ONE OF SPORT’S ENDURING delights is that it inspires conversation and discussion that lasts a lifetime. Games played in the bloom of life are replayed in the twilight, and there is an eternal pleasure in the conversation of quiet afternoons. The Gladiators of 1963 are fortunate to have been given, through John O’Gready’s photo and the premiership trophy that followed, a continuing chance to converse, over half a century, with people of all generations about great days, past and present. The topics are endless.
On recognition
ARTHUR SUMMONS
It’s a fine state of affairs when your most recognised feature is your nose, but that’s the way it is. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve broken it, but it is probably in the high teens. First time was as a small kid at school. I can still remember sitting on the football field crying. The biggest job done on it was a stiff-arm from Easts’ Gordon Clifford in my first season with Wests. It is now not much more than limp cartilage, and it’s the reason I look the way I do.
I got very good at self-correction. I would feel it go, or somebody would point out that my nose was facing the wrong direction, and I would grab hold of it and with a sudden yank pull it back to where it needed to be. I did that many times, and it proved a handy skill later in life. At home in Wagga Wagga, when my daughter Catherine was not much more than a toddler, she swam into the wall of the local swimming pool face first. The blood gushed, and when we got her out of the pool her nose was at an angle that was well known to me but horrified her mother. I grabbed it in the old familiar way and yanked. My wife Pam freaked. ‘Don’t do that,’ she shrieked. ‘I don’t want her with a nose that looks like yours.’
It was, of course, straight by then, and even when Pam insisted we take her to the doctor, my on-the-run surgery got a very serious nod of approval. ‘I would say Arthur knows a lot more about broken noses than I do,’ the doctor told Pam. ‘It is in perfect position.’ It’s an ill wind that blows no good!
NORM PROVAN
I don’t know whether it is good or bad, but being the size I am I do get recognised a fair bit. It has its pressures, and it’s hard on my wife Lindy sometimes, but there’s still something nice about it. I enjoy talking football, often with young people who are a couple of generations behind me. But I have found that being recognised is one thing, and taking it for granted is another. I remember being pulled over by a traffic cop in northern Queensland one day when I was helping out with some coaching at a local club. I was in a hurry, and the policeman was certainly within his rights to stop me. We had a lovely conversation. He asked me about ‘The Gladiators’ and I confirmed that indeed it was me in the photo, and he gushed on about what an honour it was to meet me and how much he loved the football and so on. But my expectation of any favours was poorly placed. As he handed me the fine, he seemed quite sincere in telling me what a great pleasure it had been to have a chat.
On Super League
NORM PROVAN
One of the more difficult assignments of my life in football was to sit perfectly still for artist Reg Campbell as he painted a portrait of me that now hangs in the foyer of the St George Leagues club. It was entered in the Archibald Prize and was one of those selected for display. It is an excellent painting, and the fact the St George club wanted to do it remains one of the great honours of my life. It was tough going, mind you. We did it in two-hour sittings, and the hardest part was getting the exact same pose every time I resumed my seat. Reg was a perfectionist. We were going to do it in a studio at Penrith, but the light wasn’t right, so we finished up in the dining room at St George Leagues.
During the Super League war of the middle 1990s, the painting mysteriously disappeared from the wall above the staircase at the leagues club. They said later it had been sent out for cleaning, but I’m not so sure about that. The Super League ruckus had led the Saints Board to seek an amalgamation with Eastern Suburbs. There was a lot of pressure at the time for consolidation of the Sydney clubs, and Saints were trying to ensure their survival. But such a plan obviously had plenty of emotional opponents, and I was one of them. I spoke at a public meeting at Arncliffe School of Arts and gave the Board both barrels for even suggesting that a club with Saints’ history should partner up with Easts. The Board members were furious with me, but the amalgamation was put on hold and in the end did not go ahead. That’s when the painting disappeared. I was convinced they had declared me persona non grata and wiped me from the memory bank.
