Sunday Herald - 21 August 2005
‘Rugby will become an open game and there will be no prohibition on payment to any person involved in the game’
Alasdair Reid says the coming of the professional era was a shock but it was a move that is well worth celebrating


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It’s uncanny how many followers of rugby can remember where they were 10 years ago when they heard their sport had become professional.
With hindsight, the communique that emerged from the International Rugby Board’s (IRB) meeting in Paris on August 27, 1995 seems no more than inevitable, but the amateur ethos had been so fundamental to rugby union it still managed to take the breath away.

T he game’s governors had acquired a reputation for inertia on the matter by the time they arrived in Paris for the meeting that would map out rugby’s future. Most chroniclers of the sport believed they would open the door to professionalism by a few reluctant and heavily qualified inches, not blow the thing off its hinges.

So it was a truly staggering moment when the administrators revealed they were ready to unleash the dogs of professionalism on the sport .

In retrospect, even the game’s modernisers might wish they had exercised some of their more familiar caution, but the sheer boldness of the move should never be forgotten.

Nor should its necessity, for if other sports had come to accept the need for professionalism after long and steady evolution, rugby had no such luxury . The pressure for change had grown over the preceding 10 years, as the demands on players and coaches made their participation in top-flight rugby incompatible with a normal job, but less than six months before the Paris meeting it was still possible for Bill Hogg, then SRU secretary, to pen a programme article declaring rugby would remain an amateur sport.

Hogg has often been pilloried for that dinosaur outlook, but it has to be remembered there were an awful lot of other dinosaurs around at the time.

Many were wearing rugby kit, for at the start of that season only a handful of the world’s top players professed a belief in all-out professionalism. Most wished only to see a revision of the rules to cover lost wages or allow them to exploit fame for financial reward.

Yet if the IRB working party on amateurism, whose report was to be delivered in Paris, had entertained the notion that a compromise could still be adopted or that professionalism could somehow be accommodated in the sport’s traditional framework, the events of the three months preceding the August meeting blew such misconceptions to smithereens. The actions of a handful of men, most from the southern hemisphere, set rugby on an unwavering course towards professionalism.

The most significant of all was the 20-year-old winger from Auckland who had just written his name all over the World Cup tournament in South Africa and across the sporting consciousness of the wider world as well.

Jonah Lomu was rugby’s first true superstar, a figure who could only be supported by a professional game.

He left defences shattered in his wake; you could argue that a century of amateurism was also to be found in the rubble.

Lomu’s worth was better measured by the overtures of scouts from rugby league and American football than any yardstick rugby union had employed. The game had to change to hold on to him, and the backers were lining up with the readies that would provide the means to do so.

It is said Lomu’s destructive power against England in the World Cup semi-final was the significant factor in Rupert Murdoch’s offer of A$550 million for the rights to all major southern hemisphere rugby over the next 10 years.




Famously, three senior officials from the New Zealand, South African and Australian unions got together in Johannesburg and, over the next three hours, mapped out the formats of the Tri-Nations and Super 12 tournaments that would earn the Murdoch dollars. In the aftermath of that meeting, Louis Luyt, president of the South African union, smirked that the money would be directed towards the wider development of the game, but others recognised the real implications. Tony Hallett, the English RFU secretary, declared that amateurism had reached a state of rigor mortis.

But a messy burial was to follow. While the Murdoch deal was being put together, and while the authorities still claimed it was compatible with amateurism, agents for Kerry Packer, Australia’s other heavy-hitting media magnate, were pulling together the strands of an openly professional World Rugby Championship. Under the laws as they then stood, anyone who took Packer’s money would be banned from official involvement in rugby union. But a host of players indicated a willingness to sign up, and those pledges effectively forced the hands of the IRB delegates in Paris. It might have been possible for them to man the barricades a little longer, to expand a few trust funds and tickle the rules governing what players could earn for promotional work, but the contest between Murdoch and Packer persuaded them the amateur game was well and truly up. The southern hemisphere unions had long since abandoned anything resembling adherence to the amateur principle, and the northern representatives realised they could no longer swim against the tide.

The IRB statement released after that Paris meeting stressed that rugby would be open at all levels – that payment could be made to anyone in the game, there would be no ceiling, and win bonuses would not be banned.

Regrets? There have been a few. The most significant was that no-one seemed to realise that paying a bloke to play a game of rugby was simply a matter of historic principle, and that it would be the arrival of the market economy in the sport that was to have the greatest repercussions.

Certainly, Scottish rugby is still struggling to cope with the consequences of that development, and it may struggle for a few seasons yet.

But where professionalism has flourished it has been a riotous success. The sleepy old giants of English rugby now routinely attract crowds close to 10,000 to their Premiership matches, while the international game is played at an intensity that could hardly have been anticipated 10 years ago. A difficult decade at times, but an anniversary still worth celebrating.

This article was posted on 21-Aug-2005, 22:13 by Hugh Barrow.