16
THE SUBTLE SHADES OF GREATNESS

IN THEIR ELEVEN-YEAR premiership run from 1956 to 1966, St George played 222 games and lost only 34 of them. In no season did they lose more than four games, and only in four of those years did they lose that many. Of their 183 victories, a large majority were overwhelmingly decisive, and they were always at their best when it counted most, especially in grand finals. The eternal question of what made such greatness has many answers. The simple one is that they had in one team through that period perhaps a dozen of the greatest players of their generation. More particularly, in John Raper, Reg Gasnier, Graeme Langlands and Norm Provan they had four of the greatest of all time. But there was much more to it than that. It was no accident that those players came together as they did, and it was no accident that they were fashioned into the most efficient winning machine in the history of the game.

NORM PROVAN

St George had some huge advantages in those years. We had exceptional players, and the way we were coached from the time that Ken Kearney arrived put us well ahead of the field. But by far the biggest edge the Saints had on other clubs was the way the club was run. Saints had a bunch of administrators who were just exceptional, and they saw to it that the supply of high-quality players was organised years ahead. Baden Wales was secretary of the club when I joined and later was the driving force in setting up the leagues club, and he was the start of it. Then came Alex Mackie, Laurie Doust, Len Kelly, Glynn Price, Jack Proops and various support troops whose dedication to the running of the club made it what it was. There was no self-importance, none of the egos you see in some sporting officials. They were committed to making the club successful, even when hard decisions were required. Their first consideration always was the club. They made sure the players were comfortable and happy, and they related well to everybody.

The biggest influence of all, however, was Frank Facer, who took over as secretary in 1956 and ran the club like a military operation for the next 22 years. His role had none of the trappings of the big time that similar positions have now. It was an honorary role when he started, and even when Frank became one of the first full-timers, it was a long way from the big-money job it is today. They called them secretaries then. Fancy titles like chief executive officer were a long way off.

When Facer took over in 1956, players still took their gear home and did their own washing. It was no easy task with St George whites, either, I can tell you. And Frank had to operate under the old residential qualification rule, which meant players had to play with the club in whose designated area they lived. Under those rules, building up the sort of team that Saints finished up with took some imagination. Luckily Frank had plenty.

He certainly developed a great understanding of the ins and outs of real estate. Some club officials had multiple boarders, at least as far as official addresses were concerned. For most of us it was a case of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’, but Frank had more tricks up his sleeve than a country magician. The residential qualification system was one of those old rules that grew out of a different time. It was made to protect smaller clubs from the ravages of bigger clubs, particularly in ensuring that juniors weren’t poached en masse. It was also geared to encouraging clubs to make sure they looked after juniors and so grew their own players. But it was set up at a time when Sydney was a much more insular place, and people were less mobile. By the 1950s a greater percentage of the population was able to afford a car, and hopping about town was much easier than it had been when all the rules were written. It was no big deal to live in North Sydney and play for Saints, or vice versa.They abandoned the rule in 1960, and given its universal abuse, that wasn’t before time.

Facer’s ability to manage and manipulate the residential rule was only one of the great benefits he brought to St George as the club started to build its premiership run. Facer had been a player when I joined in 1950. He had been hooker in the 1949 premiership team, and in four years he played 75 first-grade games. He had already had a long career with North Sydney. I was in the lower grades in his final year with Saints so I didn’t get the chance to play in the same team. But he was a bit of a legend to all of us at Saints at that time, particularly newcomers like myself. He had a lot of fire in him and got into plenty of fights—and not always just on the field. It was that knockabout nature that stood him in such good stead when he became secretary. He ran the club with an iron hand.

Facer was one of those straight, no-frills operators who worked out what needed to be done and did it. He was very direct and didn’t have much time for sentiment. He was very hard to get a dollar out of, very blunt in his negotiations, and he made sure that none of us knew what anyone else was getting. I’m sure Saints players of that time, despite our success, were in many cases nowhere near as well paid as they were in other clubs. Yet Facer developed a fierce loyalty in the club. Everybody respected him and liked him, despite his occasional hard-line gruffness, and his attitudes had a lot to do with developing our winning spirit. But where he really excelled was in the planning he did, his knowledge of footballers, and the steady stream of top-line players he was able to bring to the club.

