The Gladiators

by Norman Tasker

  While I was feeling sorry for myself I had a ring from Ian Walsh, my vice-captain on the Kangaroo tour and now the Australian captain. He had been offered a job in Wagga, but his wife didn’t want to leave the Saints. The Wagga people were after a marquee player as captain–coach of the Wagga Magpies, but with that role came another job as general manager of Wagga Leagues club. This was real work, and a long-term prospect. As was so often the case in the early days of the club industry, it was offered as an extra inducement for a player they thought might help the footy team, despite the serious responsibilities that running a licensed club entailed. Since he couldn’t go, Walsh asked me if I would like him to mention me as an alternative. I asked him to give me a day or two to discuss it with my wife.

  Suddenly there was a lot to think about. I was contracted to Wests, but I knew I was crook and not likely to be a lot of value for the rest of the year. I had worked as a schoolteacher until a couple of years before, when I was offered a job as an advertising salesman with radio 2UW. After the final Test of the 1962 series, the boss of 2UW, Bob Hynes, had watched me at the end of the game as I found my family on the fence and hugged them. It was my first go as captain of Australia and we had won the game and the emotion was naturally high. Bob wrote to me offering me a job and saying I would be paid while away on the Kangaroo tour at the end of the following year. That looked a very distant prospect to me, but he seemed to think it would happen. I knew how hard a long tour was without an income, and this seemed like an enormous bonus, so I took the job and worked as hard as I could to make a success of it. Bob Hynes had been very generous, and it was important to me that I gave him full value.

  The fact was, however, that I wasn’t cut out to be an advertising salesman. I just didn’t have the right personality for it. I had realised that before the Wagga possibility was raised, but it suddenly seemed that a job managing a club was a much more feasible plan for my particular talents. I explained the position to Bob Hynes, who was very understanding. Pam had taught briefly at Wagga in the local high school, and she liked the town. So I told Ian Walsh we were definitely interested, made the deal with the Magpies club when the offer came, and set about making my peace with Wests. They were not happy. They seemed to think I would recover and give them value that season, but I just knew I couldn’t. As it turned out, I could not play again that year, although I did play five seasons at Wagga after that. I was never the same. I played on my wits, but the quickness that had been so important to me was dulled, and that would certainly have been found out in the pressure of the Sydney competition.

  I would have been found out in the Riverina, too, had I chosen to play as I had always played. But I realised that direction and organisation that drew on my experience would now be more important to me than the zip of former days. In short, the coach part of the captain–coach role became more defined. When I finally called it quits after five seasons with the Wagga Magpies, we had won three premierships and been runner-up twice. In the heated competition that prevailed in those days, with a sprinkling of old internationals from both Australia and New Zealand playing in many teams, it was a fair result. I found I liked coaching. With the Kangaroo team in Britain I had had to learn fast, and the whole operation was so immediate and so tense that the adrenaline rush carried me. Now I had time to learn the ins and outs of coaching in a more settled environment, and it gave me a buzz. After I stopped playing with the Wagga Magpies I enjoyed many years coaching Riverina and Combined Country, and I was also given another opportunity as Australian coach for the series against England in 1970.

  Whether I would have developed as a coach had I taken on Wests after the ’Roo tour I’ll never know. I also had an offer to coach Canterbury later on. The Bulldogs boss Peter ‘Bullfrog’ Moore had been in New Zealand scouting when we were on one of our Country tours, and apparently I had enough to say to impress him. But I look back now without any regret about my life in Country football. It was strong and spirited in those days, and it produced many internationals. Wagga was a good place to find them. Greg Brentnall and the Mortimer boys kicked off there as kids, and I had the unique experience of running into a very young Tom Raudonikis towards the end of my playing days. Cricket produced a few, too. Mark Taylor played at Wagga, although he lived at Leeton. His old man used to say that if a sportsman stopped to have a beer in Wagga, the town would claim him forever.

  I learned to be more circumspect about my attitudes to coaching. In the rough and tumble way of the ’60s, I took the firebrand line and tried to stir people up in the dressing room with speeches that were part Churchillian drama and part back-street ranting. If the occasion was right, players usually responded. Johnny Raper was a great example. But some liked a more reasoned approach. As coach of Riverina one day I delivered a pre-match classic. We were playing Western Division at Parkes, and I left nothing on the table as we worked ourselves into a lather before the game. They were so pumped I thought nobody could beat them, and sure enough they turned on a first-half blitzkrieg that had them up 23–0 at the break. At half time I didn’t think there was much to say. Just keep going. In the second half they were hopeless. They missed tackles, dropped balls, made error after error. They played like Manly played in their exit from the 2012 NRL competition. We were beaten 25–23. All nervous energy had been expended early, and they had nothing left. I resolved after that always to keep a little in reserve.

