http://blogs.news.com.au/dailyteleg...op_got_a_rough_trot_but_kept_it_all_on_track/
Gallop got a rough trot but kept it all on track
David Penberthy
Monday, June 11, 2012 (5:41pm)
A FEW years ago after the Joel Monaghan incident - details of which, youll be pleased to hear, Im not about to go into - a mate of mine had an idea for a comedy sketch.
It was called Hello, Dave speaking and it involved David Gallop answering the phone each morning.
You would only hear Gallops side of the conversation, where in a world-weary monotone he would be presented with a running sheet of league atrocities from the previous night.
A photo? A photo of what? A what? Really? Youre kidding right? OK, Ill be in soon.
For much of his 10-year tenure as NRL chief executive it seemed Gallops chief role was to be the face of official outrage whenever the code gave itself a black eye - which was often.
One of the great myths about the commercial relationship between this newspaper and the NRL is that league somehow got softer treatment because of News Limiteds involvement in the game and ownership of The Daily Telegraph.
As a former editor of this paper and someone who has also written scathing columns about issues such as the Matthew Johns incident or Manlys booze-fuelled 2009 season launch, I would say that the reverse is true, for three reasons.
The first is that there is so much paranoia on the part of editors such as myself that, if anything, the coverage of negative stories was often significantly more aggressive than it was elsewhere.
I can think of many examples where routine misdemeanours - a player copping a late-night slash in an alleyway for example - would be presented as leagues latest crisis. Too often, more journalistic attention was focused on what was happening off the park than on it.
Plenty of stories were probably over-cooked as a result.
The second is that rugby league is the closest thing in sport to the former Yugoslavia, where so many people have hated each other for so long that they cant even remember why.
Super League played a massive part in all this, but separate from that there are huge personalities involved - and many of them are people who just love a stink.
The third goes to the culture of the city of Sydney, which is still a rambunctious convict town with a strong tendency to pile in when a blue is on.
This represents a vast contrast from the culture of AFL, where the people of Melbourne and Victoria will pull together for the good of the game whenever there is a scandal. There is a certain smugness about AFL, the way it looks down its nose at league as having a monopoly on bad behaviour, when the truth is that Aussie rules has also had its fair share of abysmal conduct.
Indeed over the past few years the St Kilda Football Club alone has almost matched the whole of the NRL for shabbiness.
The difference is that, in Melbourne, the public and media are much less up for seeing their beloved game being torn apart, while in Sydney the aggro is taken as a given.
Against this backdrop you would have to argue that Gallops job brought with it the highest degree of difficulty for any sports administrator in the land. The remarkable thing is that, for all the crises that pockmarked his 10-year stint at the top of the game, league is in remarkably good shape: worth a motza in the TV rights, strong attendances, holding its own in the hotly contested heartland of western Sydney.
Gallop deserves serious credit for sailing through this near-permanent chaos and keeping the code not just viable but robust. As a Sydney-based sports administrator he was also quite unlike Sydney in that he was always calm and level-headed and laid-back when those around him were going spare.
The one sure thing about holding a top job, as he did, is that you know it will never last forever. While the circumstances of his departure will have hurt and angered him he will come out of it all with his dignity intact, and eminently employable.He could do worse than start a PR firm called Shitstorm Communications, where he advises people on how to keep their heads when all around them appears lost.
