I will never forget the night my brother James booted my old man out of our lives. I was thirteen, and had hurt my ankle playing rugby league for Paddington–Woollahra RSL and I was laid up on the lounge in the living room of the house in Dowling Street. It was a ringside vantage point to watch the blue. James, as I recall, wanted to borrow my father’s blue three-on-the-floor-manual Ford Cortina to take a girl out. (I know all about that car because when my old man was drunk I drove it.) The old man was pissed and said no. Things got nasty. James whacked him, a huge backhand blow. Dad went down. James, upset at what he’d done, ran upstairs, crying and hollering. My father picked himself up and said, ‘No son of mine is going to get away with doing that to me!’ He barged up the stairs and into James’s room. I heard the sound of a fist hitting flesh – thwack! – and someone falling down with a heavy thud. Next I see, James is shoving the old man down the stairs and tossing him out the front door onto the street. Then James drove off in the Cortina. I don’t know where Dad went. It was the best Saturday night’s entertainment I’d ever had. That night I lost what little respect I had left for my father and it was sad. At the same time I was so very proud of James.
Just near Kings Cross one of Woolloomooloo’s more colourful streets, Broug-ham Street. It’s a thoroughfare that runs from near the Harbour all the way up to William Street, and at various times in its history has been the home turf of lawbreakers. Guido Calletti, the infamous razor gangster of the 1920s and ’30s, was shot to death in a small bungalow in Brougham Street when a party got out of hand in 1939. Now I don’t know if the popular Woolloomooloo pastime of knocking off and stripping Holden Brougham cars in the years when I was growing up there had anything to do with the aura of the car’s namesake street, but if not, maybe it should have. There was just something about the luxury Brougham that made it a target. When I was a young teenager, a lot of my mates were older, in their mid to late teens – and perfectly capable of hot-wiring and stealing a Brougham car, stripping it and dumping any parts they couldn’t sell.
Another stamping ground of this little gang of car thieves was a car rental place – yes, in Brougham Lane, at the corner of McElhone Street, near the Woolloomooloo Recreational Centre. It was open slather for us. The gates of the warehouse were a cinch to open after dark and my mates charged in and lifted everything they could detach. I was too young to be an effective member of the gang, but I was certainly aware of what the guys were up to. I was given another nickname, to add to my Sunshine moniker. People started calling me the Shadow because I was always lurking around where there was trouble.
When I was thirty-seven and well on my way to being destroyed by my alcohol addiction, it was my brother James who did more than anyone to save my life. Ironically, it was James who introduced me to the demon drink.
The auspicious occasion was my fourteenth birthday; it was 1979, and James and I and some pals were celebrating it at the Zoo nightclub in William Street. I was decked out in a yellow and white grandfather shirt – that is, it had no collar – and nifty brown flared pants. James, however, made me look drab with his red, white and blue silk grandfather shirt, blue flares, high-heeled clogs and big hair. We were quite the sophisticates. We stood together at the bar. Nowadays, serving a minor would cost a publican his licence. Back then, anything went. James offered me a cigarette, which I declined. Then he asked if I’d like a drink. I accepted. From memory, it was a bourbon and Coca-Cola. The taste of the alcohol meant nothing to me. What appealed was how it made me feel. All tingling, and absolutely self-confident. I thought, Wow!
That’s how it began. I drank for fun for fifteen years and then for the next five or so I drank to get drunk. The addiction that, for many years, made life seem more exciting, more romantic, worth living. The addiction that, later on, when it really had me in its grasp, ruined everything that was important to me: my relationships with my brother and girlfriends, my legal career and my boxing, and damn near cost me my life.
I didn’t know it then, but I believe that I have inherited an X factor, a genetic predisposition that made me, just like my father, an alcoholic.
At fourteen and fifteen I was getting drunk a couple of times a weekend and sometimes after school. I financed my binge-drinking with the proceeds from my paper route and from whatever money I could scrounge from selling soft drink bottles or other scams I could work in the neighbourhood. I stuck to bourbon – Jack Daniel’s when it was on offer – and Coke. Even though it was cheaper, beer made me feel too full. And vodka and gin had a more immediate effect. With Mum in hospital or just too sick to be alert to what I was doing, it was easy for me to get out and go to the pubs and bars of Woolloomooloo, Kings Cross, Paddington and in the city, such places as the Paddington–Woollahra RSL, the Zoo, Mickey’s, Down Under, Lucy’s Tavern and the tavern at the Wentworth Hotel. Taverns were big in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was no big deal for me to have eight bourbons lined up in front of me at the bar, and I’d drain each glass in rapid time.
When under the influence, my natural gregariousness and daring nature intensified. So I did dumb stuff with my mates, like smashing things in the street, getting into fights and riding in cars driven by kids who were as drunk as me. When I went out drinking with the boys from the ’Loo I felt big and important. The troubles at home seemed less pressing after a dozen bourbons. If you’d collared me back then when I was out on the drink and asked me if I was having fun, I’d have told you I was having the time of my life.
