When team building becomes soul destroying

That may be why Jackson Topine’s lawsuit against the Bulldogs is so polarising. Topine this week commenced legal proceedings against his former club, alleging head trainer Travis Touma punished him for reporting late to training by ordering him to wrestle between 30 and 35 of his teammates. According to the 22-year-old’s statement of claim, he suffered “psychiatric injury” and “physical and mental impairment” as a result of the incident last July.

The reaction both within and outside the NRL world has been divided. On the one hand, the Bulldogs have allegedly been too heavy-handed with a player whose mental health should have been more carefully cared for. On the other, Topine’s mentality has been viewed as out of step with the sport he played. In short, it is subjective because people are subjective.

Does rugby league presuppose a certain type of mentality? More than that, does it, when in a team environment, ask individuals to forego their own psychological dispositions so that this desired mentality becomes uniform across the board? And what is the extent of this homogeneity? Do the variations in human temperament cease to exist for the duration of time on a training and playing field?

These are not sport-exclusive questions. Most industries and occupations dictate a self-imposed restriction on the parts of one’s self which do not fit a job description. In healthy terms, this is called professionalism. Perhaps this can edge towards harmful when some of these demands – explicit or implicit – clash directly with an employee’s values and/or feeling of wellbeing.

This is a heinously difficult differentiation to make in relation to rugby league. When physical punishment is a key bullet point in the job description, how does a coach or another authority figure determine how much and under what circumstances? The area becomes even more grey when considering league’s love language, which champions the hardman who would run through brick walls for teammates and continues to play with a broken jaw or shoulder or a torn ACL.

This is the implicit part – the NRL folklore discourse which equates repeatedly slamming one’s already-beaten body through another’s to heroics. On Anzac Day, Dragons centre Moses Suli was knocked clean out before he even hit the turf after a head clash with Roosters prop Jared Waerea-Hargreaves, and the concussion conversation is thankfully now well-trodden.

But even as the coaches from both sides urged a rule change to stop it happening so frequently, Shane Flanagan referenced the league as “this really tough gladiator sport”. That is not a negative per se, merely further confirmation that players are coached to deliver big hits. And now Topine’s case has placed the training environments of all 16 NRL clubs – and all the way down to grassroots – under the microscope.

History has also contributed in a big way. In the decades before the biff was outlawed, mid-game punch-ups were commonplace, and the level of physicality at training often reinforced this. Men back then were not encouraged to share their feelings, let alone protest if something caused them psychological distress. Sports psychologists are largely a 21st-century phenomenon, and some codes are ahead of others.

In 2018, an infamous Adelaide Crows training camp left Eddie Betts feeling “psychologically and culturally unsafe” after personal information of his (and others) was allegedly provided to counsellors running the camp was used against them in an exercise. One exercise at the camp allegedly involved the players forming a circle, making eye contact with one another, and screaming obscenities. In another, players were allegedly made to surrender their mobile phones and subjected to what Betts described as a barrage of verbal abuse and psychological intimidation involving fake weapons. The camp’s creators have denied most of the allegations.

Coaching, too, has moved with the times, and the art of man management might just be the key skill to possess when chasing success. What feels like too much for one player might be the bare minimum needed by another to perform.

Just ask Graham Lowe who, while coaching Manly in the early 1990s, arranged for Matthew Ridge to cop body blows from two boxing-gloved teammates for 30 seconds without retaliating as a trainer yelled “take his head off, take his head right off his shoulders”.

“I teed it up with the army instructor that we had to pick on Matthew first,” Lowe said at the time. “I did it not to try and belittle Matthew, or anything like that. I did it to try and let the other players see that Matthew had plenty of ticker.

“And that is the key – he’s got plenty of ticker. And he got put in the situation with two blokes … it’s just body punching against two other players, and it’s very, very demanding on you physically. But he was able to come out of that with plenty of dignity. I know the players were very, very pleased with the way Matthew handled himself in that situation.”

This was more than 30 years ago and, full on as it is, arguably an early act of man management designed to get the best out of a player who could handle it. Lowe coached the Sea Eagles back to the finals. That approach may not fly today. Some surely wish it would, and believe it to be the only sure way to results.

It is difficult not to think about the video that surfaced last year of a junior rugby coach in New Zealand giving a pep talk to his veritably tiny players and calling them “jersey-pulling bitches” (among other unprintable bits and bobs). The footage, apparently captured several years earlier, prompted an outcry of “toxic masculinity” and an apology from the coach himself, who said he cared deeply for the players who were from the same community. Some others wondered if that was a reason the Wallabies find it so hard to beat the All Blacks.

Everything is subjective. One size does not fit all.

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