STORM BREWING
Smith ‘joins’ NRL club
Who said this: “The Warriors will become the best single sporting franchise in Australasia, taking it to levels never seen before in this part of the world”?
And who said this: “The Warriors will win more championships than Tom Brady . . . We believe we could take the Warriors to a point where they are in the finals every year and they could win five championships in 10 years, with a better winning percentage than Tom Brady and the Patriots [five out of eight Super Bowls]”?
If you answered Eric Watson and Owen Glenn in 2012 for the first quote, well done. It was a never-tobe-forgotten piece of gum-flapping twaddle followed closely by the Matthew Elliott part of the Ivan Cleary-Brian McClennan-Elliott series of coach clangers — helping to deliver the club to where it is today (averaging 12th out of 16 NRL clubs over the past six years with no finals football).
For the second quote, if you answered JK Rowling, give yourself half a mark — because this quote, pumped out only a week or so ago, belongs so much in the realms of fantasy, it makes Harry Potter look like a chartered accountant.
The last thing the beleaguered Warriors need right now is more of the stuff that regularly comes out of a bull and doesn’t produce calves.
Watson and Glenn got it half right — the Warriors indeed reached a level never before seen in this part of the world. Unfortunately, it is a level usually visited by blind mole rats.
Source of the second quote is one Richard Fale, a Hawaiian politician born in Utah but raised in Tonga — of whom I can say I know nothing, even after a rigorous Google. I wouldn’t know him if he stood up in my bath.
But he does seem to have some powerful friends: “We have people in our group that know what a championship organisation looks like and how they operate. It takes absolute excellence on the field, and off the field. It’s something you can sense within five minutes of walking around an organisation and feeling the culture.”
So that’s all right, then. We wondered why the Warriors have been so poor. All they needed was absolute excellence.
Fale is chief executive of a consortium containing people who have won the Super Bowl — veterans of the NFL, the planet’s most successful domestic sports league: “We believe we can take the applicable parts of the expertise we have from the NFL, NBA and MLB and accelerate the growth of rugby league. What took the NFL 50 years to figure out, we believe we can put rugby league on an accelerated path towards achieving that. I think we would be able to effectively execute that in an organisation like the Warriors.”
Fale’s vision is of the Warriors as the first professional sporting organisation in the world to be owned and run by people of Polynesian and Pacific Island heritage.
“That next step in the evolution of Pacific Islanders and sports, something that could move the needle for our communities. At the moment, we are recognised only for our athletic prowess and we are still trying to assert ourselves on the world stage beyond that. We have a shared, unified vision of where we want to take the Pacific community.”
It’s a great objective — and all power to them — but you do wonder where that vision will go when it bumps up against the hoary old bigotry that part of the problem with the Warriors is “too many Polynesians”.
It might be steeped in racism, dipped in a liberal coating of prejudice sauce, but there is no denying the contention is out there.
The real problems facing the Warriors — no matter who owns them, be it Eric Watson, Richard Fale or Bill Bleedin’ Gates — are talent development and recruitment.
The salary cap will still apply, so Fale and company throwing millions about may not make much difference.
It will also take time to shift the perception among many Australian players that the Warriors are not a club to enhance a career.
While we are talking Pasifika, have you noticed how many Polynesian and Pacific Island players have been successfully absorbed into Australian NRL and rugby sides in recent years?
New Zealand/Auckland is no longer the only — or even the preferred — option for many.
So recruitment still isn’t easy and the Warriors are trying to improve junior development to produce more young players ready for first grade, as opposed to a long line who look great in the juniors but don’t quite cut it in the premiers because they are still learning their trade.
You are talking years of hard work and focused application, not a $20 million purchase and overnight success.
Plus, there’s always a niggling doubt about a sports club — or anything — based on race. I am reminded of the debacle when the British National Party (not noted for its racial tolerance) hired a black DJ to spin the grooves at its Christmas party in 2004. Some bigots, I mean party members, walked out and, after the ensuing uproar, a BNP spokesman said: “He sounded white on the phone.”
You do wonder where that vision will go when it bumps up against the hoary old bigotry that part of the problem with the Warriors is ‘too many Polynesians’.