It's SO cool!!! 
Thank you for participating!
Thank you for participating!
AND YAY SHANE!!!!
It was the smartest thing they could have done right now.
Nice to hear Russell is pumped. 
I loved that they actually DID let him finish! This was NOT an American telly program. In 15 minutes they conveyed SO much information which you
can't even get a tenth of in a 24 hour news station's programming.
Peter Lalor | May 31, 2008
IT can go either way when Russell Crowe comes to town. He can be charming or alarming.
Men rise to great heights in his almost mythical presence, or cower like hotel clerks when the mood turns and the phones fly.Consider the fortunes of Crowe's beloved rugby league club the Rabbitohs since the actor landed in Australia at the beginning of last month.
The hapless South Sydney outfit Crowe part-owns with businessman Peter Holmes a Court was riding a 10-game losing streak. It was losing money, fans and the credibility it had gained by making the finals in the previous year.
Crowe had been in Hollywood for the whole season working on various film projects but arrived on the morning of the club's Round 8 clash with the North Queensland Cowboys. The team was already behind by the time the actor found his way to the club's corporate box at ANZ Stadium in Sydney's west.
Crowe didn't - and doesn't - socialise a lot at games. On this day broadcaster Ray Martin, retail billionaire Gerry Harvey and his wife Katie Page, rugby league boss David Gallop and Holmes a Court were there when he walked in, but the actor only had eyes for the game, pushing his way forward to the balcony where he commands a view of the field like a Roman emperor at the Colosseum. Thirty seconds later, the Rabbitohs got their act together and scored their first try for the match. Crowe pumped his fists in the air and continued to do so as the team raised itself for its first victory of the year.
Every newspaper in Australia, and even a few overseas, issued reports that connected Crowe's arrival to the win.
Three weeks later, tensions in the club, and between Crowe and Holmes a Court, boiled over. At a board meeting last Monday the businessman, son of the feared 1980s corporate raider Robert Holmes a Court, stood down as chief executive. Neither would speak to the media this week, but Holmes a Court is said to be shaken by the experience and a little miffed.
When Crowe and Holmes a Court bought the club in 2006 for $3 million, the actor promised a premiership this year and drew attention to the struggling Redfern outfit by virtue of his international celebrity and working class credibility. The businessman brought entrepreneurial skills and ideas honed during stints running theatrical productions and an agricultural business.
The celebrations in the box at the drought-breaking Rabbitohs-Cowboys match earlier this month, however, masked growing tension between the actor and the businessman, who had met at an Oscars party some years back and struck up a friendship.
The actor believed the businessman, and not the club, was getting too much publicity and had sent a shot across his partner's bows a month earlier. "Peter assures me he's not going to do any more magazine shots holding rugby league balls and I'm holding him to that," Crowe told The Sunday Telegraph in a long-distance interview from the US last month.
The comment raised eyebrows - Holmes a Court had been pictured on the front of a glossy Fairfax magazine holding a football. It reflected the confluence of corporate and club culture he brought to the famously insular and working-class sport.
Crowe was apparently annoyed, even though it had been him who had stitched up a deal with his friend Giorgio Armani that saw the club decked out in improbably stylish designer suits.
While Crowe had been away the team had attracted plenty of publicity, but no premiership points. Holmes a Court had come to the NRL with great ambitions and radical plans, he announced the leagues club would abandon poker machines and embrace a difficult financial future without the machines, leaving other CEOs, who had been campaigning for a tax break on the money makers, in his wake.
Holmes a Court broke the mould on sponsorship deals, luring the NAB to the front of the club's home strip for $1 million a year, and is believed to be close to securing another groundbreaking deal with the West Australian Government for the away strip.
The businessman had taken over the chief executive's role at the club, ignoring his other interests and drawing no salary. He had also committed $4 million of his own funds to keep the club's head above water. Crowe attracted attention this week by pledging $1 million.
Then came the fall and the end of Holmes a Court's time as chief executive.
The businessman might not be a fan of the Hollywood gossip magazines, but you don't have to be to know that Crowe is apparently controlling, fickle and prone to hysterical outbursts that can have considerable consequences for those around him.
In Hollywood, Crowe demands script control of his projects and famously derailed the Australian movie Eucalyptus just days before shooting because he was not happy with a rewrite. Eighty staff were laid off and the $6.4 million set remains unused because he pulled out. Crowe had used his Hollywood wiles to woo rugby league circles. Last year he and Holmes a Court had invited the notoriously hard-bitten league journalists to exclusive Sydney restaurant Darcy's for an intimate dinner.
The actor booked out the entire top floor. His every move was stage-managed, from the late entry to the seat at the head of the table. When everyone was good and relaxed Crowe threw the room open to questions in an off-the-record session.
The league journos grilled the pair about finances and five-eighths until one finally broke ranks.
"Listen Russell," he said. "That's all boring, what we really want to know is ..."
The league writer wanted a first-hand insight into Joaquin Phoenix. "Goose, or what?" he asked. Crowe didn't miss a beat, he had his audience where he wanted them and launched into a kiss-and-tell about all matters Hollywood.
The journos loved it. One old hand described it as the most memorable event in his life this side of having children. They loved it that he wore a hoodie and jeans and looked unkempt. They loved it that he joined them on the balcony for a ciggie.
"I had to pinch myself to keep remembering the old Souths," Rebecca Wilson wrote in The Sunday Telegraph. "Crusty old club boss, George Piggins, would be wondering when the chook raffle was starting and who the bloody hell did those two blow-ins think they were anyway."
The Rabbitohs might struggle to get 10,000 people into a stadium that holds nearly 80,000 but if one of those was Crowe the sport was the richer.
Unfortunately for the actor and the businessman, running a football club is not like taking a lead role in a romantic comedy. This year, things have taken a darker turn.
Scott Penn is a part-owner of the Manly Sea Eagles club and has watched the Rabbitohs implode from across town.
"If you make promises and don't deliver you get hammered," he told The Weekend Australian. "That's part of the Australian psyche. There's always healthy scepticism as to whether they're going to do it. At the same time the game needs some fresh ideas. You need people of the ilk of Peter (Holmes a Court) who can push the boundaries and challenge the establishment. The problem with that is, it's going to ruffle feathers, as it has.
"The other problem with that is, if you don't perform on the field it is a double whammy. None of this would be happening if they were performing on the field."
South Sydney replaced Holmes a Court with Shane Richardson - the man who had done the job previously. He defends Crowe's role at the club. "He's an owner," he said. "His big thing in all of this is corporate governance, that there's a board that should be there and working away but quietly and not being the focus of what's going on.
"Then it passes on through the chairman to the CEO and the CEO should be given the controls and the power to get things done. That doesn't sound to me like a bloke who wants to interfere a lot and I spent a fair bit of time with him last week and that's been his feelings about it. That we've got to run this club as a footy club and take the administrators and the board out of the limelight and put the football players and the coach in it.
"And we've got to start winning games."
Additional reporting: Stuart Honeysett, Brent Read
Wasn't that great?! I thought that was too cute!
