Jarryd Hayne decision to quit NFL for rugby sevens has been a public relations disaster

FOOTY fans who bought into the Jarryd Hayne fairytale have every right to be upset at his decision to quit the NFL to pursue Olympic gold, writes Rebecca Wilson.

HE tried his guts out, he was humble, he sold a truckload of jerseys and he even got to wear that famous San Francisco 49ers kit for a few games.

Yes, we loved the bloke for about six months and willed the fairytale to continue into 2016. Then Jarryd Hayne hopped a plane to England from Silicon Valley, didn’t say: “Shucks folks, it didn’t work out”; and the next thing we know he is posing with a somewhat startled Fijian team in London, all of them holding those No. 38 T-shirts.

The Hayne Plane, the one that the whole of the Aussie footy world took into their hearts and willed to become an NFL champion, morphed into a commercial animal.

His utterly petulant performance on social media this week slamming anyone who dared to question his motives is proof positive that Hayne knows damn well he is now a gun for hire, beholden to corporate sponsors — a bizarre list of companies ranging from telcos to antivirus software.

Hayne no longer just smiles at the camera and mumbles. He now prefers to smile at the camera and mumble if you first agree to mention the sponsor who lined up the media call.

In the meantime, Hayne is claiming this sudden move is all about the Olympic ideal and helping the supremely gifted Fijians to an inaugural Olympic gold with his unmatched athleticism and skills.

Let’s get one thing straight. The Fijian sevens team is not some randomly assembled ragtag bunch who do their training along white sandy beaches and take their rest under palm trees sipping on coconut water.

This is the world’s No. 1 rugby sevens outfit, a formidable combination of skill, athleticism and downright speed to kill. They have plied their trade around the world for several years and worked their way to the No. 1 ranking with a group of athletes who have become the envy of the New Zealanders, South Africans and the much lower-ranked Australians.

Jarryd Hayne has morphed into a commercial animal, says Rebecca Wilson.

Basically, they don’t need Jarryd Hayne, a man who has never played rugby, let alone sevens rugby, and looks to be less fit (which comes from running 150 yards in a season), bulked up and not ready for a rugby sevens match where athletes can run up and down a footy field, very often, very fast in a very short time.

The Fiji sevens coach Ben Ryan a short, redhead Pom who calls a spade a shovel, is probably not the person who called Hayne up and said come and give this a crack. Given that he called him “Haynes” and then didn’t select him in the original 12 for this weekend’s London sevens, there is every chance that someone else thought picking Hayne was a good idea.

Hayne and his manager, Wayne Beavis, along with a coterie of hangers-on, minders, documentary makers and commercial beasts, did not think any of this through from a public relations perspective.

Many were hoping Jarryd Hayne would capitalise on a promising first year in the NFL.

They jumped on the plane to London, thought we would strap on our seatbelts and go along for the ride. Instead, Australians went “Hang on a minute, this guy can’t be for real’’.

Did it not occur to anyone in Hayne’s entourage that just disappearing off the face of the Silicon Valley planet was probably not a good idea?

Why didn’t we get the farewell presser, just like we copped the many arrival ones? Who suggested that imposing himself on the Fijian team was a good idea?

Hayne, of course, did himself no favours with a media appearance that did not involve eye contact with anyone. He mumbled, stumbled and repeated the words “baby steps” over and over again.

Jarryd Hayne put on a perplexing display at media conference in London.

He laughed when someone dared to suggest he received massive third-party payments from Parramatta, and even if he did there is no suggestion he did anything wrong. Now, of course, we are stuck with watching on as the Hayne circus exhausts all rugby union sevens options before we have to start speculating about his future in French or Japanese rugby; or in a Roosters jersey; or back at Parramatta.

No doubt Jarryd Hayne is a gifted athlete. He made us all proud with that move to the 49ers when there were no guarantees. But, now that we have had a chance to ponder all of this, let’s have a look at the money Telstra paid him upfront for the “Will he make it” documentary.

Does that documentary now move to Part Two and another round of endless speculation about his future?

Quite frankly, if the answer to that is yes, I’m scrapping Hayne and rejoining the Greg Inglis, Johnathan Thurston and Israel Folau bandwagons.

At least those three are still running around for the love of it and we’re not encouraged to endorse an irrelevant product every time we mention their names.

BAN RUSSIANS

IF you haven’t read the story about the unbelievable, better than fiction Russians cheating at the Sochi Winter Olympics, get hold of it right now.

The penny will drop about the dreadful government-sanctioned cheating that occurred at the Winter Olympics which led to the home country winning the medal tally, including 16 gold.

Three doctors basically concocted a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs for all athletes to use before competition.

They were designed for maximum performance. They worked and the samples the Russians handed over for testing were then exchanged for clean samples by the same medics.

Two of the doctors were killed in “mysterious circumstances” within 24 hours of each other and the third has managed to find his way out of the country to Los Angeles, where he has told his story to The New York Times.

Once we all realise how bad the Russians are, how foolish Olympic authorities have been to ever trust them and how widespread the cheating is, there is no way a single Russian can compete in Rio.

Then we need to brace ourselves for the 31 positive samples that have come from the Beijing Olympics (retrospective testing) and the 250 from London.

If the world is not convinced then that doping is the biggest single threat to the survival of the Olympic movement, then nothing will ever change.

The sporting community is sending positive thoughts to Jarryd Roughead. Picture: Wayne Ludbey

PRAY FOR ROUGHY

A PRAYER this week for the wonderful Jarryd Roughead who made many a Sydney Swan and other opposition players weep with his majestic skills in four grand final wins for Hawthorn. Roughead’s melanoma has returned and he now faces the battle of his life. We wish him well, we pray and we urge him to draw on the hopes of the AFL community in his darkest days.