Sayonara SBW
Sonny Bill Williams has played his last game as an All Black. How you feel about his time in the world's best sporting environment says a lot about what you think about the modern sporting landscape.
Williams has always been a spectacular player, drawing eyeballs from his teens to his twilight years, in rugby league and union and in boxing. It's this athletic transience that makes him unique but that also makes him unlikely to be considered as 'a great' of any sporting discipline.
Even with all he's won, all the titles and the medals that he's given away to fans, Williams has never put together a sustained body of work in service of a greater entity than himself. He won Super Rugby with the Chiefs and left. He won the NRL with the Roosters and 2 Rugby World Cups with New Zealand, also reaching the Rugby league World Cup Final with that country, but injury and a lack of volume, a relatively small number of caps for his various teams, means that he doesn't make the conversation when it comes to all time favourites.
The reason these teams want him is his uniqueness. He has an otherworldly combination of size and ball skills, tempering his youthful rugby league shoulder charging and becoming a hybrid of crash man and magician, able to flip a ball out of any tackle at any time. Jonny Wilkinson, who played with him at Toulon, said that 'his strength is his strength'. Steve Hansen has admitted that he'll always select him if he's anywhere near form because he can always break a game at any time with one moment of muscular magic. He's spawned legions of imitators and popularised the backdoor offload but no one engenders the same sense of panic and possibility as he does when running powerfully with the ball in one hand.
His career path is unprecedented in sport. We're suspicious of those who hop between disciplines - think about the question 'what do you do?' If someone gives us a one word answer - doctor, lawyer, carpenter, footballer - we can understand them. Williams' propensity to swap sports, back and forth between rugby codes or even taking time off to box during his club commitments make the traditionalist nervous.
Who is this guy? Who does he think he is to leave teams and pursue his own interests?
Oddly with Williams, apart from some youthful misadventures which culminated in him skipping town on his newly signed Canterbury Bulldogs contract and hightailing it to Toulon, he's always been regarded by those who work with him as a remarkably selfless professional, happy to help out, to do more and fit in.
His detractors would argue that this is an exercise in branding, in polishing his MoneyBill persona. He can pull on his cotton New Zealand club rugby jersey to play with the amateurs and still be regarded as the ultimate mercenary.
Williams the athlete and Williams the man both exist outside our normal paradigms for professional athletes. There's no doubt that he competes in service of himself - he pursues dreams and contracts across codes, showing little fealty to any one particular franchise - but he arrives with himself and his humility, ready to learn and be a professional, something that is more of a rarity than fans realise. He turns up, ready to subsume himself and his gifts in service of the collective, happy to cart the ball up and get through the graft of tackling in league or playing the role of impact substitute for New Zealand in rugby union, coming on in the 2015 final and setting up the decisive score for Ma’a Nonu, the man selected ahead of him.
His Muslim faith as a man of Pacific Island descent marks him out as different. While another code hopping corollary of his in Israel Folau rails against homosexuals, drunks and idolators, Williams keeps his public utterances on religion solely positive, practising his faith with a spirit of generosity rather than one of exclusion and division.
Williams is an interesting study in who is a sporting career for. Do you perform for yourself, to find out what your best truly is and push the limits of your being, or do you perform for a club, for the fan, the people who make you more than a man by being interested in what you're doing on a pitch? Essentially, do you owe anyone anything as an athlete? How you feel about this will probably inform how you feel about Sonny Bill Williams.
In testing his limits, Williams has proven to be above employer loyalty. He'll compete for whoever pays him, for whoever gives him a chance to win a prize or latterly, with the perennially less than the sum of their parts Auckland Blues, whoever grants him eligibility for higher honours. In this respect, he's even transcended club competition entirely, playing more games for his national team than his club one.
Williams doesn't play the world's truly lucrative sports. He'll be a wealthy man but not in the league of the big stars of the more visible games, football, the US sports, Formula One. As a rugby athlete he could never approach them in salary or visibility terms so he's created his own category, his own metrics of success, backing his talent and physique to make him a luxury commodity for owners and promoters across codes.
He'll certainly garner a big deal somewhere now he's leaving New Zealand rugby with Toronto Wolfpack allegedly interested in making him the face of their franchise. He could go back to French rugby for sure.
Whatever he does it'll be on his terms. There's never been an athlete as in command of his sporting destiny as Sonny Bill Williams. There probably never will be because in many ways, his sense of adventure and the desire to wring the most out of his talent means that for some time, he's only been competing with himself.