It may take some time for All Black halfback Jimmy Cowan to realise just how lucky he has been in the past week. After landing three separate charges of disorderly behaviour since April, he's been told he has to choose between the bottle and the black jersey: hemust abstain or he won't be playing professional rugby.
A cynic might take the view that if the All Black selectors were not so hard up for candidates to fill the No 9 spot, the young man from Mataura would have been given his marching orders long ago. As it is, he gets a fourth chance.
Having such a stark choice - between one of the more enviable jobs in New Zealand sport, and drinking - is going to make it easier for him to beat what he acknowledges is a drinking problem. No one is saying he's an alcoholic - and indeed that admission, if it comes, can only come from him. But if he is smart enough to take the chance he has been given, he will look back on Tuesday July 1 as the day his life changed course for the better.
That will not be easy. Rugby - and league, too - are cultures saturated in liquor and liquor industry money. One of the All Blacks' major sponsors is a brewer. The union itself might like to consider how responsible it is to associate its powerful brands with products that are abused - particularly by young, rugby-mad men - at such enormous social cost.
It might also consider forbidding drunken behaviour by any player on the payroll, not just three-time offenders. The Cowan saga presents rugby with a major PR opportunity, not simply a singular problem to be solved.
