Playing hardball to win the game

An outspoken and fast-moving Australian seems to have snatched the Rugby World Cup from under the noses of New Zealand's sporting establishment. GREG ANSLEY looks at the man behind the coup.

Seven years ago John O'Neill was a young banker with a big reputation, free to choose, after more than two bare-fisted decades among Sydney's financial high-flyers, just about any job he wanted.

Instead, O'Neill returned to the passion of his youth, headhunted by the Australian Rugby Union to overhaul the sport and catapult it to a new corporate future.

Unhappily for New Zealand, the former chief executive of the State Bank of New South Wales was exactly the right man for the job.

He has brawled his way through the politics of the ARU's boardroom; set up a new corporate structure with a long-term business plan that has already steamrolled New Zealand stadiums out of the World Cup; blackened Northern Hemisphere eyes; hauled big-spending sponsors into the fold; and put Australia's other major football codes on notice that he wants their scalps.

In tandem with O'Neill's boardroom charge, the rampaging Wallabies in the World Cup and the Brumbies in the Super 12 have given him the clout to punch with increasing weight and authority.

"He's a very slick operator," said one commentator who, like most interviewed for this article, preferred anonymity.

"He's the first to admit he's got a reasonably healthy ego. He likes the limelight and he likes to win.

"He does upset the traditionalists because he's prepared to go for the top dollar and sometimes he can go over the top, but overall I think he has succeeded in pushing Australian rugby into the professional age."

British rugby columnist Stephen Jones compared the Australian with England's governing body of old-fashioned amateurs who refuse to accept the business-driven expansion of world rugby and instead insist that professionalism is killing the sport.

"Compare this with O'Neill's regime in Australia," Jones wrote for Planet Rugby. "He acts quickly, he has a high profile, he speaks his mind, he grabs the attention.

"Fair enough, we all thought he was talking bilge and misunderstanding the whole of world rugby with his proposal for a six-nations [series] involving the three Down-under teams - but at least he sets an agenda and gets people talking."

Such grudging admiration is not reflected in New Zealand, where O'Neill's take-no-prisoners approach has stripped the country of tens of millions of dollars through the loss of the World Cup sub-host deal.

Coming on top of the invective the frustrated Australian launched from across the Tasman after the New Zealand union's rejection of his bid to include more of his teams in the Super 12, O'Neill's contractual hardball has hardened perceptions of the ARU chief as a rabid Kiwi-basher.

Associates say there is possibly a grain of truth in that, but insist O'Neill's uncompromising agenda is the real reason why Sports Minister Trevor Mallard had to fly, cap in hand, to beg the intervention of International Rugby Board supremo Vernon Pugh in the World Cup debacle.

"There is a little bit of tit-for-tat because he was pissed at the Super 12 decision, but I don't think that's the whole reason why he's been pretty merciless towards New Zealand," said one.

"He basically says that from day one New Zealand knew what was required and they were procrastinating."

It would be a mistake to believe anything about O'Neill other than that an outcome is always the objective.

Those who knew him in his banking days, and those who have watched his transformation of the ARU, emphasise that when it comes to the business of rugby O'Neill is always the professional chief executive, using language as much for effect as for release.

"He can tone it down and deal with other issues, quite clinically and without emotion," says Rupert Guinness, rugby writer for the Australian. "He's an astute businessman, that's for sure."

O'Neill has simply translated his skills from one boardroom to another.

Born in Sydney in 1951 to Dr John Pud O'Neill, team doctor for rugby league's South Sydney Rabbitohs, O'Neill spent six years boarding at St Joseph's College at Hunters Hill, founded by the Marist Brothers in 1881 on land overlooking the Lane Cove and Parramatta Rivers. (Motto: In Mellora Contende - Strive for Better Things).

To his enduring regret O'Neill never made St Joseph's consistently triumphant rugby First XV - he was in the Second XV - but played First XI cricket, later playing third and fourth-grade rugby for Eastern Suburbs and coaching third grade at Sydney University, where he graduated with a law diploma.

The years after university were heady. He joined the state-owned Rural Bank before it became the State Bank of NSW, moving steadily through the ranks before finally becoming managing director and chief executive in 1987, at what for bankers was the extremely tender age of 34.

