Divided rugby league fell 25 years ago – but united has it conquered?

Pre-Christmas 2016, the Brighouse Rangers – a foundation club of the Northern Union – took on the Toronto Wolfpack, then preparing for their debut season in League 1. It was cold and wet and uplifting.

This was the ’Pack’s first-ever match, featuring North American trialists whose adventures were being documented for a reality show. And it was a life-affirming day if you were a rugby league dreamer, the sport’s glorious, grimy past meeting its gleaming trans-Atlantic future right in the heart of the land that gave it life.

Nigel Wood, then CEO of the Rugby Football League, sidled up to me on a muddy touchline and suggested I should write a sequel to Mike Colman’s Super League: The Inside Story.

There is a sublime poetry to the fact that, in the time that it took to complete this project about their sport’s appetite for self-destruction, the Wolfpack themselves have lived and died.

What we learned about rugby league from the Super League War is the same thing we learned from the Wolfpack’s story.

“I think of rugby league as a small sport that is wildly over-exposed in NSW and Queensland and which will never completely go away,” former sports broadcaster Debbie Spillane said.

“But it will keep going around in circles – whether they are ever-decreasing circles, I don’t know. Perhaps they are.”

A clue about rugby league’s propensity to walk repeatedly into the same electrified fence, forgetting the agony each time, lies in our surroundings that day: overgrown traffic islands, run down semi-detached cottages, beat-up old sedans in the car park.

Firstly, and above all, rugby league can’t afford not to keep making the same mistakes over and over. It was created specifically in 1895 for those who could not afford to play rugby otherwise.

And it is still played and followed by the descendants of those people, without having made much headway at all in other parts of society in the five generations since.

“It is a game built by, played by, and watched by working-class people. They may not have much in their lives but what they have is that treasure,” Jim Quinn, the CEO at Oldham, said at the height of the merger protests over English clubs in 1995.

To me, there is one subject at the centre of any serious discussion about what Thomas Keneally called “the supreme code, a cellular structure comprised of 13 players which mimicked life and art and war so exactly that it became them.”

It’s the fatal flaw. That is, the elusive DNA strand that makes rugby league great and simultaneously holds it back – the strength that is simultaneously its weakness, the nobility that has a symbiotic relationship with pettiness, all of which lies at the red-hot nucleus of the sport.

This is a book is about that nucleus, about the people who loved a game so much they almost destroyed it – but also so much they managed to save it.

In 1997, rugby league tried to be something it wasn’t: global, glitzy, upmarket, national. When it was left floundering, it was rescued by the same core demographic that had shown its disdain for those aspirations.

Rugby league’s existing support base is often like a passionate, devoted but maniacally and violently jealous partner. It will do absolutely anything for its paramour – aside from share it or allow it a life of its own.

On March 21, 1996, colleague Peter FitzSimons wrote in the Herald: “After all this distance traversed and all this blood spilled, it is equally obvious now that the ARL is never going to be able to carry the future with Parramatta v Souths matches.

“If those games were never much in recent years, they’re going to be looking all the more pathetic now against the backdrop of the mighty Super League ‘vision’ that the Murdoch crowd have spent all those millions promoting.”

I agreed with Fitzy back then. We were, of course, both horribly wrong – South Sydney v Parramatta in 2022 is a blue-riband event.

We were wrong because we simultaneously over-estimated and underestimated the sport of rugby league.

We dramatically over-estimated its ability to appeal to new demographics and present enough of a united front to operate on a level playing field with other sports.

And we just as dramatically underestimated the dogged determination of the very same people, whose infighting retards its growth, to prop it up over and over again in their own enclaves.

Why we were wrong is what the Super League War taught us.

Like most adult eccentricities, rugby league owes its most abiding trait to its childhood – in fact, to its birth.

Because of its origins as being a reaction against something – rugby union – league is tied to class and regional identity more than other sports. They are its sole reasons to exist, in fact. When it loses its identity, it loses literally everything.

