It would be more convenient for everybody if Gerbrandt Grobler was simply a cheat.
It would be more convenient for those who insist that rugby doesn’t have a doping problem if Gerbrandt Grobler could be dismissed as a devious and cunning fraud who was acting alone and what the hell was he thinking?
It would be more convenient for Munster and the IRFU at this stage if Gerbrandt Grobler could be filed in the now bulging ‘we all make mistakes’ folder, the cheat whose doping they hadn’t considered fully, before being sent off home, never to be heard from again.
It would be more convenient for those who insist there couldn’t possibly be a doping problem in Irish rugby if the doping problem could be said to have been imported with the cheat Gerbrandt Grobler and exported when the cheat Gerbrandt Grobler leaves this saintly and blessed land.
It would be more convenient, too, for those already high on the ecstasy of sanctimony if they could continue to spit out the word ‘cheat’ as if it wins an argument when it tells us nothing at all.
And it would probably be more convenient for Gerbrandt Grobler if he could suck up the criticism, while saying as little as possible about what he did as he waits for the crowd to stop chanting ‘cheat, cheat, cheat’ and move on to something else.
But hearing nothing and saying nothing serve no purpose when it comes to doping.
It would have been better if Gerbrandt Grobler had spoken when he arrived at Munster and while he continues to stay silent – and silence seems to have been the sophisticated strategy from all of Irish rugby’s top guys in dealing with this situation – he will be easy to demonise.
Of course, it might have been better if Munster had never signed him, but that wouldn’t have changed the offensive central fact that Grobler had taken anabolic steroids. But at least it would have made it somebody else’s problem and in Ireland, we are at our most sanctimonious when passing things off as somebody else’s problem.
But now it is Irish rugby’s problem and so maybe it might be time to consider the alternative – what if Gerbrandt Grobler is not a cheat?
What if the system was bent, not Gerbrandt Grobler? Of course, even if that was the case, he played his part. He didn’t have to do what he did when he was “young and stupid”. There is always another way, but what if the path he chose didn’t seem that unusual until he got caught?
He was young and stupid, though, and if the ban he had received had been more substantial, maybe more people would have been prepared to believe in one of the staples of sports journalism: redemption.
Those two years probably felt like a long time to Grobler before he resumed his career, tarnished by the tag of cheat, but a player who served his time, admitted his mistake and remained viable within the system, without ever being too hard on the system.
But what if it was different?
The most dangerous thing of all for rugby would be if Gerbrandt Grobler was not a cheat.
The most worrying thing would be if he was not trying to get an advantage through nefarious methods over his team-mates.
The most dangerous thing of all for rugby would be if Gerbrandt Grobler felt he had no option but to dope.
Is it cheating if enough people are doing it so the system is corrupted as it was in cycling and athletics?
Tyler Hamilton said it took him a thousand days. “A thousand days of getting signals that doping is okay,” he wrote in The Secret Race. A thousand days of “signals from powerful people you trust and admire, signals that say ‘It’ll be fine’ and ‘Everybody’s doing it.’ And beneath all that, the fear that if you don’t find some way to ride faster, then your career is over”.
What is the issue then? It still makes those who dope culpable, but it makes everyone who turns away culpable too, and it also means that when cannon fodder is caught, the scapegoating is unseemly and reeks of grandstanding.
In that culture, we can label someone a cheat when the reality is that the system is bent.
In that analysis, zero tolerance allows for the grunts to be demonised while the world keeps turning and the occasional sacrifice can be used to demonstrate the eagerness of the authorities to confront the problem.
Zero tolerance was bullshit when the IRFU stated it as their policy on cheating in rugby. And zero tolerance is bullshit as a crusade, because ultimately everything has a context, although it would probably be better if the context in the Grobler case was something more than ‘there was a crying need for a second row in Munster”, as Philip Browne said on Wednesday.
“I was 21 at the time, young and stupid, and struggling with serious ankle and shoulder injuries. They weren’t getting any better, and I knew I needed to start playing again or I could lose my contract. I had my back against the wall and had reached a point where I thought, ‘OK, I’ve done all I can, so what else can I do?'”
Maybe they were the words of a man hellbent on cheating and there might be no difference between cheating and desperation. Perhaps the words of another player in a similar position to Grobler who didn’t make the choice to dope in pursuit of a contract would be more important. But maybe his words suggested a bigger problem: a world where, when your professional future is at stake, one final choice has to be made, one more line has to be crossed.
But for now we don’t need to think about that. For now, the issue seems simple.
When Gerbrandt Grobler finally leaves Ireland, everyone can ask what that was all about while wondering what that cheat was doing here in the first place.
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