My grandfather had motor neurone disease. So does NRL player Jai Arrow. But that’s not the only reason I winced when Sky cut away from his final walkout to play an ad for Betcha, writes Lachlan Woods-Davidson.
My grandfather died from motor neurone disease at 59. He left behind three kids, two grandchildren too young to remember him, and a wife who never remarried. Nana, Mum and the rest of the family have long suspected it was farm chemicals that caused it. Days spent under the high Patumahoe sun, spraying crops from the back of his tractor. No protective gear in those days of course, just one hand on the wheel, the other reaching into his flannel chest pocket for a smoke.
One-handed he could roll them, while hard at work. So it was probably easy to spot when the symptoms began, and even more crushing to watch it take the man, first sending him to a wheelchair, and then somewhere far away from the family farm.
Decades later I was working on a farm just down the road from where Ronald Woods used to toil. Each summer a few mates and I would take a couple of utes and a large flatbed trailer and pick up the small square bales that people had strung up as soon as the grass was dry enough. Tough work paying cash. The kind that’s easy to find in rural communities, if you’re keen.
That day, almost a decade ago, there were so many of us keen that we worked a shorter shift than usual. Often hay baling demands you work well into the night, and into the early morning, to get it all under cover before the rain (how does that old idiom go?). It was never a bad thing to work late. Much cooler when the sun went down, and less dust to stick to your sweat, onto your chest and down the back of your collar. But that day, with our larger, keener gang, we picked and stacked over a thousand bales in only a few hours. To thank us, our mate who ran the operation put on pizzas and jugs at the local pub.
It was at this pub, on that fading early-summer afternoon, that I was put off gambling for good. The image is seared into my brain, much like the feeling of hay scratching on my sun-raw forearms and dust up my nostrils that I can’t quite seem to shake.
One of the gang asked for his pay early and the boss handed it over with the look I was soon to understand. A stack of clean green 20s into his palm, on top of his blistered calluses, the bloke wide-eyed and almost salivating. The rest of us sat around the tall wooden cable drum with the sun going down. By the time the pizzas and the sun were gone he was back out. He’d put the lot through the pokies. The brickie’s laptop, they call it. None of us had money to spare; otherwise we wouldn’t have been stacking straw on a hot Saturday. That’s partly why, at 29, I’ve never seriously felt the pull of a punt. But mostly it’s the memory of having broken my back for six hours, then watching someone feed the result into a slot.
Jai Arrow is 31. A Queenslander who played for the Broncos and the Titans before six seasons at South Sydney. He retired in May, abruptly, on 98 games for the Rabbitohs. The club’s chief executive read out his diagnosis because he couldn’t get through it himself. It was motor neurone disease. Maybe around the stage where my Poppa noticed he could no longer swing his leg over the tractor seat.
The outpouring of support for Jai has been immense. If you’ve wondered why your favourite sports star has been pulling back an invisible arrow in celebration, now you know. In a similar act of communal empathy, the NRL made an unprecedented exception. They let Souths name Arrow as an extra player for the last two rounds of the regular season, so that he could reach a century of appearances wearing the red and green. The 99th was on the Gold Coast, against the Titans, where legendary hardman coach Wayne Bennett laced his boots, Cody Walker walked him out arm in arm, and the crowd sang Gerry and the Pacemakers’ ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, best known as the anthem Liverpool FC supporters have made their own. The 100th was Friday night. Against the Roosters, at a sold-out Allianz Stadium in Sydney, where he walked out through a corridor of club legends flown in for the occasion, while a 40,000-strong crowd belted out Ben E King’s ‘Stand By Me’. They then sang another moving rendition of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, to a man who could no longer run.
Such a fabulous display of humanity, and what a climactic occasion for everyone to witness. Only, I didn’t see it. Nor did anyone else watching on Sky Sport NZ, which gave New Zealand a few seconds of Arrow in the tunnel and then a minute and 20 of Betcha. Sky’s head of sport content, Gary Burchett, blamed a scheduling error after the Titans-Dolphins game ran long, and said they should have shown the moment in full and live. He confirmed the call was made by people, not a machine. Sky posted the walkout in full on social media afterwards, with the comments turned off. It was Gambling Harm Awareness Week. This year’s theme was online gambling harm and young people.
