Chapter31

RUGBY LEAGUE: A PEOPLE’S GAME IN A TELEVISION AGE

As in Greek tragedy, it is the athlete’s curse that their triumphs and tragedies are played out under the gaze of the public. Such was the fate of Wakefield Trinity prop Don Fox in the 1968 Rugby League Challenge Cup final against Leeds at Wembley.

Torrential rain before the kick-off covered the pitch in standing water. After 15 minutes Wakefield led 7-4, thanks to two Fox goals and a Ken Hirst try set up by long, raking Fox kick that bamboozled the Leeds defence. But then the heavens opened again and the two teams struggled to cope with the nearest thing to a monsoon that Wembley had ever seen.

Then, on 69 minutes, the game came alive. Leeds winger John Atkinson was awarded a disputed penalty try and Bev Risman’s conversion gave Leeds a 9-7 lead. Two minutes from time, Risman slotted over another penalty to give Leeds a commanding if unlikely 11-7 lead.

And then the drama began.

Fox, realising that something extraordinary had to happen, took the kick-off quickly and landed the ball just in front of the Leeds defenders. It slipped under the foot of Leeds centre Bernard Watson and was hacked on towards the posts by Hirst. He flew past five startled Leeds players and dived on the skidding ball just before it slid over the dead-ball line between the posts. Leeds now led 11-10, with a conversion to come from under the posts.

It was the 80th and final minute. The conversion would be the last act of the match. Up strode Fox, the architect of Wakefield’s fightback, to take the kick. In his 15 years as a professional rugby league player, he had kicked almost 700 goals, most of them far more difficult than the one he now faced.

Conscious of the appalling conditions, he took his time setting the ball on a small mound of mud. He placed his right foot carefully against the ball and walked backwards, slowly and precisely measuring out his customary five and a half paces.

He was the most experienced man on the pitch. He was one of the most respected players in the game. And he knew that it was now his duty to win the cup for his team and his town.

Many of the Leeds side stood with their backs to him, not wishing to witness the moment that the cup would be prised from their grasp. The crowd, too, knew that the cup would soon be on its way to Wakefield.

Fox ran up to convert just as he had hundreds of times before. But this time the slipperiness of the ball and the wet toe of his right boot did not make perfect contact. The ball flew off to the right of the posts. The match, the final and the cup were lost.

And so was Fox. In frustration he turned and flung himself to the ground, his fists slamming the wet grass that had denied him. On BBC TV, commentator Eddie Waring’s Yorkshire tones supplied the Greek chorus for the tragic scene as he exclaimed, ‘he’s a poor lad’.

Moments later, it was announced that Don Fox had been awarded the Lance Todd trophy as the man of the match.

His greatest triumph and his greatest tragedy had become one and the same.

From boom to bust to boom

Fox was born in Sharlston in the heart of the West Yorkshire coalfield, the birthplace of interwar league legend Jonty Parkin. Like Parkin, he had been a half-back but as he aged he had moved into the forwards. Like his father, he started his career with the local Sharlston club and worked at the nearby pit. And like his brothers, the illustrious Neil and the astute coach Peter, he earned his own place in rugby league immortality.

In 1953 he made his debut for Featherstone Rovers as an 18-year-old at the apex of rugby league’s post-war popularity. As with all British sports, the immediate post-war years were a boom time for rugby league. The war was over but rationing remained and austerity reigned. Sport offered a shaft of sunlight amidst the gloom of 1940s Britain.

Spectator numbers at league games rocketed to a peak of 6.8 million in the 1948–49 and 1949–50 seasons. The Challenge Cup final at Wembley sold out its 95,000 capacity for the first time in 1948. In 1954, the year after Fox made his professional debut, 102,569 people were officially recorded as attending the Challenge Cup final replay between Warrington and Halifax at Bradford’s Odsal Stadium. Many thousands of others were uncounted in the confusion of the unstoppable flood of spectators.

If crowds were high, the game’s stars had rarely shone brighter in the firmament. Two generations of the greatest rugby players ever lit up the sky. Bradford’s Ernest Ward, Barrow’s Willie Horne and Wigan’s Eric Ashton were orchestral conductors in all but name, and each captained Great Britain. Powerhouse forwards such as Vince Karalius, Ken Gee and Derek Turner were as skilful as they were intimidating.

