Rugby League: Happiness is the next victory

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Behind the reception desk at the Warriors' Penrose headquarters is a blown-up print of a bunch of very happy rugby league players. In the bottom left-hand corner the team's chief executive officer is crouching, and grinning. Champagne is being sprayed.

It is a picture that captures perfectly the joy the fans felt last Sunday when a team some Aussie commentator wrote off as "half-raw meat" proved they could more than withstand the heat of the Aussie oven.

The Warriors had made the grand final - and who would ever have thought it?

Two years ago, they were written off at home too. They had million-dollar debts, and let's face it, mate, they were losers.

So, last Monday when the team arrived home to a heroes' welcome, you could forgive CEO Mick Watson a little cockadoodledo.

But here he is being interviewed at the airport, sounding about as excited as a vegetarian at a barbecue put on by The Mad Butcher.

"Look," Watson said then, "we haven't done it yet. We haven't done much really."

Behind Watson's big, cluttered desk, in the office with family snaps and a framed photo of the Rumble in the Jungle bout site signed by Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, he's as upright as a goal post in his CEO's chair. He looks very serious in his black corporate-wear shirt with the little Warriors logo.

When I'd phoned him on Monday morning to remind him about his promise of an interview if the Warriors made it to the grand final (he hadn't forgotten; he takes keeping promises seriously), I said: "Isn't it exciting?" He said: "Not around here it isn't."

It's not very exciting sitting next to Watson at a game either. He doesn't speak, doesn't show any emotion, doesn't celebrate a try.

He had never thought about this before but says that, yes, "possibly it's a little bit of self protection, that one day my emotions may spill over. But there'll be the right time and place for that."

The truth is he suffers from awful nerves before, and during, the game. Sometimes he throws up. "Sick. Can't eat. I don't eat on game day until two or three in the morning. Very rarely do I go to bed. I usually sit up and try to relax."

The right time and place for Watson to shed his Easter Island statue impersonation might be on Sunday - if the Warriors slaughter those Roosters.

He doesn't want to talk up the team before they've won. He's naturally cautious. In any case, he says, "we talk about not just now, not this week, not even the grand final. But: what about next year?"

He'll celebrate true success "when we finally achieve other people's expectations".

It's hard to figure out whose expectations he's talking about. The fans, although they will be doing some very serious celebrating if the Warriors win the final, might already feel that their team have exceeded their expectations.

For Watson, achievement doesn't come in any easy measure: "Maybe when I leave. Maybe when we've doubled our value as a business. Maybe when we've won two or three premierships."

He is either an eternal optimist, or an eternal pessimist. Either description would strike him as excessive. He does not enjoy excessive descriptions of himself.

He is most definitely not of the ra ra rark'em-up school of motivators. He tells the team: "You're not going to win every game. Let's concentrate on the ones we can win."

"I don't give big motivational speeches," he says. "It doesn't work. I think it's condescending."

He likes the facts. He was raised a Catholic but now, "unless you can show me a ghost, unless you can provide the Loch Ness monster, I'm the person who says, 'give me an explanation on paper.'

"And the facts for this weekend are that we've beaten these guys three out of four times. The facts are that we are, probably, in my opinion, the only team that can beat this team this weekend," he says, the big grin he keeps tucked away beneath his serious CEO's face beginning to crease the corners of his mouth.

That's a good enough clue, although he is loath to predict match outcomes. He's a CEO, not a crystal-ball gazer.

As a CEO he's tough. When he arrived from Australia two years ago he cut his corporate team of around 30 to nine. Players are drug tested and their alcohol levels monitored the day after big nights out, after a big game.

He'll go as far as to admit that his biggest fault is lack of patience. In a crisis "I tend to just grab it and take over and then say this is the way it should be done. I need to be more patient and trusting."

He's working on it.

Minutes later, he's talking about maybe doing some psychology papers because "when you outsource [a sports psychologist] you never know if the person's any good."

H E'S like his Dad, he says. A bit old-fashioned. A man serious about family, about doing things right. He and his New Zealand-born wife, Melissa, have three young children.

He looks back to his own childhood with something like nostalgia for what he calls "simpler times".

He grew up, the "spoiled" youngest child of three, in Parramatta. His dad was a butcher, his mum "a mum". He was a good kid, hung out with his parents and his footie mates.

"It wasn't working class like in the movies, it was more like an institution. You did things tribally. You'd go to the football together and have a pie. You might go to a beer garden and have a squash."

He wasn't a great student under the Marist Brothers but "I've never ridden a motorbike, never held a gun, never been in a police station".

He left school at 16, went to play for South Sydney, kept getting injured. When "sport left me" he took up a career in marketing with, first, Pepsi, then Kellogg's.

Now, according to the women's magazine which had him and the family on the cover this week, he is one of the best-dressed men in the country. And a superstar. He says he has no idea where they came up with the best-dressed label. When I say "nice boots", he gives me a look, but he's too good-natured not to laugh.

I don't tell him that when I asked some women Warriors fans what they wanted to know about Watson, the response was what you'd expect from a bunch of sheilas who watch Sex and the City as avidly as they do the league.

He's already a bit exasperated by the attention: "Do I act like a superstar? My wife says 'you don't cure cancer, boy'."

He's a bit worried, he says. He's done nothing but talk about himself.

He can't help asking: Will this piece be "good news?"

It's irrelevant. As Watson knows, the only bit of news that will matter come tomorrow will be the numbers on the scoreboard when the fulltime whistle blows.