"I think a lot of people wondered how he got there," said one colleague from the period.

"People thought that he was very young for the job, that he just happened to be in the right place at the right time to float to the top, not necessarily because of merit.

"As things progressed it became obvious that however he may have got there, he was an astute banker. He proved that while he was young, he didn't get there by chance."

O'Neill was regarded as a man prepared to make bold moves, more often than not successfully, and one who was also able to think flexibly and beyond traditional boundaries: in one case, for example, surprising associates by enticing back a former officer who had left to have a child.

"It was very unusual at that time [the 1980s] to employ a woman with a family to work part-time in a managerial role," the former colleague said.

O'Neill rode turbulent times at the State Bank, watching bad debts soar and profits dive as the excesses of the 1980s came home to roost, later admitting candidly that the bank's ambitious drive into corporate and international markets was foolish.

As the head of a major state corporation, he fought concurrent boardroom and political battles, shaking off repeated Labor attacks on his salary - A$350,000 ($424,500) in 1991, rising to $A480,000 ($582,200) just before his departure - and in his last years successfully rebuilding the bank for private sale, to Colonial Mutual.

When it was time to go, O'Neill did not disguise his relief. Leaving behind assets of A$15.5 billion ($18.8 billion) - the nation's largest after the big four banks - and an environment in which, he said, "everyone wants to protect their arse", O'Neill was, at a mere 43, the longest-serving chief executive of an Australian banking house. "It's time to move on," he said at the time.

Underneath the battle scars of the boardroom were deeper, personal wounds. His mother died when he was still a child; his little sister, the youngest in a family of two boys and eight girls, was killed, aged 4, on his father's birthday; his older brother Terry died of a heart attack in 1993, heavily in debt to O'Neill's State Bank; his first marriage, to actor and childhood sweetheart Paula Duncan, failed after four years.

But by the time O'Neill joined the ARU in 1995 he was remarried with three sons - "I'm the luckiest bloke alive," he told the Sydney Morning Herald - with a string of acronyms after his name, a long list of prestigious directorships and board memberships and a bevy of charitable positions.

He remains a member of the federal panel overseeing corporate mergers, is chairman of the Australian Wool Exchange, a governor of the Sydney Institute, advises the Australian Graduate School of Management, sits on the Tourism Task Force and the NSW Australia Day Council and is chairman of the Australian Catholic University Foundation.

His clubs are Establishment strongholds: the Royal Sydney Golf Club, and the 163-year-old Australian Club in Macquarie St, which sniffily describes itself as "a private gentlemen's club".

The ARU did not know just what it was letting itself in for.

O'Neill was a man with a mission: to clear the union of what one associate describes as "the honorary guys who were in it for the blazers", overturn, streamline and reshape the board into a new corporate dynamo, and challenge the dominance of the rival codes.

There are some simple pie charts in Australian sport: a relatively small population of about 19 million whose sporting loyalties are dominated by four codes - AFL, cricket, rugby league and union, in that order - with each furiously competing for several billion dollars in sponsorships, TV rights, gate takings and associated spinoffs.

O'Neill rebuilt and corporatised the ARU, turned a A$3 million ($3.6 million) loss into a A$1 million ($1.2 million) profit within two years, went head to head with Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd over broadcasting rights, negotiated a collective bargaining deal with Wallaby players, won the rights to host the World Cup, lured new major sponsors, took test matches to Melbourne, Canberra and Perth, rode out boardroom brawls, and launched a long-term global business plan linked to the development of depth and succession in management.

He outraged the ARL by launching an assault on league with the poaching of star player Wendell Sailor, pushing union into the western suburbs and claiming that within 20 years league would be swallowed by rugby into a unified new code.

It is this corporate aggression that has set Australia and New Zealand at each other's throats.

O'Neill believes that to thrive, rugby needs a steadily increasing share of the broadcasting pie, and that in turn means expansion at the expense of the similarly aggressive AFL and ARL.

Expanding the Super 12 by including extra Australian sides was an integral part of O'Neill's strategy, and its blocking by New Zealand was a serious blow to ARU ambitions.

Little wonder O'Neill now has little sympathy for New Zealand.