This season of fairy-tales ended for rugby league with Jarryd Hayne packing his bags and getting ready to climb aboard a cloud sign-posted `Hope' and head off for a new sporting life in the USA. The media was full of speculation on the entirely unexpected twist of such a star pulling up stumps to fly away and joust with America's game. After all, the scribes and commentators were only just coming to terms with the fact of a couple more gods from league’s modern pantheon - Sam Burgess (Rabbitohs) and Sonny Bill Williams (Roosters) making their own exits-left, bound for rugby union, and, very likely, the bright lights and razzmatazz of rugby's World Cup. Hayne, extraordinary talent that he is, can be rated the longshot of the three. He will indeed be a stranger in a strange world in America's vastly popular but idiosyncratic game, of which England's peerless wordsmith Geoffrey Moorhouse wrote in his seminal 1989 book on rugby league `At the George' :
“This is a sport in which grotesquely overdressed and often grossly overweight men run very short distances before thudding and blundering into each other en masse; whereupon the game stops dead, sometimes for minutes at a time”
He continued the theme, calling American football:
“ A bastard game played by men wearing padded knickerbockers, broken up by time-outs and garnished with goose-pimpled cheer-leaders on the sidelines.”
The genial Geoffrey reserved his only positive words on gridiron for what he called the `preesentation' of the American game i.e. loud and flashy and high kickin'. You get the drift that he was not a HUGE fan. But whether he makes it or not in that arcane world Jarryd Hayne's out-of-the-blue decision landed as a great sporting story, another page in the peripatetic inclinations of the players of modern football codes. Genuine best wishes will accompany this unusual and high-talented football player on his adventure. In return and re-assuringly for the Parramatta Eels star, the security blanket of a continuing rugby league career and a big money contract will surely await him back home if things don't work out.
Hayne made his call on the coat-tail of season 2014's other fairy-tales. The Academy Award winner by a fair space in that department came via the South Sydney Rabbitohs finally killing off the longest premiership drought in the club's history by winning the Grand Final. When the men (and boys) in the cardinal and myrtle finally disposed of the gritty, hard-scrapping Bulldogs in the late, championship minutes of the game, it seemed that a whole city rejoiced. There was - literally - dancing in the streets and the hoop-la continued for days. The Peoples' Team had won again after 43 years in the wilderness! In those heady days and nights that followed, all seemed right once more with a working man's game which has become more of a business/game these days with rather too much emphasis on the `business' for many fans - and a perceived deficiency at high administrative levels in the old heart and soul qualities and the nous that had shaped the sport - albeit somewhat roughly at times - into what it became……..
Sometimes it's the small things that illuminate big events best of all for we who look on - and so it was with the Rabbitohs. Out for dinner with my wife a few nights after the Grand Final, we encountered a bubbly young waitress in a near-city pub restaurant. A teenager, she had come from home to start work that night - and it happened that her home was not much more than a decent two-iron from Redfern Oval, Rabbitoh heartland. That evening, heading for work, she had made her way through scenes of wild joy in the streets around, as cars and trucks circled, music played (`Glory, Glory to South Sydney' unquestionably Top of the Pops) and there was dancing and singing and flag-waving and over-spilling happiness in the precincts of the district. Red and green was everywhere. The young waitress had had no previous contact with rugby league, but, oh boy, she had caught the bug now!! "I'm joining the club for next season!" she gushed. You could only wonder as to how many times that story was repeated now that the team called `The Pride of the League' had climbed back to the top. The game got lucky that night after a roller coaster season.…….
As an old sports journo of 50 years or so around the traps, I was chuffed to be a bit-player in the other reaffirming fairy-tale that was celebrated in rugby league in the late months of the season of 2014. The idea which had taken up lodgings long ago in a small pigeon-hole somewhere in a dusty corner of my head, had become a reality in 2014. Something observed and experienced 40 years before had become a book of 344 pages, ‘The Night the Music Died' – celebrated on this website. It tells a seriously unlikely tale of how a team of knockabout bushies from the NSW west, probably 500/1 chances if the bookies had been calling the odds that year, had taken on all-comers in the first-ever, under-lights Amco Cup competition of 1974 and - blow me down! - had won the bloody thing!
