This transcript has been lightly edited by AI
Sean: What was some of the differences between going from the league, rugby league and NRL to going to union and working in a town, especially my hometown Melbourne, which is very much an AFL town, which is one of the other codes that we talk about when we talk about the code wars, but what was it like going from rugby league to rugby union?
Steve: I'll be forever grateful around that experience. Melbourne's an extraordinary city to work in. I worked for a man who privately owned the Rebels at the time. New Zealand entrepreneur who was passionate about the game, which is not unusual. A lot of businessmen passionate about the game to get involved.
Was really having a crack at making that franchise work in Melbourne. Melbourne's an AFL town and footy town. So you're in a non traditional market, where you're taking a product to market. So you've got to innovate and you've got to be pretty savvy around the way you do the job.
The networking, the time I spent in the market and the lessons I learned and some of the cross pollination between Codes and some of the people I've met with some of the greatest learnings in my career, Melbourne was phenomenal. The other part about Rugby union in Melbourne and it's a story that's never quite been told, but we started doing a brand DNA piece on the club so we could tell a story a little bit more.
And we started to do some research and rugby union in Melbourne, it goes back to the very foundation of AFL itself. AFL itself with T. W. Wills went to rugby college in England, came back as a cricket player. And then basically evolved AFL for a sport that was for cricketers that were keep fit over winter.
But a lot of that was rugby based stuff. And he changed the tackle technique because he thought the green in Victoria was too hard for a rugby tackle. While I was finding all these photos and all this history of rugby union in Melbourne, half the Wallaby side was based in Melbourne prior to World War II.
Weary Dunlop was the first Wallaby to come out of Melbourne, came through the University of Melbourne and basically worked his way all the way through as a student through to a spot in Wallabies until he unfortunately went away to his Burma Railway experience. Has a rich history in Melbourne and start telling that story and Melburnians start to buy in and understand they're all part of the same gene pool.
We had some great success down there. It's great fun. And the beauty about rugby also is that you get to work internationally. We were in Japan and South Africa and Argentina and often in New Zealand. So it was truly global. It was a great time.