An important figure in the recruitment processes for which Facer was the front man was selector and long-time St George committeeman Laurie Doust. Doust had a keen eye for players, but he was also dedicated to the job. He scoured the bush, kept an eye on the juniors, watched the lower grades in the clubs we played against, and when a good prospect offered he went interstate in search of new strengths. Doust and Facer kept an eye on the resources we had, monitoring players as they got near the end of their careers, assessing form on a continuing basis, and working out just what holes would likely need to be filled. By this process they were looking at players for our needs two and three years ahead, and the supply chain was unending. Kevin Ryan is a case in point.When Facer first approached him he was a Wallaby playing with the Brothers club in Brisbane. He told Facer that he wanted to join Saints but had promised another season at Brothers so would not be available for twelve months. Facer said ‘fine’, gave him a down payment there and then, and welcomed Ryan the following year at the start of seven outstanding seasons.

The names that came to the club are legendary. Men like Eddie Lumsden, Graeme Langlands and Ian Walsh from the country, Brian Clay and Johnny Raper from Newtown, Harry Bath and Dick Huddart from England, Kevin Ryan and Elton Rasmussen from Queensland . . . the list just goes on and on. And every one of them was a huge success. There was no awkward emotion in Facer’s work, either. When Raper joined the club, for instance, it put the writing on the wall for my youngest brother Peter, who had worked his way up to become the club’s top lock prospect once Poppa Clay had moved to five-eighth. Raper quickly took that role, and though Peter played on for a couple of years, getting four or five games a season—sometimes partnering me in the second row—it was clear there was not much future for him at Saints.

It was a disappointment to me, and Facer knew it. Two of my other brothers, Ian and Don, had also played in the lower grades with Saints, but Peter was the most promising, and cutting short his opportunity at the club was never going to be welcomed. Facer, however, was not inclined to let Peter go and have a crack elsewhere. He was more intent on keeping St George’s depth strong. In the end he relented, perhaps to keep me from getting too stroppy, and Peter went on to a successful career with Balmain, including the captaincy and the 1969 premiership.

Many of the outstanding gains of that time are well known. Reg Gasnier emerged from the Renown United junior club to join Saints in 1958, and after a year in President’s Cup and a few lower-grade games, he was in our top side. The word had been well and truly out about Gaz for some time. He was such a schoolboy star at Sydney Tech High that they reckoned he might have played for Australia at cricket as well. He was one of those exceptional talents who are good at just about anything. As his career developed, however, he probably exceeded even the highest expectations that his school days suggested. The local junior league was a top supplier of good players, particularly outstanding backs. John Riley, who partnered Gasnier in the centres for a few years, was another brilliant player, and Johnny King and Billy Smith too were local lads who were always going to be Saints. Add the likes of Clay, Lumsden and Langlands from other parts, and the attacking power we had is pretty obvious.

But to my mind there was a more important element in the Saints story that made the early arrival of Killer Kearney and the subsequent acquisition of Harry Bath the big turning points in the club’s progress. Kearney determined that the only way St George could develop a football style guaranteed to win was to establish absolute mastery in the forwards. To Killer the game was a tough, confrontational battle in which the team that established the strongest forward base would always dominate. When Bath arrived, his rare capacity for clever forward work helped develop the skills that added creativity to confrontation, and in my time at the club I do not believe any forward pack ever got the better of us, expect perhaps for the disastrous game against England in 1962. We just weren’t ready for that lot, and they were a team above and beyond anything you would ever see in a Sydney competition. They belted us 33–5.

