Rugby’s culture of raging machismo and the menace of professionalism
The Belfast rape trial raises worrying questions about the lives of paid sportsmen and the indulgence of harmful attitudes towards women
IN the early hours of June 28, 2016, an encounter took place in Belfast whose consequences would shake the world of rugby and horrify the public. At a small house party after a marathon drinking session, two members of the Ulster and Ireland rugby teams had sexual relations with a 19-year-old woman and bragged about their conquest afterwards in a series of explicit texts and Whatsapp messages.
The harrowing court case arising from the event ended with the two men being found not guilty of rape.
Two of their friends were also acquitted – one of exposure, the other of perverting the course of justice and withholding information.
The trial has provoked widespread discussion of issues surrounding consent and rape, as well as contempt for the brutal, laddish subculture that bedevils some rugby circles.
But the sordid revelations from the long court case – not least the distressing picture it creates of sexually aggressive young men preying on women like pieces of meat and speaking of them in sickening terms – also raises questions about the destructive role that the cossetted world of professional team sports plays in moulding young male minds.
Is it the case for instance, that the professionalisation of rugby, unlike the GAA, which has amateur status, is partly to blame for the disgusting behaviour of the two Ulster players?
Are all the perks and glittering privileges of the professional rugby fraternity no more than compensation for both the damage players sustain physically on the pitch and the warped sense of entitlement their mindset develops over the early years of their career, with, as we have just seen, such devastating consequences for women?
The terrible events of June 28, 2016 hardly need to be revisited.
Suffice to say that Stuart Olding and Paddy Jackson had just returned from a tour of South Africa and, according to Jackson’s evidence, he had spent the last day of the trip sunning himself and drinking beer by the pool, waiting for his flights.
Once home in Belfast, he continued to party. His childhood pal Blane McIlroy, whose early promise at rugby has not materialised in a senior contract at Ulster, was home from the States, where he was studying on a sports scholarship.
His other pal, Rory Harrison, who had worked in insurance in Dublin, was also due to fly in following a family holiday in Spain.
The four friends gathered in Blane McIlroy’s family home for drinks, with Blane’s father ordering them a take-out of pizza and chicken wings to celebrate the reunion.
The night was still young when they embarked on the fateful odyssey that was to change the course of so many lives forever.
To look at them as they sallied forth into the summer night, they must have seemed just like any gang of excited twentysomethings heading out on the town.
However, Jackson’s magnetic attraction for young women may have been the first sign that this was no ordinary group of lads.
His confident strut, which never wobbled, even during the darkest days of his courtroom ordeal, the manner which ensured that barmen and bouncers snapped into action immediately would be another signal to onlookers of how long it had been since either he or Stuart Olding had enjoyed anything resembling a normal life.
Unlike Blane McIlroy or Rory Harrison, they had never lived independently in the outside world.
They had never hustled for work, moved to a different country like their friends to take a degree, or worries about getting a day off work for training, like their GAA counterparts.
Jackson and Olding had lived in a sporting cocoon ever since they were children – particularly since they left school and rugby became their profession.
They both come from big rugby families, their fathers were their first coaches and they attended Protestant schools that stake their reputation on churning out star players.
Their modest A-level results showed how academic prowess took a back seat while they focused on realising their destiny as elite athletes .
The job of a professional rugby player is one of the most sought after in the world. Rugby players have a higher social status than soccer players.
The game’s roots in the British public school system make for a wealthier milieu of fawning male fans and star-struck females.
Laughably, perhaps, in the light of this dreadful case, it is called a gentleman’s game.
The money is good, with lucrative sidelines in promotional and sponsorship deals. Players do something they love every week. What’s not to like about living the boyhood dream?
But professional rugby also calls for long hours of boredom and hanging around.
Players follow a strict regime of coaching sessions, pumping iron and match-day preparation.
With their armies of dieticians, coaches and physiotherapists, they log each mile they run and every calorie they eat.
But they are off early each day,
with not an awful lot else apart from rugby to occupy the treadmills of their minds. Taking on another project is frowned upon as rugby must be their sole focus.
On his father’s advice, Jamie Heaslip turned down his first professional contract in order to finish his engineering degree.
The former Irish player says that a successful rugby career ‘demands an all-consuming existence’.
