Hayne monsters San Diego Chargers cornerback

Hayne 'pancake hit' becomes internet sensation

It's a little disconcerting, if you grew up in an era when rugby league was the Death Star of football codes, sucking all surrounding talent into its orbit, to see it transformed into a feeder farm. League fans have only just stopped cheering Jarryd Hayne's astounding first forays into the NFL when, gulp, the Americans are announcing plans to pillage our sport, and the likes of Jason Taumalolo and Roger Tuivasa-Sheck have disappeared into the fitting rooms at Rebel to try on helmets and giant shoulder pads. Wasn't Hayne's success meant to be a great advertisement for our product? Only, we're beginning to see, in the sense that African men were a great advertisement for physical strength and endurance when the Europeans first landed.

League used to be Destination Code-Hop. From Dally Messenger through to Michael O'Connor, Rex Mossop to John Brass, Ray Price to the fabulous Kenny Wright, the traffic was one way. In 1991, Scott Gourley became the 41st former Wallaby to represent the Kangaroos.

He was the last. Professionalism created a two-way street between league and union, but the six Australian dual internationals since Gourley – Andrew Walker, Wendell Sailor, Mat Rogers, Lote Tuqiri, Timana Tahu and Israel Folau – have all gone from league to union. Add to that the international stars such as Sam Burgess and Sonny Bill Williams, and code-hoppers to AFL such as Folau, Karmichael Hunt and their newest big-name recruit Rupert Murdoch, and league is looking more and more like a breeding farm for footballers. Jarryd Hayne? We used to have Manfred Moore!

Hayne's success, should it eventuate in real NFL games, is already creating annoyance outside league. Soccer wants us to get over the cultural cringe of celebrating Aussie successes in America, and return to the more established cultural cringe of celebrating Aussie successes in England or Germany. Anti-sporting types, still hungover from toasting the feats of Richard Flanagan or Cate Blanchett on the world stage, turn up their noses at the achievement of a young man who dared to test himself in a game he hadn't played, in an environment where competitiveness has been turned into a scientific industry. For Hayne to become a regular NFL player with the 49ers or anyone else would be the equivalent to, I don't know, something unthinkably ambitious, like say, Russell Crowe giving up acting and becoming a global rock star.

But is it good for league? Initially, it seemed so. Hayne was, along with Greg Inglis, the best broken-field runner in the NRL, so if anyone could make it as a running back or kick returner, he could. His journey would be a great spectacle. While league was losing one of its stars, few were saying it was losing one of its best team men. Hayne would seem a better fit for the NFL's culture than the NRL's. Even Parramatta, who stood to lose most, went as well without Hayne as with him – perhaps expectable given the loss of someone who said he'd achieved all he could achieve in the sport. *Cough* How about a premiership?

The flight of the Hayne Plane looked tremendous for league, demonstrating the gifts of one of its best athletes. League's loss looked like league's gain, until the unintended consequences took shape. Hayne's progress was so far ahead of expectations that scores of viewers started to buy NFL subscriptions. (Rupert, via ESPN and Fox coverage, wins both ways, as ever.) And then the Americans cast a predatory eye for the next Hayne. Here they come. Jeepers, please nobody tell them about Semi Radradra.

This coincided with a perfect storm for the NRL: a season gutted by its own succubus, the Origin series; teams drained of their best players by injury; a thin-looking competition with only a couple of serious contenders and the Dragoons making the final eight; an administration caught culturally between managing a game and protecting a brand; and, worst of all, a spectacle flattened out by copycat attacking shapes and an obsession with control, momentum and the elimination of risk. Even the code's depressive mania for talking itself down is beginning to look optimistic. All of a sudden, the Hayne phenomenon was not adding to league's gloss, but threatening to make it look tatty.

This doesn't stop league, at its best, from being the greatest game of all (statement of opinion, not slogan). But for a while it's been like the frog in the boiling pot, seeing great player after great player leave, tolerating its own incompetence and civil warfare, somehow continuing to thrive, until, boom, this product is looking like something less than $900 million worth. It needs to get its best players back, at least Burgess and Williams. It needs to find a new generation of talent to match the outgoing Hodges and co, keep it, and give it oxygen. It needs to get back to its greatest appeal, which was always, for players and spectators, that it was, in the immortal words of someone or other, "more funner''. League will never compete with union if a player's wife wants a year learning Italian or to take the kids for an adventure in Japan. League can't offer the experience of representing one's country at Twickenham. But league gives the brilliant individual a platform that none of its rivals can match: a showcase for the champion qualities of a Sam Burgess, a Greg Inglis, a Johnathan Thurston or even a Jarryd Hayne for a full game that rival codes can only offer in fits and starts. At its best, it's still the king of codes and way more funner - what brought five of the above six duals (and counting) back to league. But there's only one leaguie who looks like he's having a lot of fun at the moment, and he's in San Francisco.