That doesn’t mean we didn’t try hard, and in terms of commitment and support for each other you would never find a finer band of brothers. We were close in all our Tests except the last against France, and truth is we played some very good Rugby in patches. But it was all individual stuff. The right hand rarely knew what the left was doing, and the words ‘game plan’, though they had plenty of relevance back in the hurly-burly of the Sydney competition, meant nothing in Britain. The Brits operated under a quaint amateur ethos that seemed to trap us, and the tour became a social hoot but a football disaster.
British Rugby operated on a Victorian standard of ‘the game’s the thing’ that to us was plain weird. Coaches were banned. There were no domestic competitions . . . the games they played were all ‘friendlies’ and arranged by invitation. Players tried to win of course, but if they dared say so publicly they were considered ungentlemanly. International teams were allowed to gather only 48 hours before a game for a workout under the direction of the captain. It was all very proper, but to us it was also rather silly.
Unfortunately, the Wallabies got bound up in these attitudes. We didn’t have a coach appointed for the tour. We had as assistant manager Dave Cowper, who had been a 1930s Wallaby and whose son Bob was a Test batsman of the 1960s who once scored a Test triple century against England. But Dave lived in Melbourne, and was well distanced from the Rugby standards of Sydney and Brisbane. He helped out at training, but his ‘ruck it here’ and ‘ruck it there’ methods were mindlessly boring and unproductive. Our captain Bob Davidson was captain–coach of our premiership team at Gordon. He was a powerful, forceful figure who held absolute command at our Sydney club, but he was strangely reluctant to take charge of the full coaching gambit on tour. We all assumed the management had told him that they would manage things and that he should keep his place. We had no support on tour in terms of medical help, not even a physio. When I suffered a bad cork in the final British Test against Scotland, I jumped into the hot bath with everybody else, making it a whole lot worse. It ended my tour and sent me home in callipers.
The team itself had plenty of talent.The two nineteen-year-old fullbacks, Terry Curley and Jim Lenehan, were fantastic athletes who starred on tour. They had been selected ahead of the established Australian captain Dick Tooth, triggering a raging controversy before the team left. Tooth was a very versatile and experienced footballer who played both fullback and five-eighth, so in reality I was probably lucky to be picked ahead of him. I was happy to agree with the selectors. Lenehan finished up playing in the centres, where his aggressive tackling made him a controversial figure in Britain. He triggered a wild crowd reaction with one high tackle on English winger Peter Jackson in the Test against England, and raised such hackles with the Fleet Street press that some of them labelled us the dirtiest team ever to tour.
We had plenty of beef up front with men like Tony Miller, Dave Emanuel, Alan Cameron and Nick Shehadie, and we played with a dogged determination that kept all the big games close. That we lacked the polish to finish on stuck in our craw, and was a terrible reflection of the amateur humbug of the time. It was especially frustrating for me, because I made plenty of breaks only to find myself in no-man’s-land, without support. My Gordon centre Jim Phipps broke his leg about eight games into the tour, taking from us the one player who knew my game inside out and would have been with me, tactics or no tactics.
The whole approach of that Wallaby tour was a great lesson to me half a dozen years later when out of the blue I found myself captain–coach of the Rugby League Kangaroos in Britain. This was a very different affair conducted in grim conditions through the north of England, and I was at the helm of a team of champions with much more experience than myself. The Wallaby tour had taught me the value of leadership and the cost of the lack of it. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake. I set the rules and stuck by them, with the clear message that we would operate as one, and if I was wrong we would all be wrong. We brought home the Ashes for the first time, and are still thought of today as perhaps the greatest of all Kangaroo teams.
