This was the environment in which Norm Provan and Arthur Summons played their football through the 1950s and early 1960s. By today’s standards, Rugby League was only moderately professional, and for players it was a part of life that was blended in among more pressing priorities, like working for a living and raising a family. But for both of the Gladiators, it was a world full of wonderful experiences, of fierce competition and rich ambition, and of a camaraderie born of friendship and the raw joy of communal effort. Norm Provan has never let go of the values of that time.
NORM PROVAN
These days all the young blokes playing top football are full-time professionals, and they earn money that was just unimaginable when we were playing. They don’t have to work—they don’t have to do anything else but focus on football. I don’t believe that is a good thing. It doesn’t occupy them—it doesn’t fill their lives in the way the work and football combination did for us. And it can leave them stranded with nothing to fall back on when football finishes. It is also a fact that idleness breeds trouble.
When I look back at our time and the myriad of differences between that era and today, the biggest difference of all, I think, was that we all had jobs. In my early days, when I was working my way towards playing for Australia, I worked as an electrician at the Kurnell oil refinery. We did serious work, too, rigging up temperature monitors on the big tanks which relayed any sign of danger back to the control room. Billy Wilson worked there with me. Bill was a firebrand prop in most of our premierships and he played for Australia, but he worked the whole way through, as all of us did.
Some worked on garbage trucks or brewery trucks, where there was a lot of lifting and running involved, and they reckoned it helped their fitness. Reg Gasnier sold cars, my brother Peter was a carpenter. Everybody worked at something. I tried the garbage truck once to see what it was like. It was certainly good for the fitness.
Later when I was captain–coach, I had an electrical goods business, and on match days I would start work at the shop at 8 a.m. and work until 11 or 12 before heading off to the ground to play. We often played at the SCG under the old match-of-the-day system, so as long as I got away in time to be there about two hours before the game, I was fine. If it was a really big game I would sometimes try to get away early enough to have half an hour’s sleep, but that didn’t happen too often.
It is amazing to look at the way we prepared and compare it to the obsessive way they go about it today. Training these days seems to be all day, every day. In my time it was Tuesday and Thursday night for about two hours, and even in that limited time I often felt that training on the same field was a bit boring. Whenever I could I would head off to do something different, running the players on sand hills or through the bush.
When training was over it was up to the Carlton pub for a beer. I didn’t really drink much beer, but everybody else seemed to, and the pub ritual after training was something that they all thought pretty important in the way they developed as a team. We were all mates, and that was part of our success. We didn’t earn a lot of money, although in an age when not many people did I suppose we had a bit of an advantage over most. But really we played for the game itself, for the sport it represented, the fun it gave us and ultimately for the pleasure of competing and winning. I don’t know how much pleasure the young blokes get out of the high-pressure game of today, but I am certain they could not get more enjoyment from it than we did all those years ago.
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For Arthur Summons, six years as a top-flight Rugby Union player had given him a good grounding in the amateur ethos, where the game was the thing. He was also accustomed to being broke. The switch to Rugby League didn’t change that a lot, but it was enough to make a difference. The professional outlook, however, was not as starkly different from the amateur one as he might have imagined.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
I switched codes for a sign-on fee of 750 pounds. It was a grand sum at the time. I was a schoolteacher, we had a young child, and my wife had put up with a lot while I toured about the world with the Wallabies. When I look about at the haggling that went on with Israel Folau and Sonny Bill Williams . . . when I look at coaches these days getting close to a million dollars a season . . . when I see the riches available everywhere, I sometimes wonder whether I was born in the wrong era.
But all things are relative, and I don’t have any regrets about the privileges that fell to me in that time. I was very lucky. But if you want a measure of the difference that half a century makes, you don’t have to look very far. We played hard and we got bashed up in an era when there was a lot more dirty play than there is now. But I don’t think we were ever ground down by the game as they often seem to be today. We could have a drink and nobody took any notice. We didn’t have people sticking mobile-phone cameras in our faces. We could go out and have a good time without finishing up on the front page of the paper. Football was something we did on weekends, and there was a balance to life that kept our feet on the ground.
By today’s standards, it was all a bit of a lark. Training twice a week was pretty uninspiring. We would have a game of touch, run a few laps, do some sprints, try out a few moves and score great tries against nobody. We didn’t worry much about weight training, and nobody ever had to wear the torture of an ice bath, as they do now. Mind you, it might have been better if we had. The treatment of injuries was pretty basic. All the advances in medical knowledge that have occurred over the past 50 years have certainly made a difference in getting people back on the field quickly and preserving careers.
We were left to our own devices a lot in those days. In my first season with Wests I copped a stiff-arm from Easts fullback Gordon Clifford which was very late. I wasn’t ready for it, and it spread my nose all over my face. It seemed to happen regularly. I got pretty good at straightening it myself, but this one was so bad that I could not breathe at all through my nose as I played out the rest of the season. It meant breathing through my mouth as I slept, which left my tongue dry and splitting and caused me all sorts of trouble. I had an operation to clear it at the end of the season, but I had to pay for the operation myself. Wests never offered to help. Looking back, I find that strange, but it was the way it was then.You got your pay for playing, but for most other things it was a case of ‘You’re on your own, son’.
