In 1995 rugby turned professional. That’s 13 years of professionalism; only players over the age of 30 will remember a time when their team-mates juggled the hobby with the day job. The best players were gifted jobs, which allowed them to take weeks off work to go and tour the southern hemisphere to pursue their sporting goals, but others weren’t so fortunate.
When my husband, Kenny, signed his contract for Wasps he was allowed to fly from Scotland to London on a Thursday to train for the day, play on the Saturday and fly straight back to Stirling to manage and work on his farm. And that was in the first year of “professionalism”. He had a team-mate who also played for Scotland and was still an electrician in the afternoons and evenings.
A generation of players have no knowledge of such a time. They’ve gone straight from A levels to full-time contracts, a few have carried on with further education but the majority have found the bright lights far too dazzling to sit down for a few hours a day and study land management or sociology. Afternoons spent with Kelly Brook watching The Weakest Link are just too tempting.
“Does he drink aftershave?” my football-centric friends asked when they heard I was dating an oval-ball sportsman. Rugby players ... crazy, eh! seemed to be the misconception. Of course by the time I met Kenny, four years into professionalism, he was far too shattered after two training sessions a day to drink aftershave. The Wasps boys did have a weekly blowout down the pub after a match, which all seemed quite normal to me.
But what was apparent in 1999 was that this sport was on a steep learning curve. The reputation or perception that rugby players had for being accessible, open, intelligent and generally excellent role models would change with time. Money would come into the sport and alter all of that. Money corrupts, ‘twas ever thus. The values of the sport could be retained, at least on the pitch. There was no reason why players should not keep their respect for the referee, but off it larger forces were at play.
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We expected and accepted that there would be unsavoury tabloid stories, and perhaps even a player or two succumbing to recreational drugs; peer pressure or a weak-willed individual, call it what you like. Maybe we didn’t expect joke shop-purchased blood capsules and bribery allegations emanating from a club run by one of the game’s most respected coaches. In 1999 Big Brother started on Channel 4. And so did a generation of young people telling you that they wanted to be famous but with no context in which to put that; in short, the adoration of vacuous celebrity had arrived. Rugby was never going to be allowed to escape this circus, even though wanting to be famous for playing rugby is a more noble ambition than wanting to “just be famous”.
Events that may have been allowed to stay on tour in the past are perfect tabloid fodder in 2009 and rugby players had to wise up. They were no longer just of interest because they could kick goals or scrummage well, people would want to know more. The stakes were higher, the salaries growing and the endorsements increasing.
But Bloodgate is more than that, isn’t it? It’s another indicator that our moral compass may be a little out of kilter, which is why it disturbs even those unconcerned with the welfare of rugby.
With Big Brother and its ilk we can kid ourselves that these are society’s freakish minority, that the majority of us still think it’s not OK for a 20-year old to be unable to locate France on the map. When poor morals and flagrant abuse of the rules are accepted as part of sport we may have lost the battle.
Sure the stakes were high on April 12 at the Twickenham Stoop, a place in the semi-finals of the Heineken Cup up for grabs, but this is a sport that a little more than a decade ago was still being played for fun and some free kit. Parents fed up at the start of this decade of mercenary footballer stories liked the idea that their little Johnny could grow up to be like the big Jonny. For all the legitimate violence the sport contains, rugby has marketed itself successfully in the past ten years as a family sport.
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I never heard a fan at rugby asking a child to sit down using the “F” word, as was heard at White Hart Lane recently by a friend.
Learning to deal with defeat is one of the main reasons I want my children to play sport, accepting that it’s part of life; not trying to find alternative illegal or immoral ways to counter it. So how did it come to this? I keep asking myself, what if it had come off? What if they had got away with it? Would Richards have lost any sleep? Would Tom Williams have been lauded in the pub by his team-mates? Or would it all come out years later in somebody’s biography?
It bothers some that it was all done so badly - the dropping of the capsule at the first attempt, the bad bite that made Williams look like he’d eaten a pot of poster paint, all so bloody amateur. It bothers me that professionalism itself may have led the sport to this tipping point.