  The spread of talent through Country football was excellent, and my years as Combined Country coach were very rewarding. Each year we would tour to New Zealand and Queensland, and finish up with our annual match against Combined Sydney at the SCG. In the six years I was with them we didn’t lose a game in New Zealand or in Queensland, and although all the big guns were in Sydney we had one notable victory against them, too, in 1975. These were days before the Origin concept had been introduced, so it was boys who played all their football in the country against the superstars of the city, and most of the time Country came second. Everybody assumed it would be that way in 1975, too, with City boasting such luminaries as Arthur Beetson, Bob McCarthy, Ron Coote, Bob Fulton, Graeme Langlands and Ray Branighan. Steve Rogers, one of the giants of his day, could only make the bench.

  We had a healthy mix of emerging talent in our team and a lot of raw competitiveness. Country men had a grit about them, and on this day City’s superstars were caught short as our boys ripped in. Greg Brentnall at fullback was a champion on the rise, and so was Mick Cronin in the centre. Ian Martin at five-eighth was as tough an operator in that position as I have ever seen. The forwards lacked big names but were all workers, and they fed off the drive of Jim Morgan, who led the team from the front row. We scored three great tries to Sydney’s one, won the game 19–9, and severely embarrassed some high-flying individuals who learned that day that reputation alone doesn’t get the job done. One factor that went a long way towards getting us over the line was the stunning football of our halfback Steve Hewson. He was a kid from Queanbeyan and I don’t think it is drawing too long a bow to suggest that he was shaping up at that time as one of the greatest of them all. He had every skill and then some, with real speed and power in his running. He played at Queanbeyan with the Country lock John Ballesty, and their combination was very smooth. Hewson was only 20, but he won NSW selection on the strength of that performance, played brilliantly and looked a long-term option before Steve Mortimer and Peter Sterling had even arrived on the scene. Unfortunately Steve damaged his knee badly a few weeks later, and it killed his career before it had really started.

  Every year that we played City I would tell the press that we were there to win, but I suppose deep down I was realistic enough to know the difference in quality between our blokes and those who were being paid big money to play with Sydney clubs. But that year I felt we did have quality above the ordinary. We worked out ways of stopping Arthur Beetson that we all knew would be a key to the game. It was no use wrestling with him. He would stand and deliver and we would be chasing our tails
all day. We worked out a system of one man low and one man high on the ball. And for the most part we kept him under good control. It was one of those freak years. Cronin was about to become a Test player, Brentnall too, and all over the park we had a committed team. Nothing gives a coach a glow more than a well-constructed win against huge odds. That was one of my most rewarding afternoons.

  It was certainly a happier result than my return as coach of Australia five years earlier, when the Englishmen were on tour. My appointment was shrouded in one of those political duels that often flared between NSW and Queensland, and I always had the feeling that there were a few NSW administrators death-riding me. The invitation to stand came from Queensland in a phone call from Arthur Sparks, who had been manager of our Kangaroo tour back in ’63. I got on well with Arthur, and I am sure he had a genuine respect for the job I had done with the Kangaroos. They put me forward against the NSW contender Harry Bath, and as always NSW had a voting margin on the Board of Control that meant Bath would get it if they all voted in a bloc. The Country man on the Board, John O’Toole, apparently had had some conversations with Sparks, and he made a gentle inquiry as to whether NSW delegates were required to vote in a bloc. The chairman, Bill Buckley, told him they weren’t.

  So against the odds once again, a combination of Queensland votes and a loyal Country man got me the nod, and I was back as Australia’s coach for another battle with the old enemy. The English team that toured under Frank Myler was a very solid outfit, with a young Malcolm Reilly wielding his particular type of havoc in the forwards and the artistic Roger ‘The Dodger’ Millward leading a merry dance in the backs. They also had the usual combative front, with Cliff Watson in the front row especially adept at head-butting and other tricks which caused extensive damage. We won the first Test in Brisbane 37–15, but the carnage was horrendous. Three forwards—Jim Morgan, Arthur Beetson and Ron Lynch—suffered facial fractures. Morgan was the worst. Thanks to a Cliff Watson head butt, his nose was spread like a crushed watermelon. I knew a fair bit about broken noses and this was the worst I had seen. There was a classic photo taken of Jimmy after the game looking as though he had been run over by a bus. It was Jim’s first Test and he showed plenty of courage. When he came off I told him he couldn’t possibly do any more damage and sent him back, and although he finished the game a dreadful sight, he did score two tries and played magnificently. It was one of those games where Arthur Beetson seemed to direct traffic with eyes in the back of his head, and we scored five tries.

  Unfortunately, we had so many damaged people the momentum didn’t last. Our captain, Graeme Langlands, was another casualty who had to pull out of the next two Tests, and we finished up with three captains in three games. John Sattler and Phil Hawthorne had a go as well. We also had three fullbacks and a series of debutants, and it was impossible to settle on a combination that held together long enough to be competitive. We got a dusting in the second Test 28–7, and although we got within a point a few minutes from the end of the third Test, we finished up beaten 21–17. The undeniable bottom line is that it was a fine England side that deserved to win. There were some interesting introductions through the series. John Brass at centre and Phil Hawthorne at five-eighth were well-credentialled Rugby internationals, and Bobby Fulton made his Test debut as well, although he had previously played in a World Cup. While it looked very much like England had well and truly re-established their superiority, it didn’t play out that way. By the World Cup later that year Australia had regained the ascendancy, and they largely have hung on to it to this day.

