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The 2003 Rugby World Cup kicks off this week with matches being held around Australia. It's a big sporting event, and highlights the increase in the commercial and media interest in rugby since the game went professional. But are the winners limited to people on the football field? And how important are factors like television rights and media coverage?

Program Transcript

Mick O’Regan: Hello, and welcome to the program, where this week we’re interested in the biggest media event of the moment, the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

ABC Radio Sports theme/ excited commentary

Mick O’Regan: If only the next seven weeks is full of excited descriptions of Australian players scoring tries.

The connection between the media and international sport is about to be strongly reinforced as the Rugby World Cup gets under way. So this week, unabashed Rugby fan that I am, The Media Report is looking at the tournament which will begin tomorrow when the hosts and defending champions, the Australian Wallabies, take on the Argentinian Pumas.

As journalist Sally Jackson wrote in The Australian newspaper last week, sports fans love statistics and the World Cup has plenty: 600 players from 20 teams competing in 48 matches at 11 venues in 10 cities.

Channel Seven, the host broadcaster, will use 151 cameras and 830 video tapes to generate around 96 hours of coverage to be seen in 205 countries.

So it’s a big media event. And we’re going to look at the tournament from a number of different media perspectives.

Late last week I went to the Australian team’s training centre in Coff’s Harbour, on the mid north coast of New South Wales, to get a sense of how the players are anticipating the tournament, which will literally reach billions of television viewers.

First up, Wallaby Captain, George Gregan.

George Gregan: It’s good, the build-up seems very intense, but also very productive, so we’re really keen for that first match.

Mick O’Regan: George, this isn’t your first World Cup campaign; do they feel different, one to the other?

George Gregan: This is obviously much different, it’s at home, so it’s a massive event; and really excited by playing in front of your home crowd.

Mick O’Regan: Different expectations?

George Gregan: Always the same as far as an Australian team is concerned. You always want to go out and win it.

Mick O’Regan: We’re joined now by Wallaby lock, David Giffin. David, how are you feeling about the tournament?

David Giffin: Mate I’m very excited. I think a lot of guys have been waiting a long time, you know we’ve worked extremely hard over the last five or six week period and also through the domestic season, so I think there’s a lot of anticipation within the side, and guys are really looking forward to getting on the field for that first game.

Joe Roff: Obviously we’ve been speaking about the World Cup, everyone has for a long time now, but for it to actually be upon us now is really exciting. I think there’s a nervous energy in the team that is going to all go well for what’s coming up. And we’re just looking forward to getting out on the field and in that first match.

Mick O’Regan: Australian Rugby players, Joe Roff, David Giffen and of course first, George Gregan, whose play will provide the product that will be used by the media around the world.

The face and voice of much of the television coverage will be the veteran commentator, Gordon Bray, now with the Seven Network after a thorough traineeship with ABC Sport, from where he began his long career in broadcasting.

Gordon Bray: I started with the ABC Sports Department in 1969 as a specialist trainee in sport, and that was a two-year cadetship starting in Sydney. And they sent me down to Hobart after that for my first promotion. Some would argue that wasn’t seen as promotion; I thought it was, it was a fantastic learning experience. I called my first international Rugby game back in the early ‘70s, I think it was about 1971. France played Tasmania on TV. Huge day on a windswept Cornelian Bay in Hobart, the breeze was coming off the Antarctic, there were a few stray dogs there, and a few local diehards, and we were up on top of this huge scaffold that was swaying in the breeze. And Tasmania got the first try, so there you go.

Mick O’Regan: Remembering those days in Tasmania up on the windswept scaffold, describe to me the sorts of conditions you now sit down when you broadcast say the Rugby World Cup Final this year. What sort of environment are the broadcasters in? Are you sort of perched right over the field in a glass box?

