The Gladiators

by Norman Tasker

  Perhaps the greatest attribute Summons brought to his Rugby League career, however, was his leadership. He had an uncommon appreciation of tactics and strategy, and an ability to get the troops onside so that they followed as one. He found straightforward solutions to seemingly complex problems, melded complicated personalities, set standards that were not so rigid as to defy acceptance by spirited young men, and he led by example.

  The Gladiators photo and the trophy that followed may have immortalised Provan and Summons way beyond the time span of their football career. But their careers were exemplary anyway. They were champions in a tough age, and their achievements have stood the test of time.

  8

  SHAPING A GENERATION

  THE 1930S WERE a tough decade all over the world. The Great Depression had kicked off with the Wall Street crash of 1929, and even in supposedly wealthy countries unemployment was rife. Desperate people everywhere looked for work and enough food to keep their families intact. Australia was no different. It took several years for things to improve, and when they did even darker clouds rolled in. Germany under Adolf Hitler was on the rise, with aggressive plans to reshape Europe and the world. Before the 1930s had gasped their last, World War II was underway. This was the straitened world into which Norm Provan and Arthur Summons were born.

  Norman Douglas Somerville Provan was born in December 1931, the fifth of eight children. All the Provan boys down the generations have Somerville in their names. Norm’s grandfather William Somerville Provan came to Australia from Scotland in 1853 as a four-year-old. The Provans—originally Provand—go back to the 13th century. For generations Lord Provan was the local squire on 2000 acres near Glasgow, from which he maintained and was responsible for a thriving community. Provan Hall has stood there since the 16th century. Way back, there was a story of one Somerville Provand being a legendary slayer of monsters. By the time Norm’s parents had settled at Urana in the Riverina in the early 1930s, the family’s aristocratic bearing had long faded. The slaying of monsters had to be put on hold until the Saints got rolling in the 1950s.

  NORM PROVAN

  My Dad Vivian—they mostly called him Bill—was a World War I veteran. He was a lead rider in a team of horses pulling a large gun, and in the course of his stint in France he had three horses shot from under him. He was wounded and spent some time in hospital. When he returned to Australia he took up a soldier’s settlement at Urana, not far from Wagga Wagga, and that’s where I was born. The government gave a parcel of land and a house to returning soldiers. I think they were meant for three or four families, but there were ten of us, and that seemed to fill the place.

  They were hard times, and Dad and our mum Florence had to be pretty strict with us to keep everything under control. There were not a lot of luxuries, but there was the freedom to be a kid, and we enjoyed childhood in a way that kids today probably would find strange. Walking to school, for instance, involved a few challenges and a lot of running. We used to crawl through a neighbour’s fence to take a short-cut. The neighbour had a bull in the paddock, and invariably it would chase us. We had a good idea just how quick it was and how much room we would need to avoid it, but we ran like mad and got to school pretty quick. We never really thought about danger. Maybe that was where I developed my love of running.

  When the war started we moved to Wagga. I was about seven or eight and I don’t know why we moved, but Dad stayed in the Army and it was probably something to do with orders. Wagga had its adventures, too. In the First World War the cavalry was still pretty strong, and although I worked out later that World War II was more mechanised, there was still a Light Horse corral in Wagga where they kept a lot of horses. It seemed like hundreds, but it was probably dozens. They were surrounded by corrugated-iron fencing, and some of the local kids thought it was a great idea to run a stick along the corrugated iron and stir the horses up. I can still see the great stampede when the horses took off. They ran through the gate, jumped the grid, cleaned up barbed wire and were all over town. It was a scene straight out of War Horse. It took forever to round them up.

  The war was still going when we moved briefly to North Bondi, where I learned to swim and surf, and then to Willoughby, where I first started to play Rugby League. We lived in Alpha Road, near the Shore School playing fields, and I used to spend hours running around those fields. I had a track that ran down the back of them towards Eastern Valley Way. I wasn’t very old—maybe twelve—but I really enjoyed the running, and I did it every day.

  It became a habit. I did it for fun, and later, when I started to get a bit of a go at football, I did it to try to stay ahead of the pack. I was still doing it near our home in the Sunshine Coast hinterland into my mid 70s. Most of my life I would run at least an hour six days a week. By the time I was 75 I was limiting it to a couple of miles, but there were plenty of hills around home in Mooloolah. I would have kept going, too, only the doctor told me I had a sticky heart valve and it was time to slow up a bit.

