Rugby league must rise to Kane Evans’s level of courage

Nick Campton, ABC

Analysis – If the only time a person can be brave is when they’re afraid then Kane Evans will never do a braver thing than open himself to the world and now rugby league must rise to his level of courage.

Evans, a former Roosters, Eels and Warriors prop who played in the NRL between 2014 and 2021, came out as gay on Monday night during an interview with Channel Nine’s 100% Footy.

Revealing the secret he’s carried inside himself for decades, even as he was doing it, was his “worst nightmare”.

“I had three goals in life – to play NRL, to buy my parents a house and then I was going to top myself,” Evans said.

“Because I was living in denial. From a young age, I knew that I’m gay but I went down every other avenue to build up these walls to be someone … to escape who I am.”

Kane Evans playing for the Warriors in 2021. (Photo by Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images)
Photo: Ian Hitchcock

Evans spoke about the war within himself between who he was and who he pretended to be ever since realising his sexuality at age 15. He spoke about the drugs and alcohol that consumed him and the 135 days and counting he’s been sober.

He spoke about sleeping rough, about wanting to die and being afraid to live, and people trying to blackmail him during his playing career when they found out he was gay.

You could feel his memory of the shame and the guilt and the fear, and the promise of hope when he said his chains were broken and that a brighter tomorrow beckoned and that once he told his parents, the rest of his life would begin as he became a man reborn at 34 after decades in the dark.

“They know, but I have to tell them. It has to come from my mouth. By the time this airs I will have told them already and I can’t wait for that moment,” Evans said.

“Once I tell them, I’ll be free. Nothing can stop me after that.

“I know some people who have done some gangster things but I feel like this is up there.

“I’m a bit proud of myself and when I look at myself in the mirror now I’m going to smile and not have those bad thoughts.”

After his moment of extraordinary courage, Evans is now a pioneer for men’s rugby league. He’s just the second former male NRL player to publicly identify as gay along with Ian Roberts, who came out 30 years ago.

Welsh dual international Gareth Thomas and English prop Keegan Hirst are the only other professional players to come out and like Roberts, they did so while they were still playing.

It’s a certainty there are and have been others and that there will be more in the future. That’s where the game – not the NRL, but the wider rugby league community itself – must follow Evans’s example.

It must have the courage to create an environment where everyone who calls the sport home feels safe to do what Evans could not for so long and be their true selves.

It will be a challenge because, for a game founded on egalitarianism with a strong history in some areas of cultural and racial diversity, rugby league’s track record in the LGBTQI+ space is decidedly mixed.

The Manly Pride jersey still looms over rugby league.
Photo: Getty Images / Cameron Spencer

The rugby league community should be proud to have men like Roberts, Thomas and Hirst in it, as it should be proud of Evans now. Many NRLW players, including some of the game’s biggest names and most legendary figures, are openly gay.

But it was just four years ago the game faced a reckoning as a result of the Manly Pride jersey and the subsequent boycott by seven Sea Eagles players who refused to wear it on religious grounds.

The shadow of the jersey, and the reaction to it, still looms over LGBTQI+ issues in the sport. No club has attempted such an initiative since and given the fallout, it’s doubtful any will in the foreseeable future.

Such a public show of support for the LGBTQI+ community would be powerful in a world where prejudices are increasingly weaponised amid the churn of endless culture wars.

But support from the rugby league community has already come through for Evans himself in other, more personal ways and that is a more accessible example to follow.

Evans mentioned former premiership winner Joe Galuvao, who now works with the RLPA, as the man who helped him realise he deserved to be alive and be happy.

He spoke movingly of his old Roosters coach Trent Robinson, who told him the Tricolours would always be his home, and how the club had supported him as he sought mental health treatment.

It’s a reminder that a true commitment to acceptance is bigger than words or tokenistic gestures or vague platitudes or symbols.

It’s a choice, one we all make every day and must prove with our actions, and its power is in how it brings us together, even if it does so one at a time.

Evans seems to understand that. Even as he was going through something that was clearly so difficult, he was thinking of others like him.

“I’m blessed I can come here and talk to you and maybe save a life or two,” Evans said.

“I’ve carried that around my whole life. But I’m here today to show people that you don’t have to live like that.”

Proving rugby league really is for everyone goes beyond NRL initiatives or jerseys that raise awareness. Those big and showy gestures have their own big and showy power.

But the nuts and bolts of it that hold everything together is that process of support and acceptance and love that saved Evans and made him want to save others in turn.

It’s the one that exists from teammate to teammate, fan to fan, coach to player or in whatever other direction you want to draw because the game, which is really just another word for the people in it, shows its true power when it lives and believes that.

A sporting community is the sum total of how the people inside it can come together and share that feeling amongst themselves because all we really have, in there or anywhere else, is one another.

All we can be is ourselves and through his long journey, all Evans wanted so desperately was to be who he is.

Who could ever deny him that? And who would dare say that the sport he loved and the world around it is a place where it can’t happen?

His example is a reminder that rugby league should be a game with the strength and courage to have not merely an open mind but an open heart.

-ABC