Gordon Bray: We’re in a glass box. We’re right on the half-way line, we’re probably a couple of tiers back. I would call it the best seat in the house, to be honest. It’s quite spacious, there’s a little annexe room, where you can sit down quietly and prepare, have a cup of tea, have a sandwich, you see the make-up ladies perched around there somewhere in case you’ve got to appear in vision. But the actual commentary area, it will house probably up to five or six people across and the producer then sits behind you in her little compartment, and it is pretty sensational, I have to say.

You have a couple of big monitors there, so you can follow the action both from the naked eye and also from the TV monitors with just the output of the TV production van, and also you have a statistician alongside you with another large monitor which embraces every possible, every imaginable statistic to keep you up to date with what’s going on and stuff that you can feed in to the telecaster. It’s an amazing situation and I think there’s even a toilet straight outside the door, so we can’t complain.

Mick O’Regan: Now Gordon, I can imagine this raft of extraordinarily difficult surnames to pronounce, as these various players run on to the field. As one of the key Rugby broadcasters around the place, how do you actually prepare as you go into a game? Are you studying numbers and names, are you looking at team strategies; do you have to try to get a feel of the way the two teams play?

Gordon Bray: Over the last few months I’ve been gathering material, background material, from newspapers, international Rugby magazines, obviously the Internet, and compiling quite a large dossier on each team and individual players. And all of that comes together and it’s there for me during the broadcasts. It also gives me a well-rounded flavour of the whole thing, and the background of each team; that’s the way I’ve always done it. I think you prepare as you do for an examination.

If you go in there well prepared, I think you’re going to perform with some sort of confidence. And as far as pronunciations are concerned, they terrify me, particularly when I’m looking at maybe Georgia and Roumania, and even some of the South American teams like Uruguay, who I haven’t seen before. So I’m going to have to get hold of the Embassies here in Australia and physically go through and check out the correct pronunciations of every player and every official in their teams, to make sure.

Mick O’Regan: So that’s what you do, you’d actually get a Consular official or an Embassy official to sit down with you and say, ‘No, that’s pronounced like this; that’s pronounced like this.

Gordon Bray: Yes, but I’ll do it over the phone. But certainly I’ll get their phonetic pronunciation so that we’re spot on when it comes to the big day. I think that comes back to my ABC training, there’s no doubt about that. We used to have in the early days, a pronunciation clerk and whenever we were in doubt we were able to ring up this lady, I think her name was Pepita Conlan from memory, and she would give us the correct pronunciation.

Mick O’Regan: Channel Seven Rugby commentator, Gordon Bray who tomorrow evening will call the tournament’s opening game between Australia and Argentina.

…

Mick O’Regan: For players and coaches the professionalisation of Rugby Union meant a new attitude to the game and to the media.

Andrew Slack was the Captain of the Wallabies during the first World Cup in 1987, and this year was coach of the Queensland team in the provincial Super 12 competition. He played in the days when Rugby Union was an amateur code, and when media interest was a fraction of today’s blanket coverage.

So, what sort of presence did the media have in Rugby when he wore the Australian jersey?

Andrew Slack: Well they were a factor but nowhere near the factor that they are nowadays, or the presence. But I don’t think – everybody has a different view on the media and I don’t think really that the circumstances you’re in are going to change that much. I mean clearly if something had have happened in 1987 in the first World Cup, you’d probably have three reporters there, a couple of newspaper blokes and one television guy and that would have been it, as opposed to a – and they would have been rung up or just showed up as opposed to handouts, and a properly manufactured press conference. I mean there was no such a thing really until I would have thought, the ‘90s. Maybe after games that would happen, but not pre-games.

Mick O’Regan: Rugby players and football players generally aren’t always known for handling the media with any dexterity; as a person who has gone on to have a career in the media, what are your thoughts about the pressure that’s put on to players to suddenly front up often to international press conferences, and articulately explain what can be quite a complex game?

