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In what circumstance would you resurrect an Immortal?

Expert
19th March, 2018
44

Only in rugby league can you hear someone say, without irony, that an Immortal has died.

But could the concept itself be in jeopardy?

The NRL’s purchase of the Immortals concept from Bauer Media was no doubt a welcome windfall for the German publishers around the time that it was slugged $4.5 million for defaming Rebel Wilson.

From the off, we have to congratulate the current administration at League Central for caring enough about the sport’s history to spend time, money and resources on this. We’ve waited until now to discover what they plan to do with it.

The answers throw up more questions.

The reason the Immortals only included post-war players was that when it was conceived (as a promotion for a bottle of port) 37 years ago was they wanted players the judges had seen play live.

It was a rare act of restraint in a sport that sometimes struggles to find the right tone in properly acknowledging its history.

Another rare act of restraint: only inducting eight immortals in all the time that has passed since. Between 1981 and 1999, no-one was added.

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Todd Greenberg said in his announcement on Monday that it would cause debate. Here’s my contribution to that debate.

The revelation on Monday that two may be added this year alone threatens to water down the concept considerably and appears to contravene the spirit of the Immortals since 1981.

The NRL already has a Hall of Fame. If two immortals are going to be added this year, then how many Hall Of Famers? Fifty? Actually, just six. Yet there are already 100 players in the HOF and only eight in the Immortals.

Artie Beetson and Wally Lewis

(AAP Image/Gillian Ballard)

Something is awry. The balance between the two is being fiddled with on a massive scale and the danger is that the lines between them will be blurred even as, procedurally, they are being linked.

Obviously there will soon be some post-war players which no-one alive saw play. Does that render the 1981 criteria irrelevant, or does it mean that all new inductees should also be those from ‘living memory’?

The NRL has decided upon the former. Pre-war players will now be included, even though there is hardly even any film of some of them.

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They must therefore be inducted either on stats or reputation – something the progenitors of the Immortals specifically wanted to avoid.

Dally Messenger guaranteed the future of the new competition by switching codes and is credited with almost super human on-field feats (which can’t be verified). How can he be left out?

Dave Brown scored 38 tries in a season. I guess we have our ninth and 10th Immortals right there. It could, conceivably, be years before we even revisit the post-war years.

Here’s a couple of posers: Harry Bath and Brian Bevan are in the what was once the Australian Rugby League Hall of Fame.

But how can they be in the NRL Hall Of Fame when they played most of their football in Britain? And does that preclude them from being Immortals when it is now owned by the NRL, too?

As a scorer of 796 first class tries, Bevan should be a leading candidate for ‘Immortality’.
And the curator of the new awards regime is Frank Puletua.

He played 178 NRL games but unlike Bevan who played just eight premiership matches, would not be eligible for the NRL Hall of Fame because he is a Samoan and a Kiwi.

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How long before we include our first overseas player in the Hall Of Fame? And then, given that we already have included Australians who hardly played in Australia, why not foreign players whose best football was also played overseas?

Rabbit, meet hole.

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