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It’s a very common phrase in sport – “no player is bigger than the game”. It’s a phrase that’s usually painful to hear, because most of the time it’s being said by annoying, moralising tossers. And the most aggravating thing is that it’s true.
No player is bigger than the game. And believe it or not, that includes Sonny Bill Williams.
Now let me be perfectly clear: I am not saying SBW is not a great, even extraordinary player.
In the grand final he showed how good he is, and the demonstration was all the more striking for the fact that for quite a while he was having an absolute stinker, fumbling and stumbling his way around the park as if sick with nerves.
But sick with nerves he was not – Sonny Bill knows how good he is, and in the midst of what seemed destined to be quite a mediocre display from the hotshot, he suddenly unleashed upon the Sea Eagles, slipping that golden right arm of his through a tackle to offload for a spectacular long-range try, and then, with the premiership still in the balance, ripping through the defence like a sabre through silk to take the Roosters out of the red zone and into position for the sealer.
He didn’t have his best game, but as champions tend to do, he still managed to bend events to his will.
But even so. Williams is not superhuman. He is not the Bradman of rugby league, or of rugby union.
He is not walking in rarefied air high above the plane of mere mortals.
He’s not the best player ever, and it’s debatable that he’s even the best player right now.
As good as he is, the likes of Inglis, Slater, Smith, Cronk, Thurston, Cherry-Evans etc. are hardly choking on his dust.
If I say Sonny Bill Williams is overrated, it’s not because he suffers any great shortcomings in his game: it is because there’s been no player in history who’s been as good as sections of the media seem to think SBW is.
There are times when the rugby league press resembles a gaggle of hyperventilating fourteen-year-olds at a One Direction concert more than a posse of hard-headed journalists.
More importantly than his playing abilities, though, Sonny Bill is not carrying rugby league upon his shoulders, and if he goes, the game will not crash down Humpty Dumpty style, beyond reconstruction.
He is still just one player – his absence cannot kill the game. Or to put it another way, if the game were to die after he left, his presence couldn’t have saved it. Any sport that relies on an individual celebrity to keep it aloft is a dead man walking already.
League is a tough customer. It’s cockroach-like, both in its ability to withstand trauma, and the IQ of many of its most prominent commentators.
Great players – dare I say, better than SBW – have come and gone throughout its history without the game taking a fatal fall.
Scandals have beset it, criminal acts have besmirched it, harsh economic realities have assaulted it, but still it stands, and still it is fiercely beloved by the legions who adore its artful brutality and its intoxicating tribalism.
And though those legions all have their favourite players, none of them will give up on league just because one man isn’t on the field anymore. After all, for every superstar who leaves, there’s another one rising.
It’s crucial that the suits keep this in mind: Williams should be offered what he’s worth, and he’s worth a lot; but no more.
What will really cause disillusionment in the league world will be the sight of other players ending up short-changed for the sake of propping up the swollen edifice of an anointed figurehead, especially when that figurehead takes the cash and skips out after a year anyway.
And what if he doesn’t?
What if the money really does buy his everlasting loyalty to the code he’s already quit once?
In a few years Sonny Bill will retire anyway.
There’ll have to be a new Chosen One who is supposedly the key to keeping the code alive.
And he will need to be showered with even more riches as he threatens to leave if not treated like the combination of Clive Churchill and Jesus Christ that the Daily Telegraph told him he was. And there will be another. And another.
Already it’s become obvious to any half-brained player manager that the way to pump up the price is to declare you’re going to union or the AFL – the more the NRL begs Williams to stay, the more effective that strategy becomes, and the more it will be used, until league really does collapse, under either an avalanche of cross-code defections, or a landslide of idiotically lavish contracts.
If Sonny Bill Williams stays a leaguie, he will do spectacular things, and thrill the crowds.
If he goes back to the All Blacks, he will do spectacular things, and thrill the crowds.
And in the code that missed out, other brilliant players will do spectacular things, and thrill the crowds, who will cheer on their teams and clasp stars to their bosoms as ever they did.
And a new superstar will arise, and he will bestride the sport like a colossus, and with any luck, administrators on all sides will remember that, just like the great SBW, this new kid on the block is just a footballer, and there never was a game of football played with just one man on the field.