Andrew Slack: Yes we’re all different people and have different abilities as being able to explain things, that’s a start. I think the advantage they have nowadays is that they get some training; players will get training in media exposure and how best to handle it, and I think having media managers for most high profile teams, they would ideally be astute enough to say Well this bloke is not going to be capable of handling what this press conference wants, so we’ll put somebody else in’, and if there is someone who is clearly the target of the press, they will be very thoroughly I think, spoken to prior, in terms of what answers to give. So it’s all fairly strictly controlled and at times a bit sterile.

Mick O’Regan: So in that sense, is the focus damage control rather than actually giving out information?

Andrew Slack: I think damage control in certain circumstances is very much the two buzzwords, because sports are so sensitive of image nowadays, and they don’t want the wrong thing misinterpreted, or albeit, the right thing misinterpreted. So I think they are extremely careful that nothing untoward is said, and they throw out a bit of rhetoric from time to time, and sometimes the media are at fault in the way they report things, and sometimes players are at fault in the sense that they’re far too sensitive to criticism. So it bites both ways.

Mick O’Regan: Because the media’s regularly criticised beyond sport, in very much say the political realm, if they have a sort of triumph and tragedy mentality. It’s either really big news, it’s going to make everyone happy, or it’s exposing something that no-one wants to get out. Is that your experience of how Rugby is covered, that it’s either reports of some guy having a drunken brawl after a big game, or winning the World Cup, but there’s nothing really in the middle?

Andrew Slack: Yes look, I think Rugby is generally well handled in comparison to some of the other things, you know, more your tennis and golf and maybe your Rugby League, and even your AFL in the southern States. But I think the nature of the media beast is definitely a triumph or tragedy one, and my coaching this year, as I said to many people, when you do things well, they’ll say it’s better than it was, and if you do things not so well they’ll say it’s worse than it was. So there are extremes, and too often the middle ground is seen as fence sitting, and therefore weak.

Whereas quite often, the fence is the right place to be, if you know what I mean. So yes, I think you’re accurate in the assessment. Rugby I think suffers less than most, and I think by and large your general Rugby player at the elite level in Australia, handles the whole deal pretty well. And I think media people would suggest, like the guys at Channel Nine and the ABC or whatever, I think if you asked them, I’d say that the Rugby guys are pretty well respected in comparison to the others, and the way they respond to things.

Mick O’Regan: Andrew Slack, former Captain of the Wallabies, and until recently, the coach of the Queensland Rugby Union team.

Of course the person who will bear the brunt of media criticism if the Australian team doesn’t live up to expectations, is Wallaby coach, Eddie Jones. I asked him what sort of demands the media make of his time, especially in the lead-up to a major international tournament.

Eddie Jones: Well it has a fairly high demand. Firstly we’ve got a responsibility to try to promote the game; in Australia we’re in constant competition with the other sports, so being the national coach you’ve got to get out there and promote the game as much as you can, and particularly this year with the World Cup there’s enormous interest in Rugby. You’re seeing guys who don’t normally write and speak about Rugby now commentating on Rugby. So a fair chunk of the day is spent meeting the requests of the media.

Mick O’Regan: Do you have a thought through way of approaching the media, or is it a day-by-day proposition?

Eddie Jones: We have a media manager, Djuro Sen and we meet very regularly to discuss what issues we’d like to get out there in the media, how we approach the media. So we definitely have a plan in place, but as you know, Rugby’s an emotional game and sometimes the plan, you don’t stick to the plan too well.

Mick O’Regan: What about the argument that there is, especially in the lead-up to major internationals, a sort of media strategy, like psychological operations, I think the military call it; is it true? Do you think about things that might unsettle the opposition and might galvanise your own team?

Eddie Jones: I think the media is a very significant player in the environment leading up to a game, and certainly at times we’ll look to use the media to advance our position, and at other times we won’t. So it is a very significant player.

Mick O’Regan: And have you had to do media training yourself, or do you find the best way to approach it is just to say what you think and think what you say?

