When she was just 13 years old, tennis great Billie Jean King had an epiphany.

While competing in a junior match, she could not help be struck by the homogenous environment.

"White clothes, white balls, white faces," she thought to herself.

"Where is everyone else?"

King's moment of awareness would sow the seeds of a storied career as an equal rights activist, one who worked expertly inside and outside the system to achieve discernible and lasting change.

Tennis player Billie Jean King came to Australia last week for the T20 Women's World Cup. ( AAP: Michael Dodge )

Inevitably, she would be remembered as much for her work in gender equality as for the 12 grand slam singles titles she won.

King came to Australia last week as a guest of the T20 Women's World Cup organisers.

But her presence, and her vast wisdom, seemed somehow apt given the bizarre culture war that has preceded the NRL season.

The NRL's promotional campaign that has upset — you might even say triggered — some conservative commentators might be considered an answer to the question the teenage King posed.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 2 minutes 2 m NRL reinvents Simply the Best ad

The promotion featured an Indigenous player at once making a strong statement about his peoples' troubled past while celebrating his love of the sport, and two females players competing in their own league and expressing their love — and, if you like, their sexuality.

When Tina Turner originally belted out Simply the Best, rugby league was a tough, colourful, combative sport that was owned and operated by a white male hierarchy on behalf of everyone else.

Why the promo was branded as 'virtue signalling'

Three decades later, the NRL was able to proudly present convincing evidence that the sport had become more inclusive, more embracing of change and even that its power base had shifted ever so slightly.

Good job. Good message. Now let's see what happens in the next 30 years, right?

But it turns out some did not want to see what had happened between the original version and update, but instead craved dewy-eyed nostalgia.

The promotion was predictably branded as "politically correct", "virtue signalling" and attacked with the other now-routine anti-progressive epithets.

Yet rather than a legitimate beef with the promotional video, you wonder if the real objection was that it did not fit the needs of those yearning for the past.

None of the images portrayed by the NRL represent events that have in any way hamstrung the game or come at anyone else's cost.

On the contrary, they were symbolic of how rugby league had kept pace with community change — or at least made an effort to catch up.

Other than the odd clumsy continuity error, its only "failure" was that it did not hark back to the time when blokes biffed each other, women ran the canteen and everyone belted out the national anthem even if it explicitly excluded their heritage.

Subsequently, Fox Sports' newly released NRL promotion has created a sense the 2020 season has duelling themes that will appeal to progressives or conservatives.

The NRL rights holder's version features Jimmy Barnes belting out Simply the Best in the rubble of the demolished Sydney Football Stadium and uses fairly stock-standard action shots.

NRL advert 'acknowledges need to grow and expand' game

The advertisement is perfectly fine. Just the sort of comforting, non-confronting production those who wanted the NRL to produce a replica of Tina Turner's original version might have wanted.

The type of people who attend rock concerts where a veteran artist is attempting to update material and scream: "Play your old stuff!"

The promo will no doubt provide a nice play-in/play-out during pre-game and halftime breaks during Fox Sports' NRL coverage.

But it merely preaches to the converted while the NRL's more thought-provoking campaign acknowledges the need to grow and expand the game, as any league in a small and now savagely competitive market should be doing.

Time spent talking about Latrell Mitchell, centre, could be better spent, says Richard Hinds. ( AAP: Dave Hunt )

Of course, in its unerringly self-defeating way, the rugby league media's obsession with conflict and "crisis" not only managed to vilify the NRL's anodyne season launch. It overshadowed the prelude to what should be an intriguing competition.

After all, time spent obsessing over inoffensive images of Latrell Mitchell with an Indigenous flag is surely better spent contemplating the season's real issues.

Will the Bondi Billionaires dominate the competition again — this time without the presence of Mitchell and the indefatigable Cooper Cronk, who is lending his leadership expertise to the Greater Western Sydney Giants?

Did the Canberra Raiders' best shot at a first title since 1994 disappear in that moment of mad confusion during last year's grand final when the referee waved "six again" only to award a turnover to the Roosters, or can they rebound?

Can Newcastle regenerate with the exciting Kalyn Ponga and rekindle memories of their glory days, just as the Raiders did last season?

Can Wayne Bennett get the best from Mitchell, win an eighth title, this time with the Rabbitohs, and strike a blow for septuagenarians everywhere?

Who knows, in a competition that is so impressively unpredictable that if you could pick five winners in the first round you might not be far off the lead in your pub competition.

It starts with Thursday night's season opener between Parramatta and Canterbury, the ultimate boxes of chocolates: you never know what you are going to get.

Meanwhile, as the NFL reminded us, you no longer have to look around the league and wonder: "Where's everyone else?"