Jobe entered the game with high expectations and may have taken a dangerous risk Picture: Edwards Jason Source: Herald Sun THE Jobe Watson story is one of the great recent stories of Australian sport. Born to football aristocracy, he entered the game with high expectations, which for years he failed to meet. Faced with a career crisis, he gathered himself and willed himself to be a success. He became a leader and a Brownlow medallist. So why would he choose to risk all of that? The answer to that depends on when you conclude that he took the risk. Was it on Monday night when, against all advice, he admitted publicly that he took what he believed to be the banned drug AOD9604, or was it last year when the doping is said to have occurred? What's not in doubt is that the Essendon captain, highly respected as a decent, mature head in the football industry and the community, has thrown out a list of challenges to the AFL, which just happens to be the chief custodian of this city's greatest and most enduring cultural creation - Australian football. The challenges go to the integrity of the game and the quality of the AFL's stewardship. The AFL's operations manager, Mark Evans, has said that Watson's admission was not news to investigators looking into Essendon's use of performance-enhancing supplements. He urged patience as the investigation, which began early this year and could run for another two months, continued. The inquiry is complex, with a multitude of subjects, reams of paperwork of both the real and missing variety and a tonne of hearsay and "I dunno" evidence, I suspect. But it's not impossible to consider that Watson just feels like it's gone on for long enough and he just wants this saga to come to a conclusion, whatever the outcome. His off-the-cuff explanation for making his admission was that he didn't feel guilty, didn't feel he'd done anything wrong and that he just wanted the truth to come out. This matter has fizzed away, corroding the AFL's standing as the premier sporting organisation in the country, for months. Of course, as Evans and the chief executive, Andrew Demetriou, have said regularly, all the facts need to be known before action is taken. But there comes a time when the public's goodwill is endangered unless something is done. This is well understood by the AFL's chief rival, the National Rugby League. The NRL has had plenty of troubles over the years. For many Victorians, and it isn't a stretch to include a lot of the AFL's administrators, the NRL is viewed as a blokey, boofy, sometimes clumsy outfit. But when it has had large-scale problems comparable with the ongoing drug controversy at Essendon, it has acted decisively. Actions involving scandals and controversies taken against, variously, the Canterbury Bulldogs, Melbourne Storm and the Cronulla Sharks demonstrate that. In the Essendon case, by contrast, matters have been left to drag along with bits and pieces of information either dribbling out or being prised out and appearing in the media. Little wonder, then, that Watson took matters into his own hands and turbo-charged the issue. The decision could come at a very heavy price for the Essendon captain. If he did indeed take a banned drug last year, then there seems little question that his Brownlow Medal should be taken away from him. And a career-ending suspension would be a prospect too. That he believed he was taking something that was legal under the relevant sporting guidelines is immaterial. If the drug was proscribed at the time he took it, then he cannot be allowed to retain the game's highest individual honour. Were this to happen, it would of course be a tragedy for Watson, who is by all accounts a man of great quality. And I use the word "man" deliberately, in the old-fashioned way, because it took courage to 'fess up to taking AOD9604. THAT is especially the case if it turns out that he was allowing himself to be injected with the stuff only after getting assurances that it was acceptable to do so by people entrusted with the task of looking after the best interests of the players and the club. If that's so, those individuals should pay with their jobs. Ultimately, this is all about responsibility and who shoulders it. One of the overwhelming issues within modern big-ticket sport is how to reconcile the big money that is paid to sportsmen with the reality that many of them, while technically adults, are treated like outsized children. Most elite Australian footballers know they have a precious talent from an early age. As a result, they are treated as special by their families, teachers, coaches and friends. By early adulthood even journeymen players are making very good dough compared with their non-football peers. Having concentrated on their football for most of their lives, they rely on club administrators to do a lot of their real-world thinking for them. All it takes is some bad advice to create a hell of a mess. Having started out as sportsmen, the players become wealthy entertainers inside a system that's always looking for the next thing to provide an advantage, a little edge. And yet, the public still sees it as sport and sport is worthless if it is not seen as being fair. The conviction that everyone is starting from the same place, that only natural ability and endeavour will decide the result, is what makes sport so compelling. There's a moral dimension too. In sport, as in life, we expect people who do the wrong thing, however inadvertent it might have been, to own up and face the consequences.