Eddie Jones: Oh no, I think you’re always qualifying to do the job better, so you’re always looking to improve. I’m lucky Djuro gives me feedback on my performance, and certainly at times I’ve used various sorts of media people to get different ideas and to improve the way you present yourself to the media.

Mick O’Regan: Now it’s often been said of the media that they’re all power, no responsibility, and particularly in the lead-up to the World Cup, there’s huge expectations on you and the Australian team to retain the William Webb Ellis Trophy here in Australia. Does this feel different as far as the media is concerned to any other campaign that you’ve been involved with?

Eddie Jones: Most certainly. I think various media organisations are taking various campaigns to sell their product, and given the significance of the World Cup this year, the amount of speculation and scrutiny that we’re under has probably increased three or fourfold.

Mick O’Regan: And of course people would know that there are very high profile former Rugby coaches in the broadcast media; the name on everyone’s lips of course is Alan Jones who broadcasts on Sydney commercial radio. Now he’s someone who has extraordinary media clout and also a great deal of knowledge about Rugby. When Alan Jones decides to sink the metaphorical slipper, do you just ignore it or do you feel the need to respond to what people say?

Eddie Jones: Oh no, I think you just get on with it. I think there are some things you need to respond to, and other things you don’t. And you pick your mark to see what needs to be responded to, and you let other things go through.

Mick O’Regan: And what about the players? There have been various controversial issues, there’s also been a whole series of fantastic results for the Australian Rugby Union team over the past decade especially. What’s the policy of the Union as far as players speaking to the media?

Eddie Jones: Well again, it’s done through our media manager, but we like the players to be consistent in their message, but also we like the players to be individual. I think sport’s about playing in the team, but also being your own person. So whilst there are certain areas that we like to speak about, we certainly give the players some latitude in being able to express themselves fully.

Mick O’Regan: Has something gone into the media attributed to you that you thought to yourself, ‘I never said that, that’s an outright misrepresentation.’?

Eddie Jones: Yes it’s happened a couple of times. Once in South Africa last year I was quoted as saying, by various organisations, that the South African forwards were soft, which I never did say. But I found that generally speaking it hasn’t happened. There’s probably once and maybe one other time that I can think of, so I think the media in essence are quite professional about the way they handle things.

Mick O’Regan: And we often hear that a particular report that might end up in the paper, for example, that comment, or that attributed comment that the South African forwards were soft, you know you hear that Tiaan Strauss might cut that out, stick it on the wall; or Rudolph Strauli is it now, the South African coach, might stick that on the wall and get all his forwards to read it and say, ‘That’s what Eddie Jones thinks of you’, as a way of firing them up. Is that just myth, or does that actually happen, that media comments might be used to sort of invigorate your own forwards or backs?

Eddie Jones: I think it’s very dependent on the coach and the team. I think some teams tend to respond well to that sort of extrinsic motivation whereas other teams don’t. We’re certainly not a team that needs external motivation to play well, and I’m not the coach that generally uses those sort of things. But again, at times you might find that to be a little bit of a lever that lights something up.

Mick O’Regan: Do you have any anecdotes that you can share with us about particular Australian players who might have been susceptible to getting a bit worked up by pointing out that something that The New Zealand Herald might have said about them, or somesuch?

Eddie Jones: There’s definitely some players who are affected by the media, so it’s our job to ensure that that effect is in a positive way and sometimes it can be to spur the player on to great heights, you know, just thinking off the top of my head, someone like George Gregan is not affected at all by the media, it’s water off a duck’s back, whereas Wendell Sailor might take it a little bit more personally, and it gives him a bit more of a spur.

Mick O’Regan: Really, someone like George Gregan about whom a huge amount is written, George doesn’t even bother to read it I suppose.

Eddie Jones: I think George reads it and I’m sure various people around him communicate what’s being said to him, but he doesn’t let it worry him, he just gets on with the job and you can see this year the amount of coverage that he’s had just on himself. If he was to be affected by the commentary, it would be very hard for him to handle.

