Notes from the field
Faumuina was always troubled (chiefly by the drink) and in trouble and never paid the dividends his ability suggested he should.
This was not the documentary to watch if you wanted one of sport’s oldest, most offensive prejudices confirmed. The researchers behind Prime’s Life after Footy: Legends of the Pacific (8.30pm, Sunday) had done their homework in assembling a panel of retired league and rugby players of Pacific origins who had something to say, and the ability to say it.
The dumb coconut line? Yep, they’d all heard it. For Olsen Filipaina, that most talented of fiveeighths, he had heard it so often in his six years in the Sydney competition it began as a powerful motivator to compete, but became the reason why he quit.
Life after Footy set out to tell the story of what happens to our stars when the inevitable comes along, and they’ve still got three decades of employment to navigate.
It was not short of a powerful anecdote.
We had former Australia backrower Reni Maitua talking about how he tried to commit suicide as his career nosedived, and the crap life decisions that had left him, at 33, back living with his mum and dad. There was Pita Alatini on how alcohol was his crutch to survive the reality of retirement. Fred Ah Kuoi was moved to tears when he remembered the moment he realised it was time to go. Filipaina’s tales of the institutionalised racism of 1980s Sydney, were paralleled by the statesmanlike Bryan Williams laughing at the absurdity of the apartheid-era South Africans trying to confer ‘‘honorary white’’ status on him. Most powerfully, there was Sione Faumuina. I was covering league when Faumuina played for the Warriors. He was not the superstar that Oscar Kightley’s narration would have you believe, but he was an uncommonly gifted footballer and it was always apparent that he had much more between the ears than the average player.
But Faumuina was always troubled (chiefly by the drink) and in trouble and never paid the dividends his ability suggested he should. There were a couple of times when, completely against type in a highly regulated PR world, he gave me quite revealing interviews when the club had told him not to talk, simply because he had something he wanted to say.
He was just as frank in this documentary as
I remember him being a decade ago in his playing days.
Only the passage of time, retirement, and a couple of kids had brought him the wisdom he could have used back then.
He talked about having to work in a bottle shop to make ends meet, and pretending to those who recognised him he was just doing research ahead of a planned pub purchase; of copping abuse from spectators on the sideline, and seeing they were sitting next to his mum; of getting so wasted on a night out that he couldn’t remember even meeting the guy he’d spent the night drinking with. Most insightfully, he talked about realising that he wasn’t defined by his playing career.
So there were some compelling, revealing interviews here that really said something. The addition of academic Damon Salesa and psychologist Gilbert Enoka offered an extra layer of insight.
But if we’re being as brutally honest as Sione Faumuina was, what Life after Footy seemed to lack was the confidence to thread it all together and draw some conclusions.
We know that retirement is tough for some players and adapting to real life can be a struggle. What we didn’t get was some detailed theories on how this could be prevented, or a real analysis of whether Pacific players are more affected and why. But the raw material was there – and I’d have happily watched another hour of Faumuina, Maitua et al dissecting a side of the game rarely discussed.