Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Paul Hayward


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   keep. -- Cirt (talk) 15:45, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Paul Hayward

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BLP1E; notability of subject as athlete is not well-established; coverage about event already in Warren Fellows article (which should perhaps likewise be converted to an article about the event instead). Paul_012 (talk) 09:29, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Crime-related deletion discussions.  -- Paul_012 (talk) 09:34, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Australia-related deletion discussions.  -- Paul_012 (talk) 09:34, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Thailand-related deletion discussions.  -- Paul_012 (talk) 09:34, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep Rugby league record (now added) makes him clearly notable.The-Pope (talk) 13:43, 6 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep due to addition of rugby league record. Freikorp (talk) 15:47, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep. I wrote this article four years ago so I'm obviously not a neutral voice here, but I'm surprised to see it nominated for deletion, especially under a BLP criteria (Hayward died nearly 20 years ago). Certainly, Hayward is now most known for his drug trafficking conviction and his connections to various infamous criminals, including Neddy Smith, but the drug arrest in Thailand is definitely not the only basis for a claim of notability and I don't think 1E reasonably applies to an article which, at the time of AFD nomination, stated in the second sentence that the subject was an athlete who had reached a professional level in two sports (rugby league and boxing). Hayward's story still gets mentioned in the media today. As an example, in 2002, he was listed at number 3 on The Daily Telegraph's list of Australia's "Top 10 Scandals" (Ray Chesterton, "The Top 10 Scandals", The Daily Telegraph, 3 May 2002) and he is often referred to in stories involving Australian athletes running off the rails, for instance "How Footy Heroes Go Bad" in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2008 and "Dark Knight Star on Drug Charges" in WA Today in December 2009. These two articles don't give significant coverage about Hayward but they do show that 30 years after his arrest and 20 years after his death, his story is still known and referred to by the press. His case is also discussed in numerous books about Australian crime and drug trafficking, including the significant coverage in Fellow's bestselling book The Damage Done and Neddy Smith's bestselling book, Neddy. Google Books has two other books which contain at least some coverage of Hayward's case - Alfred McCoy's book Drug traffic: narcotics and organized crime in Australia and Bob Bottom's The godfather in Australia: organised crime's Australian connections. There's also some sources in Factiva's news archives that show that when Hayward was released from prison in 1989 and deported to Australia, he generated further controversy and media attention by attempting to auction his story to the current affairs shows, an early example of attempts at chequebook journalism in Australia. There's plenty of sources around that verify his playing career but finding significant coverage of it is more difficult, no doubt due to the fact that his playing career was in the 70s, predating most online archives, so most of the modern coverage is in relation to the drug trafficking, but in the 70s he was considered an Australian rugby league "star" (for example, there's a reprint of an article here  which was published in The Bulletin in 1977 about the NFL's Manfred Moore visiting Newtown which refers to Hayward as "the Newtown star Paul Hayward" and this article published in 2009 in The Brisbane Times, "Bird can play on despite jail sentence" also refers to him as a "league star". He was notable enough as a player to have his own Scanlens trading cards in 1976, 77 and 78 (Ebay's obviously not a RS but for informational purposes you can find images of the cards there). I will add some more sources to the article when I have a bit more time, but I really don't see any need to delete this article. Sarah 03:18, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.