"I’ve got to be honest, I wouldn’t have bloody a clue."
Not many people get to say their first words and their epitaph simultaneously. But Peter Beattie, as new chief of the Australian Rugby League Commission, has managed it. Congratulations, Mr Chairman. No matter what you do from here, you will always be remembered for your honest admission to not having a bloody clue.
The reaction to Beattie’s inability to identify the Sutherland Shire’s NRL team as the Cronulla Sharks – from a shortlist of three – provided a lovely capsule of how the game works. People who love and cherish rugby league, of whom there are tens of thousands, asked why one, just one, of their ilk couldn’t have found their way to the top job, and why instead the league’s independent era has doubled-down on trainwreck chairmen. John Grant wasn’t the absolute end, it seems; he was just the warm-up act.
Powers within the game circled the wagons around their beleaguered, so to speak, chair. Todd Greenberg, the league’s top executive, congratulated Beattie for his honesty in ‘owning’ his mistake, a worthy statement contradicted only by Beattie’s words following up his Sharks gaffe, to say he had ‘loved rugby league all my life’: a statement patently incompatible with not knowing who Cronulla are, and perhaps releasing a worm of doubt into all that honesty.
Then the man who asked the mastermind question, Phil Gould, conjectured that Beattie might have been confused about the words ‘Sutherland Shire’ and instead thought Gould was asking for the mascot of a sub-district or junior team. Which Beattie could not, of course, be expected to know. This was a clever hypothesis and, like Greenberg’s, very supportive. It failed only by not coming out of Beattie’s mouth. Beattie himself said he stuffed up, perhaps hoping that in the age of Donald Trump, the more directly he asserts his stupidity, the more his poll numbers will rise.
Greenberg’s and Gould’s attempts to cover up for Beattie had the unintended consequence of reminding the world that the ARLC chairman is surrounded by people much more intelligent than himself. Which was further underlined by the simultaneous appointment of Peter V’Landys and Amanda Laing to the commission. The commission floats atop an ocean of people who love and know this game. If the commission itself doesn’t share that emotional and intellectual commitment, then it has a far bigger problem than it realises.
The Beattie moment deserves some stronger description than ‘gaffe’, which brings to mind some brain-fart from the Duke of Edinburgh. As Peter FitzSimons pointed out on these pages on Thursday, Beattie has many larger issues to contend with than knowing the name of a mere 51-year-old club. (Who won the premiership two seasons ago. Who Beattie had watched last weekend.) The question is, can someone who honestly doesn’t have a bloody clue retain the confidence of the league community that he can steer a course through those larger issues? Can he really understand the feelings around stadiums, around expansion, around concussion, around off-field personal issues, around all the emotions in this emotion-driven game, if he does not know who the teams are?
Not again: Fans and the rugby league community fear another John Grant situation.
Photo: Louise KennerleyThe charge against Beattie, for better or worse, is that he revealed himself as ‘not a league person’. To go back to 2012, the ARLC was formed primarily to be independent of the constantly warring clubs and States. To be eligible, no ARL commissioner could have had any involvement with a club or another league organisation in the previous two years. This was a bit like the Socratic paradox – ‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing’ – except without the wisdom. The tenure of the strange John ‘Cronulla Hawks’ Grant showed that there can be such a thing as too much independence, when it is independence from common sense, independence from the beating heart of the game, independence from reality, in fact independence from any cause other than self and Queensland. Grant’s six years left the league community weary of farce. The game itself provides enough of that without the chairman contributing. And now Beattie, in one statement, has promised the community more of the helpless same.
One thing about rugby league that outsiders struggle to understand is that it is a brutal, physical, primal game often played by undereducated warriors that fascinates extremely smart people. The intuitive and intellectual depth of the best players and coaches may not be recognised in mortar boards and scrolls, but league IQ is no small thing. The quality of analysis from the ex-players like Gould, Peter Sterling, Andrew Johns, Paul Vautin, Laurie Daley, Greg Alexander and many others is, IMHO, second to none in Australian sport. It certainly craps all over the depth of dialogue applied to rugby union. The media coverage, from callers such as Ray Warren and Warren Smith throughout radio and print, runs the full gamut, including much at the pointy end. You can learn something every week from good rugby league brains. The commitment from fandom humbles all professional league pundits with that old maxim to remember that you are not the expert, you are speaking to experts.
Now, nobody is saying that Peter Beattie should be able to recite from memory all the junior and sub-district clubs and mascots in the Sutherland Shire. We have Steve Mascord for that. Nobody says the former politician should have doffed his cap to Chris Beattie, who, if being an 86-game Shark is not good enough, is also a Queenslander. But knowledge of league trivia is not trivial, because it stands for love of the game, respect and care for the game, of which it dismays so many thousands of fans to see that their chairman falls short.
I’m wondering why Beattie’s self-confessed ‘senior’s moment’ irritated me so much, in this game that can brush off any minor embarrassment, and plenty of major ones, by the hour. It probably boils down to the fact that the community of players, coaches, staff, administrators, media and, dwarfing all others, fans, share a genuine passion and seriousness for this game that the chairman, it would seem, lacks. This is the fundamental difference between rugby league and politicians. Mal Meninga failed as a politician because he could spout no more than 23 seconds of bullshit. Peter Beattie succeeded as a politician because he could spout it for years. Mal Meninga is rugby league. Peter Beattie is a politician.
What does Beattie’s absence of a bloody clue stand for? What league fans fear is that it stands for another man in the top job who turns up at all the events and smiles for the cameras and hands out trophies and gets his photo taken. They can cop all that. No doubt they support the concept of independence. What they can’t cop is someone whose interest in the game is shallower than theirs.
So congratulations to Mr Beattie for admitting his mistake. That’s one step towards owning it. The next step is to recognise, in all humility, what that mistake signifies for his position and the fans who cannot bear the thought of another John Grant. He has several passionate and involved men and women on the commission, and a few outside it, who can steer the league through its next challenges. If he honestly – really honestly - doesn’t have a clue, he should hand over to someone who does.
Morning & Afternoon Newsletter
Delivered Mon–Fri.