by Las Vegas is the perfect place for the NRL to launch its American revolution. Founded three years apart, the city (1905) and the Australian rugby league (1908) have risen from humble beginnings to rapidly colliding stages of risk, fame, fortune, drama, success and excellence.
When they meet this weekend, in a doubleheader showdown at Allegiant Stadium, the results – on and off the field – could be as explosive as a cocktail jigger of nitro and glycerin.
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Las Vegas is the “Atomic City” where people once sat sipping champagne cocktails in the Sky Room of the Desert Inn while watching mushroom clouds from nearby nuclear explosions. That’s why the NRL is marketing itself as the world’s ultimate blood and thunder contact sport. Come for the kill, stay for the entertainment and do a little gambling while you’re at it.
Elvis loved rugby league. With those hips, he would have packed a hell of a side. That series loved that it was a working man’s game with dreams of entertaining the world. The pioneers who built it were not college kids, but coal miners and truck drivers, farmers and field hands, street cops and council workers. Every weekend they threw tools, wore their colors and played a violent, fantastic, passionate game for the entertainment of the community.
But it’s all glitz and glamor ahead of this weekend. NFL legend Tom Brady threw bullet passes to Brisbane Broncos’ Reece Walsh. Hollywood stars Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman will be in town to headline the game between the Rabbitohs v Sea Eagles. Super Bowl winner and Taylor Swift-squeeze Travis Kelce and his superstar Patrick Mahomes are VIP visitors while Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is looking to buy a franchise in a US rugby league competition.
The stars of the four teams that were on display are keeping busy in the US market as they can. Southern center Campbell Graham bluntly promised that the sides were “going out there and beating each other”. Manly speedster Jason Saab was more diplomatic, explaining to a baffled talk show that rabbitoh was a totem and a “real animal” rather than offending the Americans when in fact he was a member of the rag, which skin and sell rabbits in the market a century ago. .
There is more to this bold venture than the ties that bind the two nations over $400bn in submarines. Crowe’s YouTube primer reminds Americans that NFL and NRL are brothers from a different mother. Rugby league, it grows eloquently, “it’s football… but maybe not as you know it”, a game of talented athletes, great teamwork, complex strategies, strange laws and tribes.
The NRL in Las Vegas, like every other punter or entertainer in the city, is there to make money. He wants a slice of the $180bn the American Gaming Association says was promised in 2023, and a turbo boost to the NRL brand to attract revenue from US broadcasters and sponsors. And it has cannily arrived, landing Stateside after the NFL season is over and before the basketball and ice hockey leagues reach the playoffs for their 82-game seasons.
But to win the grand prize of global recognition and wealth, they must first bring the show. Crowe issues a battle cry “for the first time NRL is being unleashed on Las Vegas”. It’s an advertisement for the game but also a warning to the city: when the NRL players aren’t performing on Allegiant’s rolling pitches, they’ll be playing in Sin City’s secondary playground.
Fat stocks of transit measures have already been canceled to speed up visas and the two countries have covered up a ritual of what would happen if he went nuclear. “US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy understands our culture and understands that not every rugby league player has a completely clean sheet,” prime minister Anthony Albanese told radio after the NRL’s dirty dozen were interviewed (read riot act) at United States officials before flying out.
Related: How the NRL hopes to cash in on its controversial Las Vegas feature | Jack Snape
Fans of The Hangover can only imagine what the elusive American dream could still be. Fortunately, there is a convoy of security guards in Vegas to protect the best of Australia from their bright lights and prevent the introduction of the author Hunter S. Thompson in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: “There was madness in any direction , anytime. You could hit sparks anywhere. There was a great universal feeling that everything we were doing was right … that we had won.”
Whatever happens in Vegas this weekend can’t wait. This is the first year of five NRL attacks on the USA. Will America fall in love with rugby league and the “no pad, no helmet” players? How the cards fall may be irrelevant. The real game will be played outside the field.
