A man's mission to unite NRL
By Ben English | October 09, 2009 11:00pm
MICHAEL Searle is sipping Earl Grey tea as he gazes through square-rimmed designer glasses across Sydney Harbour and beyond.
We're sitting in the executive club suite of the Sheraton on the Park. Here, 21 floors up, horns blasting from CBD traffic snarls are reduced to a faraway murmur.
It's an image at odds with the burly forward who carted the pill up for Gold Coast during their first NRL incarnation in the late 1980s.
It's also at odds with the no-nonsense chief executive who butted heads with David Gallop until he got his way in 2005, realising a six-year dream to get the Coast back into the comp. And it's certainly at odds with the man charged with perhaps the toughest diplomatic mission since Cain and Abel parted ways - unifying rugby league under one, truly independent governing body.
But, as the front-rower said to the actress, looks can be deceiving.
Beneath the serene exterior purrs an engine that would rival any of
the V8s zooming round Mt Panorama this weekend.
How else could Michael Searle command a thriving accountancy firm, head an international talent management group that boasts some of the world's top surfers, run an
NRL franchise and be responsible for setting up the Indigenous-All Stars game next year? Oh, and there's that small matter of brokering a commission to take over the running of the game.
He may not just be the hardest worker in rugby league, Michael Searle could be the hardest working man in Australia. "I'm an 18-hour-a-day guy," he admits. "But I don't have any difficulty bouncing out of bed on a Monday. I really am living the dream. I was raised a Catholic but if I believed in reincarnation, I'd say
I must have had a really, really crappy life last time around because I've been blessed this time."
Searle can be found at his desk at Titans Marine Parade headquarters in Southport from 5am. The other night he text messaged a colleague at 11.41pm. He is Mr Perpetual Motion of rugby league administration.
Yet today he estimates eight of every 10 waking minutes is spent working on the proposed independent commission.
It's an obsession borne out of not just a love for the game, but a profound knowledge of where he'd be without it. "I owe everything to rugby league," he says. "It gave my grandfather an opportunity after the second world war, it gave my father a career and our family an existence on the Gold Coast that we would never have had if it wasn't for rugby league.
"The only reason that my dad moved from Tamworth and my mum from Werris Creek to the Gold Coast was because that's where he played his football. It's given me an opportunity to get a degree and it's given my children a life they would never have expected.
"So I will dedicate my life to the game for no other reason than the game has been good to me."
From the viewpoint of a boy who grew up in the fast-buck days of the Surfers Paradise white-shoe brigade - those shady property developers that cast a pall over the strip for decades - the game has also been good to his community. "Getting the Titans into the NRL has just unified the city behind a cause," he explains.
"The Gold Coast has always been accused of being soulless. But now it seems to have almost created a level of passion among the kids and that's all anyone cares about. When I was a kid you were almost looked down upon being from the Gold Coast.
"You were almost second class. Now the kids are proud of their city - there's a sense of ownership and community." But one community's league love affair is not enough for Searle. His mission knows no geographic bounds.
He may have been raised a Catholic, but he is spreading the good word of the league with the evangelistic zeal of a missionary man.
Which might just explain how the notion of an independent commission taking over the game from those uneasy bed partners, the Australian Rugby League and News Limited, publisher of The Daily Telegraph, went from dead in the water to an imminent possibility in the space of 17 months.
It was Searle who, in May 2008, assembled fellow NRL CEOs Bruno Cullen (Broncos), Denis Fitzgerald (formerly Eels), Shane Richardson (Rabbitohs), Brian Waldren (Storm), Steve Burraston (Knights) and Tony Zappia (formerly Sharks) for the first meeting to discuss a unified force for league. Fittingly, they met at the game's spiritual home, the SCG.
It was a delicate summit. Two of those present (Waldren and Cullen) ran clubs owned by News Limited so any talk of shifting ownership of the game away from its 50 per cent partners was avoided.
"Any discussions around the shifting of equity was never openly discussed in a group format because
it would have made everyone uncomfortable," Searle recalls.
"So the equity being shifted to a non-profit entity probably came out of a sub-unit of that because the original concept was about restructuring the branding, and the equity shift came out of what we would be aiming for if we were
to move forward for the next
100 years."
That first meeting went all day and into the night. There have been 15 in Sydney since and one on the Gold Coast. They last for three to six hours.
Searle has gathered powerful allies, including Harvey Norman's Katie Page, former Qantas chairman Gary Pemberton and Sydney Roosters chairman Nick Politis.
Politis, one of league's true powerbrokers, helped ensure crucial figures such as Nine Network chief executive David Gyngell got on board. But Searle is adamant a far more potent force has driven the mood for change: the fans.
"Everywhere I go people ask me, 'When are we going to get it?' It's one of the few things I have seen come up in the game where it hasn't been howled down.
"I think people see there is a real benefit to this new structure and everyone wants to see the game
do better."
NRL's well documented off-field troubles this year have only galvanised the mood for reform, says Searle. "I think what (the off-field scandals) did was solidify a lot of fans who said, 'You know, this is part of my fabric ... I did grow up in a rugby league suburb, town or city, I love the game'. I had a discussion with Wayne Bennett the other day. He said, 'I always knew how much Queenslanders love their league, but I never realised the passion down here, they really love it in Sydney'.
"Often when things are bleak and you have dark days, people sit up and say, 'I'd hate to see my game die'.
"You almost have to lose something before you appreciate how valuable it is to you."
Searle has felt that, like when David Gallop rang him on August 16, 2004, to tell him the NRL was rejecting the Gold Coast's reinclusion proposal, that the money would instead be spent on junior development officers.
Searle told the game's chief, "That's fine Dave, that's your choice, but you can stick your development officer and your witch's hat right up your arse."
Nine months later, the Gold Coast were back in the NRL. "When I'm passionate about something, I go hard for it," he says. "I think I've had to substitute hard work because I'm not the most intellectual person in the world - hard work has been the only way I got anywhere."
That work appears ready to deliver Searle his most significant payoff yet: the game he loves being truly unified.