In 1997, it lost much of its identity and much of itself.

Those running the game discovered its limitations the hard way. It was not easily translatable to strangers. It relied absolutely and utterly on the communities that begot it and it lived or died at their whim.

To my mind, it doesn’t go far enough to say rugby league is ‘a working-class game’ in England, Australia and New Zealand. It actually IS the working class, or a branch of it.

Don’t expect rugby league to do anything the working class won’t do. And its glass ceiling is the fact that the A-B demographics in these areas are already enamoured with another code of rugby.

League’s path out of its role of selling mixed drinks and home improvement tools to western Sydney is, it would seem, permanently blocked by the circumstances of its birth.

The traditionalists saved rugby league by coming back to watch it from ’98 onwards; and the game’s debt to them makes it fearful of ever doing anything that might upset them again.

The NRL’s football operations manager Graham Annesley confirms how carefully administrators now tread – but argues progress is still possible.

“If you do things at the right pace for the right reasons and they’re well thought out, then people will come on that journey and that’s been evidenced by some of the things that are still in the game now that were introduced during that period,” he said.

“You’ve got to be very careful that when you do it, you’ve consulted widely, there is general support for it and that you’ve been through a process where you can confidently predict that there’s going to be more support for it than opposition to it.”

In the fullness of time, the greatest service anyone can do for rugby league is to be its Oppenheimer – to split that atom at its heart and let it operate free of its cultural history without killing that component during the operation.

That can, perhaps, only be done with new frontiers and new formats of the sport – which will again be mortally challenged by the deeply conservative constituents the sport relies on to draw breath each day.

But all the money in the world won’t help unless that atom is one day split. Because money can, and will always, be wasted by desperate people.

Born out of the hunger for money – even if it was just money to relieve hunger – rugby league is stuck in an interminable loop whereby that hand-to-mouth imperative will repeatedly tear it apart.

How can something demand loyalty that owes its very existence to disloyalty?

In 1995, many of the game’s dreamers saw their fantasies made manifest: Nines, Tri-series, Brisbane grand finals, expanded World Club Challenges, more big-city teams.

They were the game’s left, the constituents who looked enviously at other sports and believed rugby league could be ‘better’. Even though I worked at Fairfax, I was a rugby league leftist.

And guess what? We got a billionaire to fund our city in the clouds.

No matter what you believe about who ‘won’ the war from a business perspective, there is no doubt our floating metropolis came crashing to the ground.

The right won the cultural war – by knockout. Their prize was controlling the game’s destiny for the next 25 years. There aren’t enough leftists in rugby league to nourish it. I would posit that, by definition, it is a ‘right’ sport – in almost all the senses we now use that word: conservative, traditional, even religious.

The Super League War should have taught us rugby league lefties that we can have our grand experiments but unless we have lying around the $80 million it has so far cost the Melbourne Storm to stay afloat, they are destined to fail.

It is, fellow progressives, not our sport. We will always be in the minority. We are guests in their midst.

I once argued with an NRL executive that State of Origin had been over-commercialised with even the national anthem performance a plug for the cast of a stage show, movie trailers on a loop on the big screen and car dealerships parading their wares on a lap of the perimeter fence. He looked back at me aghast.

“State of Origin IS a commercial entity – that’s what it IS!” he responded.

Likewise, we might say that a sophisticated rugby league that looks outwards to new territories and moves suburban teams around the country like chess pieces while abhorring violence makes about as much sense as communism itself opening a chain of fast-food stores or God himself taking up atheism.

For those 12 years from 1895 that it looked the same as its parent game, the things that set the new sport apart were many of the same things that Super League in Australia wanted to change.

But it could not. As the Toronto Wolfpack might now tell you, no- one can. It comes down to that DNA.

This is an extract from Two Tribes: The Untold Story of Rugby League’s Divided Year and the Birth of the NRL.