A book-maker of a different kind, was my running mate in the challenged tackled - Sydney's Geoff Armstrong, a man of encyclopaedic knowledge of sport complemented by a deep understanding of the arcane world of publishing, the former gathered from childhood, the latter honed to a sharp edge through a number of successful book projects skilfully negotiated. With initial interest in the idea of such a book no more than lukewarm from publishers, we decided to have a whack anyway – and, so, financed the project ourselves. "You won't get a thousand books into the marketplace," one `expert' told us. Well, we laced on our boots and headed into the unknown notwithstanding, having talked to a handful of good people in the industry and garnered some support. Also deeply re-assuring was the sense of history and heritage that continued to rumble beneath the surface of the game, although seemingly unknown and un-noticed at times. Anyhow, at last count as the Spring of 2014 edged towards summer close to 10,000 copies of `Music’ had gone into the market place, and the book, warmly received in its telling of a tale from 40 years before, was snubbing its nose at the doubters.
Along the way the process of the making of this book about ancient times became something very special in itself. The story emerging, gradually taking shape via the 50 or so interviews so generously and honestly given, was genuinely remarkable – arguably THE great underdog story of Australian team sport.
The team of knockabouts, coached by an old St George champion, Johnny King and led by a hard-nosed policeman from Bathurst, Paul Dowling after all had performed near miracles along the track that season – beating `gun’ Sydney premiership sides Canterbury, Manly (the premiers) and Penrith en route to the Cup, plus a team from Auckland which contained nine internationals, plus competing fiercely against growing odds in in one of the wildest matches ever played – against the touring Great Britain side.
o .
For me, an author grateful for the chance of telling the tale, it proved to be the gift that kept on giving. Wonderful, emerging stories abounded among these hard men from the west, the east-west span of their territory reaching 550 kilometres from Lithgow to Cobar. Wonderful too, the tales and secrets of the unlikely victories, personal opportunities taken, and some lost, triumphs carved out by men who could hardly ever train together because of the tyranny of distance – and in fact barely knew each other before they gathered in Sydney for their first game.
But the real joy came gradually and late in the project – in the growing realisation of the truly wonderful bond that existed within the (18) living players. Forty years on, they were and are indeed a `band of brothers’ as the book suggests and to encounter them together en masse as happened a couple of times through the season was special indeed. In all my years in the business I can think of little to match those occasions in the understanding of what the shared experience in sport (and unlikely victory) can mean to men and women…..
Late in proceedings the National Rugby League , to their ongoing credit, joined the fray in a positive way. After some foot-dragging early and a hint of fumbling along the way, the League hosted the warriors of Western Division on a splendid September day in the `Big Smoke’. The `boys’ and some wives and partners came to town and were feted in a special and at times emotional 40 years anniversary event at the League’s excellent museum at `League Central” at Moore Park. At dusk the visitors from the west were whisked across to the ritzy venue Carriageworks for the NRL’s `One Community’ night – one of the finer occasions of the sporting year.
The League’s nod to history and tradition and magic very likely flew in the face of some professional advice given to a game that is very slickly (overwhelmingly?) `now- focussed’ these days. Solid rumour suggests that one of the highly paid `consulting firms’ brought in by the `New League’ under Dave Smith, had decried the value of `history’ in their report, suggesting that little could be made for the game’s all-important `bottom line’ from the realms of things past.
The consultants were of course wrong as other games that are played have proved and continue to prove - the likes of cricket, AFL and NFL. In all of them the nod to history is important - deep and strong and fair dinkum - entirely as it should be.
