​The Bizarre And Sordid Tale of Sorry Tim Simona

Rugby League is, as they say, the greatest game of all but hoooweee can it dish up a scandal. The Tim Simona shitstorm blowing flecks all over the West Tigers currently is one of the most sordid you'll ever read about. The short of it is Simona, a churchy Samoan-Australian who grew up in the infamous west Sydney suburb of Mt Druitt, fell spectacularly for the culture of vice and excess available to all those who play in the NRL.

His cleanskin, god-fearing upbringing in no way prepared him for the bottomless vortex of indulgence that came his way. Simona spiralled into a significant cocaine habit, gambling addiction, and shacked up with a spiteful now ex-partner who would later blackmail him for a boob job. When he didn't pay she sold him out out to match-fixing investigators via social media, so beginning this sorry saga.

Simona's downfall, which he spoke about at length in the Sunday Telegraph, is a caricature of what could possibly go wrong when you play rugby league. On the field, the game is like no other; hard, fast and played by muscle-slabbed mutants who hit each other with the kitchen sink, sans padding, every single play for 80 minutes. The injuries are hellish with aggro that reaches radioactive levels.

When the full-time siren goes the respective clubs dress their natural born killers in sharp suits, line their pockets with cash, and set their bruised and welted heads loose on the general public. For the most part they behave respectfully but even the isolated examples of skullduggery have been enough to smear the game worse than Julian O'Neill's Dubbo motel room.

Simona has disgraced himself worse than any player in recent memory. It's hard to think of a taboo he didn't break. He threatened to beat his ex-partner when their relationship soured; he abused his teammates trust in order to rip off charity and fund his addiction; he placed bets on himself to perform poorly while his teammates worked their slots out to win games; and finally threw his club and players in the shit by telling the press how they did blow during official functions. The question now is: can you come back from that?

Simona is going to try. He feels terrible about everything and has come clean on every last detail of his destructive drug and gambling addiction, which is something. He has been deregistered by the NRL and spoken of paying the money back through a potential move to European rugby union, rugby league's equivalent of a retirement village/rehab clinic.

There is still the question of whether Simona's admission of guilt over placing small-fry bets on himself is not just obfuscation, and the real crime here is playing poorly in exchange for big money and bribes from the international betting syndicates whose involvement in the game has been speculated upon recently. The fact he lives with his parents in a house in Macquarie Fields, a suburb most famous for public housing and rioting with police, where he pays $560 rent a week, would seem to disprove that.

Rugby league is literally the cousin of outlaw motorcycle gangs not to mention extremely provincial. It is played mainly along the east coast of Australia along with a selection of working class towns in Northern England. A player's career typically goes like this: born into a rural rugby league town, housing commission belt, or similar variation of the nation's underclass (this is not a game typically played by people with money. They play rugby union or aussie rules). He is scouted by a club at the age of 14 or 15 and given the chance to be a part of a NRL club's development system, thereby relegating school and career ambitions to the backseat. As you mature, so do your friends, graduating from the brutal country town or houso clump you grew up in to an organised crime syndicate/outlaw motorcycle gang. This has been key to Simona's problem, say those close to him. He simply fell in with the wrong crowd, the people he grew up with in Mt Druitt.

As a journalist who has played the game and still loves the game, it's especially tricky. In terms of what is in the public interest, without being hypocritical (i.e stringing players up for recreational drug use, which I and most journalists I've met, unashamedly do), the best I can do is ram home the fact that this is a special game played by special people. They will break the law and they will act as though they are law unto themselves. This is part of the game's appeal, so enjoy it for that but never forget it. Especially if you end up in a pub alongside them.