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The very first words ever written on The Roar were “Willie Mason is a fool who gives stupidity a bad name.” Nothing has changed. When I first read the news item that Willie Mason had been bought by the French rugby club Toulon for next season, I looked at the date of the story.
We are well past April 1, so presumably the report of his switch from rugby league to rugby union was accurate.
It’s astonishing that even someone as eccentric as the French comic books millionaire Mourad Boudjellal would agree to such a bizarre and inevitably unsuccessful signing for his club.
Mason was involved in one of the many off-field disasters that have marked his career over the years.
He moved on to another Australian rugby league club, sounded out the Waratahs in 2007 and Japanese rugby interests in 2009 before finally finding a UK Super League club, Hull Kingston Rovers, that was foolish enough to take him on as a player.
There are two points about Mason that need to be made.
First, he can’t play rugby league at anywhere near the level of impact and effectiveness he did early on in his career. He is a caricature of a league tough man, a sort of rugby league version of the pro-wrestling fake bad man.
He snarls. He yaps. He eyes his opponents fiercely. But it is all posturing.
Second, he is poison to any club he joins. There is a list of clubs he has left with their culture in tatters. His best moves are all off the field.
There is the suggestion that he will switch from his position in rugby league in the forwards to the rugby union position of inside centre. The rationale for this presumably is that Sonny Bill Williams has made a terrific transition from being a rugby league forward to this position in rugby union.
It won’t work out like this, however.
Williams and Mason are both big men but this is where the similarities end. Williams is an athlete at the peak of his powers. Mason is not.
Williams is dedicated to his profession as a rugby player. Mason is dedicated, it appears, to the need for big pay-outs to support his mortgages. Williams is smart. Mason is not.
Williams delivers on the field. Mason delivers only off the field.
Mason has no chance of being successful as a rugby union inside centre. If Andy Farrell, a league star forward with far more class and skills than Mason ever had, couldn’t do it, what hope does Mason have?
He is not fit enough, skilful enough or genuinely tough enough to play as a rugby union forward, the way Brad Thorn has.
This means that there is no position in a rugby union side that Mason can play in.
Boudjellal may be worth millions, but he is throwing money away by employing Mason. There are lots of reasons ($600,00 a year of them) for Mason to join Toulon.
But I can’t think of one reason why the club wants to bring him into its fold.