I was teaching manual arts at a high school for most of the time I played with Wests and for Australia, although I got a job in my final year there as an advertising salesman with radio station 2UW. Looking back, Rugby League was really a bit of a sideline despite the dominating influence it has had on my life. You certainly could not devote yourself to it 100 per cent of the time, as they are required to do now.
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Part of the fun of a long involvement in Rugby League is adapting to the changing nature of the game and the people who play it. The continuing involvement that the Gladiators trophy has brought to Provan and Summons has made it particularly so for them. The passing years and the changing eras give rise to inevitable debate about the good and the bad, the sensible and the ridiculous, but they also develop a universal admiration for the game and its players. In essence, the game still involves young men doing their best and loving it, just as they did. As they watched the grand final of 2012, their appreciation was no smaller, their understanding no less keen than it had been when they were sizing each other up in the ’60s.
ARTHUR SUMMONS
The tactical approach of the 2012 Canterbury–Melbourne grand final intrigued me. Canterbury had been so good for the greater part of the season that I actually thought they were favourites. Des Hasler has proved a dedicated and innovative coach, and he has brought that side along so that the attacking options off big running forwards are everywhere. But in the grand final I thought he went about it the wrong way. To my mind they tried to move the ball wide too much, and too soon. They had done so much good work there all season, I can imagine the temptation to do that. Josh Morris and Kristian Inu had been
so powerful, and Ben Barba was dynamite when he got a bit of space.
But it always seemed to me that Melbourne were too good a side, too well drilled to allow Canterbury the sort of leeway they needed to play that game. I thought the Bulldogs needed to use those big forwards more. To get control close in before they let the ball go wide. Melbourne were just so good at shutting them down. I was pleased to see Melbourne win for a number of reasons. First up, they were the best side for the talent they had, but also for the way they were drilled. Craig Bellamy is a very clever coach—you can’t have that sort of success unless you are. I know there was an unsavoury edge to their salary cap issues of previous years, but I thought it was very harsh to take those premierships off them. Players work hard for their results, and let’s face it, administrators make the mistakes that lead to salary cap rorts. I felt for the players that they were punished. The 2012 win was a little poetic justice.
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As Norm Provan watched the 2012 decider, he could not help but cast his mind back to another time, when a local junior still in his teens wandered up to the Saints looking for a game, was the centrepiece of an undefeated season in his first year, and finished up arguably the finest player the game has known.
NORM PROVAN
When I watch the really good players of today, I just can’t help measuring them against the players I played with. I try not to live in the past, but it is very hard when you’ve had the sort of experiences I have had. That team of ours that won all those premierships had champions all over the park, and at least three of them—John Raper, Reg Gasnier and Graeme Langlands—I reckon have never been equalled. Still, I look at a player like Billy Slater and I think we might have found a spot for him somewhere. People actually ask me whether he measures up with Gasnier and Langlands. All I can say is that nobody does, and that’s no criticism of Billy Slater.
There are many things about Slater’s football that put him in a similar bracket, and I can see why people ask the question. He is very quick and quite strong, but his real strength to me is his reading of the game, and his timing. The try he prevented Canterbury from scoring in the grand final, when he leapt above Josh Morris and knocked the ball away as Morris was about to grab it and fall over the line, was a case in point. It takes marvellous timing and awareness to do that. The way he bobs up all over the place at just the right time also reflects excellent timing and a good read of the game. But he doesn’t have the electrifying change of pace that Gasnier had. I have never seen a player do what Gaz could do. Of course, Gasnier and Langlands and the rest had a lot more opportunity than modern backs seem to get.
There has been a big shift in emphasis in modern league. In our day we recognised the skill of our backs and did all we could to set them free.They did the rest. These days there seems to be a fear of running the ball to the backs. The continual hit-ups with a kick at the end is dull to watch, and crippling for some of the really talented backs that are around these days. Surely there are better ways to use them.
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Provan and Summons know the risk of seeming too eager to put the players of their era on a pedestal. But it was an extraordinary era. And maybe they are right. In days when players were less powerful, and room to attack was more available, men like Gasnier and Co. had better opportunities to shine. There is, of course, an eternal risk that pundits of the vintage that Summons and Provan now boast can be labelled dinosaurs. But it is worth noting that the dinosaur was perhaps the most powerful living thing ever to wander the planet, the most ferocious predator, the most efficient and fearsome of creatures. Being a dinosaur isn’t all bad.
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THE MAKINGS OF HIGH ACHIEVEMENT
THE GLADIATORS IMAGE down the years has been presented as a depiction of Rugby League’s softer side: the sportsmanship embodied in winner and loser coming together in acknowledgement of a hard-fought game; the mutual respect of their momentary embrace; the friendship and the spirit of team sport. But such gentle imagery should not undermine the reality of these men. They were ultimate competitors in hard times, when no quarter was given and an unspoken violence was part of every contest.They were high achievers, among the highest of their time, and they built legacies that would still have been strong and enduring had John O’Gready’s photograph never made the cut.
