Hayne disloyalty narrative is Plane wrong,
JARRYD Hayne, or so the narrative goes, owes Parramatta.
The Eels, at their lowest ebb, allowed their best player to walk out on the final year of his contract to pursue his NFL ambitions. Their reward, when it all went awry, was to see him take the cash on the Gold Coast rather than honour the ‘‘lifetime agreement’’ he is said to have entered into to safeguard his return.
This is the popular version of events and does not portray Hayne well. A man indulged, only making good on his promise to return after leaving a trail of destruction that stretched from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Gold Coast. After squandering his best years elsewhere, ‘‘The Plane’’ returns a shadow of his former self, jeopardising the culture the Eels have been built in his absence.
Brad Arthur tells a very different story. Hayne did not leave Parramatta on a whim. He had been toying with the idea of try- ing his hand at American football and wanted to leave a year earlier. It was out of respect for Arthur, in his rookie season as a head coach, that he stayed.
‘‘I was in Bali when he contacted me about leaving,’’ Arthur revealed.
‘‘He just had a dream to fulfil and wanted to go 12 months before that, to be honest with you.
‘‘But he felt he didn’t want to let me down. At times in 2014 – and I didn’t know this until later on – he was struggling a bit with his heart not being 100 per cent in it. It was still in the back of his head he wanted to give the NFL a crack. He has always had dreams of that.
‘‘The fact is he stayed there out of respect and was part of the driving force to try get me to the club. It was tough for him to tell me he was going and I’m not going to force a player to stay when I knew he didn’t want to.
‘‘I knew all along that at some stage that was part of the bigger picture for him.’’
Arthur almost missed out on the Eels gig altogether. After