, including authority figures like coaches and chief executives, and the level of behaviour in some instances has been so low as to beggar belief.

And all of this at a time when league needs its most attractive PR image to fight off the threat from two rival codes – the cashed-up, all-powerful AFL and the ever-expanding world game of soccer.

All of league’s stakeholders may not fully realise it, but the code could right now be fighting for its very survival.

Unless it cleans up its act with astonishing speed, historians may see 2009 as the game’s nadir, the year it hit rock bottom, never to fully regain the pre-eminent position it has enjoyed for decades.

Many believe the full effects of this year of gross indecency may not be felt for perhaps another decade, or more, as parents begin to steer their kids towards other codes and sports.

It is those kids, and their kids, who may one day be shunning the turnstiles at rugby league grounds in favour of sports considered more savoury and exemplary.

The sorry facts do not support the pleadings of apologists who say league’s problems are reflective of society.

The game’s 2009 shame file contains no fewer than 38 names – close to 10 per cent of the approximately 400 first-grade NRL players.

The problems began even before a ball had been kicked, when Manly’s Brett Stewart was suspended by the NRL for being drunk at his club’s boozy season launch, and charged by police with sexually assaulting a teenage girl later the same day.

Until then Stewart, who is fighting the charge, had been the clean-skinned face of rugby league.

The NRL had to drop him like a hot potato from its pre-season publicity campaign.

By season’s end, his replacement as poster boy was in trouble, too.

Greg Inglis, the Melbourne and Queensland Origin star, was charged by police over an incident that reportedly left his girlfriend with a black eye. That case is also still before the courts.

In between these unfortunate season book-ends was a virtual conveyor belt of atrocities, almost all involving alcohol.

At least seven involved women, including highly publicised scandals involving Matthew Johns and Greg Bird.

Johns, the much-loved television commentator and humourist, and former NRL star, was stood down by Channel Nine.

He also lost his assistant coaching post with Melbourne Storm after ABC TV screened a program in May about group sex involving Cronulla Sharks players in New Zealand seven years ago.

Johns admitted his involvement in the incident with a 19-year-old woman, but insisted everything that happened was consensual.

A “thorough and conclusive” police investigation at the time cleared all players of wrongdoing, and New Zealand police have no intention of reopening the case.

But for two such prominent personalities, Stewart and Johns, to implode in the space of a couple of months caused grave concerns for the game’s administrators.

Former Sharks player Bird was sentenced to a minimum eight months jail for glassing his girlfriend and fined $5,000 for lying to police by blaming his flatmate. He has appealed.

A magistrate sentencing Roosters player Anthony Cherrington for domestic assault slammed NRL players for thinking they were above the law and that they could treat women with disrespect.

“You have created in your mind some belief that you are special,” said NSW chief magistrate Graeme Henson.

“You think you are a rugby league professional, some sort of titan on the slopes of Mount Olympus, that the law doesn’t have the application to you that it has for mere mortals.”

The Roosters had such an abysmal disciplinary record that the team’s coach Brad Fittler ended up in the almost risible position of having to fine himself $10,000 after trying to enter the wrong Townsville hotel room, shirtless and drunk, at 3am.

Jason Taylor was another coach in hot water.

He reportedly slapped his players at South Sydney’s “Sad Sunday” end of season drinks.

But one of his players, second-rower David Fa’alogo, didn’t share the joke, and allegedly decked Taylor in return.

Manly’s Anthony Watmough was fined $20,000 for slapping a sponsor. Now there’s a new way to drum up support.

Other players punched each other during drunken nights out.

Three were fined for drink driving.

Four were fined for urinating in public.

But that looked tasteful alongside the effort of Queensland Origin star Nate Myles, who was suspended for six games for defecating on the floor of a Central Coast hotel in a drunken stupor.

Myles insisted later he had no problem with alcohol.

Like Julian O’Neill, who once emptied his bowels in a Souths teammate’s boot, and John Hopoate, who drilled his finger into the anuses of opposing players to put them off their game, Myles feared he would forever be remembered for a single act of stupidity rather than his football.

NRL boss David Gallop believes sponsors will stick by the code provided the governing body is seen to be doing its best to clean up the game’s image.

But diarrhoea in a hotel corridor doesn’t help.

Just as worringly, the number of repeat offenders continually handed fresh chances indicates the game, and many who play it, are learning nothing.

Arana Taumata, for example, has been sacked by four clubs – Broncos, Roosters, Bulldogs and Storm, the latter over a nightclub fight this year, but will line up for a fifth club, Wests Tigers, next year.

Brett Seymour, sacked first by the Broncos and then by Cronulla for repeated alcohol-related incidents, has been signed for next year by the Warriors.

Jake Friend was fined $10,000 for driving three times over the legal limit, then charged with assault three months later, but has been re-signed by the Roosters.

Even Jarryd Hayne’s elevation as Dally M player of the year carried overtones of the game’s seedy side.

Less than two years ago the Parramatta star was being shot at in Kings Cross.

“I could have seen my son in the morgue,” said his mother Jodie.

She believes her son has turned the corner in his life, and that’s the fervent hope of every supporter of the game worried that carrying the poster boy image has become a poisoned chalice.

Hayne says he owes a lot to rugby league, but doesn’t rule out crossing codes later in his football career.

That’s something that Karmichael Hunt has already done, shocking league’s hierarchy in the process.

The Australian and Queensland Origin star delivered the NRL a body blow it could ill afford when he announced his defection to the the new Gold Coast AFL franchise in 2011.

He was the first high profile NRL player to jump ship to the AFL, and others are now expected to follow suit.

Small wonder the NRL is considering renaming itself after this litany of off-field scandals.

“There is a feeling that the NRL brand has been tarnished,” said Newcastle director Paul Harragon.

“The smartest thing the game’s administration can do is to reinvent themselves and do it fast.”