THE
GLADIATORS
Norm Provan and Arthur Summons
on Rugby League’s most iconic moment
and its continuing legacy
NORMAN TASKER
First published in 2013
Copyright © Norm Provan, Arthur Summons and Norm Tasker 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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CONTENTS
Foreword by John Grant
Introduction: A moment in time
1 The science of sport
2 The more things change . . .
3 An image for the ages
4 Cast in bronze
5 Fame and infamy
6 Different era, different world
7 The makings of high achievement
8 Shaping a generation
9 A matter of timing
10 A cocky wee Gordon
11 War with England
12 The Wallaby hop
13 From Killer to Cameron
14 A touch of English class
15 Magpies and millionaires
16 The subtle shades of greatness
17 The generation gap
18 Days of green and gold
19 Right place, right time
20 England swings
21 The coaching dilemma
22 A team for the ages
23 Boys will be boys
24 A time for heroes
25 The mentor challenge
26 Sharks on the prowl
27 Call of the bush
28 Wild ways at Wagga Wagga
29 Rules and other disasters
30 Shaping the game
31 A working life
32 Afternoon conversations
Postscript
Acknowledgements
FOREWORD
IT IS A SINGLE image that defines Australia’s sporting character.
In one muddy moment in 1963, a remarkable image captured two great heroes in a way that made us all feel proud of our game, and of being Australian. Just what was said at the time between Norm Provan and Arthur Summons has been a matter of some conjecture over the years, and maybe Norm and Arthur will shed some light on that in the pages ahead.
However, it is what that image continues to say to all who see it that has become the true legacy of John O’Gready’s magical picture, known as ‘The Gladiators’. All the drama of a great sporting moment is captured—one man’s incredible moment of triumph at having won an eighth consecutive grand final, and another’s devastation at losing three in a row.
The differences between these two men went far beyond their grand final experience to encompass their stature, playing positions, even the stark contrast of the colours of their jerseys. Yet both walked off exhausted, caked in the same SCG mud and able to raise the same respectful smile that has leapt out of the frame to fascinate us for half a century, and no doubt for decades to come.
The ‘Greatest Game of All’ is proud to have this image as part of its living history and it is sad that John O’Gready is not alive to be a part of this moment. Norm and Arthur are living treasures and their incredible individual standing in the game only grows, adding further richness to our view of John O’Gready’s photograph.
As Rugby League looks ahead to an era of unprecedented growth and opportunity, we are committed to recognising and nurturing the traditions of the game. The ‘Heroes and Legends’ museum at Rugby League Central is a place where the past gains a new vibrancy and is a current force for moulding today’s game. It is fitting that the Gladiators image towers over anyone who walks through this place.
The Gladiators captures the essence of our game—the tribal rivalry, the selflessness of being a team player, the exhausting heights reached in pursuing sporting excellence and the immense mutual respect that underscores these epic encounters. Our Rugby League heritage is made richer by books such as this, and I hope you all enjoy this insight into one of our game’s defining moments.
John Grant, Chairman
Australian Rugby League Commission
April 2013
Introduction
A MOMENT IN TIME
IT WAS A MOMENT in time that has lived for half a century. The date was August 24, 1963. At the end of an epic and controversial grand final that yielded St George the eighth premiership of an eleven-year winning streak, Sun-Herald photographer John O’Gready snapped the photograph that has become an enduring symbol of Rugby League and its ethos. The photo, dubbed ‘The Gladiators’, won a prestigious international award as the greatest sports photo of its time. It captured the rival grand final captains Norm Provan and Arthur Summons in a moment of congratulatory embrace, and the pose has been sculpted in bronze to serve for the past 30 years as the league’s premiership trophy.
The photo and the trophy have come to express many facets of Rugby League. The mud-caked images invoke the toughness of a hard game. The tall second rower and the diminutive halfback speak of the game’s diversity, and the fact that there is a place for everybody. The momentary embrace reflects the character of a hard team sport, where the fierceness of the battle quickly gives way to expressions of mutual respect. It is a stark and striking depiction of sportsmanship in its finest livery.
Importantly, the image lives as a bridge between generations. Year after year, at grand finals and at the game’s big awards night, the Dally Ms, the link is recognised. The Provan–Summons Medal is awarded each season to the popularly voted Player of the Year. Last year it was won by the Canterbury fullback Ben Barba, and as he received his trophy from the two giants of yesteryear, the link between old and new was clear. No matter how much things change, the core of the game stays the same, and the spirit of The Gladiators is as alive today as it was in the Sydney Cricket Ground mud 50 years ago.
