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How do rugby league players become associated with the kinds of people linked to James Segeyaro, Corey Norman and most recently Jarryd Hayne?
In my experience the reason is simple. Let me explain.
Football players have very little time for the recreational activities that normal guys in their 20s get up to. I missed weddings during my football career and I missed birthdays and other “normal” social events. I missed lots of them in fact.
The reality of life as a football player is that you don’t do much socialising during the week outside of with your teammates. There may be a day in the middle of the week where you’re free, but all your non-football mates are at work, and at that stage you’re likely to be focussing the upcoming game anyway.
After a long week, we all enjoy letting our hair down with a beer. Whether you’re a lawyer, accountant, chippy or footy player, it’s a nice feeling to relax after a tough slog. Your accountant and chippy mates might want to hang out on the weekend, but for footy players that’s game time. Game time is work time.
A footy player’s schedule detaches you from society to a certain extent.
You often have a little window after all the post match formalities when you can blow off a little steam and let your hair down – win, lose or draw. Get a few Monday and Sunday games in a row and it ends up being a long time between drinks and the pressure builds.
So how do players blow off steam? Well that’s where the lives of NRL players and the so called undesirable people involved in certain scenes start to collide.
Those kinds of people have greater access to the players; certainly more than your average punter.
Put simply, they’re in the positions of power in the scene the players are in during the only time they get for recreation – after the game.
So when you decide to go to a club and have a drink, you’re confronted with a couple of options.
Go to the pub or club and people want to chew your ear off about the game or about footy. The reason you’re there in the first place is to get away from exactly that.
Or, someone comes up to the team, asks if you’d like a separate area, free drinks to get you started, and the ability to ask any girl you’d like to hang out with you.
We’ve all heard enough stories about players getting into fights in public to know that the private area is the smart choice.
It’s the way it’s going in Australia. The USA has already seen it happen.
Professional baseballers, NFL guys and most major athletes pay to rope off half the club. That costs about $20,000. In my day at least, players in the NRL simply weren’t able to handle that kind of cost.
When someone who owns or helps run a club offers you free drinks and a free private area, you are very thankful to that person for doing you a favour. Same goes for the person or the group of people that invites you into their private area away from the hustle of the crowd, the ones with the private waiters, pretty girls and free drinks.
The people who are organising that for you, however, are a completely separate issue.
Drugs, criminal figures and nightclubs are all intrinsically linked, they always have been. If you don’t think that 70 per cent of people in that club knows someone that has some connection with the drug scene then you have your head in the sand. It’s a sad reality.
Chances are the person organising your area, with your free drinks and facilitating you talking to beautiful women, also has some connection to that.
Aside from the fact you feel like a bit of a rockstar, players are also doing nothing wrong by accepting that. Because those people are around you, talking to you, helping you, doesn’t mean you’re doing drugs with them. It doesn’t mean you’re consorting on criminal business.
Over the course of a few weeks they can become your ‘mate’, but it doesn’t mean that a player has thought about that person’s record with law enforcement.
Of all the people that supposedly have shady backgrounds that these recent players have been hanging out with, I wouldn’t been able to name a single one of them, nor would I have been able to tell you what they had been previously convicted or were under surveillance for until the newspapers spelled it out in black and white on the front page. Could you?
Is it incumbent upon players to check the criminal history of people they are associating with at a nightclub in their spare time?
In my experience, while these people might have criminal associations, they are as big a footy fans as anyone else in the club. Players are encouraged to be nice to everyone. To say g’day to everyone. To be sociable.
Does this stop with people who may be associated with a criminal investigation? And if so, how can you tell?
I was in that situation many times, and honestly I had no idea of who these people were or what they’d done.
The inkling is there that the people you’re dealing with could have an association with that scene, but is that really the situation for a player to make that judgement about that individual?
If someone in a club has a big tattoo on his neck does that mean you shouldn’t associate with them? Half the NRL players have tattoos – it’s not a great rule to go by when it comes to identifying troublesome people.
These people offer players a sanctuary. They become associated with a good time. They become a ‘mate’.
They’re not hurting anyone, or doing any drugs.
That’s how it starts.
As long as players are not going out for lunch with them, or taking them to meet the fans I don’t see a problem with what players do in a nightclub or who they choose to associate with.
For people who sit on the sideline and judge players for associating with certain individuals, who a player may or may not know the back story of, is a fine line of argument.
The case of Andrew Fifita is different.
You have your mates who you’ve known your whole life, and I’m sure we’d all agree that different people choose different paths. You can’t be there to hold everyone’s hand, and sometimes your mate makes a stupid decision and does the wrong thing.
A few of my mates have ended up in jail because they were caught in situations that spiralled out of control, or they made a mistake.
Going to jail I would imagine is the most daunting thing in any person’s life.
But they’re still your mate. And there is one thing that is ingrained into a rugby league player since day dot, and that is to stand by your mates. You’re entitled to help your mates through the rehabilitation process. After all, going to jail is not just about punishing, but also rehabilitation is it not?
Andrew Fifita should be allowed to support his mate.(Click to Tweet)
At the same time, if a person has been tried and convicted of a crime through our legal system, as a role model you can’t be writing what is an implied protest on your wrist and using your platform to give it prominence. This stands true regardless of whether you think the ruling was unfair, incorrect or whether you think you know the untold “truth”.
Fifita’s not a lawyer. He can’t be using his time on TV to protest a ruling that was handed down by a judge who is highly educated and knows the facts of the case and their association to the law better than him. As a role model in front of thousands of people, he simply can’t.
Support your mate. Talk to his family. Encourage them to visit him. Help him be a better person.
Now I understand the public’s opinion that you should be screening the people you hang out with.
But players can’t help who their mates are. They also can’t spend all their personal time figuring out the criminal records of those they meet when they’re out.
It’s complicated, but the fact is that if a player is doing nothing wrong, then the public outcry is not warranted.
Unless players start getting a list of personalities that they are not allowed to hang out with, which I’m sure would be just as long as the list of banned substances in the WADA handbook, and just as easily to memorise (not very), then i can’t see how any of this could be changed or enforced.
It will only ever be an after-the-fact situation, more overblown headlines and more slagging of the great game we love. For my mind it’s a cheap and easy angle that the media has now discovered that can generate headlines and sell newspapers on a slow news day.
Consorting with criminals is not something I condone. But first show me evidence of NRL players of partaking in illegal behaviour, then I’ll start throwing some stones.