SPIRO: Welcome home prodigal son James O'Connor

Yes, I know that James O’Connor has been a prat. An official at the ARU who had to deal with him all the time told me that O’Connor was the worst of the Three Amigos – O’Connor, Kurtley Beale and Quade Cooper.

He would encourage and lead his mates into trouble and then, somehow, slide away unscathed, while the other two copped the blame and the punishments.

But Australian rugby needs to, and should, welcome him back to the game here. At his best, on and off the field, he can add a lustre to the rugby experience in this country.

There are good reasons why we need to forgive his past behaviour and the smearing of rugby’s good reputation and support the decision of the Queensland Reds in offering him a Super Rugby contract for 2015.

This contract and his behaviour next year will confirm, in my opinion, his new worthiness to play in the famous gold jersey in the Rugby World Cup tournament next year in England.

First, he has done his time. The ARU were right to put him out to pasture after his behaviour off the field last year and earlier.

James O’Connor went to Europe. He played well and behaved splendidly. His return to Australian rugby under these circumstances represent the return of a prodigal son back home, a wiser and more complete man and player, hopefully.

Second, rugby is and must remain more than a game. It is a code that has a timeless morality about it. You play for the team. You accept the bounce of the ball. You don’t pass to a player in a worse situation than yourself. You exhibit courage. And at the heart of this code is the redemption factor.

One way of presenting this ideal is the All Blacks’ mantra: better people make better players.

This is the no dickheads policy that has worked so well for them. In the recent history, for instance, there was a good player who used to make a habit of unloading a monstrous dump in the dressing room toilets before Tests. The dumps stank out the dressing rooms and created an environment, to put it mildly, where the players could not concentrate on their preparations for the Test.

The player was told several times to do his dumps back in the hotel or anywhere else, but in the dressing toilets. He refused. And was correctly dropped from the side for dickhead behaviour.

Notice that he was given the chance to change his behaviour. He refused.

When All Blacks players Israel Dagg and Corey Janes had a night on the tiles before the Rugby World Cup 2011 semi-final against the Wallabies, they were hauled before the senior members of the All Blacks and forced to confess the stupidity of their behaviour and make a commitment not to behave this way again.

They were offered the chance of redemption. And they took it.

This ordeal of facing the senior All Blacks clearly affected both the players. They came out and played blinders against the Wallabies. And, just as importantly, they have behaved impeccably off the field since.

I don’t think that we should underestimate the redemptive power of a sporting code like rugby. Just because James O’Connor has been a silly boy in the past, he deserves the chance, like Dagg and Jane, to redeem himself.

Virtually all my rugby books over the past couple of decades were criticised by sports historians spouting Marxist nonsense that I had not accepted the notion that rugby is a game that reflects ‘the white male hegemony’. The argument here, as far I can understand it, is that there is a fault in the rugby construct that makes it somehow outside the democratic ideal of being open to everyone.

These sports historians were infected with the Marxist nonsense that infected the liberal arts in universities throughout the world that place ideology above the data.

I would point out to these so-called historians that rugby, like all other games, reflected the values and aspirations of the communities in which they operated. Moreover, the inclusive ethic inherent in the rugby culture would, in time, overpower the local cultural dissonances.

I pointed out that rugby was played in more than 100 countries, most of them not ‘white male hegemonies’. Women’s rugby is exploding. It is the second fastest growing sport (after women’s football) in the United States. The first captain of a New Zealand touring side was a Maori. The first major international tour from the southern hemisphere to Europe was the New Zealand Natives team of 1888-89, a side of Maoris with a couple of Pakeha players to make up the numbers.

But the sports historians, like too many academics these days, preferred their ideology over the data about the prevailing diversity and inclusiveness of the rugby game and its ethic.

Now we have another piece of data that destroys the Marxist nonsense (although I wouldn’t hold my breath that these academics will acknowledge this truth). I refer to the Bingham Cup tournament that was played in Sydney over the weekend. The cup is the Gay Rugby World Cup. Sydney is its seventh edition.

Mark Bingham was a modern hero. He was a gay rugby-playing man from San Francisco who was on United Flight 93 on September 11. Bingham and other passengers stormed the cockpit, took it back from the terrorists and forced the plane to crash into farmland rather than the White House, its target.

He loved rugby and he loved the cause.

Thirty teams competed in the Bingham Cup in Sydney. And here, the inclusiveness of rugby came to the fore again. Some of the teams contained players who did not identify as gay.

Bevan Morgan, a New Zealander playing for the New Zealand Falcons side, made the point well about the rugby ethic and the attitude of his gay teammates.

“The team is incredibly welcoming. It’s not just a gay team, it’s a team that accepts anyone. It doesn’t matter what your sexual orientation is, what your race is,” he said.

I love the concept of the rugby tribe that embraces all those rugby players and lovers of the game who have passed on, those still around and kicking, and the generations of the tribe yet to come. This is why I have always included a historical orientation to my writing. I remember once being asked this by Peter FitzSimons, not long after he started at The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Spiro, why do you have so much rugby history in your columns’.

Fitzy is now our leading popular historian, in the Frank Clune tradition. He knows the answer to his question. Unless we learn from the past we can’t understand the present. This applies to thinking about rugby, as it does to all other aspects of life.

In a column where James O’Connor is welcomed home as a prodigal son, where the Bingham Cup is honoured as a tournament that reflects the essential inclusiveness of the rugby code, we farewell a member of our rugby tribe who has passed from being a living member to the other side and became a living memory of the game in history.

James Murphy-O’Connor died on August 10. He was an Irish international who is credited with developing a revolutionary kicking style in the 1940s, which has become known as the ’round-the-corner’ goal-kick.

It was using this technique that another O’Connor, James O’Connor in fact, converted a penalty against the Springboks in the 2011 Rugby World Cup quarter-final that was the decisive moment in a memorable victory for the Wallabies.