But perhaps the greatest talent to emerge in the post-war years was Alex Murphy, the St Helens’ scrum-half whose lightning speed off the mark was matched only by his quickness of thought. Murphy had been signed by St Helens at one minute past midnight on his 16th birthday in 1955 and as an 18-year-old had starred on the 1958 British tour to Australia. After winning everything with St Helens, he moved to Leigh and guided the club as player-coach to their only Wembley win in a 24-7 upset over odds-on favourites Leeds in 1971. He then moved to Warrington, playing and coaching them to Wembley glory in 1974.

It was not just home-grown players who rose to prominence. Lewis Jones and Billy Boston were just two of dozens of Welshman who made their way north for rugby glory and an honest day’s pay. Some stars had trekked even further. Until 1947, when an international transfer ban was introduced, British clubs cherry-picked the best of post-war Antipodean talent, among them Brian Bevan, Harry Bath, Arthur Clues, Lionel Cooper, Pat Devery, and Johnny Hunter. Possibly even more than the preceding two generations of Australian exiles, this group left an indelible mark on the game.

Sydney-born Bevan’s 796 tries made him rugby’s most prolific try scorer ever, and today a statue dedicated to his memory stands in his adopted home of Warrington. Hunter, Devery and Cooper became the crucial triumvirate in Huddersfield success of the early 1950s. Arthur Clues and a complete three-quarter line of fellow Australians raised Leeds back to the heights they had conquered under their previous generation of imports.

By the end of the 1950s however the boom years were over for British rugby league. Between 1950 and 1960 the average league match crowd fell from 9,600 to 4,829. The trend became alarming in the 1960s and by the early 1970s total annual attendances were barely more than a million for all games. It was not the only sport to suffer a decline. English soccer crowds fell by almost a third between 1950 and 1965 and cricket crowds by almost two-thirds. Britain also underwent profound economic changes, especially in rugby league’s northern industrial heartland. Between 1947 and 1970, more than two-thirds of all coal mines were closed. In 1984 the number of people employed in the textile industry was little more than 10 per cent of its 1954 total. The soil in which rugby league had flourished was rapidly becoming barren.

The decline in attendances led to a crisis of confidence and considerable debate about the rules of the game. It was widely believed that negative tactics were driving away spectators, the most notable example being that of the ‘creeping barrage’. This involved the acting half-back picking the ball up from the play-the-ball and running forward without passing until he was tackled. This would be repeated ad infinitum to minimise the risk of losing possession. Bill Fallowfield, the prickly secretary of the RFL, had campaigned to change the play-the-ball rule since the early 1950s, but the issue was finally settled by a decision to borrow from American football. At the 1966 meeting of the Rugby League International Board, Fallowfield suggested limiting possession to four tackles per team. The proposal was passed unanimously and within weeks the new rule was being hailed as a turning point for the game.

The rule was extended to six tackles in 1972 in order to allow greater opportunities for attack, and gradually other rules were streamlined to encourage faster, more open play. In 1974 the value of the drop goal was reduced from two points to one. The problem of constantly resetting the scrum was gradually solved by allowing, albeit informally, the scrum-half to feed the ball to his own forwards, and in 1983 a handover of the ball to the opposing side, rather than a scrum, was introduced when the attacking side was tackled on the sixth tackle. The principle cherished by the founders of the Northern Union, that theirs would be ‘a game without monotony’, had never been more apparent.

Despite such positive changes, rugby league also continued to suffer at the hands of rugby union. Until the late 1980s, anyone who played league, paid or not, was automatically banned from the union game. Faced with threat of sporting and social ostracism, very few players dared change codes. Sometimes players joining a rugby union club were asked to sign a declaration stating, ‘I have not taken part in rugby league football, either as an amateur or a professional, nor have I signed any rugby league form, after reaching my 18th birthday’.

Although this was officially explained as combating professionalism, everyone understood that the enemy was not professional sport but rugby league itself, as the IRB admitted in 1958: ‘there is in general no objection to persons who are or have been ranked as professionals in games other than Rugby League football being permitted to play Rugby Union football or to participate in the affairs of rugby union clubs’.¹ This nonsense would only finally end in 1995, when union itself openly embraced the dreaded professionalism.

