I used to live next door to a bloke for a few years. Middle-aged, quiet fella who only ever used to say “G’day,” and maybe the occasional longer chat if the neighbourhood kids knocked over his garbage bins.
One day I woke up to find he’d put his house for sale, and a couple of weeks later he was gone. Hearing that David Gallop was leaving the NRL yesterday left me with a similar feeling.
With Gallop’s shock mid-season, pre-David Furner resignation, a lot of questions are sure to be asked. Was there a falling out with the ARLC commissioners? Did one too many late night phone calls on the ‘fire-up’ phone push him over the edge?
Or was Gallop a victim of his own stiff form of justice, having being caught tweeting a picture of himself urinating in the corner of the Coogee Bay Hotel early Sunday morning?
Perhaps more importantly, just who was David Gallop?
Think about it, how much did we actually know about Gallop? Footy CEOs are supposed to be meaty fisted ex-players with cauliflower ears and weather-beaten heads, growling their way through press conferences at shrinking reporters. Everyone knows who they are… or were.
Gallop ‘the Grey’ was a slim, spectacled, sushi-eating enigma in this beer and beefsteak bastion of blokedom. His initial appointment was met with blank stares by fans, and some scepticism by different sides of rugby league’s great war. In essence his surprise succession to the top job was a bit like when you and your partner are arguing over what to order in for dinner, before coming to a compromise – by getting something you both didn’t really want.
From these humble beginnings, where his name was only good for a couple of lame horse related puns, Gallop managed to carve out a reign trademarked by his stiff upper lip approach to crisis. Be it salary caps, sex scandal or just general skulduggery, Gallop always fronted up like some sort of monotone terminator.
His critics may have been many, but considering his predecessor was more or less chased out of the country on his over-priced European road cycling bike after a couple of years, Gallop can be considered to have won the respect, if not the love, of the majority of rugby league fans.
Sure he could be as exciting as a Finnish Film festival, and he may well have written his Dally M speech in April, but the fact that he is now being chased by everyone from the West Sydney Wombles to the North Melbourne Money-pits should show the doubting-Stewarts out there that he was good at his job.
They say a hero is someone who does what needs to be done, and then fades off into the distance. While calling Gallop a hero of rugby league is a bigger stretch than George Rose’s grundies, he had to make some tough decisions in his time. And, through the implementation of the ARLC, leaves the game in a better position than it was when he started.
Funny thing about that bloke I used to live next door to. After he left, a family with five kids and an excitable fox-terrier moved in. Turned out the bloke whose name I can’t even remember was the best neighbour I would ever have, and I didn’t even know it.
Here’s hoping rugby league fans don’t end up with the fox terrier.
Follow Chris on Twitter @Vic_Arious
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