The Wallaby tour was thus a great learning experience for me. Despite the results, it was also a lot of fun. As a measure of the sort of life we were leading, we were befriended early on by a fellow who introduced himself as Hughie. He was your quintessential Englishmen, with an Oxford accent and a flourishing handlebar moustache that curled at the ends. We wondered how much time he spent training those curls. Hughie was an extremely generous fellow who turned up everywhere we were in England and was always buying us drinks. He invited a bunch of us to his London home for Christmas. By this time we had seen plenty of him, and although we knew him only as Hughie, he was the sort of bloke you felt you had known all your life. Christmas was the full bottle in a lovely home, and since we didn’t even know his name, other than Hughie, we thought it about time we asked. It turned out he was Brigadier Glen Hughes, honorary surgeon to the Queen.
The tone of that tour had been set on the good ship Strathmore on tedious weeks at sea.There was too much food, too little space for effective training, and perhaps too little discipline to ensure that we arrived in the best shape possible.Training was running around a limited deck, flicking footballs through the hands. It was only wide enough for two or three passes. Plenty of footballs went overboard. We always suspected some of it was deliberate, and we had to stock up again in Bombay. In days before all football training was designed to turn everybody into weightlifters, there was a core of us on tour who were quite small. Wingers Ken Donald and Tony Fox, halves Des Connor and Don Logan and the fly halves Ron Harvey and myself were all geared for pace rather than power. The big blokes like Dave Emanuel, Stuart Scotts, Tony Miller and Nick Shehadie lorded it over us a bit, especially in the ship’s swimming pool, where holding us under water was a favourite trick.
We decided there was safety in numbers, so we formed a gang called the Mosquitoes. Brains would beat brawn, we decided. We got the better of them on a few occasions, most notably in our team hotel one night when a room went up in flames. Smoking in those days was not the taboo it is today, and our prop Geoff Vaughan, later an accomplished medico, somehow managed to set the curtains alight in his room. His roommate Nick Shehadie was nowhere to be seen. The hotel manager was in a rare flap, the fire brigade was called, and in the end what was really a modest fire was quickly extinguished.
The hotel manager quickly went into Sherlock Holmes mode, demanding to know where Shehadie was, but at least having the presence of mind to order a couple of cases of beer for the firemen. Nick had gone upstairs, where his wife Marie had taken a room, and when he appeared in a dressing gown the hotel manager was consumed by moral outrage. Women in the hotel were a no-no, and though Shehadie protested that they had long been married, the hotel manager would have none of it, unwittingly besmirching the reputation of the future governor of New South Wales in the process. In all the confusion, the beer arrived for the firemen. ‘Where do you want it?’ the delivery boy asked. ‘In here,’ we replied, quick as a flash, directing him to a room down the hall. The Mosquitoes had commandeered the beer, the word went out to our mates, and the firemen and the forwards saw none of it.
Shehadie was on his second tour of Britain, having toured with the team Trevor Allan ended up leading in 1947–48. He was very much the leader of the pack, and though his tour ways were born of his standing as a leader of men, they were not always of the conservative standard he later adopted as Sir Nicholas Shehadie, Lord Mayor of Sydney. One dare he perpetrated on a wild, cold day on the northern English coast scared the pants off us. Nick dared any of us to walk to the end of a long breakwater as the wind raged and the waves crashed over it. There was ten quid at stake, which was fair money on an amateur tour that saw most of us broke most of the time. Kevin Ryan couldn’t resist. Even as a 21-year-old I thought it was pretty stupid. Dave Emanuel and Stuart Scotts, the lifesavers among us, were ready to go in to get Ryan as soon as he lost his footing. It seemed inevitable. But
as Ryan proved in many battles through both Rugby Union and Rugby League, he was no quitter. He made it there and back, claimed his ten quid, and revelled in Shehadie’s discomfort at having to pay up.
