ONE thing that was always drummed into me was an old newsroom saying: If everybody thinks the same thing, then nobody is actually doing any thinking. So, with everybody thinking it would be great if the International Olympic Committee rubberstamps a recommendation that rugby (and golf) be included in the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, I'm thinking: "Are we missing a trick here?"
I'm in a big bind here: I love rugby (even went to the school where it was invented) and I especially love Fiji rugby (I'm within arm's reach of a jersey signed by the 1997 sevens Rugby World Cup-winning team, and a framed photo of the 15s side that beat the British Lions in 1977).
But, sometimes you have to think with your head and not your heart. I believe rugby's unconditional admission to the Olympics would only sustain a political structure of governance that is discredited and needs to be swept away to save the game we all love.
The same brain's trust of major unions that stand to benefit from rugby's inclusion are the very reason rugby left the Olympics in the first place. England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa did not deign to send teams to the Paris Olympics in 1924, where there was only hosts France, the USA and Romania. The same unions' subsequent refusal to enter the 1928 Games was too much for the rugby-loving founder of the modern Olympics Baron Pierre de Coubertin who reluctantly okayed the game's subsequent omission.
This negligence has characterised so much of the direction given by political powers that control the International Rugby Board. "Patrician and haughty", "frightened indolence", these are some of the more polite terms used by respected rugby writer Stephen Jones to describe the calibre of leadership provided by past IRB delegates from major unions.
So who is this brain's trust? Political power within the IRB is vigorously and jealously manipulated by a self-selected elite of first world nations. Last year an independent study, co-authored by top UK legal firm Addleshaw Goddard, found seven per cent of IRB's member unions controlled 62 per cent of voting power. Put another way, 90 per cent of the unions (think, developing world) had less than a quarter of the votes.
The apex of this power, rugby's equivalent of a boardroom, is the 26-member IRB Council, the game's ultimate and supreme authority.
Sixteen votes, two-a-piece, come from the so-called Foundation Unions of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
Compared to this permanent bloc, the ten votes shared, one each, between Japan, Italy, Argentina, Canada and the six regional confederations, are almost an irrelevance. But the regional bodies do allow the IRB to put up the figleaf that technically all 97 full member unions are represented, albeit once removed.
Fiji, for instance, votes to elect the Federation of Oceania Rugby Union's IRB representative (currently, the Samoan lawyer Harry Schuster), but Australia and New Zealand also vote in the same FORU election as well as having two seats apiece in the Council.
The painful truth is rugby is not in good health across the Council membership. Some examples: The number of senior male players in Scotland may soon tip below 10,000; in Australia almost all of the Super 14 matches were out-rated in the critical New South Wales TV market by the National Rugby League' Under-20 Toyota Cup (that's right, Under-20); in England, a month into the Premiership season and only two sides have scored try-bonus points and five out of the 12 teams are averaging less than a try a match (prompting headlines in the Daily Telegraph like, "Is It Me, Or Is The Rugby Rubbish?") And, for the first time two Foundation Unions failed to reach the knockout phase of the last Rugby World Cup (but don't worry, the rules were rewritten to make sure both qualified automatically for 2011).
In fact everybody on the Council is fretting about something - from the weakness of their local currency to inroads made by rival sporting codes. Which is why the 20 delegates representing national unions view issues through the prism, not of what is good for the game, but what is good for my game.
As if that isn't enough of a burden, a dead man's grip is written into the system. All significant initiatives require a 75 percent majority, meaning three foundation unions plus one other can scupper anything (including changing the Council composition). So issues play out along well-worn fracture lines: Everybody Against England. Celts Together. North vs South. Don't Let Australia Depower The Scrum, and so on.
The jaundiced watchcry is Cui Bono - rather than Pro Bono.
This mutual suspicion is what collapsed attempts to rewrite the Laws of the Game (the so-called ELVs). And why, as rugby enters its first economic recession since turning professional and the Zurich Premiership averaging a kick every ninety seconds, the game's lack of leadership is imperilling its very existence as an entertainment choice.
Not only have the ELVs been kicked into touch but a raft of long-overdue areas of reform have also been neglected because decision-making has become such a fraught process.
Critical for developing unions are an overhaul of the rules on eligibility, on the release of club players for national duties and the creation of clear, transparent and binding system to manage player transfers and the fees due to the unions that developed them.
Of course, every governing body has internal tensions between members who have political and economic muscle and members who don't. But you would have thought that at least in the area of the Rugby World Cup - the game's showpiece tournament - the IRB Council would only sanction a truly level playing field?