The influence of Kearney and Bath dictated many of the signings that Doust and Facer rounded up through the winning years, and there was a particular emphasis on front rowers. To Kearney and Bath, that’s where everything started. We were well off for front rowers from the start, with strong, honest workers like Kevin Brown, Bryan Orrock and Harry Melville on deck through those early premiership years. Monty Porter joined as another workhorse, and later Robin Gourley, but the key men who gave Saints so much of their forward grunt in those years were the inimitable Bill Wilson and Kevin ‘Kandos’ Ryan. Wilson had left the club after the 1956 premiership win to go bush, but he came back in 1958 and stayed for another five premierships. Kevin Ryan was on deck from 1960 until the last grand final win of the run in 1966.

Billy Wilson was a unique footballer. He saw it almost as his duty to get into three or four fights a game, and most of his reputation is built around the images of his toughness. He was certainly a hard man. They called him ‘Captain Blood’ for the way he would sacrifice himself to the battle, fearlessly and without any inhibitions. He was always playing on with damage that would have scuttled a lesser man—he once completed about three-quarters of a game with a broken arm—and it seemed almost compulsory that he finished every game with blood covering him somewhere or other. But there were many sides to Billy Wilson. He was an excellent ball player, for starters. He could position runners and he could assess where the play needed to go, and it was a bit of a shame that the subtle side of him got swallowed up in all the fights and the mayhem. He started off as a lock and he often had to cover in the backs when we lost someone during a game. He always handled the job well. He was also a very funny man off the field—one of the club’s great characters, and universally loved.

Many stories have been told of the Wilson trait for cutting off people’s ties.Wearing one when Billy Wilson was around was asking for trouble. He would strike when you least expected it. On one occasion I had stopped at the traffic lights just before the Captain Cook Bridge as I was driving on Taren Point Road at Miranda, when Bill approached me from the side of the road. He had just been walking by. Before I even had time to react he had grabbed my tie, thrust it between his teeth, and in one almighty rip rended it into a couple of pieces. It didn’t matter to Bill whether you were heading for an important meeting, or trying to impress a client or whatever. He just couldn’t resist your tie.

Billy always meant well. In the 1962 grand final, the young Wests forward Jim Cody had flattened me just before half time. Cody was a bit like an old American gunfighter who wanted prize notches on his gun belt, and apparently I qualified because he never let up on me. Anyway, he got me good and proper this day, cutting me around the eye and leaving me very groggy. When the team came into the room at half time, I was prone on the treatment table and pretty much out of it. Billy had taken over the captaincy, and from the little I can remember of what he said in the half-time talk, and what was relayed to me afterwards, he made a stirring speech about being responsible and not retaliating against Cody for what he had done to me. This was a grand final, after all. Winning was the important thing, he said. Just play football.

It was all very sensible, the sort of thing you might expect from a responsible captain with a grand final victory in sight. Only trouble was, as soon as Billy got back on the field he found himself in close proximity to Cody virtually from the kick-off, and he couldn’t help himself. He poleaxed Cody and was promptly sent off. I was still on the dressing-room table, just starting to come to my senses, when Billy returned, having hardly left. I was sufficiently conscious to work out the maths . . . no Provan and no Wilson left us two men down, and that would have made it too hard against a Wests team that by this time was starting to shape up as a very worthy adversary. I staggered back on, and we duly won 9–6. But it would have been a lot easier had Billy Wilson accepted the very good half-time advice that he had offered to everybody else.

When Kevin Ryan joined the club, the front-row tradition that had served us so well was set in cement, if you’ll excuse the pun. They called Ryan ‘Kandos’ after the cement company, because he was as hard as their product. I think Ryan was the most single-minded man I have ever met. It didn’t matter what he was doing, the eyes would narrow and the focus would be unerring. Whether it was lining up some poor victim to steamroll on the field, or studying for his law exams, or striving to make a go of a successful political career, Ryan’s commitment seemed beyond the limits of normal men.

Kevin worked hard at everything he did, knew exactly what his desired result was, and let nothing deter him. On the football field this led to some stunning performances, and his reputation as the hardest exponent of the front rower’s art was well won. He became a dual international, having already been a team-mate of Arthur Summons in Wallaby teams, and he was an integral part of the last six premierships in Saints’ run. He went to Canterbury as captain–coach after the 1966 grand final in which Saints defeated Balmain 23–4. Ironically, he was at the helm at Canterbury when they eliminated St George from the competition with a one-point win in the 1967 final—bringing to an end a St George dominance that had started to seem unbreakable.

