https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/i...s/news-story/283d9a313cb7be5402a42b0b21d10303
Is Jarryd Hayne’s career over after sex assault allegations?
If nothing else, Jarryd Hayne has learnt the value of perseverance.
He will need it more than ever as he faces up to 20 years in jail over an alleged sexual assault.
Once the best rugby league player in the world, 30-year-old Hayne soared to incredible sporting heights — but has now flown too close to the sun and risks going up in smoke.
The Hayne plane has crashed.
He was one of Australia’s greatest sporting stories, leaving a million-dollar-a-season National Rugby League contract behind to try to break into the American NFL.
Against all the odds, he made it, winning a contract with the San Francisco 49ers.
“The things I went through and came through are more significant than anything I’ve achieved,” Hayne said at the time of his contract signing.
“Getting through the tough days has been more important than having the days where I can celebrate … When it’s become tough and it’s become difficult, I’ve learned to persevere.”
League legend Phil Gould made a harsh but prescient call about Hayne earlier this month as the star confronted an uncertain NRL future, well before news of the sex assault investigation leaked out.
Asked where he thought Hayne would end up as he attempted to squeeze more money out of the Parramatta Eels — or a rival club — Gould was emphatic. “Probably unhappy. Unsettled. Unfulfilled,” he wrote on Twitter.
“At his best, he’s a talent,” Gould added. “Can definitely win you games. 2009 was a long time ago though.”
The year Hayne emerged as the best player in rugby league feels like a lifetime ago given everything that’s happened since.
That was the year of his magical run that helped Parramatta win the Grand Final. He went on to win two Dally M medals — the sport’s highest national honour, play 11 Tests for Australia and 23 State of Origins for NSW, and scored 121 tries in 214 NRL games.
It wasn’t as though his life had been incident-free during that breakout year of 2009 — he was shot at by a gunman in Kings Cross the year before — but you could fill several books with the ups and downs of his time since then.
The most recent lowpoint — this week’s arrest over the alleged assault of a 26-year-old Newcastle woman — could be the final nail in the coffin of the code-hopper’s career.
He was talented, ambitious and moral, born to a single mum at a southwest Sydney housing commission flat. Jodie would sleep by the door to ensure her children would be safe from home invaders.
His father is former rugby league star Manoa Thompson, who was absent when Hayne was growing up but reunited with his son later in life.
After showing his prodigious football talent at Westfields Sports High School, he signed with the Parramatta Eels and immediately became one of the game’s top performers.
He narrowly avoided being shot by a bikie gang member during a night out in 2008 — a moment Hayne later said changed his life.
He turned to religion after playing for the Fijian rugby league team at the World Cup in what was a tumultuous year for the young footballer.
“For the next year after that, there were sleepless nights … I knew I was a marked man. I was told I was. That was pretty much the pinnacle of where my life was going,” he told Light FM Christian radio.
“I sat down and told myself, ‘Man, I’m a rugby league player. I’m not a bikie. I’m not a gangster.’ But the way that whole year developed, it became such a God-glorifying year. It was something that changed my life and made me who I am today.”
HAYNE later became a poster boy for Hillsong, a contemporary Pentecostal church.
At the 49ers signing, he was quoting Christian verses and humming the tune to a Hillsong number called
Oceans during a video hook-up with journalists in Australia, trumpeting the message that anything is possible if you believe — in yourself and God.
“In God we’ve trusted. This whole journey has never been about making a roster or being in a team. It’s been about giving myself an opportunity,” Hayne said. “Taking a risk and putting myself out there. This whole journey, I’ve never felt so alive. To be able to walk in faith … sometimes you have to take yourself places and hope God shows up. I’ve leant on him more than ever.”
It was his ill-fated entrance into the notoriously hard-drinking, troubled San Francisco 49ers that marked the start of a decline in luck for one of Australia’s most beloved athletes.
Hayne was signed as an undrafted free agent in the position of running back, on a three-year contract with a base salary of $US1,575,000.
It was the fulfilment of a long-held ambition of Hayne’s, who had attempted to quit rugby league at the age of 23 in 2011.
A host of Bay Area news outlets — including KBR, the
East Bay Times and
The Mercury News — carried the story of Hayne’s arrest by Sex Crime Squad detectives on Monday.
It’s the second time he’s created headlines in San Francisco since leaving the 49ers in 2016 after a woman in her mid-20s accused him of raping her at his apartment in December 2015.
Hayne has unequivocally denied the allegations, which were investigated by San Jose Police, but did not result in charges because of a reported lack of evidence.
The woman is now pursuing damages in a civil court, with a trial set for 2020.
Current and former 49ers players’ brushes with the law have provided regular fodder this decade in what’s been a tumultuous era for one of the NFL’s most storeyed franchises.
Thirteen team members were arrested in a six-year period on charges including drink driving, illegal possession of a weapon, hit and run, disorderly conduct, sexual battery, driving under the influence and vandalism.
Defensive tackle Ray McDonald was arrested on suspicion of domestic abuse after police said his pregnant fiancee showed “visible injuries” of sexual abuse.
Charges were dropped in April 2017, when the alleged victim exercised her legal right not to press charges.
A group of Niners all lived in the affluent San Jose neighbourhood of Silver Creek, 15 minutes’ drive from where Hayne lived during his time with the team.
Police were regularly called to their wild late-night parties, and tight end Aldon Smith drove into a tree at 7am one Thursday.
“It’s a risk-reward business,” former general manager and the man who signed Hayne, Trent Baalke, said. “There are other times when the character of an individual coming into the NFL was sterling.
“But they end up being guys who get in trouble.
“It’s not always the guys that come into the league with a chequered past that leave the league with a chequered past. It can be the opposite.”
HAYNE’S life has been a whirlwind since California. He played for Fiji’s Rugby Sevens side in an attempt to make it to the Rio Olympics, but missed selection in the gold medal-winning squad.
Soon after he met Australian Amellia Bonnici, reportedly on Instagram, and the pair started dating.
Hayne, then reviving his NRL career with the Gold Coast Titans, was shocked when the 25-year-old announced not long after they met that she was pregnant and expecting his child by the end of the year.
He moved her into his Gold Coast apartment and their daughter, Beliviah Ivy, was born in December 2016.
The following November, Hayne confirmed he would leave the Titans and return to Sydney on compassionate grounds, to be closer to his girlfriend and child, who were now living in Forster on the NSW Central Coast near family.
He reportedly took a hefty pay cut to return to his old club, Parramatta, hoping to get his head down and rebuild his reputation.
The Eels had been hopeful at least one other player could be picked up by another club to fit Hayne into next year’s salary cap.
“As this is a police matter the club will be making no public comment in relation to these reports,” a Parramatta spokeswoman said.
Hayne’s representative Wayne Beavis also opted not to comment.
NRL CEO Todd Greenberg wouldn’t be drawn on Hayne’s playing future, but said: “Jarryd has got issues to deal with and they have got nothing to do with rugby league at the moment.”
But pulling on the boots again seems almost impossible after Hayne was this week charged with aggravated sexual assault and inflicting actual bodily harm.
Police will allege he bit the woman’s genitals so hard that she required hospitalisation and that she contacted him afterwards to tell him he hurt her.
Hayne handed himself into Ryde Police Station on Monday afternoon.
He was released in the early hours of Tuesday morning after first reporting to the station about 4pm on Monday.
