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Does rugby have an Israel Folau hangover?
Georgina Robinson
May 17, 2023 — 3.30pm
On Thursday night Australian rugby will relive the tumult and distress of the Israel Folau saga when the ABC airs the Folau documentary.
It is an excellent film that does what journalists at the time — including this writer — could not, which is bring to the fore the experience of rugby’s sizeable Pacific Islander playing community.
It was not for want of trying. This masthead reached out to senior teammates of Folau’s for their reactions to the fullback’s plight, but none responded. Instead, what came was a call from a Rugby Australia media manager, furious that a journalist would canvas players directly for their reactions to one of the biggest controversies in a decade to play out in Australian sport.
It was a strange time, characterised by fear, loathing and mistrust. The players who resented Rugby Australia’s treatment of Folau resorted to cryptic social media messages and there were rumours of a deepening rift between Pacific Islander players and the rest of the team and coach, Michael Cheika.
Ultimately, the players were worried enough about their own employment to stop them from speaking openly on the issue. Maybe they did not trust a white, female journalist to understand or respect their perspectives. Maybe it was a bit of both.
Folau director Nel Minchin delivers these perspectives in her film with depth and breadth, interviewing Wallabies centre Samu Kerevi, former Wallabies No.8 Toutai Kefu, academic Jioji Ravulo, the Folau family’s former Mormon bishop Salesi Tupou and gay Christian pastor Andre Afamasaga, among others.
It is airing at an interesting time in Australian political and cultural life. Ready or not, Rugby Australia, the country’s diverse playing group and the five Super Rugby clubs are again wrestling with the game’s intersection with these matters.
“It was agreed unanimously by our board that we don’t think politics should play a part in sport and it’s an individual’s preference,” Brumbies chairman Matt Nobbs said on Tuesday.
Nobbs was speaking about the upcoming referendum on building into the constitution an Indigenous Voice to parliament. By the end of the same day, he had faced a firestorm of feedback from Brumbies’ fans, players and other stakeholders, with one club executive characterising it as “world war three”.
Rugby is not the only sport that has taken time to communicate a position on the Voice but it is the only one with recent experience of what can happen when sports rush to do the trendy thing — or the right one — but don’t do their due diligence first.
If there is still polarised opinion around what Rugby Australia should have done when Folau started publishing the most controversial aspects of his conservative Christian beliefs on social media — that homosexuals were going to Hell — it is easier to draw lessons from the year preceding the acrimonious breakup, and how poorly the internal communications were handled in the aftermath.
Rugby Australia backed the Yes campaign in the 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite with limited consultation. Then-Wallabies breakaway David Pocock and Michael Hooper backed the move in public, but Folau dissented in a Tweet widely regarded as a respectful expression of his position.
It was the beginning of the end of Folau’s career in Australia, the fork in the road where Rugby Australia, a self-styled progressive, inclusive international sports brand, left behind a large portion of its professional players. A year later the organisation was weathering a storm as fierce within as without.
It will not make the same mistake again, apparently. While only one Rugby Australia director, Pip Marlow, remains on the board from that time and none of the senior executive remain, it is hard not to view the sport’s go-slow approach as a reaction to Folau.
It would not be a stretch to posit that every sport, as well as large sections of corporate Australia, has internalised the lessons from those two drawn-out years of legal argument and turmoil. The case ended without answering the central legal question but it shone a light on what can happen when a sport fails to bring along its most important assets, its players. Manly’s pride jersey fiasco[/url] did the same thing, three years later.
As sports administrator and former players’ union boss Greg Harris, the man who brokered Folau’s move to rugby 10 years ago, used to say, “when you’re ahead of the pack it pays to look back once in a while to make sure the pack is still behind you”.
Nobbs, drawing a leaf from former prime minister John Howard’s book, is old-fashioned in his views on sport and politics. There is a generation younger than him that is comfortable recognising the political in everything.
They are holding sway, but they should also not fool themselves that governing bodies and corporations are only doing what is right when they take positions on social issues.
They are also doing what will grow their bottom line or please their own paymasters which, in the case of sporting organisations, are often state and federal governments. While Nobbs’ comments whizzed around rugby’s corridors of power, one official remarked to this masthead: “The Brumbies have just stuffed their stadium negotiations. Why should [ACT Chief Minister] Andrew Barr support them in their top priority (a new stadium in the centre of Canberra) if they won’t support one of his?”
Every governing body that has backed or will back the Yes campaign has made a calculation that their position carries minimal commercial risk and a good chunk of potential upside. If it’s also the right thing to do, they’ve hit the trifecta.
Which brings up the glaring fly in Big Sport’s feelgood ointment: sports gambling. When the AFL, NRL and Rugby Australia wean themselves off that teat, their credibility will improve.
Georgina Robinson appears as an interviewee on the Folau documentary
https://www.smh.com.au/sport/rugby-u...15-p5d8kd.html
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