PETER JACKSON
THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW
JORDAN Mailata is one of a kind, the only rugby player to make it big in American football, in his case all the way to the Super Bowl. Everything about Mailata is not so much big as gigantic. For a start there is an awful lot of him at 6ft 8ins and more than 25 stone, a bulk which he shifts around the ball park like a cat on the proverbial hot tin roof.
And then there’s his salary, every bit as hefty as the man himself. An ‘offensive tackle’, he is halfway through a four-year contract with the Philadelphia Eagles worth $64,000,000 dollars, $16,000,000-a-year, $307,692 and 30 cents a week.
At current conversion rates, that’s the equivalent on this side of the Atlantic of £50.5m over four years or, as near as makes no difference, £250,000-a-week for 208 weeks. In any currency, it requires a lot of heavy lifting.
What’s more, almost two-thirds of the total, $40,000,000 or £34,000,000, was guaranteed the day he put pen to paper two Septembers ago. And that excludes any bonus payments the Eagles would have paid their players for taking them to Super Bowl LVII in December 2022.
Mailata made it from the South Sydney Rabbitohs in Australian Rugby League via the National Football League’s International Player Pathway Program (as they spell it States-side) in Bradenton, Florida.
Louis Rees-Zammit’s attempt to make the same quantum leap starts at the same camp in the same place. That nobody from outside the US other than Mailata has made it from any other code of football illustrates the magnitude of the challenge.
His decision may have come as a rude shock to Warren Gatland and the Wales hierarchy but, contrary to popular opinion, the move has been a long time coming. Joe Zammit’s passion for all things NFL explains why making it in grid-iron has long been a dream for his younger son.
With his Gloucester contract running out, Louis could have taken his pick of any major French club from Toulouse down instead of opting for a change of scenery few would dare tackle. Succeeding against historic odds would be no more than he deserves for having the courage to push himself to the limit, physically and mentally.
The NFL believe he has a chance, hence their invitation to take a treasured place in what amounts to an intensive 10-week series of trials. Making the cut will not guarantee Rees-Zammit a squad place in any of