That the League eschewed such cold corporate advice and instead said howdy to the boys of ’74 and brought them to town and marked the occasion of an important anniversary of their Cinderella story of that long ago season was, ultimately, rather wonderful. The players were given awards that should have been theirs’ 40 years ago, remembered, photographed, interviewed and welcomed with great warmth.
Standing tall alongside such events as the Great Rabbitoh Revival and Jarryd Hayne’s magic carpet ride to an unknown future this brief afterglow for the boys of Western Division in the game’s 107 th year was in its own way…. a fairy-tale too.
It was that kind of season.
“This is a sport in which grotesquely overdressed and often grossly overweight men run very short distances before thudding and blundering into each other en masse; whereupon the game stops dead, sometimes for minutes at a time”
He continued the theme, calling American football:
“ A bastard game played by men wearing padded knickerbockers, broken up by time-outs and garnished with goose-pimpled cheer-leaders on the sidelines.”
The genial Geoffrey reserved his only positive words on gridiron for what he called the `preesentation' of the American game i.e. loud and flashy and high kickin'. You get the drift that he was not a HUGE fan. But whether he makes it or not in that arcane world Jarryd Hayne's out-of-the-blue decision landed as a great sporting story, another page in the peripatetic inclinations of the players of modern football codes. Genuine best wishes will accompany this unusual and high-talented football player on his adventure. In return and re-assuringly for the Parramatta Eels star, the security blanket of a continuing rugby league career and a big money contract will surely await him back home if things don't work out.
Hayne made his call on the coat-tail of season 2014's other fairy-tales. The Academy Award winner by a fair space in that department came via the South Sydney Rabbitohs finally killing off the longest premiership drought in the club's history by winning the Grand Final. When the men (and boys) in the cardinal and myrtle finally disposed of the gritty, hard-scrapping Bulldogs in the late, championship minutes of the game, it seemed that a whole city rejoiced. There was - literally - dancing in the streets and the hoop-la continued for days. The Peoples' Team had won again after 43 years in the wilderness! In those heady days and nights that followed, all seemed right once more with a working man's game which has become more of a business/game these days with rather too much emphasis on the `business' for many fans - and a perceived deficiency at high administrative levels in the old heart and soul qualities and the nous that had shaped the sport - albeit somewhat roughly at times - into what it became……..
Sometimes it's the small things that illuminate big events best of all for we who look on - and so it was with the Rabbitohs. Out for dinner with my wife a few nights after the Grand Final, we encountered a bubbly young waitress in a near-city pub restaurant. A teenager, she had come from home to start work that night - and it happened that her home was not much more than a decent two-iron from Redfern Oval, Rabbitoh heartland. That evening, heading for work, she had made her way through scenes of wild joy in the streets around, as cars and trucks circled, music played (`Glory, Glory to South Sydney' unquestionably Top of the Pops) and there was dancing and singing and flag-waving and over-spilling happiness in the precincts of the district. Red and green was everywhere. The young waitress had had no previous contact with rugby league, but, oh boy, she had caught the bug now!! "I'm joining the club for next season!" she gushed. You could only wonder as to how many times that story was repeated now that the team called `The Pride of the League' had climbed back to the top. The game got lucky that night after a roller coaster season.…….
As an old sports journo of 50 years or so around the traps, I was chuffed to be a bit-player in the other reaffirming fairy-tale that was celebrated in rugby league in the late months of the season of 2014. The idea which had taken up lodgings long ago in a small pigeon-hole somewhere in a dusty corner of my head, had become a reality in 2014. Something observed and experienced 40 years before had become a book of 344 pages, ‘The Night the Music Died' – celebrated on this website. It tells a seriously unlikely tale of how a team of knockabout bushies from the NSW west, probably 500/1 chances if the bookies had been calling the odds that year, had taken on all-comers in the first-ever, under-lights Amco Cup competition of 1974 and - blow me down! - had won the bloody thing!
