FOR the past week Quade Cooper and his reputation have taken a battering.
How easy it has been to portray him as a money-grubbing upstart too big for his look-at-me white footy boots.
The rugby websites have been clogged with criticism of him. Fox Sports commentator Brendan Cannon noted on air that the Wallabies five-eighth looks like "a greedy guy". One regular correspondent suggested in an email that the game would be better served if the ARU just let Cooper "f-off to Parra where he belongs".
Yet, right from the beginning, nothing about the whole Quade Cooper saga has quite stacked up. How on earth did a well-paid high-profile footballer land himself in the predicament of being charged with burglary? Why, one year out from a World Cup that has his name written all over it, would he start shopping himself around the rugby league clubs -- especially after he had earlier this year rejected a $1 million-a-season offer to play rugby in France? If it wasn't about the money then, why had it suddenly become all about the money now?
These days every major public scandal is soon distilled down to one of the seven deadly sins or a combination thereof. But which ones applies here? Lust? Well, he is a healthy 22-year-old male but so far he appears to have kept his libido in check. Gluttony? No, Cooper's skin folds are as good as ever. Sloth? Hardly, not with him regularly alerting his Twitter fans about his many trips to training and the gym. Pride? Maybe, but he certainly doesn't come across in his tweets or media interviews as anything other than a humble, even a reserved young man.
So that just leaves wrath, envy and greed, all admittedly outstanding ingredients for a media pot-boiler. So here's how it was scripted: angry at the Australian Rugby Union for not treating him like a superstar and envious of what Matt Giteau is earning, Cooper greedily had gone chasing a piece of the action.
It was neat, it was believable and it was wrong.
It wasn't Giteau Cooper initially was comparing himself to but a former Wallaby, three years out of the Australian side who, he discovered, had received an ARU contract top-up $30,000 better than what he had been offered. We're not talking Dan Vickerman here, incidentally, but a mid-range player that Robbie Deans decided right from the outset he didn't want.
Wrath? What office worker in the midst of salary reviews wouldn't be angry to make such a discovery, especially after having just been named Employee of the Year, which effectively is what Cooper's Australian Super 14 Player of the Year award amounts to.
No one can blame the ARU for playing hardball in its contract negotiations. These are, after all, difficult financial times. But if that's so, then why has the ARU splashed out on top-ups to a range of players Deans has shown no interest in?
If money was so tight, why was it not targeted on the players deemed most valuable?
Arguably, in Cooper's case, other factors may have applied, like his dodgy disciplinary record. It might well be that the ARU was low-balling him because of his involvement in a childish food fight in Canberra last year, his stupidity in driving without a licence and, of course, the infamous alleged burglary.
But this week new light was shed on what might have triggered Cooper's bewildering behaviour on the night of Peter Hynes' bucks party. It emerged that Cooper had taken a Wallabies-supplied sleeping pill on the Singapore-Brisbane leg of the flight home from the spring tour and basically gone straight from the airport to the party. The Australian Rugby Union has counselled players about the use of sleeping pills but it's possible Cooper might have been Twittering during the lecture and missed the bit about not mixing them with alcohol. Or, given that he had taken them on the nights before Test matches to help him sleep, he might have been aware of the alcohol factor but wrongly presumed the drug was no longer in his system.
The phrase "duty of care" raises its head at this point and then gently lowers it again. Thankfully, the alleged burglary went off without anyone getting hurt but what if Cooper, his behaviour distorted by a pill that can have weird side-effects, had bashed someone, or worse?
Of course, there is a less complicated explanation -- that the pill had had no effect whatever and that Cooper's utterly out-of-character behaviour on the night was solely the result of hitting the booze too hard at the end of a month-long tour in which two beers would have constituted a big night out. Had he acted more responsibly, none of this would have happened.
Whatever, he was in a bind and the ARU took full advantage of it by offering him a contract that was the negotiating equivalent of a slap in the face. At that point, he did what any other employee in his position would have done -- he started sending out his resume.
It's history now that the Parramatta Eels showered him with love. Let's not laugh at that. Had the ARU shown Vickerman a little more love -- "$20,000 extra plus an appreciative phone call is all it would have taken", according to one person close to those 2008 negotiations -- he might never have wandered off to Cambridge.
Suddenly, faced with a serious competitor, Cooper's employers started showing more interest. The dynamic had shifted. He was now the one negotiating from a position of strength and who could blame him for playing a bit of hardball himself?
Cooper may be many things, naive, self-centred, even needy. But a money-grubber?
Like so many other elements of this saga, it doesn't quite stack up.