At this early stage of my addiction, excessive drinking had no lasting effect on me. After a big Friday or Saturday night out getting falling-down drunk, sometimes vomiting my guts up, it was nothing for me to fall into bed at 3 am and be up again at six to play football or box at the Police Boys Club or go surfing and feel no ill effects at all. The air all around me would reek of bourbon. Then late that afternoon and into the night I’d be back at the pub. I had an impulsive personality, my senses racing at 10,000 kilometres an hour, and I channelled all this energy into sport … and drinking.
Looking back, there was something I routinely did then that makes me shudder today, because it shows just how out of control my drinking was. My thirst was always bigger than my wallet, so to keep drinking after my money had run out I had a trick. I waited until drinkers around me at the bar went to the toilet and while they were gone, I sidled over to where they’d been standing and if their friends weren’t watching I picked up their glass and gulped down the dregs. Judge me if you want, but until you’ve been in the grip of alcohol you can’t understand how desperate you become, how low you’ll sink, to get a drink.
It wasn’t as if I had to look far to see the damage that alcohol can do. My father was a violent drunk who had torn our family apart. I’d seen some of my mother’s family drinking cans of VB at 7.30 in the morning. And all around me in Woolloomooloo were the victims of alcohol, dirty and dishevelled, their lined faces etched with despair, and sleeping rough. James was always telling me to pull my head in and cut out the heavy boozing. He even got tough with me a few times. I shucked off his advice and laughed at him behind his back. No warning bells rang in my head as I had another drink.
There were always fights, especially as this was the era of teenage tribes: surfies, sharpies, mods, rockers, skinheads, bikies, the disco types, all with a grudge against every other gang. On Friday and Saturday nights after boozing it up at the Zoo we would buy hamburgers at Steve’s Hero Burger Bar and watch the fights break out in William Street.
Thank God for sport. Through my early drinking, through the damage I was inflicting on myself, there was always my sport. I wasn’t a world-beater, I simply had a go and realised my potential.
Rugby league was my main game. It was made for a bloke like me. I wasn’t as big as others, but I compensated with my fitness, strength and tenacity. I played five-eighth or lock, and was a terrier, a busy, bustling player, hitting the ball up time and again, charging into the teeth of the opposition and tackling any opponent no matter how big and fast. Some observers back then told me that I reminded them of the pocket-sized Roosters forward Barry ‘Bunny’ Reilly and the South Sydney and Australian second rower Gary Stevens.
I loved the hard body contact of rugby league. Usually it was played with controlled aggression but when a brawl broke out I was never backward in coming forward.
I began playing rugby league when I was five at St Joseph’s in Camperdown and when I started at St Mary’s I slotted right into the team there. I also played for various local junior teams, including Paddington–Woollahra RSL and Zetland. More often than not I won the best forward award. Two or three games a week, as well as touch football on the grass at the Domain, were never enough for me.
When I was fifteen, in 1980, I was selected for the New South Wales Schoolboys team that toured New Zealand and played three ‘ Tests’ against the Kiwi kids. Frankly, I was surprised to make that team, especially because the bloke I beat for the five-eighth spot was Stuart Raper, who went on to be a fine first grader and a coach and of course is the son of the legendary St George and Australian lock forward Johnny ‘Chook’ Raper. Chook was there at the selection trial, and I’m afraid he had to put up with my over-the-top reaction when I got the nod from the selectors over Stu. I leapt in the air, yelled, shadow-boxed and hugged James and my mum, who had left her sick bed to be there. Others in the team who went on to star at a senior level were Greg Alexander, Paul Langmack and Andrew Ettingshausen.
Unfortunately I didn’t make the most of that tremendous experience. I played well enough in New Zealand, but the knowledge that Mum was dying from her cancer, and being in a strange country away from her and James and Alison and my pals at Woolloomooloo made me feel sad, lonely and abandoned. I hit the bottle and mucked up and was nearly sent home.
The following year I found myself the only white player in the Aboriginal Zetland junior rugby league club. I’d always had Aboriginal mates. I admired their sense of humour, camaraderie, sensitivity and wonderful sporting ability. I have never seen such hand–eye coordination, which is why we’ve had so many great Aboriginal boxers and rugby league and union players. I knew James’s mate, Alan Ferguson, from school and footy, and he seemed typical. A gentle, lovely young man whose skills at rugby league left me in awe. Perhaps, too, if I’m really honest, I had an affinity with Alan because, like me, he was an alcoholic.