  I ran into a spot of bother during that 1970 English visit when I coached Riverina in a mid-week game against them. Riverina had a good side and took a game against England very seriously indeed, so the contest necessarily was a very spirited affair.We had some good players. Ron Crowe was a strong international forward in the front row, and the five-eighth was Kiwi international Doug Ellwood. The rest of them were hard-bitten country boys who ate nails for breakfast and looked upon the Englishmen as mere mortals, as vulnerable as anybody else to a bit of stick. At one point their little fullback Derek Edwards got beneath a big up-and-under as our hooker Wayne Linsell gave chase. Linsell kept his eyes on the ball and was still looking at it as he ran straight over the top of Edwards, leaving him seriously unwell. The English took great umbrage. They accused us, and I think me in particular, of trying to knock them about for the Test match that followed a few days later. We drew the game, and Wagga Wagga rocked all night to the celebrations that followed.

  The third Test of 1970 was the end of it for me as an Australian coach. For a tour of New Zealand the following year, the NSW Rugby League reverted to normal practice and organised a bloc vote on the Board. Despite the fact I was a born and bred New South Welshman, I think they still resented my getting the job on the back of Queensland support the previous year, and they decided Harry Bath would resume for the New Zealand trip. I would happily have departed the scene had Harry beaten me in a ballot, because I had the highest respect for him as a coach, having played under him in the early ’60s. But the Queenslanders had read the tea leaves and didn’t even nominate me. I was disappointed about that. Thereafter I put my energies into local football and the Country side, and for several more years I continued to find coaching a very rewarding task.

  28

  WILD WAYS AT WAGGA WAGGA

  WHEN ARTHUR SUMMONS took on life in the country soon after his groundbreaking Kangaroo tour, the local football was fiercely fought and of good standard. Rugby League flourished through the country towns of NSW at that time. Australian Test teams were liberally sprinkled with players who were not only bred in the bush but still played their football there. On top of that, the country towns and the money on offer were a lure for old champions on the way down. The teams that Summons faced every week were spiced with Australian and New Zealand internationals, and taking them on was a continuing challenge.

  ARTHUR SUMMONS

  It didn’t take me long to realise that Country football was full of character and full of characters. Taking over the reins of the Wagga leagues club allowed me to quickly get a handle on the culture of the place, and while I was nursing my injured groin through that first year I got a good sense of how things worked. The football was very rough-and-tumble, the referees parochial, and the support passionate. But there was also some very high-quality football involved. Greg Hawick was captain–coach of our arch-rivals in Wagga, the Kangaroos. He had been a top-drawer Souths five-eighth through a string of premierships and played many Tests for Australia. We had Kevin Brown, who was a 1959 Kangaroo tourist and a front-row stalwart of St George’s early premiership years. We also had Bob Honeysett, who played halfback in those great Souths teams under Jack Rayner, and the outstanding New Zealand centre Graham Kennedy. There was a fantastic culture too among the born-and-bred locals. If they had some shortcomings in skill, they more than compensated in spirit, effort and sheer ruthlessness. There was nothing soft about football in the Riverina.

  My first game came in my second year there, and it quickly became obvious what the tactics of the teams we faced would be. As captain–coach of the Australian team not much more than twelve months before, I became the central target of an almost universal mission to take the city big-noter down a peg or two and show him how real country men operated. In my first game at Leeton I was knocked out cold. They were after me as if they were on some sort of mountain pig shoot. I was fair game. The sad thing as well was that I never really regained my old pace after the groin injury that finished me at Wests, and self-preservation at Wagga required some deft improvisation. My only defence in those early weeks was to pass the ball. Even that was an imperfect defence against men who, having decided to wipe me out, were not to be put off by worrying about who actually had the football. It developed the creative side of my game, living off my experience.

  Leeton was always one of the hardest places to play. In one game there, a big forward named Billy Watson got ho
ld of me and gave me the ritualistic face massage, just to make the point that there was always a price to pay for smart little halfbacks who thought the game was all about running. It was just one incident in a traditionally tough game in which it was not so much what you did but what you could get away with that counted. My assistant manager at the leagues club, Fred Turner, had a job on the side with the local radio station commenting on the games. He was away that weekend and he asked me if I could do it for him. I turned up at the studio with black eyes and other obvious damage and was sufficiently irate about events to give the Leeton team a public serve. I complained that even though they were a better side, if they continued to resort to the sort of violence they laid on us they wouldn’t get very far. That inspired a response from their club president, Ron Bernholt, who sent me a little lady’s green handkerchief with a note suggesting I use it to wipe the tears away. It was reflective of the spirit of the place.These days it would probably be a lawyer’s letter or some complaint about a code-of-conduct breach, or something equally bureaucratic.