NRL humour stewards missed an even bigger joke: the Suaalii exception
There’s a nice old racing joke about the chief steward who comes across a trainer feeding his horse a suspicious white powder before a race. “It’s nothing,” the trainer says, “just a flavourless glucose powder.” The chief steward says: “Prove it.” So the trainer eats a scoop himself and gives the steward a mouthful, too.
After the steward goes off, the jockey comes up and asks the trainer for his riding instructions. “Go hard in the lead,” the trainer says, “because the only ones who are any chance of catching him today are me and the chief steward.”
As its subject is breaking rules to gain an unfair advantage in sport, the joke is on safe ground.
Less so sexism and racism, as the National Rugby League dictated this week.
In its role as chief steward of humour control, the NRL re-educated Sharks forward Toby Rudolf, who had joked in a post-game interview that he was off to Northies to drink “a thousand beers” and then “try and pull something, anything will do”.
In my innocence, I thought Mr Rudolf was describing nothing more than some end-of-night self-pleasuring or a similar victimless crime, but apparently the verb in his sentence meant sexual conquest and was less offensive than its object, the likening of (we assume) women to “something, anything”.
Never mind that Mr Rudolf was performing a self-parody of the boofhead sexist footballer and was actually headed for an ice bath and a night in front of The Crown. It was a bad time for a sexist joke, even if told against himself, and an even worse look for his male TV interlocutors to be chortling away in a tone that suggested some had misheard Rudolf’s meaning and taken his Northies plan literally. We all reveal our subconscious in what we find funny, and the NRL did not like what it heard.
If the NRL got in a twist over that one – the predictable dialogue over fun police and driving “characters” out of the game ensued – it made a real pretzel of itself over racism.
The object here was Parramatta’s Junior Paulo, whose on-field display of strength was applauded with a gorilla emoji on an NRL digital organ. Gorilla! Primate! Ape! Someone at the NRL woke up screaming in the middle of the night and took the emoji down. After which, Paulo put it back up, the big tough prop proud to be called a gorilla. It was then taken down again. And so the offending emoji faced an extinction from which not even Jane Goodall could save it.
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