A book-maker of a different kind, was my running mate in the challenged tackled - Sydney's Geoff Armstrong, a man of encyclopaedic knowledge of sport complemented by a deep understanding of the arcane world of publishing, the former gathered from childhood, the latter honed to a sharp edge through a number of successful book projects skilfully negotiated. With initial interest in the idea of such a book no more than lukewarm from publishers, we decided to have a whack anyway – and, so, financed the project ourselves. "You won't get a thousand books into the marketplace," one `expert' told us. Well, we laced on our boots and headed into the unknown notwithstanding, having talked to a handful of good people in the industry and garnered some support. Also deeply re-assuring was the sense of history and heritage that continued to rumble beneath the surface of the game, although seemingly unknown and un-noticed at times. Anyhow, at last count as the Spring of 2014 edged towards summer close to 10,000 copies of `Music’ had gone into the market place, and the book, warmly received in its telling of a tale from 40 years before, was snubbing its nose at the doubters.
Along the way the process of the making of this book about ancient times became something very special in itself. The story emerging, gradually taking shape via the 50 or so interviews so generously and honestly given, was genuinely remarkable – arguably THE great underdog story of Australian team sport.
The team of knockabouts, coached by an old St George champion, Johnny King and led by a hard-nosed policeman from Bathurst, Paul Dowling after all had performed near miracles along the track that season – beating `gun’ Sydney premiership sides Canterbury, Manly (the premiers) and Penrith en route to the Cup, plus a team from Auckland which contained nine internationals, plus competing fiercely against growing odds in in one of the wildest matches ever played – against the touring Great Britain side.
o .
For me, an author grateful for the chance of telling the tale, it proved to be the gift that kept on giving. Wonderful, emerging stories abounded among these hard men from the west, the east-west span of their territory reaching 550 kilometres from Lithgow to Cobar. Wonderful too, the tales and secrets of the unlikely victories, personal opportunities taken, and some lost, triumphs carved out by men who could hardly ever train together because of the tyranny of distance – and in fact barely knew each other before they gathered in Sydney for their first game.
But the real joy came gradually and late in the project – in the growing realisation of the truly wonderful bond that existed within the (18) living players. Forty years on, they were and are indeed a `band of brothers’ as the book suggests and to encounter them together en masse as happened a couple of times through the season was special indeed. In all my years in the business I can think of little to match those occasions in the understanding of what the shared experience in sport (and unlikely victory) can mean to men and women…..
Late in proceedings the National Rugby League , to their ongoing credit, joined the fray in a positive way. After some foot-dragging early and a hint of fumbling along the way, the League hosted the warriors of Western Division on a splendid September day in the `Big Smoke’. The `boys’ and some wives and partners came to town and were feted in a special and at times emotional 40 years anniversary event at the League’s excellent museum at `League Central” at Moore Park. At dusk the visitors from the west were whisked across to the ritzy venue Carriageworks for the NRL’s `One Community’ night – one of the finer occasions of the sporting year.
The League’s nod to history and tradition and magic very likely flew in the face of some professional advice given to a game that is very slickly (overwhelmingly?) `now- focussed’ these days. Solid rumour suggests that one of the highly paid `consulting firms’ brought in by the `New League’ under Dave Smith, had decried the value of `history’ in their report, suggesting that little could be made for the game’s all-important `bottom line’ from the realms of things past.
The consultants were of course wrong as other games that are played have proved and continue to prove - the likes of cricket, AFL and NFL. In all of them the nod to history is important - deep and strong and fair dinkum - entirely as it should be.
That the League eschewed such cold corporate advice and instead said howdy to the boys of ’74 and brought them to town and marked the occasion of an important anniversary of their Cinderella story of that long ago season was, ultimately, rather wonderful. The players were given awards that should have been theirs’ 40 years ago, remembered, photographed, interviewed and welcomed with great warmth.
Standing tall alongside such events as the Great Rabbitoh Revival and Jarryd Hayne’s magic carpet ride to an unknown future this brief afterglow for the boys of Western Division in the game’s 107 th year was in its own way…. a fairy-tale too.
It was that kind of season.