Some time later I got a letter from the Board asking me if I would support an amalgamation with the Illawarra Steelers. They pointed out that they really needed to do this if the club was to emerge intact from the Super League war. I told them that if such a union was imperative, this was a much better fit. We had gained so many players from the Illawarra, and even the colours were the same. The ‘cleaning’ job was completed and the painting was restored to its spot in the club. It was a hard time for everybody, and the aftermath of the Super League raid I think left permanent damage. Inflation in player payments and the game generally put money on a new pedestal, which changed lot of things. Trust, even between friends, was broken. And great clubs forced to amalgamate inevitably lost some of their identity. It was a shame.
On pride and prejudice
ARTHUR SUMMONS
Switching from Rugby Union to Rugby League made me a marked man on both sides of the fence. In my first year in league we played Manly in one game and I ran into the legendary Rex Mossop, also a former Rugby international. I remember making a break and turning the ball inside as Mossop came at me. He just kept coming, knocked me down, and gave me the facial massage that was commonplace at the time.
‘You’re not playing that sissy game now, son,’ he said. ‘This is a man’s game.’ I looked up at him and said, ‘I can’t see too many men around here.’ That got me a whack in the mouth and a split lip. But the angst came from both sides. Some years after I switched, I was at a Wallaby reunion at the Rugby Club in Sydney, all dressed up in a dinner suit. I bent at the bar to pick something up and the old Wallaby warhorse Tony Miller nudged me with his knee into the trough. As I tried to get up he nudged again, and down I went again. It was a great joke. Cyril Towers and Wylie Breckenridge, two legends of the 1927 Waratahs, were at the function and they looked at me with withering contempt. Clearly they thought Rugby League had turned me into some sort of delinquent.
On greatness
NORM PROVAN
Sport has always been at the centre of my life. I have admired Jack Nicklaus and Cathy Freeman and Kosta Tzyu as much as I admired the champions of my Rugby League life. My home is adorned with team photos that rekindle memories of a wonderful time. Among them are photo compilations of the groups selected to celebrate the first 100 years of Rugby League in Australia. These are the Top 100 Players of the Century, and the Team of the Century. For me, looking through them brings back recollections of great people and great days. I have always found greatness a hard thing to measure. Dally Messenger, for instance, makes it into the group that represents the Team of the Century, but I wonder how much of that is just the romance built into the legend over so many years. Messenger must have been a fine player, as reflected in his label ‘The Master’. But how much of his reputation revolves around the fact that his switch from Rugby Union gave league the impetus it needed to kick off in the first place? Would he really measure up with Gasnier or Fulton, or with Mick Cronin or Harry Wells or Darren Lockyer or all the greats that have followed? Of course, we’ll never know. And as the years roll by, I suppose you can say that about almost anybody who finds himself in such exalted company.
Still, since my time in Rugby League stretches back to the late 1940s, I reckon I have had enough personal experience to know greatness when I see it, and I have seen plenty. I played with and against Clive Churchill when he was league’s greatest player, starting the trend that turned the fullback into one of the game’s most potent attacking agents. I remember the natural genius of Brian Carlson, who could play almost anywhere in the backs with equal skill. I have been on the field with classic Englishmen like Brian McTigue and Eric Ashton, and I have joined battle with firebrands like Vince Karalius. I have watched in awe so many champions who have followed. Men like Wally Lewis and Bob Fulton, Arthur Beetson and Ron Coote, Darren Lockyer and Andrew Johns, Greg Inglis and Billy Slater would stand in any era.
