E.T’s own bone

Most spors commentators wrote off Dwain Chambers’ attempt to forge playing career in Rugby League as a publicity stunt. Plenty of RL pundits balked at the mere suggestion of any serious intent; some even went as far as to say it shouldn’t be allowed to happen, making a mockery of the game. (No prizes for guessing who those names were!) However, you could argue that all of them have since eaten varying amounts of humble pie. The one commentator who actually talked some sense during the hubbub was (for once) ‘Stevo’.

In his column for Rugby Leaguer & League Express, ‘Stevo’ had wrote earlier about how the game only gets decent media coverage when it reports on adverse or bad news. This was in direct response to the Jared Hayne ‘shooting’, and to a lesser extent Tim Smith’s battle with alcohol dependancy and bipolar disorder, and Andrew Johns’s 12-year battle with depression—exposed after he was caught in possession of ecstacy. In comparison with these, ‘Stevo’ felt that the Dwain Chambers story, despite previous controversies linked with the shamed athlete, could have a positive effect on the game’s publicity, or rather, could be spun by the powers-that-be to have a positive effect.

It’s true: rugby league on its own merits doesn’t have the commercial gravitas nor nationwide public appeal of certain other sports. The case concerning Damien Reid, and delving deeper into the past, Chev Walker et al, probably earned more space in the national dailies for one day than the game could in a whole week. However, there’s no doubt that in the past month, the main topic of national debate—make that non-RL-followers-actually-taking-about-RL-for-once debate—has been about Dwain Chambers. The most obvious mainstream coverage I’ve seen anywhere has been on BBC One’s Gabby Logan-fronted sports magazine show, Inside Sport. For the past four or five weeks, Dwain’s affair with Castleford has been a main feature. I’m quite sure, bar, perhaps, a duty bound feature to do something before the Challenge Cup final, rugby league has never has this kind of exposure on terrestrial TV for a very long time. Actually, scratch that. More like exposure not seen since the Wigan salary cap fiasco a couple of years back. Fiasco being the operative word, and with it, we come back to Stevo’s original point.

One of the regular commentators on Inside Sport is Tony Livesey. He was quite vocal in playing down Dwain Chambers’s attempts in rugby league; in fact, Livesey virtually denounced them, hinting that the move was nigh on a disgrace to rugby league’s ardent followers. Now, I know this is a long-winded way to get to the nub of this post, but Tony Livesey is, I guess, responsible for the most prominent rugby league related story I’ve seen in a British newspaper for at least twenty years. As a previous long time editor-in-chief for the Daily Sport, Livesey presided over a raft ‘unapologetically trashy’ stories for ‘the newspaper adults read’—not least for their main headline on Wednesday 1 February 1995:

The story surrounded Andrew Ettinghausen—best known in Britain for his stint at Leeds in the late 80s and mano et mano on-pitch battles with Martin Offiah—and Basquali, a notorious Australian photographer. ‘E.T’ was in the process of suing the photographer, then known as Brett Cochrane, and Australia’s HQ magazine because of a nude photo that he found particularly explicit was published without his permission in 1991. The photo in question was taken by Cochrane whilst Ettinghausen was in the shower during the 1990 Kangaroo tour. (’E.T’ eventually won the case and was awarded AUS$350,000, later reduced to AUS$100,000 after appeal.) The Daily Sport, it seems, couldn’t pass the opportunity to tart up the story a bit.

Under the sub-headline: ‘Fans saw my todger in mag’, Ettinghausen claimed, as part of his case against HQ magzine, that ever since the photo was published, a photo he felt was ‘pornographic’, rugby league fans were giving him stick:

Now 28-year-old Andy runs the gauntlet every time he walks down the street. Tormentors even follow him when he goes fishing. And they drive past his house shouting obsenities… Andy claimed he now had to score ‘heaps of tries or do something spectacular’ to divert the attention of fans from the size of his plonker.

I can honestly say: I’ve never felt a player had to do something spectacular to divert my attention from the size of his ‘plonker’, regardless of how long he his in the shower. I’m sure the majority you, especially the fellas, are with me on this. As unpleasant and harrowing this experience must have been for Ettinghausen, the story is typically Sportesque, i.e. funny. But the story wasn’t damaging to rugby league’s image either. In this regard, it has to go alongside the Dwain Chambers episode as quite a refreshing change i.e. the story didn’t inlove an assault, a boozy night on the tiles or a shooting. A great moment in rugby league history it may not be, but alternative it most certainly is.