This book has come about not only to honour the 50th anniversary of the day and the photo, but to relate, largely in their own words, the life and times of two remarkable footballers. It embraces not just what drove them all those years ago, but the way their lives have evolved since. Their experiences of the past 30 years or so have been uniquely shaped by O’Gready’s momentary reaction and the image it produced.Their fame and their recognition have never faded. They sign autographs today for young men whose fathers weren’t yet born when Saints won that 1963 grand final and a single photograph immortalised the occasion and its central characters. Importantly, they have become firm friends.
The account they give also speaks of another time, when players worked for a living, when Tuesday and Thursday night training routinely ended with a drink at the pub, when the game was played without replacements, and heroes endured with broken bones but unshakeable spirit. Provan and Summons wer
e high achievers. Provan played through sixteen first-grade seasons. He was in the St George side for ten successive grand final wins, and was captain–coach in the last four. He played in Australian teams as far back as Clive Churchill and nurtured giants like Reg Gasnier and Graeme Langlands when they were mere boys. He was the rock on which a great club built an amazing era—an era that will forever remain unmatchable.
Arthur Summons came to Western Suburbs from Rugby Union, where he had played six seasons with Gordon, won two premierships and played ten Test matches. He played for the Australian Rugby League team in his second year in the new code, was captain in a winning Test against England the following year, and ended up captain–coach of the 1963–64 Kangaroos—still, in the opinion of many, the finest of all Kangaroo sides. They were the first to win the Ashes in England. Summons played three successive grand finals against Saints and lost the lot. To this day he bears the scars of the last of them, in which he believes Wests got a raw deal.
Rugby League has produced many fine players, many great teams and many grand occasions in the 50 years since the Gladiators did their stuff. Yet nothing, even now, captures the game’s spirit quite as does O’Gready’s photograph, perpetuated in the premiership trophy. It is a constant in changing times.
The corporate nature of the modern sporting business has wrought many changes since Norm Provan and Arthur Summons were involved, and not all of them progressive. Shocking revelations about drug use and organised crime at the start of the 2013 season made that crystal clear. Yet in an era of high professionalism, saturation television coverage, the personality cult of modern sport and the constant scrutiny of an all-pervasive media, the Gladiators image remains a permanent reminder that the game, no matter how sorely tested, has at its heart an ethos of sportsmanship and camaraderie that reflects the best of the human condition. It is at once a memorial to another age, and a beacon of light for the future.
Norman Tasker
March 2013
1
THE SCIENCE OF SPORT
NOTHING CHANGES THE WORLD like science. From Isaac Newton to the space race, great scientific minds have shaped the way we all live. Science is changing sport, too. In Rugby League, computerisation and the use of global positioning satellites have forged new frontiers for coaches and altered the way players train. Clubs have employed sports scientists to maximise competitive advantage with dietary regimens and supplements. Some, it seems, have plunged further into the dark arts of sports science than is generally regarded as ethical or proper. As the 2013 season was getting into gear, an Australian Crime Commission report laid bare claims of widespread illegal drug use and potential match fixing, of blackmail and organised crime. It was a broad brush applied with a flourish to a range of sports, and it threw suspicion about with abandon.
The affair was a living metaphor for the way Rugby League has changed. Fifty years ago Norm Provan and Arthur Summons played a memorable grand final on a Sydney Cricket Ground sea of mud. After the game, as the captains walked off together, a photographer shot a famous photo. It has been replicated as the league’s premiership trophy, and it stands today as a metaphor for the Rugby League ethos of the time, when life was simpler and the game was the thing. Nobody spoke then of human growth hormone, or considered injecting calf ’s blood to improve performance. Provan and Summons look back on those days with wry amusement. Scientific help was limited largely to a bottle of liniment and a packet of Bex. A bit of a rub and a headache powder.
As the two champions of another age look back on more than 50 years in the game, there is some disappointment but little surprise in the revelations so spectacularly made in early 2013. The eternal search for a competitive edge was always going to lead to cheating. That’s human nature, and when an illicit market develops there is no shortage of suppliers. Suspicion about drug use in sport has been about for decades, and tests have uncovered more than one offender. The issue for today is how to deal with it. And on this front, Norm Provan and Arthur Summons have slightly different views. Provan is an unswerving devotee of the standards that he lived by through his playing days. Arthur Summons has a more pragmatic view, raising the question of how long administrations can keep their finger in the dike, and to what extent they must.
NORM PROVAN
A few things about drugs in sport are clear. First, I am sure Rugby League as a whole is pretty clean. There undoubtedly are a few bad apples who will seek to grab an unfair advantage if they can, but only a few. The other undeniable truth is that those bad apples have been about for a very long time. They are risk takers, both in terms of their own health and in terms of the trouble they can bring upon themselves, their clubs and the game. But I have seen too many players over time who have bulked up tremendously, then suddenly shrunk when their playing days are done. That is rarely a result of natural change. They have taken something, then stopped taking it, and the effects sometimes are dramatic. But I don’t think many do it. The great surprise about the spectacular way the issue was raised through the Crime Commission at the start of 2013 was the way it threw a blanket over everybody. It was almost a case of guilty until proven innocent for the many, many players who would never countenance using drugs.
