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Hock's failure a worry for game?
BY the time this column goes to Press, a white-coated laboratory technician - who I like to imagine would sport some of those bottle-bottom glasses held together with sellotape beloved of Calderdale's chemistry teachers in the 1980s - will have shoved his dip stick in Gareth Hock's B sample and we will know whether Wigan's superstar back rower did, as it appears, take cocaine.
If the jury comes back with a guilty verdict, Hock will get a mandatory two year suspension from the game and a career that once looked so promising, for both club and country, will be in tatters.
The England forward had it all: a six-figure contract with his hometown club, a walk-up place in Tony Smith's Test squad and the best years of his career ahead of him.
Given those advantages, it can only have been idiocy or supreme arrogance that made him risk it all for the temporary high afforded by a line of the white stuff.
There are those who regard doping in sport, whether performance enhancing or recreational, as a hanging offence.
I'm not one of them, because human frailty dictates that everyone - you, me, them - can make a mistake.
And there are rules in place to deal with those mistakes.
Which means if you do the crime, you do the time, spend two years kicking your heels and are then free to try and return to your profession without further recrimination.
Wendell Sailor, Ryan Hudson and, closer to home, Jamie Bloem, Martin Pearson and Sean Penkywicz have both done just that with varying degrees of success and it is my guess that Hock will eventually do the same, probably still with Wigan.
The disturbing thing about Hock's case is that it is not the first cocaine positive this year.
Low profile Batley hooker George Flanagan fell into the same trap in the spring.
Two cases hardly constitute a crisis, but given that sport is not immune from the problems that afflict society at large, the game's powerbrokers can ill afford to be complacent about recreational drug use.
And while punitive action has a place when an athlete falls foul of the testers, it is education, from individual clubs and the governing body, that prevents them from failing those tests in the first place.
In that respect, Hock's positive - from a player who has enjoyed every privilege the sport affords its star names and who certainly had a lot more to lose than Flanagan and probably 90 per cent of his fellow professionals - should at least prompt a reassessment of those programmes.
WHILE Hock awaits his fate, a player for whom the term 'model professional' could have been invented has announced his retirement.
Canterbury's Hazem El Masri, a veteran of 300-plus first grade matches for the Bulldogs, is calling it a day at the end of the season.
In an era where the sport Down Under seems to attract bad news like horses attract flies, El Masri is a sporting and social icon, particularly for Sydney's Lebanese community.
The record breaking kicker has never been tainted by the whiff of scandal and remains the epitome of class, on and off the field.
The Bulldogs will miss 'El Magic'. But not as much as Australian rugby league.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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