Hard Road: Tough Thoughts On A Tough Game - extract
Article from: The Daily Telegraph
March 25, 2009 12:00am
THIS is an extract from Shane Webcke's book Hard Road: Tough Thoughts On A Tough Game. The following came under a chapter titled Broncos Behaving Badly.
This is the chapter I didnt want to write, but the one I knew I had to. In just about every aspect, the events it addresses represent one of the blackest times in the long and mainly admirable history of the Brisbane Broncos. In the troubled 2008 centenary season, there were too many instances of late-night dramas and drunken misbehaviour involving prominent rugby league players. (By September, 22 incidents had been recorded over eight months!) And the Broncos captured some of the biggest and worst headlines of the year, just as an exciting run to the finals was starting. What took place in September, and the clubs response to it, led to something that had never happened before in my life and probably will never happen again: I went to a Broncos game not really caring if they won or not.
You would have had to be living in a cave or sailing around the world single-handed with no wireless contact to have not heard what happened that week. In telling the story, I dont want to set myself up as some sort of paragon of virtue or moral barometer. For bloody sure, Im not that. In past seasons I was once or twice on the edge of things that could have caused me problems. When I reflect on that, Id like to think I would have taken on the chin any punishment that may have resulted. But in September 2008, in a rugby league world that has changed hugely in terms of expectations of players behaviour, there were aspects of what took place in downtown Brisbane one Saturday night and in the aftermath that troubled me deeply and which I believe damaged the Broncos.
The story, briefly, was this: early in the first week of the 2008 finals of the NRL premiership-proper, the news broke, in huge headlines, of serious trouble in Brisbane involving what had long since become a toxic mix football players and booze in Fortitude Valleys Alhambra Lounge Nightclub on the night 13 September. Black Saturday, indeed! The previous night, at the Sydney Football Stadium, the Broncos had toughed out a gripping 16-8 win over the Sydney Roosters in a qualifying final to set up a home semi-final against the Storm. Some players enthusiastically accepted the chance of being briefly off the leash, and a number of them met on the Saturday afternoon to begin what would turn out to be a long day and night.
What allegedly took place sometime fairly early that evening was both seedy and for the newspapers sensational. It followed a steady afternoon of drinking, involving up to eight Broncos players. It was reported that three of them Karmichael Hunt, Darius Boyd, and Sam Thaiday had gone with a young woman to a male toilet cubicle in the Alhambra Lounge where she had provided oral sex to two of them, and engaged in penetrative sex with the third. Some of what took place was allegedly filmed on a camera phone. The womans version later was that she was an unwilling participant in some aspects of the encounter. Sharing the details with a friend, and then her mother, she was urged to make a formal complaint to the police, which she did.
In the next couple of days, the story was all over the media, in glaring headlines the news that three Bronco players were being investigated after claims they had sexually assaulted a 24-year-old woman, claims that were denied. It was now a matter for the police, who had set up a crime scene at the club on the Saturday night.
The media frenzy that followed was huge and ongoing in its detailing of a juicy story it being precisely the sort of celebrity scandal that sells newspapers, whether football clubs like it or not. Sex, booze, big-time footballers always a compelling mix.
Whatever it was exactly that occurred on that night and I know what I have heard and read it opened a Pandoras Box that will haunt the Broncos for a long time. The medias pursuit of further details, and the ready involvement of ordinary people perhaps tired of the behaviour of wealthy, drunken young men, led to reporting of alleged details of other aspects of drunken behaviour by Broncos players, adding to the clubs already supreme discomfort. They included:
The disclosure that three players had arrived affected by alcohol at a morning training session on Sunday 20 July following the teams win over the Cowboys.
The release by a bar owner of CCTV footage of an earlier occasion which showed several drink-affected Broncos players entering his venue, grabbing unopened bottles from behind the bar (which they paid for) and walking out with them in violation of liquor licensing law. The decision by Terry De Gunten, owner of the Casablanca Bar, to pursue the players when he realised what they were doing resulted in further embarrassment for the Broncos. De Gunten claimed that one of the players skipper Darren Lockyer had tackled him when he tried to stop the group. Denials from Lockyer and the club followed, but after the release of clearer footage a couple of days later Lockyer admitted that he had been the player involved in the incident caught on film. Some more footage came out yesterday which proves that I am the person who made the tackle on the manager there, he said. If thats the case, my intentions were never to be intimidating. If I offended anyone, I apologise. To be perfectly honest, I dont recall doing it. This episode was hardly earth-shattering but in the context of all that was going on at the time, it was a further embarrassment for the club. And especially so in that it involved the hugely admired captain, Locky.
Accusations that Broncos players had been kicked out of hotels, had been abusive to and spat at members of the public, and had pushed in ahead of other patrons in a lengthy taxi queue outside Brisbanes Normandy Hotel late on the night of the Alhambra Lounge incident.