  My first experience of football was at Willoughby Public School, where the weight teams were strong and the teachers who ran them were very keen. I was into sports of every kind, and one of the teachers, Mr Thom, saw some potential in me and encouraged me to work at it. I played with Willoughby in the North Sydney juniors, and I got a real feel for Rugby League as we lined up at Willoughby Park in our yellow jumpers with a blue V and took on all comers.

  When it came time for high school, I went to Crows Nest Intermediate High, where I continued playing football. I was starting to grow pretty quickly, and since I was bigger than most of the other kids it was assumed I could fight. Dad knew how to look after himself and worked out on a bag of oats back at Wagga, and I had learned a bit about boxing too from my brother Ian when we were quite young. Ian and I would have a real go at it, and Ian never gave up. I never considered myself a fighter, however, even when I was playing Rugby League at the highest level and a blue was part of the scene. I would defend myself, sure, but I simply didn’t like fighting and didn’t see the sense in it.

  I couldn’t convince all the kids of that at Crows Nest High. There was a notorious bully who was giving lots of them a bad time, and I was commissioned to take him on and administer some form of discouragement. I didn’t want to. This kid had done nothing to me, and I wasn’t sure I could beat him anyway. But peer pressure at school is a fierce thing, and I just couldn’t get out of it. So there we were, the bully and me, slugging it out in the lane behind the school with an audience that was egging me on, but seemed to enjoy the entertainment of it anyway. We went for about 20 minutes. Eventually he gave up, but as I recall there wasn’t a lot in it. Next day the headmaster called my name at assembly. I had come to school with black eyes and looking the worse for wear and I thought I was for it. He virtually congratulated me. The bully had been a problem for everybody, it seemed, not just the kids. He didn’t worry anybody after that.

  We moved to Kirrawee, where I completed my secondary education, and as I moved through the middle teens sport became a much larger part of my life. I was into everything—long jump, high jump, sprinting, Rugby League . . . I ran at every opportunity—for the train or the tram, up hills, down dales. I became a bit obsessive about fitness.The serious business of Rugby League started for me when I joined the Sutherland Woronora club. I had the good fortune to have as my coach Noel Hollingdale, who had been a first-grade forward with Saints and Easts and who knew something about the game. I have often wondered how many careers have been squandered by well-meaning fathers who take on coaching junior sides and just don’t know enough about it to develop young blokes or to inspire them. That was not how it was with Noel Hollingdale. So much of the success I had later on was a result of the things he told me and the things he encouraged me to do. His influence was huge.

  In 1949 Noel took me off to his old club Easts for a trial. I was barely seventeen, but Noel obviously thought I was big enough and mature enough to learn a trick or two from the big boys. Easts thought
otherwise. I played some trials and made their train-on list, which would have meant hanging around for a game in third grade if I was lucky. Looking back, Easts probably made a reasonable call because I was so young, but it didn’t seem like that at the time. I went back for another season with Sutherland Woronora, where Noel Hollingdale had time to develop some skills in me. By the following year, at eighteen, I had shown enough to get a trial with St George. They graded me in the seconds. I went down to the thirds for a while. It was 1951 when I had my first crack at first grade. I played the whole season, and by the end of it I was a first-grade fixture. I never played a lower grade again.

  •

  For Arthur Summons, the road to the big time took a very different path. He had grown up in Rugby League, where his father had been a mover and shaker with the Mount Pritchard junior club. But Summons had embarked on an educational path that took him to Rugby Union at Homebush Boys’ High School, and then again at teachers’ college. His mates took him to the Gordon Rugby club, where he excelled, travelling a distinguished path that led him to be Australia’s twenty-ninth dual international and eventually captain–coach of the Kangaroos.

  ARTHUR SUMMONS

  It is fair to say, I suppose, that the early signs were not good. As a child I was prone to missing a lot of school with colds and the like. And I was small . . . smaller, it seemed, than all the other kids. My mother tried to overcome my boredom on days home sick by teaching me to knit. I did a lot of it and I was quite good at it. I was also terrified that my mates would find out that knitting was part of my routine. I told nobody. The best thing I knitted, though, was a football jumper, so there must have been a bit of Freudian direction there somewhere.