Mick O’Regan: So do you say to players who you think might be negatively affected by the media, to basically not listen and not read and to try to switch off as much as they can?

Eddie Jones: Yes, most definitely. We need each player individually to handle the media well, so it’s definitely one of my responsibilities and Djuro Sen’s more specifically, to ensure that the players aren’t affected adversely by media.

Mick O’Regan: Eddie Jones, coach of the Australian Wallabies.

…

Mick O’Regan: Now to the more serious end of the media’s involvement in international Rugby, which is ultimately connected to the rise of Pay television and the need for sport ‘product’ to fill air time.

Peter Fitzsimons is a writer and journalist who has covered Rugby Union for 20 years. He was in fact a Wallaby in 1989 and 1990. His book, ‘The Rugby Wars’ analysed the transition of Rugby from an amateur game to a professional one, and charted the key role played by Pay television.

Peter Fitzsimons: In 1995 what happened was when Pay television came to Australia, you ended up with two camps being the camp run by Packer and the camp run by Murdoch, one being Optus, one being Foxtel, and they were looking for ‘product’, and this is the first time that Rugby started to think of itself as a product. In essence, on April 1st, 1995, Rupert Murdoch launched Super League, which was an attempt to get the product he needed, first-rate product which was going to be a Rugby League competition which would be what they termed a driver for subscription.

So the essence of the idea of Super League was to have this competition whereby every serious Rugby League person across Australia would have to pay the $30 a month to watch the competition. To get the players, they pretty much had to pay them their telephone numbers, which was guys like Bradley Clyde who was the star of Canberra at the time. From memory, I think his salary went up from something like $150,000 a year to $800,000 a year over a four year contract. Ricky Stewart something similar. They were getting paid enormous sums of money, and what this meant for Rugby Union as this war broke out in Rugby League, was if Rugby Union was going to keep its stars, guys like Tim Horan, Jason Little and all the rest, they would have to pay them serious money.

For years and years, Rugby Union players had been plucked from Rugby and taken to Rugby League, but had always been one every two years, or one every three years, because Rugby was able to offer them, ‘Look, we can’t give you all the money they’re giving you, but we can give you job opportunities’, and all the rest. Now with Super League being launched, Rugby simply had to pay its players money, and the only person who could pay that money was really the sugar-daddies of the modern sporting world, which are the television bosses. And the only person who could pay the real money that they wanted was Rupert Murdoch.

So you had this bizarre situation whereby even though Rupert Murdoch’s forces started the Super League war, it was to them that Rugby Union turned to find the money. And so what happened was, the three Rugby Unions of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, went to Rupert Murdoch and said, ‘We’ll sell you our broadcasting rights over a period of ten years’, and after much to-ing and fro-ing and crunching of numbers the News Corporation came up with a figure of $US555-million over those ten years. And with that amount of money sloshing into the game, their Rugby simply had to turn professional.

Now it was complicated in that particular year because a guy by the name of Ross Turnbull with Geoff Levy and Michael Hill, with the partial backing of Kerry Packer, who put in about $4-million seed money, he tried to launch, they had this World Rugby Corporation, whereby they tried to launch an alternative competition, so for a brief period, and that’s what my book ‘The Rugby War’ is about, you had this fight between Packer and Murdoch for control of Rugby. In the end, Murdoch won it and Rugby Union found themselves with $US555-million and it was on the basis of that, that in November of 1995 Rugby turned fully professional, and just said that ‘this main plank upon which the game has been built for 100 years now is no more. We’re an open, free, professional game.’

Mick O’Regan: And so what you got was a sort of intertwining of the political economies of Pay television and of the professional sport?

Peter Fitzsimons: Absolutely. And it was the Pay television that was the catalyst. And ultimately, it simply couldn’t have gone on. If you looked at you really couldn’t have had this artificially amateur game which surrounded by these other games, whereby people were pulling about half a million dollars a year in Rugby League, it just couldn’t have gone on, it was a vacuum, it was an artificial vacuum, and that vacuum could persist when the sports around it were making a little bit of money here and there, but what we’ve seen in the latter part of the 20th century, was all over the world the elite sports got huge money, huge amounts of money, more or less built on that whole Pay television industry because the corporate world found a way to corral the thing that people wanted, which was to watch sport, and make enormous amounts of money out of it.

