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CHAPTER 7 Professionalism 210 The centrality of amateurism to the overall ethos of rugby union ensured that when the game ‘went open’ in 1995, it became the last major international sport to embrace professionalism. This development , though immediately attributable to the irresistible commercial power of satellite broadcasting, was ultimately the outcome of the game’s internal contradictions. The principal contradiction, always in existence but more evident from the 1960s, was between declared support for amateurism and clandestine toleration of abuses of the amateur code. This was particularly true of the southern hemisphere unions and France. As the deference of former colonies to Britain began to erode from the 1960s, the RFU, as the foremost proponent of amateurism , began to lose its international stranglehold over rugby union. This meant that moves towards the dilution of amateurism (if not its abandonment) clearly favoured by South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and France carried much greater weight, particularly from the 1980s. Moves towards the introduction of a Rugby World Cup, for instance, were successful despite strenuous opposition from the RFU. The financial success of the tournament’s inaugural and second stagings in 1987 and 1991 put considerable strain on the maintenance of amateurism.1 This was exacerbated by agitation among players for a share of the financial windfall, exemplified by the refusal of English players to speak to the media during the 1991 Five Nations Championship without monetary compensation. It was the intervention of Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation, however, that delivered a fatal blow to amateurism in rugby union. In early 1995, Murdoch proposed the introduction of a new Super League competition that would significantly expand the financial base of rugby league in Australia. With mass defections of union players to league and its new-found riches likely, the southern hemisphere unions were left with little choice but to negotiate a separate deal with Murdoch. In April 1995, the three unions (now under the SANZAR umbrella) signed a£340 million deal with Murdoch to televise rugby union and declared Professionalism 211 that the game was no longer amateur. Their northern hemisphere counterparts , faced with the certainty of a split in world rugby, had no option to accept the game’s new disposition.2 It has already been observed in Chapter 2 that the end of amateurism was met with a hostile reaction in Ireland.3 Irish rugby officials and press correspondents opposed the development on a mixed platform of ideological and practical considerations. For the IRFU, amateurism was essential to the character of the game, as evidenced by an official pronouncement in 1995: The IRFU will oppose the concept of payment to players to play the game and payment to others such as coaches, referees, touch judges and members of committees for taking part in the game because the game is a leisure activity played on a voluntary basis.4 Even more revealing was the opinion of then IRFU president Ken Reid: Let us be realistic, this could mean the end of a player pursuing a career outside the game and that is a sad situation. When [then Ireland scrum-half] Niall Hogan was conferred with his medical degree . . . I pointed that out.5 Clearly the idea that an individual qualified to practise a respectable profession having attended a respectable school (Hogan attended Terenure College) could conceivably consider rugby anything other than a pastime defied Reid’s assumptions of what the function of the game was and what social cachet it should appeal to. The sentimental musings of the IRFU were matched by legitimate concerns as to the effect of market forces on a game built around a rigid and conservative club system. It was obvious to commentators that the domestic game, being built on a modest financial base and solidly amateur in outlook, would be vulnerable to the cultural change that professionalism would inevitably bring about. This cultural change would come in the form of new elite-level competitions, merchandising , marketing, broadcasting deals and an international transfer market. The IRFU had no obvious scheme in mind for coping with this traumatic change and an overarching sense of trepidation characterised official and press discussion on the fate of Irish rugby in the seasons immediately following the 1995 decision. Edmund Van Esbeck, perhaps the most vocal critic of professionalism, summed up the views of many in late 1995: There is every reason now to be apprehensive about the fallout from the game in this country. I stated before that once professionalism came in the...

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