Despite the frustration of a poorly managed tour, I still look back on those days with a sense of awe. My first Test was against Wales at Cardiff Arms Park, and I can still hear the crowd singing Waltzing Matilda as we took the field. They all knew it, and they sang it with such gusto the tears welled in your eyes. Then the Welsh team appeared and they burst into Land of Our Fathers, and that was something else. There can be few environments more intimidating than Cardiff Arms Park when the Welsh are on song, and a touring side goes weak at the knees. I had the chance to play at places like Twickenham and Murrayfield, and I played against legends like the Irish five-eighth Jackie Kyle. I made some wonderful friends in Rugby. I named my first-born David Terrence after Dave Emanuel and Terry Curley, and many years later Dave and I went into partnership to run a Wagga Wagga pub. I stayed in Rugby for two more seasons after that tour, making a Wallaby tour to New Zealand in 1958 and finishing up against the British Lions in 1959.
In New Zealand we finally had a nominated coach in Bill McLaughlin, and a highly capable manager in Charles Blunt, and we rose above ourselves to take a Test off the All Blacks. I was honoured as one of the New Zealand Rugby Almanac’s five players of the year, and I got back from the tour in time to play the Sydney grand final and win another premiership with Gordon. The Lions of 1959 gave us a dusting in two Tests, but NSW beat them, and I had the privilege in this game to play outside a nineteen-year-old Ken Catchpole, who went on to legendary status in Australian Rugby Union. For all of my ten Tests, though, my halfback was Des Connor, whose extraordinarily long pass made life for a five-eighth very luxurious indeed.
The Lions were a brilliant side, with the five-eighth Bev Risman and the big Irish winger Tony O’Reilly especially prominent. They had a range of brilliant moves and strategies, things that the Wallabies of my time, especially the touring team to Britain, just didn’t have at all. It was the one blot on my Rugby experience. Yet as I left Rugby at the end of the 1959 season, I was grateful for six fantastic years the game had given me. They were years loaded with hard football, a wonderful spirit, extraordinary experiences, and friends that last a lifetime. The Lions tour at the end had built on my already high respect for the skill of British footballers. But I could not have dreamed then, as I headed off to Western Suburbs, of the international opportunities I was to have in Rugby League. I was lucky to be at the centre of an era that turned the tables on England, and set Australia up as League’s dominant nation.
13
FROM KILLER TO CAMERON
THE ASTUTE MELBOURNE CAPTAIN Cameron Smith has a long list of achievements to set him above the pack as a Rugby League footballer. His man-of-the-match awards at every level of the game are legion. He captains the Queensland State of Origin team and the Australian Test team and he has been honoured internationally as the best hooker in the game. His highest recommendation, however, comes closer to home. Ask any of his Melbourne contemporaries who is the greatest player in the game and they have plenty to pick from. But despite the quality of men like Greg Inglis and Billy Slater, the judgement of his peers tips the scales heavily in favour of Smith.
There are many reasons for this: his cool command on the field; his prolific goal-kicking; his vision and his ability to make decisions quickly. But above all Smith is very much a creature of his time. He plays like a halfback. All hookers do. He is supreme among his peers as the maestro of the orchestra, the choreographer of the movement that provides scope and opportunity for the rare talents around him. The one thing an artist like Smith does not have to worry about is a labourer’s work at the scrum. Winning the ball is no longer required of the man in the middle of the front row. It happens automatically, ritually, easily and without any real involvement from hookers.
There is no position in the modern Rugby League team that so starkly defines the difference between the way the game is played today and the way it was played when Norm Provan and Arthur Summons were at their peak, and old warhorses like Ken ‘Killer’ Kearney and Noel Kelly were at the forefront of every battle. The role of the hooker has morphed from a dog-eat-dog battle in which winning the ball was the prime concern, if not the only concern, into a more nuanced role, where control at the scrum is no longer important. Rather, the hooker is charged with controlling just about everything else.
It has been a gathering change since the 1960s, when referees decided to clamp down on cheating hookers to the extent that they were being ordered from the field, week after week, for the all-encompassing sin of ‘repeated scrum infringements’. It became farcical, but no matter how stern the referees and how frustrated the administration, nothing seemed to make a difference. The scrum was an eternal shambles. So everybody just gave up. Whoever fed the ball to the scrum was allowed to do virtually whatever they liked with it. Feeding the second row, once a mortal sin, became an accepted tactic at every scrum. Without the need for a hard competitor in the middle of the front row, teams started to look for other skills—for inventive dummy halves; for secondary halfbacks who had all the visionary skills necessary to manage runners, to make a bit of a dart themselves, to kick judiciously when required and to take a commanding role of the game’s tactics and strategies.
