Ever hear the joke about the bloke who turned down an invitation to King Charles’ 70th birthday party at Buckingham Palace so he could go to footy training?

That Australian comedian, Adam Hills, should tell it on stage one day. When it comes to the punchline, there’s no need to be extravagant.

It’s funny … because it’s true. That footy player I’m talking about, that was me.

“It wasn’t just out of a commitment to a team,” Hills explains. “I just don’t want to miss training. I said to my manager, ‘just keep Tuesdays free’. I would get gig offers and I’d be like, ‘no, no, Tuesday is for training’.

“I would much rather run around the footy field for an hour-and-a-half with my mates than go to Buckingham Palace with a bunch of people I don’t know and have to put on a suit.”

King Charles and the late Queen Elizabeth II’s corgis don’t know what they were passed over for, even if it wasn’t Hills’ most outlandish attempt to get to training (he once left a family holiday in the south of France to travel all day to Warrington in northern England, returning to the vacation the next day).

Rugby league can mean a lot to many people.

To Ron Coote, being inducted as the sport’s 14th Immortal on Wednesday night, it was a neat ribbon tied on a lifelong commitment to the sport. To the six-year-old kid sporting a Ryan Papenhuyzen mullet down the park playing on a Saturday morning, it’s a chance to run free with your mates.

To Adam Hills, it’s part of life.

You probably haven’t heard much about it yet, but one of the country’s greatest entertainers, best known here for his work on music quiz show Spicks And Specks, will become the president of England’s Rugby Football League in 2025, an Australian representing the old enemy at rugby league’s top table. Prince William holds a similar honorary role with the Football Association.

Hills, who was born without a right foot, is not unfamiliar to rugby league audiences in the United Kingdom. He fronted Channel 4’s coverage in recent years – “to go, ‘I’m from Sydney, and in Sydney everyone loves rugby league’ … people kept talking about it as a breath of fresh air” – and will use his new platform to spread the sport’s gospel even further.

His major involvement in rugby league has been through physical disability competition for years, even representing Australia at the maiden World Cup in 2022.

The first rule between competitors is don’t go easy on each other. After that, almost anything goes.

“The worst thing you can do is patronise someone,” Hills says. “One of our guys made a 15-metre break, and when he watched the video back, he realised they let him go. He was fuming.”

That means if someone doesn’t have one arm, you try to beat them down that side, and conversely if you’re defending next to a teammate who is lacking a limb, you have to work harder to help them in a tackle. Hills wears a prosthetic foot when he plays.

“They all know which foot I’m stepping off,” he jokes.

Hills had flirted with the prospect of representing England, to the point England’s physical disability rugby league coach, Shaun Briscoe, pulled him aside one day.

“Do you want to represent your country or do you want to win the World Cup?”

Before the Lancashire and Yorkshire match, in which Hills was playing, Briscoe told the players it was the first step to representing England.

“I said to him afterwards, ‘when you said that, I didn’t get butterflies’,” Hills recalls. “I should have got butterflies. My dad always said to me, ‘when you pull on your country’s shirt, you should grow an extra foot’. I said, ‘if I could grow an extra foot, I wouldn’t be playing disability rugby league’.

“But they got it. I didn’t get heart flutters. On the first day of the Australian camp we were presented with our kit, I pulled out the green and gold and I knew I made the right choice. I could feel it.

“It became so addictive. I normally carry a book of jokes with me and if I think of one, I’ll write it down. But I started writing and scribbling down set plays.”

Hills played one of the best matches of his life against Wales during the World Cup, after a week in which most of his teammates had contracted a stomach bug. Now, it was rugby league which kept the adrenaline pumping.

How long Hills, 54, can keep playing for might be out of his hands. A text message from actor and South Sydney co-owner Russell Crowe (Hills is a Rabbitohs fan) about listening to his body has stayed with him. He has previously been knocked unconscious in a tackle and is mending a serious IT band tear, a result of being twisted during a tackle. It’s kept him off the field in 2024.

So, attention has turned to what he can do off the field for the sport, where he predicts next year’s Warrington-Wigan clash in Las Vegas will be a shot in the arm for the English game, and how to get more traction outside heartland areas of northern England, particularly London.

But the most pressing question: can an Australian really be president of the RFL?

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“I was really reticent at first,” he says. “I had two hesitations. One was, I’m not going to be in the country the whole year, and two was, I’m Australian. I don’t know how I’m going to support England in rugby league when they play a Test. But I realised what I could bring to the role is a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of excitement and positivity about rugby league.

“There’s a perception over here it’s a rain-sodden, slow, drudgery game. Maybe that’s one of the things I can help to turn around. There’s a real inferiority complex over here, but I don’t think there needs to be. What I’d love to see that is that inferiority complex chipped away a little bit because it’s a great game.

“I’ll be like a cheerleader in a suit … and happy to be that.”

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