The manager of Zetland’s A-grade side was the Australian boxing champion, Tony Mundine, father of the controversial current boxing champ and former league star Anthony ‘ The Man’ Mundine. Tony’s brother, Mick Mundine, played in the team. The coach was Frank Curry, a wonderful coach and conditioner and a nice man, who went on to coach the South Sydney Rabbitohs. Because I was sixteen I was playing C grade for Zetland. The A-grade side won the state Aboriginal knockout competition, and in attack were more than a match for most of the sides we played against. Tackling was not the Zetland boys’ strong point. Neither was a strict adherence to schedules. It was typical that five or six of the players simply wouldn’t show up at a game or for training, and that was fine. They’d wander back when they felt like it, and not before. In a white team, such behaviour would get you drummed out of the side; with Zetland it was the way things were.
One afternoon Zetland A grade played James’s team, Bondi United, at a park on the headland at North Bondi. It was the surfies versus the black fellas, and the sledging that went on before the game was something to hear. Our guys’ disposition was not helped by the fact that half of the team were drunk. I was looking forward to watching my black brothers mixing it with my real brother, but the game was barely under way when one of our guys collected one of their guys with a head-high tackle. A ferocious brawl broke out and the game was called off, but not before I ran in from the sideline where I’d been watching and got involved in the action.
After one of my first matches for Zetland, Mick Mundine invited me to join him and my teammates at the Clifton Hotel, in Redfern, where no whites were welcome, for an orange juice. He didn’t know I drank alcohol regularly. I told him, ‘Sure. Be glad to.’ When I walked into the joint I had second thoughts about having accepted his invitation. It was like a scene in a western movie when the bad guy walks into the saloon and everything stops. The talking, the drinking, the card games and the piano-playing. Every eye in the Clifton was drilling me and I was wondering if I was going to get out of there alive. Thankfully, Mick came in right then with the guys from the team. He called out to me, ‘Stevie, over here!’ and then he said to the patrons, ‘This bloke’s okay, and he’s a damn good footballer and boxer too.’ Suddenly I was everyone’s mate.
There was boxing at the Police Boys Club. Under the tutelage of Bruce Farthing I was becoming a very good fighter. James and I sparred a couple of times. He was much bigger and five years older but by the time I was in my mid teens I could hold my own with him. He had the heart of a lion and was fit and strong and he packed a mighty wallop but by then he had a million things on his mind – looking after Mum and Alison and me, trying to earn a quid, his rugby league career – and he just didn’t have the extreme focus, and killer instinct, that you need to be a fighter.
My summer sport was surfing, and Bondi was my stamping ground. I looked the part, with my bushy blond hair. I was reasonable at riding the surfboard Mum had scrounged and saved to buy me.
Before, during and after surfing, I was a keen skate-boarder. I skateboarded everywhere on my Surfa Sam, riding in a car being out of the question, unless it was one my mates had stolen. I had my first skateboard when I was five. It was made of wood and had clay wheels, and was so inflexible because the ‘trucks’ attached to the deck of the skateboard were rigid. Any halfway fancy manoeuvre sent me flying off onto the footpath. My knees, elbows and the palms of my hands were perpetually skinned, and Mum would always have antiseptic and bandages ready to treat my wounds. No matter, I loved the risks and the skill involved (just as it was skill and danger that made me a devotee of rugby league and boxing), and when in my teenage years I graduated to the more advanced boards made of fibreglass with polyurethane wheels I became a whiz, adept at all the tricks. With a strong upper body and thin legs, I had the build for the sport.
The spring handstand, where you run with the board in your hand and bang the board down onto the ground then balance on your hands with your legs straight up in the air, was my trick of choice when I competed in the Coca-Cola Bottlers skateboarding state championships in 1976, when I was eleven. I’d won the area championship and that qualified me to show what I could do against kids from all over New South Wales. It was staged at Moore Park and ABC television covered it live. A kid who was a gun skateboarder, named Greg Collier, performed a headstand, which was incredible, and another boy did a 720-degree turn in the air. Cheyne Horan, the champion surfer, was also a competitor.
Skateboarding became a passion with me and still is today, long after my boxing and football have become distant memories. Throughout my life and all its ups and downs a skateboard has been a constant companion.
Now, in my mid forties, I ride a skateboard to work, and I can ride fast and jump gutters. And I can still do handstands.
In 1979, one night at about eight o’clock, I was at home with Mum. James was playing touch footy at the Woolloomooloo playground as he did every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening. Mum started gasping and gurgling. She collapsed onto her bed. At fourteen, it was rammed home to me just how sick my mother was. I ran frantic and crying to the playground. I saw James and yelled, ‘James, Mum’s dying. Come home!’ My brother couldn’t hear me over the hubbub of his game. ‘What! Why do I have to come home?’ he said, angry now.
‘Because,’ I screamed, ‘our mother is fucking dying!’
James threw down the ball and we scurried home, me right on his heels. He called the ambulance. It took Mum away.