If you take head knocks out of the NRL it’s just not Rugby League
Be as offended as you like about James Graham’s approach to head knocks, but when it comes down to it the big Pom is right – the NRL needs brutality to survive, writes MIKE COLMAN.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
GLORY DAYS: Gillmeister sheds light on head knocks
IT HAPPENS: Graham stands by concussion opinion
James Graham was typically blunt with his comments on the possibility of suffering head knocks from playing rugby league, and good on him.
The people who were critical of his “it’s my life” approach don’t make their living playing the game like Graham does. He is taking a calculated risk. The game gives him a good living and an outlet for his competitive juices.
Furthermore, the sight of big men crashing into each other is a major part of rugby league’s appeal and what Graham said, while upsetting some peoples’ sensitivities, was in fact highlighting a major conundrum facing all impact sports.
As Rocky Balboa’s trainer Mickey says to him in Rocky III, “the worst thing happened to you that could happen to any fighter: you got civilised.”
So what happens if rugby league gets civilised?
Rugby league is a high impact, contact sport and collisions are inevitable. The NRL, like rugby union and the NFL, are taking measures to attempt to lessen the frequency of head injuries and ensure that players spend an adequate time on the sideline before returning after concussion, but there is only so much they can do.
Take that physical element out of the equation and it’s not rugby league anymore.
Former Wallaby coach Bob Dwyer once said, “in rugby there are two types of athletes: the piano movers and the piano players.”
By that he meant there are the big, musclebound forwards who punch holes in the opposition defensive wall, and the small, fast, backs who run through those holes.
It’s the same with rugby league. Graham is a piano mover, and much as spectators love to watch the piano players such as Andrew Johns, Johnathan Thurston and Billy Slater, you can’t have one without the other.
Gorden Tallis, one of the best piano movers ever to play the game, spoke of “walking the tightrope” and stretching the rules to the utmost in order to give the Broncos little men like Alfie Langer, Kevin Walters and Darren Lockyer the freedom to work their magic.
“If I don’t do my job, they can’t do theirs’,” he said. “And if that happens, the club will get rid of me and find someone else.”
What Tallis and Graham are saying might sound brutish and, in the light of recent studies of the long-term effects of concussion, irresponsible, but they are speaking the truth.
A very inconvenient truth for the people who administer contact sports. On one hand they have to ensure the long-term safety of players, and address the concerns of parents reluctant to put their children into the firing line.
On the other, they have to present a game that provides the primeval, physical spectacle that many paying customers expect.
As Graham said, you might as well go and play Oztag – and who’s going to pay to watch that?
In 2012 the NFL suspended New Orleans defensive co-ordinator Gregg Williams for 12 months when it was revealed he had run a “bounty” system under which defenders were paid set amounts for injuring specific opposition players.
Leading US sports columnist Buzz Bissinger, author of the best-selling book Friday Night Lights, was highly critical – not of Williams, but of the NFL.
“Coaches are paid to win, and motivating players is part of that equation,” he wrote. “If offering bounties to knock players out of the game by injuring them is an added motivation, then that’s what coaches will do.
“Is it barbaric? Yes. Is it terrifying? Yes. Is it sick? Yes.
“So what?
“I’ve said it before and I will say it again: That is why we watch football. Because it is barbaric and terrifying and sick. Because we love good hits and kamikaze safety blitzes and a quarterback sitting on the field after a sack with visions of Tweety Bird dancing in his brain.”
Less than two weeks ago England’s Australia-born rugby coach Eddie Jones came under fire for telling reporters, “Whenever you pick a side you are always looking for the biggest, fastest, most skilful guys who like to hit and hurt people.”
Like Bissinger, Tallis and Graham, Jones was just telling it how it is – or maybe how it used to be.
If you want to see how far the game has come in recent years you only had to watch a replay of an old match shown on Fox Sports recently.
After St George forward Lance Thompson left the field injured “sideline eye” Mario Fenech was dispatched to find out what was wrong.
“He’s OK,” reported former Souths and Norths hooker Fenech, one of the hardest men ever to lace on a boot. “It’s just concussion. Nothing serious. He’ll be back on soon.”
Thompson died last year aged 40 from a “medical incident”. Fenech, who estimates he was knocked out “eight or nine times a season” in his 274-game 15 year career, currently takes daily medication to counter the effects of brain damage.
Would he have chosen not to play rugby league if someone had warned him what might happen?
I’d wager he would have said, “It’s my life.”
Buzz’s top-50 NRL players for 2024: Four millionaires miss the cut
Phil Rothfield’s Top 50 NRL players for 2024 is littered with the game’s highest paid players, but four million-dollar men from the Rich 100 failed to make the cut. See the full Top 50 and have your say.
What Seibold’s revival says about ‘cursed’ Broncos coaching role
“It’s you not us’’ was the cry when Anthony Seibold was effectively shown the door in Brisbane. Maybe, ROBERT CRADDOCK writes, it was the Broncos all along.