Covering Hayne-mania was one of the highlights of my career. But not because of him

Cam Inman is a San Francisco Bay Area-based sports reporter who has specialized in the San Francisco 49ers and NFL since 2000. He covered Jarryd Hayne extensively for Fox Sports Australia during the 2015 49ers season.

MELBOURNE — My affection for Australia went untapped until a late-night caller hit my mobile 11 years ago.

A website editor introduced himself and sought my help with NFL insight.

I was a seasoned reporter covering the San Francisco 49ers and I had a feeling something momentous was afoot, a story that would balloon America’s No.1 sport throughout Australia while the NFL strove for international growth.

The topic: Jarryd Hayne.

The mission: Chart his path from rugby-league stardom to an American football apprenticeship.

The result: My sincere appreciation for anything about Australia, and it’s had way longer staying power than Hayne in the NFL, seeing how he lasted just the 2015 season.

For me, a maiden voyage Down Under became a bucket-list item I am gratefully fulfilling this week. My main boss since 1995, the Bay Area News Group, has dispatched me to cover the NFL’s first regular-season visit to this far-away land, where the 49ers and late-arriving Los Angeles Rams meet at the Melbourne Cricket Ground this Friday morning at 10.35am AEST.

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Let’s hold off before I reveal my first impressions/meals/beers/laneways/coffees/etc.

And let me hype up what awaits 100,000 fans at The ‘G: California rivals are both Super Bowl contenders loaded with stars. I’ve got the underdog 49ers winning 24-23 before a legion of red-jersey fans at “Levi’s Down Under.”

One might even be Hayne.

OK, he is a polarising and disgraced figure, as my Australian colleagues reinforced to me during chats at 49ers practice this week at AAMI Park.

But he couldn’t have been nicer or appear genuinely happier to reconnect when we had a 45-minute, trans-Pacific video chat last month.

I wanted to do a whatever-happened-to-that-bloke story. The intent was not to glamorise, sympathise, or condemn him.

“It’s disappointing, everything that’s happened,” Hayne said in Sunday’s front-page print edition of the San Jose Mercury News and its affiliates. “I haven’t really spoken on it yet. We’re doing some stuff behind the scenes where I’ll have my say eventually. I’ve kind of sat back and copped the heat for eight years and not been able to tell my side of the story.” (READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE)

He didn’t delve further into his legal woes. Instead, he shared how he’s rebooting his life as a married father of five who’s launched an academy for young rugby-league prospects and who plans to relay his sports’ knowledge in the podcast and social media world — like a flood of other non-journalists around our globe.

Hayne still follows the NFL and the 49ers, and he has a keen grasp on how the franchise’s aging stars need to hit pay dirt this season to end a 31-season drought since its fifth and last Lombardi Trophy championship.

His was a short-lived, short-circuited NFL career. He played about half the games in the 49ers’ 2015 downturn. He made the 53-man roster as a punt return, only to botch his debut and literally drop the ball on “Monday Night Football” (on a Tuesday morning here in Oz). Two more fumbles followed in the next four games, he got demoted, made a late-season return masquerading as a running back, then reversed field back to Australia come May 2016 (or autumn here).

His reputation soon imploded upon returning and facing sexual assault allegations, charges, convictions, appeals, jail time and more drama for some six years, until his criminal case got quashed in 2024.

What a change. Speaking of, he was a summertime sensation in America in August 2015 as he triumphantly switched codes (a term previously unknown to this “sports” reporter).

Covering Hayne’s every move and word that 2015 season is one of the highlights of my 40-year career.

Not because of him.

Because of Australia.

I learned a new sport, rugby league, and I did so by slipping into my neighbour’s house to watch State of Origin games they recorded on satellite broadcasts for me. I watched with their poodle while they went to work in the daytime. I watch now (in my house) if I wake up in the middle of the night and somehow get word that Origin is playing.

I still don’t know anything about AFL footie, other than my new barber, Tim, on Hardware Lane confirmed it’s the No.1 sport here in Melbourne, followed by cricket, which is another code I can’t grasp but tried to learn on a Caribbean honeymoon when I had other pressing matters.

I digress. Australia had me at AC/DC (1989 Cow Palace tour stop), and Men at Work, and Mick Dundee, and The Outback Steakhouse, and Paul Hogan’s ‘another shrimp on the barbie’.

Those are old attractions. More and more feed my appetite these days.

I covered the FIFA World Cup a couple of months ago and relished having the Socceroos in my backyard, or literally in the former Oakland Raiders’ grass yard.

As cool as the team and its traveling media were, nothing showcased Australia’s brotherhood and bond more than the sight of thousands of yellow jerseys storming the 49ers’ home of Levi’s Stadium, squishing into the concourse to sing songs, then bowing back and forth in synchronicity with its squad bound for the knockout stage.

So here I am in my budget hotel thumbing away on my outdated iPhone to finish this love letter to you. It’s almost 7am and I am hoping the neighbouring apartment complex blared AC/DC’s “Back In Black” like it did at 7am Sunday, a wonderfully church-bells-like wake-up call.

Australia is so accommodating, outstanding, and fascinating.

It’s been that way since I rushed through customs to make my Sydney connection, since I awoke Saturday morning for an exploratory run through the CBD, since I sampled obligatory coffee shops, since I scoured Victoria Market for kangaroo meat just to see if that’s a true option (not for me), since I found Balter XPA and VB tastier than Carlton Draught, and since I zig-zagged laneways to seek out murals, barber shops, benches, smiles, croissants, tourists, 49ers fans, and locals whose mustaches are bushy and whose hospitality is exemplary.

Thanks for letting us crash your daily party. My invitation came in a 2011 phone call. It just took a while — and the NFL — to get me here.

G’day. I really should just stay.

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