He added recently that eventually a compromise was reached with the powers that-be to allow the rising star continue his studies while
‘Speaking of women in sickening terms’
keeping his hand in with the Leinster Academy.
When training is over for the day, the lads are simply expected to rest and recover. Most spend long stretches watching TV, playing video games and napping.
Most young men in the prime of life are constrained by the need to earn a crust or pass exams, but the burden of professional rugby players is killing time.
If they are not bookish, they will not bother to read or improve their minds.
In their rarefied worlds, everything is done for them, right down to the laying out of their gear before training.
The constant surveillance of their diet and exercise means that they are infantilised in some respect and are able to offload their personal responsibility. In their immediate orbit, everyone, from family members to coaches, serves one purpose only –that of delivering them onto the pitch in prime condition, like well-oiled human juggernauts on match day.
Unless they are grounded individuals, they can become egotistical and entitled, confirmed in the belief that the world is their’s for the taking.
As Paddy Jackson said about his return home in June 2016: ‘I was the happiest man in Belfast.’
But running parallel to the massive arrogance of many professional team players is a selfish immaturity.
Soccer stars who have courted scandal, like Ryan Giggs and Wayne Rooney, seem emotionally stunted, focused on their own desires – like children, with little empathy for the wives and girlfriends they humiliate with such insouciance.
The self-importance that is almost bred into virile young players, their extraordinarily insular and pampered world, not to mention the long hours of indolence, makes toxic masculinity almost inevitable.
There is nothing new about the Belfast rugby trial in terms of scandal. We are, after all, used to reports of drug abuse, rape allegations, stories about ‘spit roasting’ and threesomes from professional players.
A few years ago, two Irish rugby players had a threesome with a woman they had met in a fast-food restaurant in Dublin.
Graphic details of the fling were circulated after the woman posted a private message on Facebook, which inadvertently went public.
In the early noughties in England, a spate of reported orgies and threesomes involving football players triggered much soul-searching in the media and a former football groupie wrote under the pseudonym Amanda Hughes of her experience with Premiership stars while she was a university student.
She touched on how the arrival of mobile phones alleviated the boredom of their lives.
‘With the arrival of mobile phones and text messaging, you can imag- ine how bored young men whiled away the hours the night before a game – and it wasn’t by watching Jonathan Ross,’ she wrote.
She explained the players’ appetite for group sex as an extension of their pack mentality.
‘Once you were in a player’s hotel room, he would encourage you to allow his mates join in.
‘I never understood why. The argument seemed to be that it was “only fair” that they were having the same as the player was having.’
The book Night Games: A Journey To The Dark Side Of Sport, by Anna Krien, suggests that professional sport, where hyper-masculinity is enshrined, has created a horrific world where group sex has become a form of male bonding.
Krien examines a number of highprofile cases from Australia and the UK and suggests an ‘ambiguous grey zone’ between consent and rape.
‘Sometimes, a woman can feel raped when she hasn’t been,’ she writes controversially.
She has no ambivalence, however, about the dangerous macho culture of humiliation that stalks certain professional team sports.
‘Men who use sport as power and people – team-mates, fans, clubs, coaches , police , lawyers, journalists, groupies – let them do whatever they want,’ she writes.
When Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding returned to Belfast from South Africa, they were embarking on a four-week holiday.
They could drink and indulge themselves, free of the normal restraints – the lack of money, time of even interest from the opposite sex – that keep most of their peers on the straight and narrow.
Their power was so great that even friends like Blane McIlroy could enjoy the benefits of their reflected glory.
Blane crowed on Whatsapp about having ‘pumped a girl with Jacko on Monday. Roasted her. Then another on Tuesday night.’
But there was another factor that hastened the conquering heroes along the road to hell.
To his credit – although a cynic might see it as a desperate attempt to shore up his damaged reputation – Olding regretfully acknowledged it outside the courthouse.
They had no respect for the woman involved in their drunken threesome and wore their callous indifference to her as a badge of honour.
Olding says he is not the same man today as he was then.
Perhaps the world of professional team sports should explain how it lets players come to maturity with such a shameful view of women.
‘Fawning male fans and star-struck females’ ‘Jackson’s magnetic attraction for women’