Not a bit of it. The major unions can only advantage themselves if they disadvantage others; witness in this example, the unrepresented Pacific Island teams:
Under the draw for the 2007 tournament, Fiji (v Japan and Canada), Samoa (v England and USA) and Tonga (v USA and Samoa) were required to play two Test matches with the space of four days.
Not only that, the draw required them to break camp and travel from one end of France to another (in Fiji's case to fly from France to Wales). Effectively this meant, the Pacific Island teams had only three days recovery between crucial qualifying matches. Was this terrible imposition asked of any of the Foundations Unions? Of course, not. Just as it wasn't in RWC 2003, when the same self-serving political elite also produced a conspicuously lop-sided draw.
The IRB concedes the political structure is skewed in favour of some nations but adds, "it is not unreasonable to argue that those that provide the bulk of players and money into the Game should have the bulk of the representation".
The bulk of players? Well, that isn't true: Fiji, with a population one-sixth of Scotland, has more senior male players and a consistently higher IRB ranking, but is only represented at arm's length by a regional confederation.
Perhaps quality of players? Not true either. Japan, Italy and Canada hold three precious Council votes but between them have only once reached the final eight in all editions of the RWC. Samoa has made it to the knockout stages in three of the five previous tournaments, yet has no direct vote (Schuster represents FORU and votes in a manner proscribed by his FORU constituents).
So all that's left to justify this magic-circle arrangement is money. How close to the Olympic ideal does this sound, Bring the Game a bag of cash and you'll have special voting privileges for life? (The RWC has justified the manifestly unfair draws imposed on smaller unions by saying it facilitates TV scheduling and the viewing demands of broadcasters). But that appeal to money sounds especially discordant in Copenhagen where IOC delegates expressly turned away from the big-money corporate appeal of Chicago 2016, in order to embrace the possibilities of the developing world in the shape of Rio de Janeiro.
In the past the IRB has validated its constitutional arrangements by saying that, from RWC profits, it reinvests upwards of USD50 million a year in growing the game globally.
But the RWC is only this profitable because of the teams competing from outside the Foundation Unions. A tournament with only Foundation Unions would consist of 16 games, producing a fraction of the revenue to put against largely the same per-team costs. It's only when you add the 12 teams with no IRB vote (or one) that the tournament grows to 48 matches and, at an average of 47,000-plus paying spectators per game, generates the vast profits seen in France.
Therefore the IRB are only distributing the very profits that unfranchised members helped earn, yet use the profits to cloak the Council in respectability and stymie attempts to create a fairer, more responsive and forward-looking political structure.
That $50million investment should be seen for what it is, not a sign of the Council's spiritual enlightenment, but a financial dividend for participating in a profitable enterprise. By the IRB's standard, a retiree's FNPF pension would count as an on-going altruistic gift from the employer, not the payment of deferred salary.
What we are really talking about is the Rous Paradox, named after Sir Stanley Rous, the former schoolmaster who became FIFA president in 1961. Rous discovered the hard way that the more you grow the game, the more political power the ancien regime must concede, and the smaller its place is in the new order. Rous diligently grew football, particularly in Asia and Africa, but the more members the president brought into FIFA the less biddable the organisation became.
Rous lost the FIFA presidency to Joao Havelange in 1974 and Europe's old order, in the form of UEFA, have not backed the winning candidate in a contested presidential election ever since. But by serving a wider, global constituency both Havelange and his successor Sepp Blatter have grown the game in a manner unimaginable to Rous and his predecessors (and European football can hardly claim to have suffered as a consequence).
When I was at school, one of the claims to fame that Fiji had was an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records: greatest defeat in a World Cup qualifier - 0-13 against New Zealand in 1982. Thankfully that record is gone but, let's be honest, on the world stage that's about all that Fiji football has achieved. So it seems remarkable (in a good way) that the Fiji Football Association has as powerful a vote within FIFA in presidential elections, changing the constitution, ratifying financial reports, as England, Germany or Brazil.
Yet the Fiji Rugby Union (twice 7s world champions and the only team to tour New Zealand unbeaten) is mute, basically powerless in the IRB. And all the time the major unions are squabbling and back-stabbing, only stopping to conjure up new ways to advantage themselves and disadvantage those not at the top table.
Here's the tragedy of rugby. Although both rugby and football started at the same point in time, from the same place, have a similar colonial heritage and a similar low cost of entry and participation, rugby's consistently backward-looking governance has denied the sport the spectacular trajectory enjoyed by football. And that's why the IOC should send a clear message to the IRB Council. Play fair with your governance.
Loosen your grip, open things up, and once you've created a level playing field, then come and join the Olympic movement.
Charlie Charters was marketing manager of the Fiji Rugby Union from 2001-4 and helped create the Pacific Islanders Test side. His first book
the thriller Bolt Action
will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in May.