But when all is said and done, I know how fortunate I was to have played in the teams I did. Even now, I don’t believe anybody has ever surpassed the supreme standard of Reg Gasnier, Graeme Langlands and John Raper. I have watched the halfback geniuses over time, and I still can’t say that I would put the likes of Peter Sterling or Steve Mortimer or Andrew Johns or Cooper Cronk ahead of Billy Smith. Billy played up a bit, but on the football field he was the ultimate professional, the ultimate competitor, and a man blessed with rich skill. I can say with conviction I have never seen a better forward than Harry Bath, nor a more skilled leader than Ken Kearney. It is true that I played my football in a different age, when we lived by different standards, and in no way do I minimise the skill of today’s players. But I consider myself lucky to have played in the era I did. It was a simpler, more relaxed way of life and football was part of that, but it was an era that produced some amazing players, and it offered a camaraderie that lasts a lifetime. Looking back and remembering the people who made it like that remains one of life’s great joys.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
It is an impossible task, but interesting nonetheless, to try to name the greatest players of your experience. As a barometer for the greatness I have seen, I tried to pick my top side of the last 50 years or so, but I quickly found I was stuck in the days of my youth, when I was at my most impressionable and heroes were everywhere. It also made the point, I think, that emotion is a huge part of a team game like Rugby League. The people I toiled with and bled with will always stand above those who came later, when the armchair was my solace and the passion was more subdued. In picking a fullback, for instance, I tried hard to coolly analyse the talents of Darren Lockyer or Billy Slater, but the debate in my mind somehow always came back to Ken Thornett or Graeme Langlands. I tried hard to see where Andrew Johns would fit, but no matter how hard I tried, Barry Muir kept niggling back at me, or even Des Connor, who was my Wallaby halfback in Rugby and who I don’t think has ever played a game of league in his life.
So in the end you concede that you are a creature of your time, and the respect that you have built for your contemporaries is almost impregnable, despite the relentless cavalcade of champions that has followed. It is also a fact that for a fellow of my vintage, we are talking about very different games. A wonderful player like Cameron Smith, for instance, would shake his head at the trials a hooker like Noel Kelly or Ian Walsh had to go through, flailing feet and butting heads in a no-holds-barred fight for scrum possession. Likewise Barry Muir at halfback would never have had the skill to kick for a leaping winger, as Andrew Johns or Cooper Cronk could do so sweetly in the era of limited tackles. Nor would Ken Irvine, perhaps the best winger I have seen, be able to leap for the ball over the line as wingers leap now. He was a road-runner, small but blindingly fast, and he fitted his time. So indulge me.Allow me to reflect on the greatness of my time in the game in my own way, recalling an age when Rugby League was different and the requirements of its players less complicated.
Even now, as I watch Slater or Ben Barba weave their magic, I still see Ken Thornett thundering down the field like a runaway train. He had everything . . . the strength of a second-rower, the speed of a winger. Nobody ever got past him, and he swallowed the high ball every time. Peter Dimond and Ken Irvine and Reg Gasnier still have pride of place, and later arrivals like Mick Cronin at centre and Wally Lewis at five-eighth also make my list of the greatest. Lewis is perhaps the best footballer I ever saw. Or was it Langlands? People often ask me how players would go in other eras. Andrew Johns is a case in point. He was a masterful player in his time, but I don’t think he would have been quick enough for the game we played. But we’ll never know.
I try to be more expansive in picking greatness among forwards over the years, but still I come back to my era. Nobody has ever been better than Johnny Raper. Dick Thornett and Brian Hambly, Noel Kelly and Ian Walsh of my time were all mighty players, as was Norm Provan. Now I know there is no logic to this, since great players just keep coming. But greatness is in the eye of the beholder, and as I sit back on a warm afternoon, glass of red wine in hand, my mind’s eye goes to those whose greatness I knew from personal experience. We’ll throw the immaculate front rower Arthur Beetson into that lot. And if I take in the breadth of my experience, there’s a word, too, for old Wallaby team-mates like winger Ken Donald, a fantastic player in any conditions, and the most durable forwards I have known in Nick Shehadie and Tony Miller, who both made British tours, ten years apart.
So there you have it. I remain eternally grateful for the privileges I have had, for the friendships that both Rugby codes have brought me, and for the greatness I have seen and mixed with along the way. John O’Gready’s photo and Winfield’s decision to turn it into a trophy have been a big part of that, as has the enduring friendship with Norm Provan that it inspired. I consider myself a very lucky man.