The decline in rugby league’s fortunes was only arrested in the mid-1970s. Off the field, the development of commercial sponsorship, which the game had pioneered in 1961, brought new money into the sport. In November 1971 the inaugural Player’s No. 6 Trophy competition kicked off and in May 1974 the RFL agreed to allow clubs to carry advertising on their shirts, something which had first been seen in the 1960s in French rugby league.

This rugby league renaissance was led by the two Hull clubs, Hull FC and Hull Kingston Rovers. Together, they dominated the game in the late 1970s and 1980s, winning championships and challenge cups and jointly contesting the major finals six times in six seasons. Their mantle was then taken up by Wigan who revolutionised the game by becoming the first club to employ players on a full-time basis in the mid-1980s.

This enabled them to sign many of the biggest stars in the game, including Martin Offiah, Joe Lydon, Andy Gregory and Ellery Hanley, and from 1985 they dominated the game in a way not seen since Harold Wagstaff’s Huddersfield. In 11 seasons they won the Challenge Cup nine times and the championship eight.

The renewed interest in the game was taken to new heights by the 1982 Australian Kangaroos’ tour, which not only saw the Great Britain side humiliated but also brought crowds flocking to witness the brilliance of the Kangaroos’ play. For the first time since the 1950s Australian players became household names across the north of England.

Like the England soccer team’s eye-opening 6-3 defeat by Hungary in November 1953, the shock at the scale of the 1982 series’ whitewash was traumatic and, desperate to learn from their conquerors, the league authorities lifted the international transfer ban in 1983. In the following ten years, 757 Australian players came to play for British clubs. Many became local icons, among them Mal Meninga at St Helens, Peter Sterling at Hull, Brett Kenny and John Ferguson at Wigan. The high point of this invasion was undoubtedly the 1985 Challenge Cup final between Wigan and Hull, which brought the sublime skills of Kenny, Sterling and John Ferguson to the attention of a national public in a thrilling 28-24 Wigan victory.

But as the British game reached new heights domestically, it fell to a new low internationally. Britain had last won the Ashes in 1970 but was humiliated in 1979 when, for the first time ever, it lost a series 3-0. The same happened in the next four Ashes series. It would be nine years before Great Britain would win another Test match against Australia. As even the most one-eyed British supporter had to admit, Australia was now the world’s dominant rugby league power on and off the field.

Down Under on top

This was a considerable turnaround. At the end of the Second World War, Australian rugby league had no doubt that it was the junior partner to the British game. In October 1945 Australian Foreign Minister H. V. Evatt persuaded the RFL to send a British touring team Down Under in 1946 telling them that Lions’ tours ‘ought to be resumed as soon as possible, in the best interests of rugby league football and of the Empire’.² E. S. Brown, the manager of the 1954 Australian World Cup squad, was even more explicit, telling the RFL that ‘there is a strong desire in Australia to get along with England from every point of view’.³

In 1950, 30 years after they had last won them, Australia finally regained the Ashes at a muddy Sydney Cricket Ground when winger Ron Roberts found himself the extra man on an overlap and dived over in the corner 15 minutes from time to give his side a series-winning 5-2 victory. Normality was restored in 1952 when Britain retook the crown but they faltered in 1954 when, in one of the most thrilling and free-scoring series, Clive Churchill once again captained the Australians to success.

Britain retained the Ashes for the rest of the decade but in the 1963 series, in a portent of what was to come, Australia shocked even themselves and took the Ashes by winning the first two matches by 28-2 and 50-12, the first time any side had scored 50 points in an Ashes match.

Australia’s growing power on the pitch reflected increasing economic clout off it. The legalisation of poker machines in New South Wales in 1956 introduced a considerable new source of income for rugby league clubs, and led to the creation of ‘leagues clubs’, which combined gambling, restaurants and community activities, allowing clubs to subsidise their on-field activities lavishly. Coupled with the abandonment of the local residential qualification for players in 1959, which meant that players no longer had to live in the immediate area of their club, Sydney clubs were now able to compete financially with the British.