These were the claims, the allegations, and in some cases the revelations, that accompanied the Broncos into the 2008 finals series.
The whole thing was bloody awful the biggest drama we have confronted in my time at the club. The following Saturday night, before a near-full stadium, the Broncos and the Storm played one of the greatest finals matches in memory maybe one of the greatest of all time. In the Broncos side, which went down almost unbelievably 16-14 in the final minute, were Karmichael Hunt, Sam Thaiday and Darius Boyd.
Ill now turn to a matter of parallel concern: the Broncos response to what took place on the night of 13 September. I want to put on the record my strong belief that, whether or not any criminal charges were to be pressed over the Alhambra incident, the three players involved should not have been allowed to play in that match against the Storm. I believe that the majority of ordinary, decent people who make up our community would have supported such a stance and would have admired the Broncos for taking it.
In my view, the two key elements in the matter can be clearly separated: the specific criminal aspect, which was to be settled by other people, in other places; and the wider behavioural aspect, the question of players having breached the Broncos code of conduct and bringing the club and the game into disrepute. The fact that we had three players in a public toilet with a woman, and drunken players kicked out of hotels should have been enough for us to say: Youre not going to play! That would have been the best and clearest way for the club to tackle it: to stand down the players. It would have been a stance of real strength that would have been applauded, Im sure, by all fair-minded people. Yes, the players had been given the green light to go out drinking that day but, as far as Im concerned, their behaviour went far beyond the boundaries of what is accepted.
At the time, I discussed the issue at length with Bruno Cullen and left him in no doubt about my views. He said the police had asked the club not to do anything until they had completed their investigation. But the police were talking about the legal issue being examined (the sexual assault claim), which was their sole and specific area of interest. On the other hand, it seemed beyond doubt that the Broncos code of conduct had been breached and I could see no problem with action being taken promptly on that completely separate basis. I told Bruno of my belief that we could never go wrong doing the right thing. And from the Broncos point of view, the right thing was to stand down the players. After all, I said, weve stood down players this year for missing training sessions. Youre well within the bounds of precedence them down for this. The Broncos had also, of course, sacked players over behavioural issues in the two previous seasons, as I have recorded earlier.
The Board made their decision in line with advice given by police and Thaiday, Hunt and Boyd played. No doubt the unusual, and unexpected, incursion of Queensland Police Minister Judy Spence into the fray encouraged the clubs decision too. I would encourage people not to pre-judge these players or the events surrounding this incident on the weekend, she said. Come along to the match this weekend.
In stark contrast to the Broncos decision was the stance taken by the Cronulla Sharks around the same time in relation to their five-eighth, Greg Bird. An incident allegedly involving Bird and his girlfriend Katie Milligan had dominated the headlines for days in late August, with Bird initially facing charges of maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm (later changed to a lesser charge of reckless wounding), and Milligan in hospital being treated for serious facial injuries. Later there would be news of further charges against Bird of public mischief and false accusation. Moving quickly, the Sharks stood him down indefinitely and in the weeks that followed refused to budge on their stance despite what appeared to be an orchestrated campaign to let Greg play. Without Bird, the ambitious, but premiership-barren, Sharks bowed out of the competition on the penultimate week of the finals, beaten 28-0 by the storm. I applaud Cronulla for their firm stance, especially as it involved a player considered to be a key element in their premiership campaign.
Meanwhile, at the Broncos, something that really narked me was that even as a storm raged around three players involved in the Alhambra Lounge incident, it simply didnt appear to be important to them. They were seen laughing and carrying on as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, blokes like me and plenty of others who love the club and love the game were defending our arses off, trying to prop things up for the place as best we could. For me, there was always a big moral question at the heart of it. One bloke said to me Ah, well, what about the girl? What about what she did? I replied: For any young girl to be doing that youd have to think she has some problems. But Ill tell you this for sure were not let off the hook in any way because we take advantage of that.
Throughout the whole episode, Bruno Cullen was a man under enormous pressure stuck in the eye of a cyclone. These days, if youre the CEO of a professional football club, and being paid good money, its going to be that way sometimes. It comes with the territory. Brunos was no easy job, and he struggled as most people probably would have done.
Jeff Hall, league scribe for crikey.com.au, was critical of the club in a strong overview of what had become a huge story, writing:
Broncos officials have handled the issues poorly. And in doing so they have seriously damaged the clubs well-deserved reputation in recent years for taking a very hard line for players behaving badly.
Wall was right about the damage being done to the clubs reputation. The story dominated for days, and there were headlines written and opinions offered that were shattering for a proud club. These were just a few of them:
Spit Claims Surface as Broncos Grilled
Broncos say Toilet Sex was Consensual
The Broncos have attracted shocking headlines to a sport that needed to be on the back page for the right reasons this week.
Three Drunk at Training
The club should tear up their contract.
