KEY POINTS:
There were renewed reports over the weekend that Jerry Collins is set on a move to Europe sooner rather than later. Good luck to him.
He will be missed for his all-guns-blazing deeds even though too many of his tackles slipped upwards, to use a modern description for
the coathanger.
As for words, there will never be a lot of great Collins quotes to remember, perhaps because you had to be there to get the meaning which was conveyed through the frequent use of a popular yet condemned verb.
As a colleague observed, there were interesting concepts buried in there if you had the stamina to delete the expletives.
Here, in a nutshell, was a man more than willing but sadly unable to rip off the cotton wool for the honour of playing for his Wellington club team.
"I just want to play footy - can you cut out all the other $%@*&% *&^%" is my guess at his credo .
Collins' European move might even reopen the minor debate about whether the New Zealand Rugby Union should continue to ban overseas-based players from the All Blacks.
No one expects the NZRU to consider changing its mind unless an avalanche including Dan Carter and Richie McCaw departs and leaves a ghetto behind. Not that it matters if the grand scheme involves playing tests in places like Hong Kong where the average resident wouldn't know the difference between Jerry Collins and Joan Collins.
To be fair to the NZRU - and it's awfully tempting not to be in light of their arrogance - they face a tough dilemma over the revolving-door forces which send legions overseas and spit a handful back, a few still in a useable condition. Scrap the rule and you open the floodgates, hold on to it and you delete stars like Carl Hayman from the test side.
That's the theory but as we found out last year, New Zealand rugby theories don't always work because they involve blanket concepts that don't apply to individual responses.
Even if the rule is removed, the test team will always include mainly home-based players because it is difficult to bring a large group of players back for a coherent campaign anyway. Rule or no rule, players who head overseas know that they may be signing off as test footballers. A lot of players will still want to initially play here, to test themselves on home turf and build reputations that will turn into hard foreign currency later.
If only New Zealand rugby could just relax a little, take the foot off it's own throat, stop seeing itself as the tragically undisputed yet uncrowned champions of the world. Good things might then begin to flow.
The player drain is not going to stop, for love or money. Most of the players find themselves enchanted by the delights - including monetary - of living in Europe, and even discover that the rugby crusade doctrines they were brought up with fade a little once they tread the Champs-Élysées.
The All Blacks' bosses are always banging on about growing the players as people, as if they can do it with a couple of seminars at Lambton Quay. Getting around the global village is a more attractive method, and not to be wasted on old age.
So what's it to be? A scoot around the Riviera, a few European art galleries, pop off to watch the English Premier League, a London club, and all with relative anonymity - or a blackboard session with the official NZRU lifestyle coach? It's a tough one.
Typically of New Zealand rugby, the debate about picking overseas players has a black-and-white quality to it.
I may be wrong, but the image is that packs of overseas-based players would be torn from their mansions and pensions, put on troop ships, frog marched into battle against the old enemy Australia and South Africa for the 4000th time, and sent weary and wounded back to Europe.
It wouldn't have to be like that. A removal of the rule is a starting point and from there on judicious decisions by the selectors and mature negotiations between the NZRU and the European clubs would evolve. Many of the players are clearly looking for a break from test rugby and the World Cup obsession anyway, which also has to be factored in.
The major point about the current situation is that test rugby is being demeaned, because some of the finest players on the planet are officially excluded from playing it.
An All Black front row without Carl Hayman is a joke quite frankly, and the test side is not going to look right without him. It has already reached the point where the All Blacks no longer represent the country, but instead the policies of the NZRU.
As with just about everything in New Zealand rugby, the worrying facet is the lack of vigorous debate from within. New Zealand rugby is a totalitarian HQ with branch offices that have lost the will - if they ever had it - to publicly dispute or even discuss the dictates from above.
As for Collins, another adventure lies ahead. And as the NZRU showed by scheduling a potential Bledisloe Cup decider in Hong Kong, sport is just another commodity.
Should anyone dispute Collins' right to head overseas - and you doubt that anyone would - he could use an official line and blurt out his desire to spread the rugby gospel around the world.
"I'm St Jerry," he could say, hinting again at the devil within.