Now the tide of rugby league emigration turned, to flow in the opposite direction. In March 1963 Derek Hallas became the first player in the modern era to move Down Under when he went from Keighley to Parramatta. He was followed by major stars such as St Helens’ Dick Huddart and Tommy Bishop, who, together with a host of other top players, migrated in the 1960s. Britain’s 1970 Ashes victory accelerated the exodus, as Australian clubs clamoured to sign the victorious British stars. In 1971 Manly paid a then world record £15,000 to Castleford to sign their awesome loose forward Malcolm Reilly.

The wave of British imports of the 1960s and 1970s brought new skills and approaches to the Australian game. Wigan’s Dave Bolton went to Balmain and redefined stand-off play. Reilly brought a whole new combination of all-sided technical ability and uncompromising ferociousness. His Manly teammate, Hull KR’s Phil Lowe, built on Dick Huddart’s legacy as a free-running second-row forward: ‘as the aircraft carrier made the battleship obsolete, Phil Lowe established that the lumbering forward was about to join the mastodons in extinction,’ wrote an admiring Thomas Keneally.⁴

The loss of British players to Australian clubs was one symptom of how rugby league was being revolutionised in Australia. Thanks to immigration by ‘Ten Pound Poms’ (an expression used to described Britons who emigrated to Australia after the war on an assisted passage scheme) from Britain and by southern Europeans, the country’s population doubled in the 30 years following the Second World War and, as the dominant sport in NSW and Queensland, rugby league grew hugely in popularity among both players and spectators in the post-war years. New clubs were admitted to the NSW premiership in 1947 and 1967 and between 1959 and 1967 crowds attending matches in Sydney doubled to more than 1.5 million per season.

The popularity of the game was, perhaps paradoxically, spurred by the dominance of South Sydney in the early 1950s and then by St George from 1956 to 1966. Souths, based in working-class, inner-city Sydney, dominated the premiership in the interwar years and resumed that role in the early 1950s. Nicknamed the ‘Rabbitohs’, allegedly because players were so poor they sold rabbits around the district, the side was captained by Clive Churchill, a full-back who redefined the role, turning it from a stentorian last line of defence to a fifth three-quarter.

Souths’ domination did not last. St George, based in the rapidly expanding southern suburbs of Sydney, quickly outstripped the achievements of the Rabbitohs by winning the premiership for 11 successive seasons from 1956 to 1966. They were able to capitalise financially on the now legal presence of poker machines and the growing local population to build a huge leagues club that quickly became known as the ‘Taj Mahal’ for its size and opulence.

This apparently never-ending flow of revenue allowed St George to buy the very best talent. Much of the success of St George’s record-breaking championship-winning run was due to the influence of British playing methods learned by returning players such as Harry Bath, who had emigrated to play for Warrington between 1948 and 1956, and hooker Ken Kearney, who played for Leeds between 1948 and 1952. By the mid-1960s, the influence of players and coaches who had played in England had helped to raise the Australian game to the same level as the traditionally dominant British.

Australian attitudes to the Mother Country were also changing. Britain’s application to join the European Common Market in 1961 without consulting Australia and the ending of free entry into the UK for Australians in 1962 led to growing alienation. Many began to look to the United States, among them rugby league coaches seeking an advantage in the increasingly competitive Sydney competition. Two young coaches, Terry Fearnley and Jack Gibson, went to America to study American football coaching methods in the NFL, especially those of the all-conquering Green Bay Packers’ legendary coach Vince Lombardi.

Gibson, in particular, would have tremendous success in the 1970s and 1980s, first with Sydney’s Roosters and then with the Parramatta Eels. By the time that Gibson’s Parramatta completed a hat-trick of premierships in 1983, Australian rugby league had become a major entertainment industry in its own right. The importance of the British link to the game had withered and, as British teams struggled to remain competitive, the importance and intensity of Anglo-Australian Test matches was replaced by the annual NSW versus Queensland ‘State of Origin’ series.

State of Origin began in 1980 and quickly became a centrepiece of the Australian sporting winter. By selecting only players born in each state – hence ‘origin’ – the three-match series rekindled regional passions and raised rugby league to new heights. In 1988 the New South Wales Rugby League became a national league with the addition of teams from Queensland, in particular the Brisbane Broncos, and for the first time the very best Australian players all played in the same league. Together, the new Australian Rugby League (ARL) and State of Origin commanded massive public interest and huge television audiences. The ARL was now the world’s most important club competition in either rugby code. As the game entered the 1990s, a bright future seemed assured.