The record is imposing. At the centenary of the game in 2008, both Summons and Provan were named among the Top 100 Players of the Century. Provan made it to the Team of the Century—the top thirteen. Provan played 284 games for St George over sixteen seasons from 1950 to 1965—256 of them in first grade. He won ten premierships in a row—the last four as captain–coach. He played fourteen Test matches for Australia from 1954 to 1960, played in two World Cups, made one Kangaroo tour and would have played a lot more had a growing business career not forced him to stand down.
Perhaps there is no higher recommendation of the legacy that Provan left than the deliberations of 2012 that led to the induction of Rugby League’s eighth Immortal. Andrew Johns was revealed as an addition to the game’s most honoured group at a large black-tie function held in Sydney in September 2012. NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell announced the selection via a large image of Johns flashed on to the pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.The Immortals began as a promotion in Rugby League Week magazine back in 1981, a year before the Winfield Cup and everything that went with it began achieving new heights for the game. Of the original inductees—Clive Churchill, John Raper, Reg Gasnier and Bob Fulton—Provan had played with three, and two were members of his legendary St George team.
In 1999 Graeme Langlands—another of Provan’s ‘boys’—was added to the group along with Wally Lewis, and in 2003 Arthur Beetson was added. As the 2012 announcement was made, Provan was in the audience. He had been invited as one of the leading candidates, and it is generally accepted that as the judges weighed the pluses and minuses of a string of outstanding contenders, Provan was hovering in the top three. Consider for a moment what that meant. Here was a man who started his first-grade career in 1951, who had last played some 47 years previously, who was being measured against almost everybody who had played the game since, and who was still in the frame—along with as few as two other prime contenders—as an Immortal of the game.
As a coach, Provan’s achievements were also impressive. To his four premierships at Saints as captain–coach, he added a non-playing role in 1968, then had one year at Parramatta in 1975 and two years with the Cronulla–Sutherland Sharks in 1978 and 1979. He taught Parramatta and Cronulla how to win, lifting Parramatta from near the bottom of the competition to an extended finals campaign, and bringing Cronulla from sixth competition place in 1977 to a drawn grand final the following year. (They lost the grand final replay three days later.)
Summons had a distinguished Rugby Union career before switching to Rugby League with Western Suburbs in 1960. He played six seasons with the Gordon Rugby club, including two premiership wins, and played ten Tests matches, including a major tour to the British Isles and another to New Zealand. After a settling season with Wests in 1960 that saw him selected for only seven first-grade games, Summons found his feet in 1961, winning a Test place with the Australian team in New Zealand. He played three successive grand finals against St George from 1961 to 1963, captaining Wests in the last two.
Summons made the Australian team for three Tests against Great Britain in 1962, scoring a couple of slashing tries and captaining Australia in the final Test. It was the only one they won. He captained Australia five times in Test matches against England, New Zealand, France and the only one ever played against South Africa. Australia won the lot. Appointed captain–coach for the 1963–64 tour of England, he was thwarted by injury, but his coaching and general leadership were crucial to a 2–1 series win—the first time Australia had won the Ashes in England.
Both Provan and Summons were renowned as fierce competitors. Provan developed good pace for such a big man, and had a powerful running game to add to his brutal defence. He
scored 63 tries in first grade with Saints, and developed some devastating combinations with the unmatchable backs he had outside him. It was not uncommon for Provan to breach the defence sufficiently to provide the small gap necessary for a flier like Reg Gasnier to take full profit. A small gap was all Gasnier ever needed. Provan was blessed with outsize hands. He triggered some important turning points in big matches by plucking the ball one-handed from the ground, notably on muddy fields, of which there were plenty in those days. Provan also managed seven tries from his fourteen Test matches.
Summons had a skill set that was as broad as it was natural. His feet moved quickly, he was a natural jinker, and he could step his way through defences that would have bet the house that they had him covered. His footwork, and the sharpness of his break, were natural traits that he started developing from a young age. He maintained a relaxed training regime to maintain those talents, wary of the heavy slogging that left him tired and jaded. He was light on his feet, and he spent much of his career trying to stay that way.
Some of the tries he scored are seared in the memories of those who saw them. Two against England in 1962 stand out, one when he covered most of the field, stepping and dummying as Englishmen clutched at him in vain, and another when he broke from a scrum and with one giant step left everybody in his wake. But perhaps the best of all was in his Rugby days, when he lined up against Ireland at Lansdowne Road in Dublin and was playing opposite Jackie Kyle, one of the all-time legends of British Rugby. As the Irish Independent put it: ‘Summons, with a lightning change of direction, went through the Irish defence like a scalded cat.’ Summons was regarded as the most impressive back of that tour, and the Irish effort was not the only ‘scalded cat’ break that he made.
The Gladiators Page 5