Amid the continuing joy of the South Sydney Rabbitohs premiership the very thing that breathed new life into the near-death club has been tossed away like a dirty old pair of Sluggos.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
After the actor Russell Crowe and the business scion Peter Holmes a Court bought shares in the Rabbitohs, they delighted many a year later announcing they would purge the club of poker machines.
The great and good lined up in 2007 to praise the pair as saviours from the pernicious vice of gambling.
The then treasurer Peter Costello, his brother, World Vision chief executive Tim Costello, NSW Greens MLC Lee Rhiannon and South Australian anti-gambling independent senator Nick Xenophon all sang from the same songbook.
"Pokies are the electronic locusts of the 21st century," Xenophon told the ABC.
Holmes a Court wrote in the Herald that same month: "When leagues clubs were given poker machines in 1956, the goal was not to have more casinos. The goal was to provide leagues clubs with the funding to do positive things in the community. The goal was to help Australians in the healthy pursuit of playing football and for a district to feel good about itself by having a first grade side. Fifty-one years later, the machines have an undeniable social cost."
In the afterglow of the club's first premiership since 1971, it is passing strange that Holmes a Court is selling his share to casino mogul James Packer.
But then, Crowe and Holmes a Court never got away with their vision splendid.
The year after their takeover, the pair copped a humiliating defeat when only three of 100 or so members voted to support their proposal to ban poker machines.
The two reportedly fell out, the split made wider when Crowe assented to sponsorship deals, first with Star Casino, and later with Packer's Crown Casino.
The son of Australia's first high-profile assets stripper, Robert Holmes a Court, whose corporate raider image has been airbrushed by the contribution of his widow, Janet Holmes a Court, and his children to the nation's artistic and sporting cultures, Peter Holmes a Court had all but checked out of his Australian interests years ago after his first marriage went south.
The death of a close friend in a train accident in July while attending his marriage to American Alissa Everett in Zimbabwe apparently convinced him to cut more Australian ties. Holmes a Court, who paid $1.5 million for his share of the Rabbitohs, may pocket $7 million or so by selling to Packer.
Raised in Perth and educated at Geelong Grammar School to the siren sound of Australian Rules, Holmes a Court always seemed an odd fit with South Sydney.
But the reality was that the NRL wanted to go down the AFL path of corporatisation, and Holmes a Court's Rabbitohs' gambit, while both prescient and self-indulgent.
Both codes also had two things in common: The Murdoch and Packer families.
The two dynasties have depended on the codes for their newspaper and television network content for years.
The innovative James Packer even brought gambling to the sport, and these days his Crown Casino in Melbourne permeates the AFL like Condy's Crystals in a swimming pool.
A long-time Rabbitohs supporter, Crowe's financial rescue of the hard-scrabble club turned him from a film star into a working class hero.
As the owner of a casino that will reshape Sydney's self-image, Packer's piece of the victorious Rabbitohs' action makes him a winner too.