Super war

The ever-increasing popularity of Australian rugby league was not confined to Australia. Its rising tide had also lifted the game in New Zealand. In the 1970s, the increasing wealth of league in Sydney lured a number of top Kiwi players over the Tasman. In the 1980s regular televising of Australian club matches began in New Zealand. Most importantly, from 1983 onwards the New Zealand Kiwis played a series of physically intense and nail-biting matches against the Kangaroos. At a time when Great Britain struggled to score tries against Australia, let alone beat them, the Kiwis were formidable opponents.

In 1988 they reached the final of the Rugby League World Cup for the first time in their history, only to lose disappointingly to Australia. Despite this the team’s top players, such as Mark Graham and Kevin Tamati, became national celebrities. Even more astounding for a nation fixated with rugby union, a steady stream of All Blacks switched to league, including John Gallagher, Marc Ellis and John Schuster. Kiwi stars became crucial components of Australian club sides and in 1992 it was announced that a team from Auckland, the traditional power base of New Zealand league, would join the ARL in 1995.

The 1988 World Cup also saw the inclusion of Papua New Guinea for the first time. League had been established in PNG by Australian servicemen during the Second World War and, as Australia began to colonise the country in the 1950s and 1960s, the popularity of the game grew among the indigenous population. By the 1970s it had become the undisputed national sport of PNG, highlighted in 1975 by the visit of England on their way to the 1975 World Cup in Australia.

Two years later, the Kumuls (named for the indigenous bird of paradise) pulled off one of the biggest shocks ever in rugby league by walloping France 37-6 in Port Moresby, the PNG capital. It would be another nine years before they would record another victory, a 24-22 win over a full-strength New Zealand team, but by this time PNG had been accepted as the fifth international side of rugby league. The increasing penetration of television in a largely underdeveloped and, in some places, still unexplored country only served to increase the popularity of the game and establish it as PNG’s national sport.

The emergence of satellite television in the 1980s also led to greater worldwide exposure for league around the world. By 1995, the number of countries playing the sport had grown so much that the Centenary Rugby League World Cup held that year saw ten teams participating, including Fiji, Tonga and Samoa for the first time, and another seven in an Emerging Nations tournament that was held at the same time.

Such prescience did not extend to the leaders of Australian rugby league. In 1993 they had signed a deal with Kerry Packer’s free-to-air Channel 9 that paid the ARL A$80 million for TV rights for the next seven years. Pay-TV rights were also included in the deal for free. The previous year English soccer’s newly formed Premier League had been paid £191.5 million for pay-TV rights by Murdoch’s BSkyB. When Murdoch’s Australian News Ltd company approached the ARL to open discussions about acquiring pay-TV rights in 1994, the ARL told them to speak to Packer.

To make matter worse, the expansion of the Australian Rugby League had also led to friction between the traditional Sydney clubs and the newer clubs, especially the Brisbane Broncos. In early 1994, the Broncos’ chief executive, former Australian winger John Ribot, met Rupert Murdoch and proposed the formation of a ‘Super League’ tailored to suit the needs of News Ltd’s satellite television network which included mergers of clubs in Sydney. Locked into a weak bargaining position thanks to its Channel 9 deal, the ARL found itself in the middle of a battle between the two media barons with little means of self-defence. Discussions continued between the ARL and Ribot’s Super League supporters throughout late 1994 and 1995 but Ribot’s hopes that the ARL would compromise came to naught, partly because Kerry Packer did not want an agreement with Rupert Murdoch.

Finally, at the end of March 1995, negotiations broke down completely. Ribot, assisted by Lachlan Murdoch (Robert Murdoch’s eldest son and deputy chief executive of News Ltd), rolled out a battle plan and began to sign players for their new Super League, largely through the simple expedient of offering them more money than they had ever seen in their lives. Within weeks Murdoch’s men had also signed up all the professional clubs in England, who agreed to switch to a summer season as part of an £87 million deal. The global war for rugby league was on – and within weeks it would also have a momentous impact on rugby union.

Rugby league had never seen so much money nor such commercial interest in it. Yet the sport’s very existence was now at stake. Just like Don Fox at Wembley in 1968, what should have been its moment of greatest triumph became the moment of its greatest disaster.