LOCKER ROOM:Is the New Zealand Rugby Union about to lose its iron grip on its prize assets?

WHEN YOU look at all those empty seats which have disfigured Lansdowne Road for the last couple of weekends you can make either of two assumptions, depending on outlook.

When people who love rugby can no longer afford rugby, it’s time to put our hands up as citizens of the EU and ask for the bail out. Health, education and social welfare are one thing. Empty seats are another.

Or perhaps the reason people are staying away in their impoverished droves isn’t as depressing. You’d kill to see the All Blacks pretty much anytime. Putting some money by is no hardship. But to see the All Blacks next weekend with Sonny Bill Williams playing. Well, you’d carelessly assassinate some bank executives.

It’s the item which makes everything else on the menu look like fast food.

Every now and then a sport gets gifted a character who seems destined to transcend its boundaries and become something more broadly iconic. An Ali. A George Best. A Babe Ruth. A Joe Namath. Rugby has found one such. Sonny Bill Williams.

Not that he is a wet-behind-the-ears Boy Wonder. That’s the beauty. When he tore Scotland apart on Saturday in just his second international as an All Black, thrilling us all with his astonishing trademark offloads, he did so as a fully-fledged celebrity and controversialist.

Drink driving. A sideline as a boxing pro. A smash up with the paparazzi. An unwise, drunken dalliance in a public toilet. A man whose exits are never without tears. A name which you couldn’t make up if you were designing a legend for a comic book. He comes with it all.

And of course he’s good looking, laconic and as hard as nails. Just when you thought the All Blacks couldn’t get any more charismatic or sexy they come out with Sonny Bill Williams playing at centre.

The All Blacks scored seven tries on Saturday and went through periods where they weren’t exerting themselves too much. When they were switched on, though, they played with an intensity and aggression which was awesome. And which seemed to be embodied in the granite form of Sonny Bill Williams.

It was mesmeric. Sonny Bill had played outside centre last week against England but moved inside a little on Saturday. Even to the untrained eye he is something special. With a World Cup coming up next year in New Zealand he looks like the sort of addition which will push the nervy All Blacks over the line in a way even Carter and McCaw have been unable to do.

And what then? Sonny Bill is an interesting case for a sport like rugby which is still feeling its way into the professional era. He was born into a rugby league family. His father played, but he says his mother got him into the game. Only in New Zealand do you have mothers like that.

Before he played union he was a legend in league. He moved to Australia in his late teens and signed for the Canterbury Bulldogs. He hopped through the grades and at 18 made his full debut for the club. They won the Grand Final that year and it rained awards on Sonny Bill’s broad shoulders. He was on his way.

Now, back in 2007, in the spring, he sat down with his advisers and the Bulldogs people and they all thrashed out a big new contract for Sonny Bill. It was a good contract, making him the highest-earning player in the club, but it wasn’t a great contract. Not if you were a Beckham or a Messi or, better still, if you had the marketing potential of one and the playing potential of the other.

It was good for a league grunt but not so great if you were a superstar sensing that you were already bigger than the league you were playing in. The rugby league people in Australia wisely use a salary cap system to prevent all the best players ending up at a few big clubs. Generally it works, but rugby is complicated if you are as good as Sonny Boy Williams and there are other places to run to.

The following year in the summer the good people of Sydney woke up to find they were missing a Sonny Boy. Gone. Without leaving a note saying so long and thanks for all the controversy, he had hot-footed it to Europe where he had signed for Toulon as a union man. The deal was done before anybody had informed the Canterbury Bulldogs that Sonny Bill’s feet were even itchy.

He left mid-season with his team-mates barnacled at the bottom of their league. There was nothing classy about the manner of it, but rugby league as the senior professional game had spent so long standing up for that precise freedom of movement it couldn’t complain too long or too loudly. A cheque from Europe duly arrived and all feelings were soothed.

And deep down people understood the reality. Having outgrown one sport, the logical step was to get to the very top in another. New Zealand, as is well known, insists its international players stay home to ensure the quality of the domestic competition and of the country’s sides which play Super 15 with the best of Australia and South Africa.

Super 15 (or just Super Rugby, as the marketing folk want it called) is an immense and bulging cash cow for the Kiwis and they are earnest about keeping things that way. For cash reasons and for cultural reasons New Zealand has to behave like a sanctuary in order to ensure its greatest products are a protected species. The magic of the black jersey is the principle method of ringfencing the talent. You want the jersey or you don’t?

In 2008, though, when Dan Carter took a six-month “sabbatical” to come to Europe and play for Perpignan, he was allowed continue as an All Black under the auspices of his “special deal”.

For many All Black players who had come to Europe for the money (smaller than what Carter got but enough to hedge them against the real world after retirement) and been denied the right to wear the sacred black jersey it was a hard pill to swallow. Carter is a special talent, though, and maybe this was a once off.

Sure enough, Sonny Boy Williams’ sudden manifestation as a star in the firmament of cash-rich Toulon came at probably the wrong time in relation to the Carter incident. Hence, only now on this tour is he pulling on the All Black jersey for the first time.

He has taken what looks like a short-term sacrifice. He has gone home to New Zealand to play for Canterbury at club level and to play alongside Carter for Crusaders (regional/ provincial level) in the Super 15 series.

Once again he came into the salary-cap zone. Toulon were frantically waving a contract worth €4 million at him. New Zealand rugby could only offer €500,000 per year, but going home held out the prospect of the greatest marketing bonanza a young man can imagine. Wearing the black jersey in a side which wins the World Cup at home.

And then what will happen? Well, blessed are the big television markets for they shall inherit the earth. New Zealand, like ourselves, is a small nation with a modest population which means in today’s cruel world that for all their keenness they will never amount to a big television market.

France is a big television market and Sonny Boy Williams is as good as rugby gets on TV. So Sonny Boy looks at his NZRU contract next summer when he has just walked on water and he says to the NZRU this isn’t quite enough, au revoir. Encore.

Or a side like St Helen’s implores him to come back to rugby league. Either way, the NZRU potentially has a huge challenge ahead. Especially if team-mates use Williams as a Trojan horse and try to bail out with him.

Already Mourad Boudjellal, the owner of Toulon, has accused Dan Carter of asking for ludicrous money to return to France. Writing in L'Equipe, Boudjellal alleged Carter was looking for $2.2 million a year or $42,300 a week to return to France after the World Cup. Carter, it seems, fancies three years in France before returning for another World Cup.

What then? Will the double standard which crept in with the treatment already afforded to Carter come into play again? If it does, the centre (no pun) will scarcely hold.

If stars begin routinely holding the NZRU to ransom while making “special deals”, an exodus will surely be the end result. Will the kiwis be content to play with a shadow team between World Cups, all the while pining for their exiled stars in Europe? Can the game in New Zealand survive that? Will principle be corroded by money yet again?

When rugby went professional a lot of deals were made with the devil, but the sport has been remarkably astute about surviving and thriving despite having some cloven-hoofed bedfellows. Dan Carter stretched the boundaries a little and the man who plays beside him, Sonny Boy Williams, will test those boundaries more vigorously.

A star is born. Call the wise men. The world is about to get interesting.