Don’t know if this has been posted else where
NRL must find a 'crime' to fit punishment for Dogs duo
Malcolm Knox
Sports columnist
March 14, 2020 — 12.01am
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Rugby league’s twin pin-ups of the week, Corey Harawira-Naera and Jayden Okunbor, did nothing illegal in Port Macquarie. And yet they are guilty, certainly, of something. The NRL’s job is to find an appropriate punishment, but also, much more trickily, to find a ‘crime against league’ that fits.
There was no actual criminal act because their sexual partners in Port were of an age that the law slides around. There is no suggestion the sexual contact was not consensual, and indeed, to cast the girls as passive victims is to deny them sexual agency. This does not make them victims or the footballers predators, or vice versa; it simply leaves them as four heedless young people who followed their appetites into a world of adult consequence.
The transgression for which the players have been stood aside is a code of conduct breach at the Bulldogs club, which prohibits players bringing guests to their hotel rooms. If you’ll recall, two Wallabies players fell into similar strife a couple of years ago, when they were dropped for breaching team protocol by having female visitors in their hotel room after a Test match. Even though one of the females was her host’s sister-in-law, and nothing more transgressive than a game of pinochle took place. More took place in Port, but if you are a player, your clear take-away from this code of conduct breach is that if you meet a girl and the pair of you want to have sex, you ought to do it in a car, a park or a phone booth, up a tree or in a bathroom … anywhere in fact, so long as it is not the pure sacristy of the team hotel.
If there is a sub-sub-transgression, it is the lingering bad odour of ‘schoolgirls’ being predated upon. But what happened was a little more convoluted. One of the girls met one of the players during a school visit, but she had to send him a picture to remind him. The other girl did not meet the players during the visit. Nevertheless, the image of school uniforms, and the mere word ‘schoolgirls’, are enough to set off a moral panic; however long the bow that is drawn, however far apart the dots that must be joined, to make that narrative.
Initially, I’d thought the players’ offence was against public health, and that by swapping saliva with members of the public, the two Bulldogs players were potentially endangering all Bulldogs, match officials, competitors and fans they encountered during the next 14 days, and the Dogs would now have to stage their campaign to avoid the wooden spoon before empty stadiums (in case you could tell the difference). But no, it wasn’t about health; this was the one story in the whole world that was not about COVID bloody 19.
Then the conversation turned to how Okunbor and Harawira-Naera brought the game of rugby league into disrepute. Jokes aside, rugby league thrives on disrepute like mushrooms thrive on cowpats. The comedy of disrepute extended to the restaurant chain Rashays (The Best Casual Restaurant & Cafe Near You – Get a Schnitty for $10 Today & Tomorrow ONLY!), which was about to sign a jersey sponsorship with the Bulldogs, but pulled out after the Port incident. In fear of being brought into disrepute, Rashays coupled its name indelibly with ‘Bulldogs’ and ‘Port Macquarie’ by making lengthy public statements about just how much disrepute it narrowly avoided.
And by the end of this performance, you could still get a schnitty for $10 yesterday and the day before. Port (which, along with Coffs Harbour, might have its own case for being brought into disrepute by the Bulldogs – where next, Taree?) will no doubt soon have a Rashays of its own. I’ve never seen a restaurant chain get so much publicity for not wanting to be associated with publicity.
As flamboyant as Rashays was in publicly distancing itself from the Bulldogs, nobody looked quite as much as if they could do with a free schnitty as poor old Dean Pay. There was the Bulldogs coach, alongside his chief executive Andrew Hill, in a press conference trying to evade the task of defending the indefensible or explain the inexplicable. Both looked as if they had seen the same ghost. These were hard-working servants of the game who had been made to look like fools.
It was while watching the fooled Pay and Hill, considering all this disrepute, that the penny finally dropped. The transgression that has been committed is that of making fools out of … everyone. The two players had made fools of Pay and Hill. They made fools of the NRL and its message of respect for women. They made fools of those members of the public who believe and accept the message that rugby league players routinely disrespect women. They made fools of the Women in League, and for that matter the Men in League.
There are many who never believe any of that PR in the first place, who have a cynical view of rugby league, a cynicism cloaked in amusement. This incident is so rugby league; it’s even more rugby league than actual games of rugby league. It speaks to a great big pantomime: here are the things that league says it believes in, here are the people league says it speaks for, but it’s all show. What is really happening in rugby league is dumb young men with narcissistic pride in their bodies and a sense of entitlement, whose current adventure in life is about any opportunity that comes their way in their brief moment of youth and celebrity. Everything else is hypocrisy.
This incident is not on the same continuum as the serious crimes involving violence, drugs and drink-driving for which league players have been convicted. Instead it belongs with the party-boy peccadillos, the stupid shit. These aren’t hanging offences, but in some ways they are the most corrosive acts a league player can commit, because they are saying that all the high-minded professions of morality, all the modernising of culture, all the charity work and championing of progressive causes, are really just an act for the cameras that league players are dragooned into performing, while what’s really happening, what’s really on their minds, is not much different from what was on their minds back in the dark ages.
These players are guilty of lifting a lid to reveal the real world of rugby league, a world that never caught up. Harawira-Naera and Okunbor have been caught making fools of too many people, inside and outside the game, to get away unpunished. Their actions have exposed a pantomime made of cardboard sets. In order to restore its own dignity, the game is now facing the task of inventing a ‘crime against league’ to fit the punishment.
https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/nr...-punishment-for-dogs-duo-20200312-p549m5.html