I am often asked about the highlights of those ten grand finals I played in, and it probably seems a bit dismissive when I say they all seem to run into each other. But the fact is we all took them one at a time. We never even thought about a long run, and even when the numbers started to grow we took nothing for granted. We knew we had a good team and we were confident, not least because winning became a habit and the thought of not winning was a bit scary. The more we won, the more important winning became. But if I must list highlights, I suppose there are four years that stand out—1956, 1959, 1963 and 1965.

The first of them, in 1956, will always be special because it was won under great adversity, it broke a long drought, and it gave final vindication of a process that had developed over two or three years under Ken Kearney. The whole year was, to us at least, a big step forward in the march to professional attitudes that were the forerunner to the modern game. For me personally it was a big year. I had established myself in the Australian side over the two previous seasons, I was 24 and approaching my best years as a player, and I ended up on a Kangaroo tour at the end of the season. The grand final against Balmain was hard fought, not least because we lost our centre, Merv ‘Smacker’ Lees, thirteen minutes after the start. Merv was a very good player, but he had been through a shocking season, having broken a collarbone and his jaw earlier in the year. When he smashed the collarbone again in the grand final, there was no question of his being able to continue.

That meant playing the next 67 minutes a man short. In the era of no replacements we had to move Billy Wilson to centre and play one short in the forwards. But playing short wasn’t the big deal it would seem to people brought up on modern football. The Saints’ defensive pattern of those days had a bit up its sleeve. We worked a grid system with everybody responsible for his little area, and we had enough faith in each other to know that everybody would do his job. As for Billy, any thought his rival centres might have had about an easier afternoon was soon killed off. He tackled ferociously, ran hard with the ball, and on more than one occasion produced some nice passes for his winger that allowed him space.We won 18–12, but we scored four good tries to Balmain’s two, and really it was only some good goal-kicking from a young Keith Barnes that kept Balmain in it.

By 1957 Kearney had assumed the captain–coach role, and with Harry Bath added to the forward pack we only got better, winning against Manly in ’57 and Wests in ’58 by reasonable margins. The Wests game particularly was pretty brutal, but we were well used to that. By 1959, as we shaped up for our fourth title on the trot, the St George dynasty was really starting to take shape. This was in my opinion the best of the St George years. We went through the competition undefeated, which tells part of the story. But we were gathering a team of such proportions that rivals were just looking at us and shaking their head. That was the year that brought it all together. Kearney had had time to establish his patterns and standards, and the players who had been there for a while were all at their peak and brimming with confidence. Bob Bugden at half gave us sharpness, especially off the skill of Harry Bath, who was in his final year but was still very effective. Eddie Lumsden had slotted in brilliantly on the wing, and once we moved Poppa Clay from lock to five-eighth he gave us a new dimension as well. Then there were one or two new boys who also helped.

Reg Gasnier came up from the President’s Cup side and was instantly successful. Reg’s centre partner John Riley was another who came out of that President’s Cup team who proved a very worthy first-grader. John Raper had moved over from Newtown, and he added strengths in both attack and defence that surprised everybody. This was the peak of the St George period, blending a new range of outstanding talents with the discipline and the competitive grunt that Kearney had instilled into the St George culture over the previous eight seasons.

We drew one game against Balmain that year, and for the rest of it we were rarely challenged. But not everything fell neatly into place for us. For the grand final against Manly, both of our young centre finds Gasnier and Riley were out injured, so we moved John Raper to centre, brought up Geoff Weekes, and played my brother Peter at lock. Raper was a talent who could play anywhere and shine, and it was especially pleasing to me that Peter Provan had an absolute blinder at lock in that game. He was exhausted afterwards and more than a little knocked about, but he had contributed mightily to our 20–0 win. The score makes it look easy, but it wasn’t. Manly fought like terriers, and near the end Harry Bath and Rex Mossop got into a violent, no-holds-barred eruption that saw both of them sent off. They had been sparring partners of so many English seasons, and it was a battle that carried a lot of history.

