Paul Osborne, the new CEO of the National Rugby League club Parramatta Eels, is a devout Catholic with nine kids who’s just entered a glamorous world where maintaining Christian values at times seems impossible. In Perth 13-17 February for a pre-season game against St George Illawarra, he revealed to Anthony Barich how God redeemed him through his Catholic faith, his marriage and the fraternity of other Christians.
In 1994, Paul Osborne was the toast of the nation’s capital when he was the most unlikely hero in the Canberra Raiders’ NSW Rugby League premiership.
Raiders fans, starved of a premiership since then, still talk of the glory days when the club – and the competition – was dominated by “Green Machine” – a name which applied as much to the club’s guernsey colours as its imposing captain, the legendary Mal Meninga, who also remains the only player to captain an Australian Kangaroos tour twice.
Osborne’s 16-minute blitz as a last-minute replacement prop in that decider was almost as surprising as his successful election to the ACT Legislative Assembly as its first independent member a year later.
By this stage, however, he’d drifted from the Church and, in his words, “the marriage was under the pump”. He looked to his local parish – St Thomas’ in Kambah – for support, and soon realised that he needed that foundation to keep his marriage strong. He even remembers his Kambah parish priest, Fr Greg Beath. “Good fella,” Osborne reminisced.
Though he admits he was “out of control” in his football heyday, he maintained a connection to his Christian roots by striking up a friendship with Australian World Cup winner and NSW State of Origin star Jason Stevens – a Christian who, since retiring, has set up a website and toured schools promoting celibacy before marriage to youth.
With Stevens, he organised during his playing days an annual get-together of Christian footballers, and gathered up to 70 players annually. Osborne was also a police officer during his playing days.
Osborne’s seven years in politics – he held the balance of power when ACT’s Liberal Chief Minister Kate Cornell formed a minority government with his support in both 1995 and 1998 – also contributed to him finding the straight and narrow.
In a “liberal jurisdiction”, his public opposition to abortion, euthanasia and heroin “shooting galleries” made him a target but it forced him to think about his faith more seriously.
“It was a real challenge for me as I’d only just got back to Church; though I’d been a regular Massgoer, I hadn’t been that involved,” Osborne, now 43, recalls of his early days in politics, which he said he joined as he wanted to have an influence on the city where he was bringing up his children.
“It was a real test in what I always believed, as it’s one thing to say it in the privacy of your own home or amongst friends, but when you have to go out in front of 300,000 people and articulate an argument as to why you don’t think euthanasia is a good thing, it’s a real challenge.”
It was a tough time, but he was edified by striking up a friendship with prominent Catholic Brian Harradine, the elder statesman of federal politics who, like Osborne, held the balance of power.
“The sad reality of society is that all the things we believe in are slowly being eroded away. But I read somewhere that Mother Teresa wrote that God doesn’t call you to be successful, he calls you to be faithful.” - Paul Osborne
Harradine was responsible for Coalition Prime Minister John Howard barring Australian taxpayers funding overseas abortions, a policy which the Rudd Government reversed last year.
“It was a very tough time, as when you take a stand on these things you can come under the pump a bit. You’re a target,” Osborne said, chatting to The Record in a van in the parking lot of an obscure rubgy oval in Beaconsfield where his boys go through their routines. “I was fortunate that Brian Harradine was in parliament at the time and he became a mentor to me. He really spent a long time with me. We used to hang out. He’s just a great, great man.
“The sad reality of society is that all the things we believe in are slowly being eroded away. But I read somewhere that Mother Teresa wrote that God doesn’t call you to be successful, he calls you to be faithful.
“So I think it’s just nice to be able to stand up and say ‘here’s what’s right’, and it doesn’t matter what others think.
“I was encouraged by the strength of my convictions on those issues. Obviously, the Christian Brothers did a good job on me in Lewisham,” he half-joked.
Having returned to professional rugby as community relations officer for the Raiders in 2004, then as chief executive of the NRL’s Player Manager Accreditation Programme in 2005 and matchday commentator for ABC’s rugby league coverage, he made another remarkable comeback when appointed chief executive of the troubled Parramatta Eels in July last year.
When he took over, the club was in dire straits. In 2008, it reported a record $7.8 million loss but, when he took over, things transformed nearly overnight.
He oversaw the troubled club’s rise to the grand final, winning seven regular season matches in a row on the way, breaking the record for the biggest crowd at a match outside of the grand final when 75,000 people attended their Preliminary Final win over the Bulldogs.
His friendship with rugby union convert Timana Tahu was also pivotal in the star returning to the Eels from rugby for the 2010 season.
While the club is not as embroiled in controversies by players’ extracurricular activities as, say, the Bulldogs, temptation is still rife, which he knows all too well.
With nine children aged three to 18, he’s tired of having to explain to his boys why yet another player drank too much, got in yet another bar brawl, glassed a girl or was charged with sexual offences. “There are a lot of pressures and temptations out there; it’s very difficult to maintain (any kind of) faith,” he said. But things have turned around since his playing days.
“There’s a lot of Christian guys coming together and encouraging each other. Many guys are certainly benefiting from the fact that there are many other Christians out there supporting them.
“Ultimately, they’re responsible for their own actions and all you can do is give them as much support as you can. The club’s player welfare manager is a Christian, we have a chaplain, we try to look after their families and them.”
For Osborne, it’s a great privilege to play rugby league at a professional level, and “these guys need to appreciate that, and if they don’t like it they can do something else”.
“I just get sick to death of trying to explain to my boys why someone did this and did that. You can’t make excuses for them forever,” he said.
It is when players connect with the Christian faith that he sees profound changes, like his own Parramatta superstar Jarryd Hayne, a regular church-goer at Hillsong.
“It’s really turned him around,” Osborne said. “There’s a calmness about him that wasn’t there before, and I think that’s because he’s hooked up to a church.
“The thing for me was my faith gives me some security and peace in knowing that God is there. It’s certainly made a difference in my life.”
In an effort to lift public faith in footballers and to give them the chance to gain the perspective of the wider world outside their own glamorised bubble, he organised six non-Christian NRL stars on a trip to Rwanda in October 2008, working in a village building houses for widows and orphans and visiting the famed Mountain Gorillas.
The trip gained extended coverage in News Limited newspapers and Fox Sports TV.
He was inspired to organise this when visiting Uganda in 2006 with his mate Brian Houston, a Hillsong pastor.
His son Jacob, 13 at the time, wanted to come so two years later he took him with the rugby stars as a bar mitzvah-style ‘right of initiation’.
“I believe very much in the Jewish tradition of the bar mitzvah – where you go from a boy to a man, and I thought Jacob was ready to go,” Osborne said.
“He’s a great kid. I’m very proud of him, and I just wanted him to see how lucky he was here and to have a strong social conscience, and that, if you can help people, you should. For us (NRL personalities), it was eight days out of our time, the cost didn’t take a lot for us to make a not insignificant contribution.”
Last year, he took six more high-profile players, and now he has a queue of stars wanting to come along on the annual trip.
Amidst all the notorious bad press around NRL players, Christianity may just be taking a foothold … gradually.