Tackling Demons

THE SUICIDE OF AN EMERGING STAR COMPELLED NRL CLUB WESTS TIGERS TO GO ON THE ATTACK AGAINST MENTAL ILLNESS. FIND OUT HOW TO PLAY IT WHEN YOU SENSE TORMENT IN SOMEONE CLOSE TO YOU – OR WHEN YOU’RE STRUGGLING YOURSELF

- Daniel Williams

It’s a drizzly Wednesday morning and you are shoulder to shoulder with the players after a Wests Tigers training run, chatting with them about stuff besides footy. And it’s then that a truth slaps you like an affronted woman: televised rugby league shows you everything, and nothing. Slick and all-seeing, it’s also dehumanising. The combatants’ inner worlds – their motivations, insecurities, fears – may as well not exist. To the armchair viewer, the players are pieces in a game, no more or less important than their effect on the outcome.

Paul Whatuira makes his way down the grandstand steps and onto the sidelines of Sydney’s Concord Oval, where the players are toweling off and sipping fluid.

“I try to guide them as best I can,” says Whatuira, the Tigers’ welfare and education officer. “I don’t have all the answers. But at least I can show them a bit of love.”

Whatuira is on the frontline of a movement sweeping through the hyper-masculine world of rugby league. The game has learned the hard way that mental illness can strike just about anyone who’s struggling to cope with what life has thrown at them. It matters little or naught footballers are preternaturally tough, or that fans see them as gladiators, or even that some players may see themselves that way. The truth is they are as vulnerable as you are to the twin scourges of depression and anxiety, and to the occasionally fatal consequence of those insidious maladies.

In a recent poll, 1 in 5 NRL players reported having suffered a mental illness. While that proportion may seem high, it reflects rates in the community where the rest of us do our best to hold things together.