Las Vegas is the perfect place for the NRL to launch its American revolution. Founded three years apart, the city (1905) and Australian rugby league (1908) have both risen from humble origins to become stages where risk, fame, fortune, drama, success and excess collide at speed.
When they come together this weekend, in a double-header showcase at Allegiant Stadium, the results – on field and off – could be as explosive as a cocktail jigger of nitro and glycerine.
Las Vegas is the “Atomic City” where people once sipped champagne cocktails in the Sky Room of the Desert Inn while watching mushroom clouds from nearby nuclear explosions. It’s why the NRL is marketing itself as the world’s ultimate blood and thunder contact sport. Come for the carnage, stay for the entertainment and do a little gambling while you’re at it.
Elvis would have loved rugby league. With those hips, he’d have packed a hell of a sidestep. He’d have loved that league is a working man’s game with dreams to entertain the world. The pioneers who built it weren’t college kids, but coalminers and truck drivers, farmers and field hands, street cops and council workers. Every weekend they downed tools, donned their colours and played a violent, brilliant, passionate game for the public’s entertainment.
Yet the lead-up to this weekend has been all glitz and glamour. NFL legend Tom Brady threw bullet passes to Brisbane Broncos pin-up Reece Walsh. Hollywood stars Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman are in town as the figureheads for the Rabbitohs v Sea Eagles clash. Super Bowl-winner and Taylor Swift-squeeze Travis Kelce and his bestie Patrick Mahomes are VIP invitees and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson wants to buy a franchise in a US rugby league competition.
Stars from the four teams on show have been busily wooing the US market as only they can. Souths’ centre Campbell Graham bluntly vowed the sides are “going to get out there and bash each other”. Manly speedster Jason Saab was more diplomatic, explaining to a baffled talk show that a rabbitoh was a totem and “a real animal” rather than repel Americans with the reality that it was a bloke who caught, skinned and sold bunnies at market a century back.
This bold venture is more about the ties that bind the two nations beyond $400bn in submarines. Crowe’s YouTube primer reminds Americans that NFL and NRL are brothers from another mother. Rugby league, he eloquently growls, “is football … but maybe not as you know it”, a game of gifted athletes, brilliant teamwork, complex strategies, curious laws and tribalism.
The NRL is in Las Vegas, like every other punter or entertainer in the city, to make money. It craves a slice of the $180bn the American Gambling Association says was bet in 2023, and a turbo-boost of the NRL brand to lure revenue from US broadcasters and sponsors. And it has timed its arrival cannily, landing Stateside after the NFL season has finished and before the basketball and ice hockey leagues reach the playoffs of their 82-game seasons.
But to win the grand prize of global recognition and riches, they must first bring the show. Crowe issues a battle cry that “for the first time NRL is being unleashed on Las Vegas”. It is an advertisement for the game but also a warning for the city: when the NRL’s players aren’t performing on Allegiant’s field-on-wheels, they’ll be at play in the vice playground of Sin City.
A fat stack of transgressions have already been waved off to get visas expedited and both countries have laid down covering fire for what could happen if it goes atomic. “US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy understands our culture and understands not every rugby league player has a completely clean sheet,” prime minister Anthony Albanese told radio after an NRL dirty dozen were interviewed (read the riot act) by US officials before flying out.
Fans of The Hangover can only imagine what fevered American dream may yet play out. Luckily, like Elvis, a convoy of minders are in Vegas to protect Australia’s finest from its bright lights and prevent author Hunter S Thompson’s premonition in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right … we were winning.”
Whatever happens in Vegas this weekend can’t stay there. This is the first year of five NRL assaults on the US. Will America fall in love with rugby league and its “no pad, no helmets” players? How the cards fall may be immaterial. The real game will be played off the field.