And from that moment on, it was always destined to be that Rugby would have to turn professional. And it’s interesting looking back upon it, I mean I look back upon a couple of (I work for The Sydney Morning Herald) columns that I wrote in the early 1990s which for me now, from the point of view of 2003, I find stunning in their naiveté, for one, that I could have written that. And I remember writing in ’92 and ’93 something along the lines of, ‘I never want to see the day where anybody is paid money for putting on the Wallaby jersey.’

You know, that day when I wrote that, was in fact two or three years away only, and guys like John Eales would be making half a million dollars out of it, and it’s been a whole cultural shift in the way we look at, and in many ways I think it’s gone too far, that I can’t stand it to hear Rugby Union referred to as a product. There is a whole different paradigm used by the sporting administrators now, and I think that because it’s a product, they try to manufacture as much of that product as they can, and so the Wallabies, instead of playing five or six tests a year or three tests a year, they’re now playing ten and twelve tests a year because you’ve got to deliver the product into the gaping maw of the Pay television. And all the rest.

Mick O’Regan: Now Peter, just a final question: given your history in the game as an amateur and your analysis of the professional game as a journalist, part of whose portfolio includes Rugby, just give me a sense of the Rugby World Cup that’s nearly upon us as a media event; how big and how vast is the international media coverage going to be?

Peter Fitzsimons: Well it’ll be vast. I mean you won’t be able to spit out the window without hitting a Rugby journalist from somewhere in the world right in the eye, or a Rugby supporter. It’s the biggest sporting event in the world this year, in terms of the number of visitors it generates, the number of games, the number of spectators watching it, and the television audience globally will be enormous. Mind you, I always laugh when I see these television audiences reported 3-billion people watching around the world, I think, Well let’s see, there’s 16-million now, 20-million in Australia of which I suppose 2-million to 3-million could give a damn about Rugby. OK, so Australia’s contributing 3-million; New Zealand, the country of 5-million, they will, well let’s put all 5-million of them watching, OK, so 8-million between Australia and New Zealand.

I tell you what, I’m struggling to get up to 3-billion. It won’t be as big as that, maybe that’ll be the collective audience if everybody in New Zealand and Australia turns it on 16 times in a row, which I’m sure we all will. Then we’ll start to get a collective figure maybe up to 3-billion, but at any given time I’ve got no idea and I suspect no-one has any idea, certainly in the hundreds of millions, but not up to 3-billion. But will be a huge event, and it’ll be an occasion for Australia to strut its stuff on the global stage.

Mick O’Regan: Peter Fitzsimons, thank you very much for joining The Media Report.

Peter Fitzsimons: Thank you.

Mick O’Regan: Journalist and author, Peter Fitzsimons. His book ‘The Rugby War’ is published by Harper Collins.

For information on the World Cup, look no further than the ABC’s own website, abc.net.au/rugbyunion/worldcup

And for listening to the games, ABC local radio will be broadcasting all the Wallaby games as well as the finals.

And that’s the program for this week. Thanks to producer, Andrew Davies, who by the way is supporting Wales in the tournament, and to our technical producer, Peter MacMurray who’s draping a Scottish flag round his neck for the whole series.

Andrew Slack
Former Wallaby & Former Queensland Rugby Coach.

David Giffin
Wallaby Lock

Eddie Jones
Wallaby Coach

George Gregan
Wallaby Captain

Gordon Bray
Channel Seven Rugby Commentator

Joe Roff
Wallaby Winger

Peter Fitzsimons
Journalist & Author.

The Rugby Wars
Author: Peter Fitzsimons
Publisher: Harper Collins

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