KEY POINTS:
When you consider the pay rate of nurses and others in like professions, where serving rather than surpassing is the ultimate reward, then no sportsperson is worth what they get.
However, if you are of the view that one is worth what someone is prepared to pay, then
you can only say good luck to well paid athletes.
Matt Giteau has been touted as the most highly paid footballer in Australia, with some media guesswork throwing around numbers like five million dollars in three years.
Good luck to him I guess, and while I'd be happy to wave a placard endorsing higher wages for the nursing fraternity, I'm not sure I'd be able to knock back the fiscal opportunities directed my way if my name were Giteau.
In my short-lived one year career as a Super 12 coach, one of the few reasonably smart things I did was offer the then largely unknown Canberra Vikings half-back a contract to play with the Reds.
That was late 2002 and the two year offer was around $70,000 per year. He and his father Ron declined, citing a desire to remain at home in Canberra. It was a realistic offer and I'm sure not one of the three of us walking out of that meeting would have envisaged the type of money he was able to command within three years. Is he worth what the newspapers say he's getting? Giteau is Australia's best rugby player. He can wear 9, 10 or 12 on his back and look completely at ease, and about the only rugby weakness I see in him is that he'd be useless in the lineout.
His talent is matched by his competitiveness and his understanding of life's checks and balances. The best ever individual package in Australian rugby in the past forty years has been Tim Horan, and Giteau is constructed of the same stuff. Brilliant but unable to take themselves too seriously. If money was no object and I wanted the best player, Giteau would be my target.
Rugby is a team game. More than thirty years on I vividly recall sitting in the team room at the Hornby Trust hotel in Christchurch before a Lancaster Park encounter between Canterbury and Queensland in 1977, and listening to the late Wallaby and Queensland coach, Bob Templeton.
"A chain is only as strong as its weakest link," he pleaded. Pay the Giteaus or any other superstar what you think they're worth, but unless they understand that what Tempo preached remains valid today, then team success is going to elude them.
What I've had to do with Giteau tells me that he is a man driven by the team ethic. It is unlikely he's got the cattle around him in Perth to turn that into Super 14 triumph, but you get the feeling he'd be prepared to swap some of the filthy lucre being tossed in his coffers for the experience of raising a trophy above his head.
