Jarryd Hayne: Australian rugby league legend aims to blaze a trail in the NFL with the San Francisco 49ers

Australian rugby league legend has been dazzling fans of San Francisco 49ers as he makes tricky transition into gridiron’s complex code, writes Rupert Cornwell

Jarryd Hayne (GETTY IMAGES)

Usually, National Football League pre-season games are a bust. The best players are used sparingly for fear of injury and those who do perform are throttling back for the same reason. Coaches use them to experiment with new plays and evaluate new talent. But not this August, at least not where the San Francisco 49ers are concerned. The reason? A one-time Australian rugby league superstar called Jarryd Hayne.

Hayne is trying to do the virtually unprecedented. Not only is he switching continents and football codes. He is seeking to break into the NFL, standard-bearer of the most proudly all-American of sports, without having played the game before in his life.

But this pre-season he has been a revelation. In his first appearance against the Houston Texans he made a 53-yard run, just the second time he touched the ball. In his second, against the Dallas Cowboys in San Francisco, he did even better, making two spectacular punt returns before a twisting 34-yard carry as a running back – a stunning home debut that had the crowd in ecstasy as it witnessed perhaps history in the making.

As the late and beloved Philadelphia sports broadcaster John Facenda used to say, “pro football in America is a special game, a unique game, played nowhere else on earth”. And he might have added in a patriotic coda: by no one but Americans.

Foreigners are everywhere in the other major US sports leagues, of baseball, basketball and ice hockey. Not in the NFL, however. True, the odd one has featured in the specialist position of field goal-kicker. But the two dozen foreign-born players in the League all moved to the US as children and played gridiron at high school and college, Americanised in all but name and passport.

Hayne is the exception who proves the rule. In his previous life, as a back for Sydney’s Parramatta Eels, he was among the finest rugby league players on the planet. In 2009 he was voted his sport’s worldwide player of the year; twice he was named the National Rugby League’s most valuable player. He was all set to sign a A$1.35m (£617,000)-a-year contract, the richest in League history. Then in October 2014 he gave it all up.

“It’s always been a dream of mine to play in the NFL and, at my age, this is my one and only chance,” the 26-year old Hayne said back then. He had, he explained, achieved all he could in rugby league and needed a fresh challenge. “Life is a gamble. It isn’t going to be easy… but I’d rather live with failure than die with regret,” he said. In March he signed on with the 49ers, for a mere $100,000 guarantee, in a potential three-year deal worth just $500,000 (£322,000) a year.

The misery of Eels fans then is matched by the joy in San Francisco now. This has been a shambolic off-season for the 49ers – the strange parting of the ways with head coach Jim Harbaugh, who led the franchise to the Super Bowl in 2013 but has returned to college football, the retirement of star rookie Chris Borland, who cited fears for his future health, and this month the release of star linebacker Aldon Smith after the latest in a string of drink-driving and drug incidents. The team desperately needed a feel-good story. With Hayne they have one.

So too has the NFL, as it tries to turn itself into a global sporting brand, with talk of even locating a team in London. What better than a foreigner breaking into its all-American sanctum? And how better to deflect the spotlight from the problems facing the League: concussions and later life brain damage, domestic violence – not to mention that damaging farce known as “Deflategate?”

Don’t get carried away by the Hayne hype, warns Jim Tomsula, the 49ers’ new coach. But, barring a stunning collapse in form, it would be astounding if the Australian did not make the 49ers’ 53-man roster for 2015, which must be announced by 5 September, five days before the start of the season proper. And if the 49ers don’t take him, another team surely will.

Hayne is unlikely to be a starting running back or receiver. Even he admits he still has much to learn about a formidably complex sport, with its intricate tactics and myriad pre-planned plays. In this specialised age, transitions from one sport to another rarely work – as anyone who watched Michael Jordan living his own dream of playing baseball, with the minor league Birmingham Barons in 1994, can testify.

But if anyone can do it, Hayne can. He’s coming to a tough sport from one that was no less tough, and didn’t have the protection of helmets and padding. His speed, his strength, his elusiveness as a runner and capacity to stay on his feet are all perfectly suited to the NFL. Most important, Hayne knows the task ahead: “I’m over here having a crack and doing my best. I’m just focused on the job in hand.”