NRL humour stewards missed an even bigger joke: the Suaalii exception

There’s a nice old racing joke about the chief steward who comes across a trainer feeding his horse a suspicious white powder before a race. “It’s nothing,” the trainer says, “just a flavourless glucose powder.” The chief steward says: “Prove it.” So the trainer eats a scoop himself and gives the steward a mouthful, too.

After the steward goes off, the jockey comes up and asks the trainer for his riding instructions. “Go hard in the lead,” the trainer says, “because the only ones who are any chance of catching him today are me and the chief steward.”

What do Joseph Suaalii, Toby Rudolf and Junior Paulo have in common? They’ve all come to the attention of the NRL but with different humour thresholds.Credit:Getty

As its subject is breaking rules to gain an unfair advantage in sport, the joke is on safe ground.
Less so sexism and racism, as the National Rugby League dictated this week.

In its role as chief steward of humour control, the NRL re-educated Sharks forward Toby Rudolf, who had joked in a post-game interview that he was off to Northies to drink “a thousand beers” and then “try and pull something, anything will do”.

In my innocence, I thought Mr Rudolf was describing nothing more than some end-of-night self-pleasuring or a similar victimless crime, but apparently the verb in his sentence meant sexual conquest and was less offensive than its object, the likening of (we assume) women to “something, anything”.

Never mind that Mr Rudolf was performing a self-parody of the boofhead sexist footballer and was actually headed for an ice bath and a night in front of The Crown. It was a bad time for a sexist joke, even if told against himself, and an even worse look for his male TV interlocutors to be chortling away in a tone that suggested some had misheard Rudolf’s meaning and taken his Northies plan literally. We all reveal our subconscious in what we find funny, and the NRL did not like what it heard.

If the NRL got in a twist over that one – the predictable dialogue over fun police and driving “characters” out of the game ensued – it made a real pretzel of itself over racism.

The object here was Parramatta’s Junior Paulo, whose on-field display of strength was applauded with a gorilla emoji on an NRL digital organ. Gorilla! Primate! Ape! Someone at the NRL woke up screaming in the middle of the night and took the emoji down. After which, Paulo put it back up, the big tough prop proud to be called a gorilla. It was then taken down again. And so the offending emoji faced an extinction from which not even Jane Goodall could save it.

Nobody seemed much the wiser about if, why, how or to whom the gorilla emoji was offensive, but today it’s better to be confusedly safe than publicly sorry.

But if you thought the NRL had no sense of humour, it showed its comedic talent with the hilarious announcement that it was bending its rule against allowing minors to play in the big league so that King’s student Joseph Suaalii can convert a few thousand potential rugby union players in GPS schools by turning out for the Roosters.

As its subject was someone breaking rules to gain an unfair advantage in sport, the Suaalii gag was on safe ground. When an already suspiciously over-advantaged club is able to talk the NRL into giving it a further edge, that’s what we call comic timing. In case anyone didn’t understand that the Suaalii joke was a joke, the CEO of the NRL, Andrew Abdo, doubled down by declaring: “The commission takes the integrity of the competition extremely seriously. Everything we do is about creating a fair and even and exciting comp.”

By the end of the first round, this had everyone rolling in the aisles. Exciting? It certainly was for fans of those teams that ran in try after try with frantic, free-flowing attack. If you follow division one – Melbourne, the Roosters, Penrith, Souths, the Eels and the Raiders, this year’s, sorry last year’s, sorry this year’s, top six – then it’s going to be one of the most exciting winters on record. A couple of other teams will make the eight, because, um, there have to be eight in the eight.

But for division two, the first round was, after a short summer of wishful thinking, a reminder that this season will be even longer than the last. Even the bookies were offering interest-rate odds on most games (albeit Keating-era rates). The sad conclusion from round one was just that, a conclusion: two-thirds of the NRL clubs have zero chance of winning the 2021 premiership, and can only be consoled by winning a few games, most of them against their fellow also-rans.

A fair and even comp? As humour, this was Seinfeld, Flight of the Conchords, Schitt’s Creek grade. Much analysis has been given to the effect of Premier V’landys’s personal rule changes, but the speedy game only exacerbates existing inequalities, it doesn’t create them.

Joseph Suaalii was granted an exception to play first-grade before his 18th birthday. Not everyone was amused.Credit:Getty

The bottom six clubs, already clearly identifiable, have inferior playing lists, their premiership hopes are null and void, and their players’ minds are already on the golf course.

How did the NRL get into this spot, with such an uneven spread of talent, when the salary cap was meant to give us this comedic mirage of the “fair and even” comp?

If the NRL thinks the cap is currently working, it would be like the doctor who declares the operation a success even if the patient died.

The main reason, it would seem, is that the equation of talent with salary spending is an obsolete idea.

In pre-cap days, a club could buy the best players; the assumption took hold that players could be bought and money was their only language. But it’s a long time since the free market failed. When a player is already guaranteed several hundred thousand dollars, he is wealthy enough to look at other inducements: what coach does he want to play for, where can he win premierships, who can offer him a post-career job, which club has a millionaire benefactor who can look after him, his family and their future generations? He will be drawn to a club that is more professionally run, and play for “unders”, receiving $400,000 when he could have got $600,000 playing for the rabble at the bottom of the ladder, who in turn are forced to pay “overs” to attract even sketchy talent.

The question that follows is whether that inequality is unfair. At present, the NRL’s view is that it likes well-managed, slick, professionally run clubs and likes to hang out with them and reward them with favours. Its signal to the other clubs is “smarten up and you too can have rules bent in your favour”. It also explains why it’s the weak clubs with poor lists who get caught violating the cap. It’s not that they’re the only ones doing it, but they’re the ones badly managed enough to get caught. So supporters of the current system might say that the strong are rewarded for their strength, and competition was never meant to be “even”; in fact, sport is all about punishing the weak until they learn how to improve.

For the spectator, though, the end result is all that matters. Two clubs have won the past four grand finals and six of the past nine, they have the best playing lists for this year, and it was getting monotonous long before it went into rinse-and-repeat for 2021.

The salary cap is, unlike all those other jokes that tread on tricky territory, an actual joke, in the literal sense of a thing that cannot be taken seriously. If the NRL thinks the cap is currently working, it would be like the doctor who declares the operation a success even if the patient died. But if the administrators struggle with humour, they are not dopes. Indeed, a review and revamp of the salary cap system is envisaged, a good idea, but let’s see where it leads. The NRL likes its super-successful clubs and wants others to strive to emulate them. In the process, it has also had a little bit of what they’re having and is out there as chief steward alongside the dodgy trainer tearing up the racetrack. There’s a lot of speed going around, but not enough racing.

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