CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
A recently retired NRL journeyman has today reached that cross roads in life that all rugby league players reach once the bright lights of professional football turn into engine lights.
While not exactly a world-beater, Blane Corduroy (37) retired just short of 300 games. He also managed to wrangle a couple of Origin starts that no one really remembers because it wasn’t a good year.
However, even with all of these credentials – his post-playing career options, while not exactly undesirable, are rather limited.
With four teenage kids at home and only two or three corporate speaking gigs a year coming in, Blane has to decide what comes next – And he has to decide soon – before the pay-out for that last contract that he signed knowing he had a dodgy collar bone runs out.
After being tackled roughly 6000 times in his career, Blane is too physically battered to finish his plastering apprenticeship at trade at 37. He’s also far too unpolished to find work in media.
Short of going to university as a mature aged student and studying something that interests him, Blane has had to decide between opening up an F45 circuit training franchise in his hometown of East Betoota Ponds – or alternatively, train up for a heavyweight boxing match.
Considering that he’s still on good terms with Choc and Blocker, and has always been handy in a scrap, boxing is looking like a real goer. But the possibility of developing a belated social media presence through personal training is also appealing.
It’s a tough one. Does he deal with overweight office drones at the crack of dawn each morning? or does he delve into a combat sports career that forces him to hang out with dodgy boxing promoters, also at the crack of dawn each morning.
Either way, there’s going to be a lot of strangers asking him to talk about what it was like to play against Sonny Bill.
With his missus barely making any coin through her status as an Instagram homewares influencer, Blane decides he better do what’s right.
He’s gonna sign a three-year contract with the Titans and come back to this decision in 2022.