Online gambling gets into young men the way spray gets into a farmer: not by choice, but by being in the air where the work is, without the education to protect yourself or the social discourse to know that such protection is what you need. You cannot be a 20-something male in this country without breathing it in. Betcha is the TAB’s second brand, launched in August 2024 for the under-35s. Sleek, blue and orange, stylised all lowercase and optimised for a phone screen.
Behind it is Entain, the London-listed owner of Ladbrokes, which since 2023 has run the TAB’s betting under a 25-year deal, splitting the profits and guaranteeing the TAB $150 million a year for five years. In June last year the government banned offshore bookmakers, which made TAB and Betcha the only legal online sportsbook in the country, and Entain paid another $100 million for the privilege. Friday’s blunder was not a rogue ad. It was bred in a paddock fenced by parliament, with a youth brand shaking the feed bucket.
Because it is no longer just the allure of the races, where men of my poppa’s time might tie a double Windsor to attend, nor the brickie’s laptop in the dark corner of the country pub of my time. This is factory farming. The men Betcha wants to harvest were raised on feed like Fifa packs and Fortnite llamas before they could legally bet, and are now served short videos of other young men predicting results and rating team strength as if they were providing a service. The Problem Gambling Foundation says kids are talking bets at school.
The spray drift is everywhere. Israel Dagg fronts TAB segments inside All Blacks tests. In Poppa’s day as well as mine, that broadcast was sacrosanct for families crowded around a small black television with hot Milo, custard and cream. Offshore casinos email Māori creators asking for a 20-second story to their followers. Jabez Makawe and Pairama Wright said no. The Problem Gambling Foundation says a young person who had eased off Betcha got a phone call from the TAB encouraging them back; the TAB’s chief executive says “those conversations do happen”. And Sky embeds Betcha in its Premier League highlights on YouTube, so even paying to skip the ads gets you a young man explaining how to bet live on the football: “Alright, enough from us, back to the action.”
The defence, when it comes, will be that betting pays for sport. Mostly it pays for racing, and nobody is asking the TAB to stop taking bets. I’m just asking for young men not to be actively pursued at the exact moment another young man is fighting a battle of his own.
And the government already knows what it thinks of ads like Friday’s. It has just written the rules for the online casinos it’s auctioning licences to this month, and they ban any advertising during a live broadcast, or within half an hour either side of one. The same June 2025 law that fenced the paddock for the TAB also included provisions for advertising restrictions to be made for the TAB itself. The racing minister’s department says he’d rather observe the new system first. What we have in the meantime is the industry-funded Advertising Standards Authority, which last year took 955 complaints about 306 gambling ads and found issues with 12. So Friday’s ad was harmful enough to outlaw for a casino, and fine for the bookmaker the Crown is in business with.
Another 31-year-old league forward is part of this story. Last month Luke Bateman sat in front of an Australian Senate inquiry (the one examining the bill, since passed, that will ban betting ads during daytime live sport over there from January). He played 71 games for the Raiders, but has since found his space within the BookTok community, as a kind of symbol that blokes who stack hay can enjoy fantasy fiction too. He told senators that at 23, while losing tens of thousands of dollars a month, he had a VIP manager of a betting agency send him offers every Friday, fly him to the races, and ask what drugs he might be after for the excursion. The point of all of it, Bateman said, was “creating a sense of trust, creating a sense of friendship”. He didn’t name the bookmaker. Sportsbet and Australia’s TAB both told the inquiry they’d never heard of such a thing.
And perhaps most on the nose: Entain’s Ladbrokes is Liverpool’s official betting partner, its name on the LED boards beneath ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ at Anfield, while its New Zealand cousin talked over the same song being sung to a man taking his last walk onto a pitch. You’ll never walk alone, unless they can get you alone, in the app or at the machine, or on the phone or on a plane. Because what’s lonelier than leaving a crowded table of mates you’ve just sweated the day out with to sit in a cave and piss away your pay?
I wince at the thought of my poppa working so hard for his family while perhaps slowly poisoning himself in the process. I wonder if we will look back at a bookmaker’s ad playing over a man’s last walk-out, to a song about never walking alone, and wince the same way. But as Betcha might say to people harping on like me: “Enough from you. Back to the action.”
