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Willie Mason’s long search for a club has won the ‘drawn out saga of the off-season’ award pretty comfortably. But it seems to be pretty unique by modern sporting standards.
We all like to talk about about clubs having a ‘No Dickhead’ policy, but when a dickhead with particular talent is out there, there is usually someone willing to snap them up pretty quickly.
The bloke in question quickly says he’s keen to prove the doubters wrong and show his appreciation with some tee-total gut busting performances. And the club talks about how everyone deserves a second chance and how the contract is filled with behavioural clauses.
But Mason seems to be a completely different case, and being such, has become perhaps the best education programme for young players there is.
The lesson is, stuff up and you won’t get a game.
Mason hasn’t been convicted of anything worse than many of the players going around happily with their clubs. But years of headlines seem to have caught up with the big man.
There was the controversy over a drugs test at the Bulldogs and he has been hit with a public urination fine. But after that, it has been little more than rumours.
You’d have to think that, given he now seems to be rugby league’s version of the black plague, there may be something more to those rumours as clubs and other players all seem to have more of a clue than the public or journos (and Mason has been the feature or more than one piece about a fresh start).
To put it in perspective, Mason is available for just $80,000, given the Roosters will be forced to pay the remainder of his $450,000 yearly salary. For that, you get an international, a premiership winner, and a Clive Churchill medalist, all for the amount of your fringe full time squad members.
But until yesterday, there were no real takers.
You do wonder how big the smile was on Steve Folkes’ face after he attempted to get a deal with the Tigers. The player who ‘wrote’ in The Australian that he had learnt nothing under Folkes was now going cap in hand to every club going.
Even Japanese rugby, which supposedly has the cash to consume rugby league, didn’t want to scrap the Yen together to put Mason’s frame in a capsule hotel.
The final twist was a bidding war between Newcastle and North Queensland, but all the protagonists in this drama resembled young men at 3am, when the lights have gone on at the nightclub and they are racing around and propositioning every woman left in the place.
Maybe his new club, the Cowboys, would have been better off just getting a kebab.
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