Immortals heaven is filling up fast. When will the ‘Full House’ sign go up?

The afterlife will be miserable now that we Mortals can’t watch the best rugby league.

We were doing our good deeds and saying our prayers in hopes of an eternal Saturday afternoon on the couch: Bozo in the ’73 grand final, the King and Mal on the ‘86 Kangaroo tour, Joey doing Origin better than Adam and Eve. And now Ron Coote will be in charge of cover defence. Heaven.

But the Immortals will be in that other place, the open bar on Mount Olympus with the likes of Jesus Christ (winger), Hercules (front-rower), Eros (hooker) and L. Ron Hubbard (touch judge).

Down among the sinners, it’ll be rugby league hell. It’ll be Clint Gutherson arguing with referees until the end of time. It’ll be Jason Saab making a defensive read (actually that’s more like Purgatory, neither here nor there). It’ll be waiting for the Bunker to determine if there was downward pressure.

It’ll be a coach waiting for a call from the board, and then the board saying they’ve turned the corner. It’ll be seeing the Roosters buy Kalyn Ponga, Reece Walsh, Payne Haas and Mitchell Moses while remaining under the salary cap. It’ll be “There is no suggestion the white substance was an illicit drug.”

Rugby league hell will resemble reality, but it won’t have an off-season. Hell will be Las Vegas without a return ticket. (It could be worse: it could be having to watch the Game They Play In Heaven until you’re begging for hell.)

The original Immortals Clive Churchill, Reg Gasnier, Bob Fulton and Johnny Raper in 1981.Credit: Robert Pearce

The point? The Immortals is an enjoyable concept, turning pub debates into a formal tribute. It is deeply rugby league: a real honour and prank, managing to take itself not too seriously and way over-seriously at the same time.

Once every four years (Why an Olympic cycle? Ask someone pretentious), everyone in league can get heated about whether Coote or Cameron Smith, Johnathan Thurston or Ray Price, or some other apple should be chosen over a completely unrelated orange to be given free entry at the turnstiles of Saint Peter.

It’s tongue-in-cheek in the best possible way, until one of the Immortals, Andrew Johns, gripes at not being invited to vote on who else gets in, like this is the Royal Sydney Golf Club.

How much space is there in Immortal heaven? Nobody knows. Kerry Packer famously got to the door, looked in, and came back saying there’s nothing there. But the Immortals are there. Capturing the television rights until the end of time was not enough to get Kerry in.

Where does it stop? How big is this club? These do seem like the only serious questions about the Immortals concept. Unfortunately, administrators are happy to kick these questions down the road until a future generation is forced to close the border. That will happen when Australians vote for it.

Credit: Illustration: Simon Letch

The only people who seem to have thought this through were the originators of the concept at Rugby League Week in 1981. Under Ian Heads’s editorship, judges Frank Hyde, Harry Bath and Tom Goodman named Clive Churchill, Johnny Raper, Reg Gasnier and Bob Fulton in a list that they saw no need to enlarge. Valhalla: max cap 4 pax.

They restricted themselves to players they had seen. So they could have chosen Graeme Langlands or Arthur Beetson, but didn’t. Simple. To grow the list would water down the honour. They gave Churchill, Raper, Gasnier and Fulton a box of vintage port bottles, and that was that.

That remained that for another 18 years, and expansion kept looking silly until a commercial reboot brought in Langlands and Wally Lewis in 1999, then Beetson in 2003 and Johns in 2012. Who could begrudge any of those choices? No arguments on the quality of the cordial, but once you start adding the water, who is game to stand up and say ‘Stop’?

‘The Immortals is an enjoyable concept … It is deeply rugby league: a real honour and prank.’

Rugby League Week was not, unfortunately, immortal. It died in 2017. A year later, the NRL took over the concept, and as we know, today’s NRL has never seen an expansion that it doesn’t like. The pearly floodgates were flung open, and the four that became eight became 14. The concept has now moved onto its interchange bench. If the federal government wants to throw a few million at the Immortals concept to keep China out and get the rugby league chairman invited to big dinners with heavy hitters, Immortality just becomes another product for sale.

It’s easy to say it should stop here, but how can Cameron Smith – most games, most points, most tackles, most wins – not live forever? Or, do you add him in 2028 and then say to the rest, ‘Sorry, it really is getting silly now’? Will that be seen as a terrible snub to Thurston, Slater, Greg Inglis and maybe a new contender like Nathan Cleary? Will they care? Johns’s reaction suggests yes.

Then, as the recent Les Boyd debate shows, arises the question of a character test. Boyd, as a newly inducted member of the Hall of Fame, is now eligible for Immortality. His disciplinary record suggests he should also be eligible for parole.

Maybe. To make room, do they start to carry out character checks on Immortals and go all Peter Dutton on the idea, sending Immortals back to where they came from? Would Nathan Cleary be stealing Andrew Johns’s job? If the ‘House Full’ sign goes up, the only way to keep expanding is to start deporting.

The indulgence will have to stop – but not for us. A future generation will have to pay for our giddy appetites. We’ll have stuffed up not only their planet but their afterlife. This concept is sounding less and less unique.

One thing the first panel knew was that they were selectors. The not-quite-seriousness of the concept meant they didn’t have to make the tough phone call to Langlands or Beetson, but they were realistic enough to understand that to include is also to exclude.

In today’s world of printing money and calling it debt, on the other hand, you just keep on growing until it blows up all over someone younger than you, by which time you will be in your afterlife getting what you deserve, watching Gutho argue with refs, the Bunker check another angle, the Roosters buy another superstar, your own club rationalise another rebuild, another white substance that is not an illicit drug ...

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