Dodgy salary cap deals have long been par for the course in NRL
DID you hear the one about the rugby league official who just loved losing at golf?
Especially around player contract time.
As a contract sweetener, he would take a player out on the golf course then, after losing, would return to the clubhouse to pay up.
“Now, what was our bet again ... $20,000?’’ he would ask the player, who would look stunned because he thought it was a scratch round.
Then, of course, the penny would drop. What better way to hand over a dodgy contract payment than to make it part of a golf bet.
Had the salary cap investigators caught on, which they never did, the duo could have laughed off the inquiry with “How can you seriously say a golf bet is part of the salary cap?’’
Welcome to the shady world of player contract deals that will come into sharp focus over the next two days if, as expected, Parramatta get docked up to eight points for deliberately rorting the cap.
The sad story of Kieran Foran’s woes has shunted the salary cap issue into the background but it will now burst back into the spotlight.
The brazenness of the Eels’ breaches said a lot about the confidence they had of getting away with it like many others have before them.
Not so lucky was the player who thought the best way to stash a $50,000 payment was to put it in his attic, only to find that he told too many people and was robbed.
Unfortunately house insurance does not cover money received in brown papers bags, so our man had to bite his lip and carry on.
One player who had more luck was the one who sat in his house for a few days and watched a landscaping firm go to work in his backyard in a scene that could have been stolen from the series Backyard Blitz.
Down went the lawn, in went the trees, up went the shrubs.
The bill was absorbed by the club and salary cap investigators never saw the wood for the trees.
The reaction to the Eels’ penalty will be interesting.
These things tend to follow a revealing pattern.
The first is that when the penalty is handed down, many rival club officials become harder to find than Santa Claus in June.
That has a lot to do with those two old sayings: “there but for the grace of god go us’’ and “let he without guilt throw the first stone’’.
When it comes to salary cap breaches, many administrators have secrets and skeletons.
Pointing the finger at others is a risky business.
The day Melbourne Storm got busted in April 2010 by rorting the cap by almost $4 million it was as if every mobile phone network in the country had a major seizure.
Many rival club officials refused to answer their phones. When news broke about the Storm, one rival official rang them and said “Haven’t you blokes heard of brown paper bags?’’
Plenty of others had.