Looking back, I think I might have been a bit of a pioneer in the field anyway. It was not uncommon in the years that I played in the Australian team to play a Test on Saturday, then back up for your club next day.We were used to playing injured or knocked about at best, and backing up for your club was the done thing.
In those days the Sun-Herald had a man-of-the-match award of ten pounds for the best player. I won it in a Saturday Test against England, and next day I turned up for the club game looking battered after a hard game against the Poms. The team doctor looked at me, grabbed a very small pill and a glass of water, and said, ‘Take this.’
I didn’t even think about it. I just did as I was told. I was always stimulated playing football. When I ran on to the field I grew six inches. This day I grew about three feet. I had never felt stronger. I was bursting with energy. I had a whale of a game, and at the end of 80 minutes I was running as strongly as I had at the start. Tom Goodman was the Herald man at the game, and he was full of apology afterwards. ‘Norm,’ he said, ‘I can’t give you the tenner again, because you won it yesterday and we don’t allow two in the one weekend. But you certainly deserve it.’ Indeed, but as the years passed I began to realise that had I got the tenner I might have been winning it under false pretences. I must have looked crook that day, because I had never been offered a pill before, and I was never offered one again. I don’t know what the pill was, but given the emphasis on drugs in sport these days, I think I might unwittingly have been one of the early beneficiaries, if ever so briefly.
The crews of Bomber Command in England through World War II used to take some sort of stimulant—amphetamines, I suppose—to keep them going through tense missions over Europe that sometimes lasted as long as ten hours. They called them ‘wakey-wakey’ pills, because they were designed to ward off drowsiness. Ken ‘Killer’ Kearney was captain–coach of our team at the time and had also played in the Test match the previous day. In World War II as a very young man, ‘Killer’ had been seconded to Bomber Command from the RAAF. He saw action in Lancaster bombers over Europe as a wireless operator. I’m sure it was all very innocent, and maybe they were just glucose tablets, but whatever they were, they certainly enhanced performance.
My attitude to drugs is simple. It’s not on. Rugby League should always be a clean game, where matches are decided not on who has the best chemist but on who has the best team. That was certainly the case when I was playing at St George. We trained hard. We had excellent systems that Ken Kearney and Harry Bath had introduced, and we were extremely fit. We lasted better than other teams and we were very successful. We had no need of needles, or sports scientists or chemical supplements. It is a damning critique of modern sport and modern society, I believe, that such things are now considered by many to be benefic
ial, even necessary.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
When I was playing Rugby League, sports science and science fiction fell into roughly the same category. Our game was, as Roy Masters once put it, more about ‘clouds of dust and buckets of blood’ than it was about science. We had a club doctor who was probably a volunteer, but there was no physio or sports psychologist or nutritionist or any of that. Self-help was more the order of the day. I broke my nose many times, and mostly just whacked it back into place myself. The only supplement we got involved with was a few beers at the pub after training, and calf’s blood made good gravy with a nice roast beef, but certainly wasn’t injectable.
As an example of how lacking in sports science we were, there is no better example than the Kangaroo tour of Britain in 1963–64. I was captain–coach, and we had a couple of managers who usually were appointed as a reward for services rendered. They were good blokes but they didn’t do much. If we needed physio or treatment it was usually off to the hospital or a doctor’s surgery in town. We were lucky at one stage to pick up some unofficial help from a lovely bloke called Bill Hunter, who had made himself into a pioneer ‘rubber’ at the Parramatta club in Sydney, and joined our tour on a sort of freelance basis. Bill was a huge boon to us in circumstances where injury management was a much-neglected art. Bill was not young, but he was an enthusiastic helper. He set up a treatment room and would lug his gear around the hotel without complaint. After our big second Test win on that tour, Bill had a heart attack. He was bedded down in the expectation that he would recover, but a short time later he died. I was with him at the end. He was a much-loved tour character, and his passing affected everybody.
That’s the way it was in those days. Bill Hunter was a good man who was thrilled to be with us and worked perhaps beyond what was reasonable. Whether that contributed to his heart attack we don’t know, but the remarkable fact was the team did not have a better arrangement for medical support. This was one of the great Australian teams, the first ever to win the Ashes in England, and it was loaded with some of the greatest champions the game has seen. But there was no real effort made to protect them or to enhance their performance in any of the ways that modern sports science would suggest. Reg Gasnier was arguably the finest player the game has seen, yet when he dislocated a finger, who was the expert to reduce the dislocation and get everything pointing in the right direction? I was. Looking back, we could have done with a little sports science, however limited it might have been in those days.
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