Throughout 2015, the NRL news cycle was dominated by one event: Jarryd Hayne’s move to the NFL.
Even the Cowboys’ historic win over the Broncos paled in comparison with the amount of media speculation and hype that surrounded each of Hayne’s games with the San Francisco 49ers.
While Australian NFL players are nothing new, they’ve always been sourced from AFL, with just one Australian coming from rugby union.
Even in those cases they have either played zero games or have been employed as punters, so for an NRL player to move to the NFL as a potential running back is the stuff of dreams.
By moving to the United States, Hayne personified the driving mythology of Australian sport – the belief that sport represents an equal playing field where anyone can make something of themselves if they work hard enough for it.
In the case of Hayne, that transition is all the more startling in that he was playing for one of the least successful outfits in the NRL, and wasn’t even achieving his potential there, with most reports from the sheds suggesting that he’d lost motivation a long time before he left for the States.
He was still one of the best fullbacks in the game – he dominated Origin and won the Dally M in 2014 – but that sense of unrealised potential made you wonder whether he might wait out his entire career for an opportunity to put his supreme skills to better use.
And while you could argue that the 49ers occupy a similar position in the NFL as the Eels do in the NRL – bottom-dwellers desperately searching for a way to recover their former glory – there was something about seeing Hayne move so effortlessly from frustration to elation that was hard to resist, even if he did leave behind a fairly depleted Eels and Blues outfit to regather in his wake.
In the process, Hayne has transformed, overnight, from one of Australia’s best sportsmen to a veritable ambassador for Australian sports, earning comparisons to Donald Bradman, Dawn Fraser and Cathy Freeman.
Without at all detracting from Hayne’s achievements, there has been something a bit pre-emptive in the way that his NFL career has been assumed as a foregone conclusion on the part of the tabloid media.
Obviously backing and supporting him is great, but the sheer amount of hype must have also put an incredible amount of pressure on the former Parra fullback to perform at the level required to maintain his position with San Francisco.
Not only was he the running front cover story for most Australian tabloid publications throughout 2015 – even in the lead-up to the NRL grand final – but his move prompted a wave of merchandising that was totally unprecedented for an Australian sportsman, at least in my memory.
In the weeks following the grand final, I only saw one or two people in Cowboys gear, while Hayne jerseys have started to feel ubiquitous.
Admittedly, I live in Sydney, not North Queensland, but there’s still something to be said about the way in which Hayne’s image and iconography has started to pervade every aspect of Australian culture.
Now that Hayne has returned for his second stint with the 49ers, it’s interesting to think about him as a phenomenon as much as a player.
While miles of ink have been spilled on his talent as a fullback, I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks thinking about some of the key factors contributing to his phenomenal media presence and the way it has allowed him to capture the imagination of the Australian public, both NRL fans and non-NRL fans alike.
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