I took over as captain–coach in 1962 when Killer Kearney couldn’t play any more and went off to coach Parramatta, taking Bob Bugden with him. We secured four more premierships before I gave it away. The 1963 encounter with Wests was probably the toughest, as outlined elsewhere, and is well remembered for the photograph it inspired. But the most emotional for me was the last of them, when we beat a spirited young South Sydney side 12–8 in 1965. At that point I had been playing in the St George jumper for sixteen seasons. I was a few months short of my 34th birthday, and already I had tried to retire a couple of times. This time I had decided definitely that the grand final would be my last game, so it was always going to be an emotional day for me. But I had been through so much over those sixteen years . . . I had had so many great experiences, that I didn’t believe anything in Rugby League could surprise me. I was wrong.

As we gathered in the dressing room before that grand final, it was much like any other. We knew there was a big crowd in the ground . . . there always was for grand finals. But our focus as always was on the task of winning, and what we had to do to achieve that. It was tense and I was nervous, as I always was. But even though I knew it was my last game, there was nothing terribly different about the way we felt about the game. As we left the dressing room and started down the steps to the field, that all changed.

The sight that greeted us was beyond belief. People were perched on top of the Hill Stand roof, somewhat dangerously it seemed to me. The overflow covered the steps to the Showground clock tower next door. Once we got on the field, there was even a delay while they cleared to a safe distance thousands of people who had jumped the fence and taken up spots on the extremities of the field. It was a sight to take the breath away, and for me it was perhaps the most emotional moment of my whole career. It was exhilarating, and once the nervousness evaporated I felt like a giant. It somehow book-ended everything we had done over the last decade or so to set this scene. Some said the fact that we won all the time took away from the interest in the competition. On this wonderful afternoon at the Sydney Cricket Ground, such a theory seemed to be utterly discredited.

They said there were more than 78 000 people in the ground that day, way above anything seen at the SCG before. But they could not possibly have counted them all. Worried officials had closed the gates at 1 p.m., but fans who would not be turned away simply broke down the gate and flooded in.They grabbed spots wherever they could. An English Challenge Cup final replay in the early 1950s had been played at Odsal Stadium in the north of England where they said the crowd was about 104 000. Harry Bath was captain of Warrington, the winning team that day, and he said the number was more like 130 000. It was like that at the Cricket Ground as we took on Souths, and the atmosphere was unlike anything I had experienced.

We won 12–8, scoring two tries to one, against an emerging Souths team that boasted a young Eric Simms, 23-year-old John Sattler, champion forwards like Ron Coote, Bob McCarthy and John O’Neill, and Kangaroos Michael Cleary and Jim Lisle in the backs. It was a fine team, as their subsequent premiership reign from 1967 proved. But we were well equipped too. Kevin Ryan and Poppa Clay tackled like demons and all the flair that Souths had was largely kept in check. Billy Smith played in the centres with Reg Gasnier, and of the thirteen players we fielded, I think ten had played for Australia. For me, it was a satisfying end. I know I gave it everything I had, and I thought I had a strong game. The man-of-the-match award was a nice farewell.

And so it ended. I had planned to retire after the 1963 grand final, and again after 1964, but on reflection I just wasn’t ready. I still loved training, and if I was going to keep doing that I thought I might as well put it to good use. I’m glad I did. But by 1965 I could feel that I was not quite getting to the places I used to get to. The pace and the ability to just keep going were starting to wane, and though it was probably only marginal there were times when I felt that I wasn’t keeping up . . . not the way I wanted to, anyway. There was no doubt in my mind it was time to finish. I had no complaints. Sixteen years with one club is a good run. Ten first-grade premierships is beyond belief. The Test matches and the tours were great too. But the best thing was that I was at a great club, playing alongside great men who remained friends for life. It was a unique time, not likely ever to be repeated.