Steve Mascord's new book Two Tribes poses some key questions about a tumultuous, yet crucial period in rugby league's history - the Super League war.
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Namely, what was the war about? Who won? And what did we learn from it?
However, rather than impose his own views, Mascord would prefer the reader examined the evidence he's collected from various perspectives and then make up their own mind.
"As a journalist and someone who lived through it, I wanted people to be first and foremost entertained by it and go, 'did I just actually read that?' or 'that's a funny story'," the Illawarra product told the Mercury.
"Also, I want people to make their peace with the year, and understand there were two comps and people on both sides who loved the game.
"And also understand there are multiple views on why it happened and how people behaved."
In the mid-90s, pay television was very much in its early stages in Australia.
Rugby league's establishment had previously agreed to a multi-year deal with Channel Nine that also included the pay TV rights for the club competition.
Therefore, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, unable to secure the rights and seeking to drive subscribers to Foxtel (a joint venture between Telstra and News) decided to create its own breakaway competition, Super League.
The Australian Rugby League, with more than $20 million in backing from the Optus Vision pay TV and telephony business (who owned the pay TV rights to the ARL) and Kerry Packer, staged a legal defence against Super League.
Initially, Optus Vision and the ARL won a qualified victory in court in their battle for control of league against News Corp.
However, News successfully appealed and as a result, in 1997, two separate competitions were run - the establishment's ARL and News's renegade Super League.
Mascord had been an "early adopter" of the Illawarra Steelers, one of the clubs who remained aligned with the ARL.
He attended the club's debut training session at Stuart Park in November 1981, and has the corner post from their first trial game at Dapto Showground.
Mascord started covering their games for Australian Associated Press while still in his teens, and at the time of the sport's schism was a league reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald.
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Several years ago, Mascord was at the Toronto Wolfpack's first trial game when Nigel Wood, then CEO of the Rugby Football League, told him someone should pen a sequel to Mike Colman's book Super League: The Inside Story, released in 1996.
"He said, 'why don't you do it?'" Mascord said. "'I'll give you a little bit of money to start you off to do it'.
"Nigel wanted a book that basically brought Colman's book completely up-to-date, covering 25 years.
"Colman's book covered a 14-month period, and I don't think the sequel should cover a 25-year period. The sequel needs to cover another 14-month period."
Two Tribes is being released in time for the 25th anniversary of the dual competitions.
The book is essentially the sport's answer to Gideon Haigh's The Cricket War, which documented the launch of World Series Cricket in the late 1970s.
Writing and researching the 500-plus page tome, which often utilises an oral history type format, was a two-year process for Mascord.
The end result incorporated more than 100 new interviews with key figures from both sides during the era, as well as timelines and archival stories from Mascord himself to provide greater context.
A key aspect of the book is the events surrounding what is for many the enduring image of the split competitions - Newcastle's last-second upset win over Manly in the ARL grand final.
Conversely, the Super League decider between Brisbane and Cronulla is barely a footnote in the code's history.
Mascord said the Knights' premiership glory and the passion it elicited from supporters was a key bargaining chip for the ARL when it went to the negotiating table with News to broker a peace deal.
"When we say that the Knights saved rugby league, they saved traditional rugby league, because the ARL had no cards at the table, they had no money," Mascord said.
"News, even though they wanted to stop spending money, Super League would definitely have happened in 1998 anyway.
"Newcastle winning gave the ARL cards at the table, where they said, 'well, the public are with us, and the only town that still cares is with us'.
"So we got an NRL that was philosophically, outwardly, PR-wise, very ARL-centic because we need to win back our core support. The game had failed basically to win new support during that period."
Time for a sliding doors moment - what if Darren Albert didn't score that match-winning try, and Manly eventually won that grand final in extra time?
"I think News have a lot more cards at the table as far as a compromise deal," Mascord said of such a hypothetical.
"And maybe more ARL clubs are forced to merge. I think the game struggles for longer to win back that core support. I think it takes a lot longer."
During the year of the split competitions, Mascord noted that Super League financially propped up clubs "that were willing to jump into bed with them", while Optus Vision supported teams that would provide content for them to help the fight against News.
Although the majority of the new book dissects the "the year of two tribes", it also documents the aforementioned peace deal which led to the unified competition, the National Rugby League, in 1998.
The Melbourne Storm was duly launched, but there were clubs that became casualties both directly as a result of the truce, and also in its aftermath.
This includes the folding of franchises such as the Western/Perth Reds, Adelaide Rams, Hunter Mariners and South Queensland Crushers, and the temporary expulsion of South Sydney.
There were also the mergers that occurred during the NRL's rationalisation process, both ongoing (St George Illawarra, Wests Tigers) and ultimately unsuccessful (Northern Eagles).
At the time when News had been actively signing clubs to join its own competition, Mascord said the Steelers were essentially financially and morally beholden to the ARL, and therefore remained with the establishment.
When Illawarra's merger with fellow ARL aligned club St George was finalised ahead of the 1999 season, Mascord was out of the country.
"I do believe that if the Steelers had switched to Super League, they'd still be playing in scarlet and white in Wollongong, and be a standalone club like Canterbury," Mascord said.
"(Super League aligned clubs) Canterbury, Penrith and Cronulla all still stand alone.
"(NSW Rugby League chief executive and NRL CEO) Neil Whittaker talks about in the book about why many NRL clubs had to merge and why Super League clubs didn't.
"Yes, there was pressure on Cronulla, Penrith and Canterbury to merge, but in the end, News had their back, they had a stack of money and the ARL clubs simply didn't. That the Steelers might have been on the other side of the fence is quite a beguiling idea for the Steelers fan."
Now based in London, Mascord has self-published Two Tribes.
It's his second book, following the release of the autobiographical Touchstones in 2017.
"This book will never be out of print, and need never be finished," he said of Two Tribes.
"I'm not going to update it with what happens in 2022. But I can fix literals, add quotes that should be in there, improve the layout, put an index in.
"I hope it becomes a reference book and a touchstone."
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