Storm clouds on Broncos horizon
And so it went on
When the Darren Lockyer issue emerged to compound an already horrendous week, Wayne Bennett lambasted journalists, calling their coverage just a lot of muckraking and quite unnecessary. But the club was on the back foot almost immediately when Locky had to deliver his mea culpa on what was admittedly a fairly minor matter, but still one that could have been handled so much better.
At the end of the week, Phil Gould assessed a year in which there had been too much drunken misbehaviour by players. In a Sun-Herald column, under the headline Sorry, Boys, but Partys Over ban the booze, he called for players to sign an agreement stating that they cant drink alcohol while under contract to play rugby league.
As a bloke who loves the Broncos, I was filthy on the whole thing. I long to see the game of rugby league be what it can be. Yet here, once again and on the eve of its showcase weeks of the year it shoots itself in the foot with players acting like imbeciles. I have no doubt that if the Broncos had taken a hard line with the three players as we had with others in 2006 and 2007, we would have come up smelling like roses. My belief remains that they should have been stood down form the game against the Storm. But it was such a bloody hard call for the club. In fact, we were pretty much corralled into a certain response by the police advice: they did not want us to take any action against the players until they had completed their investigations.
I think there were two aspects of that day that should have been separated: first, there was the police matter, and second there was the question of the clubs code of conduct. To have sat the players out would have sent out the powerful message that the clubs code had been breached and we would not condone it. I thought it was wrong of the police to put pressure on the club by stepping across into the territory of our code of conduct which is not a legal matter, but a matter of the moral and ethical standard that we seek to maintain. But I understand the clubs position in the circumstances; it would have been no easy thing to go against the police advice.
At the heart of it is an issue that Wayne Bennett and I have always disagreed on, and which I have mentioned already: whether or not players are role models.
I wont repeat what I have already said on this matter, except to say that the responsibility that comes with being a highly paid professional sportsperson representing a club, its fans, and all the traditions that the club stands for demands that you conduct yourself in a manner that wont harm or discredit the club. Whenever professional players cross a certain moral or legal line, clubs must be tough enough to make hard decisions. Football clubs arent the moral guiding lights of society, but I would argue that they must have amoral benchmark that matches common standards. The question for the Broncos on this occasion was: do our standards as a club include the view that its okay for three high-profile first graders to be drunk in a public toilet with a woman, committing sex acts?
As a professional in high-profile sport, you are on show most of the time. Its a fact of life these days when sportspeople are so readily identifiable. To blokes who dont or cant accept that, Id simply say, Well dont play high-level rugby league, then, because in the 21st century that happens to be the way it is.
The Broncos as a club came out of the events of September 2008 badly. The club peered into the abyss and was encouraged to take a certain position on police advice, thereby setting a difficult precedent. To stand down the players was the hard line, probably consigning the team to certain defeat in the biggest match of the year. The Boards decision to let the trio play wasnt in line with my view. When Hunt, Thaiday and Boyd ran out on to Suncorp, it was reported they got the biggest cheers from all the crowd of 50,000. I made the point to some others in the box at the time that four million other Queenslanders probably werent cheering either the players actions or the clubs reaction.
At the end of the week, there was perhaps a little public perception that the club would take a hard line with lesser players but couldnt bring itself to do the same with high-profile players. In defence of the Broncos management, the point must be made that the situation was completely different with Hunt, Boyd and Thaiday. The advice form the police (to not take any action) was particularly strong it was pretty close to the matter being out of the clubs hand entirely. I wont disclose Board discussions, but will say this: there was a shared feeling of dismay and anger, with feelings so strong that the option of not just standing down the players, but sacking them, was certainly raised.
It was a sorry saga, one that disappointed many people. A syndicated newspaper column written by Tony Durkin, who had been the clubs communications manager for seven years, cut as deeply as anything. Durkin defined disappointment in rugby league and then got stuck in:
Disgust utter disgust is when players from the club we support hit the headlines like the Broncos players have this week and show to the general public anyway no apparent remorse. Since first news broke on Sunday night that three high profile rugby league players were involved in an incident in a Brisbane night club, I feared the worst. As the week rolled on I found it extremely difficult to come to terms with the ugly and damning reports that have kept coming.
Dunkin wrote of feeling betrayed and made to feel a fool by Karmichael Hunt, who he had anointed publicly in his column as the next Broncos captain. Illegalities aside, the 12 hour bender by him and his mates, in the middle of a finals campaign, is disgusting enough behaviour
I am gutted and totally disillusioned by what had happened.
Durko, a heart-and-soul Broncos man, couldnt bring himself to support the club in the match against the Storm.
History records that in the final seconds of the game, the Storms Greg Inglis scored a try that stole the match from the Broncos grasp. For Brisbane, the season was over.
In The Sydney Morning Herald two days later, a four-word letter was published:
Broncos lose. Instant karma.
It said it all. Early the following month, the Broncos moved to stop the rot.