If you wanted to pick a moment when the transformation of the hooker’s role became complete, the 1995 World Cup in England is as good a place as any. Bob Fulton was the Australian coach. He had in his team two specialist hookers in Wayne Bartrim and Aaron Raper, but he used neither of them in the big games. Andrew Johns, halfback with the Newcastle Knights, had emerged for the tournament as a rookie of unbridled promise. Also in the team was Geoff Toovey, the Manly scrum half who was as tough as teak and an experienced operator who provided an imaginative link between forwards and backs.
Fulton developed a scheme whereby Johns would pack at hooker in the scrums, with Toovey at halfback, but in general play Toovey would revert to dummy half and Johns would work as first receiver. It added to the play-making potential of the side, and it provided enormous flexibility. It also worked a treat. Australia won that World Cup against huge odds—it was played in the first angry year of the Super League war and most of Australia’s top players were ruled ineligible, having signed for the rebel organisation.
Fulton’s brainwave also formalised the way the hooker role would be seen from that point on. It was no longer a ball-winning role. It gave a team an extra attacking option and widened the skill base in that a virtual extra back was in play. It would have seemed a strange turn of events to the hookers of Provan and Summons’ day, for whom the battle for the ball at the scrum was a wild and violent affair crucial to a team’s success. In those days of unlimited tackles, a scrum ball won was a special jewel, because a well-drilled side could hang on to the ball interminably. It bred hookers of gladiatorial determination.
One such competitor was Ken ‘Killer’ Kearney, who joined St George in 1952 and is credited with being the brains behind their ultimate rise to eleven straight premierships. He was captain for the first of them, and captain–coach for the next five, although injury restricted him to non-playing coach for much of the fifth. He was also Australia’s Test hooker, captaining the side in nine of his 21 internationals and leading the 1956 Kangaroos to England as captain–coach. Kearney had been a Wallaby, playing seven Tests including all five on the Wallaby tour of Britain and France in 1947–48. After the tour he signed with Leeds in England, where he learned a thing or two about scrummaging, as well as gathering a tactical awareness that was to lift St George way above the pack.
As an indicator of just how the hooker’s role has changed, Kearney’s outpouring to author Larry Writer for his 1995 book on the St George premiership run, Never Before, Never Again, paints a pretty good picture:
Things went on in those north of England scrums I’d never dreamed of. Loose arms, the op
posing half would throw the ball either into the second row or right at my face, I was punched from the second row, head-butted, bitten, scratched, had mud rubbed in my eyes. I didn’t stand a chance. Then one day in that first year after a game in which I’d been thrashed for the ball by the great Wigan and Great Britain hooker Joe Egan, he gave me some advice: ‘Remember this, laad. In Rugby League the hooker’s job stops and starts with winning the ball, no matter how you do it.’ Then and there I decided that I would fight back and become a ruthless ball-winner. From that day my catchcry was ‘retaliate first’. Be aggressive. Thump them before they thump you . . .
NORM PROVAN
Nobody will ever convince me that the game today is as hard as it was then. Killer Kearney competed hard at the scrum, but he was by no means on his own. There was no quarter given anywhere in those days. And it wasn’t just the scrum. There was a general acceptance that it was a hard game, and that seemed to excuse a lot of violent stuff that went on. A lot of players thought they would be considered a bit of a sook if they weren’t in there clobbering somebody.
Referees allowed a lot of leeway, and it was considered part of every game that some sorting out would go on. One of the big differences was that it was all done in the moment . . . we didn’t have incessant replays to analyse it all and none of the close camera stuff that makes that sort of behaviour impossible today. It was on, then it was over, and we all just got on with it.
The Gladiators Page 9