  Things started to turn for the better when we got hold of a cow and set it up in the back yard. We lived at St Johns Park in Sydney, out beyond Cabramatta, in a time before the suburban sprawl had got anywhere near that far. We had five acres, and there was a football field nearby, so there was a lot of room to spread out and enjoy an outdoor life. The advent of the cow meant we had a lot of milk. We named her Peggy, and it was my job each day to milk her pretty much as soon as the sun was up. We had lots of milk, straight from the cow. We just put it in the ice chest to chill it. It was full cream and tasted great, and despite the lack of pasteurisation and other modern treatments it did us no harm. In fact it built me up rapidly. I never got very tall, but I was nuggetty, and sooner or later sport was bound to become a part of my life.

  There was a bit of sport in the genes. My dad, John Whitten Summons, had been a handy footballer with Alexandria Rovers as he grew up in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. He played some reserve grade with South Sydney but achieved greater notoriety as a boxer. He was NSW bantamweight champion at one stage, and he fought for four or five years until he was sat on his backside in a title fight and couldn’t get up. He reckoned he wasn’t knocked out, his legs just wouldn’t work. He believed he had let himself get carried away and hadn’t trained hard enough, and he gave up boxing there and then.

  In some ways I was a lucky talisman for my old man. I was born in December 1935, as the remnants of the Great Depression continued to oppress people. Mum and Dad had done it very tough, as all couples starting out at that time did, but Dad got a job the day I was born, and he was never out of work again. My mother had grown up Myrtle Elizabeth Roberts in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, but she suffered badly from asthma and had to move away from the sea. That triggered our move to St Johns Park, and as Dad beavered away at his bricklaying and Mum maintained a warm and happy household, my younger sister Patricia and I were blessed with a happy childhood. Not much money, but lots of love.

  Football first became a factor when I was at St Johns Park Primary, and they played in a midweek Rugby League competition. I had had no exposure at all to the game.They looked at me, saw how small I was, and made me halfback. They showed me how to put the ball in the scrum, and in the early games that’s all I did. I wandered from scrum to scrum to put the ball in. Later on I found some joy in running, and I discovered that I was quick enough and light enough on my feet to run around people.

  In those years, as World War II ended and a great post-war relief fell over the world, I found an uncommon joy in physical activity, especially running. I’d get on to the oval out the back of the house and run, hour after hour, day after day. Pat would come with me, we’d work out a start for her over 440 yards, and we’d compete with the intensity of Olympians. She was younger than me, but no matter how much I fudged on the starts I never seemed able to beat her. When I moved on to Liverpool Tech, and later to Homebush Boys’ High School, football became a more structured part of life. Dad had been the senior coach at Mount Pritchard Rugby League Club, so I started there in about the under-12s. We won four or five premierships in a row, and I began to realise not just that I had a bit of aptitude to play Rugby League, but that I was starting to love it.

  It seemed to fit the everyday lifestyle of the time. We were a knockabout lot in everything we did. Old Peggy the cow kept us nutritionally sound, I suppose you could say, and there was the odd occasion she would provide us with a good training workout as well. When Peggy was on heat she was pretty much uncontrollable. We had her staked on a long chain in the back paddock so that we had some control over the supply of grass. When she was keen for some company, she would give that chain a terrible workout. On one occasion my mate Wally Abrahams and I decided it would be nice for Peggy if we found her a bull somewhere, to relieve the frustration as it were. We also thought a calf would be nice. So we took the chain off the stake and headed off in search of a soul mate for our milk factory. We had no idea where we were going to find a bull, but Peggy seemed to have a few clues on the matter, and she took off. It was all we could do to keep up. In those freewheeling days on Sydney’s outskirts, life was relaxed, and finding a stray bull to help out our randy cow was not a particular problem. Peggy must have sensed him a mile off, anyway, because she found one all right and they had a wonderful time, which relaxed Peggy no end. This time we had to drag her home.

  When I found myself at Homebush Boys’ High for the final two years of school, the football was much more serious. They played Rugby Union in the Combined High Schools competition. There was a lot of school pride involved, and I really enjoyed the lift in tempo that the games involved. I made the Combined High Schools team, went on to Sydney Teachers’ College where the game was similarly intense, and ran into an awful lot of good mates who have stuck with me more or less ever since. Soon after school I was called up for National Service, which required a six-month stint in Army training. For me, that meant three months at Ingleburn and three months at Singleton. It was a legislated requirement for eighteen-year-olds in those days, and certainly was not a bad thing in a young man’s development. It involved long route marches of about 20 km, and it gave me a core fitness that stood me in wonderful stead for a career in football. Physical training aside, though, I don’t think I was cut out to be much of a soldier.

  Guard duty never sat well with me. We spent a couple of hours at a time guarding the camp during exercises, and I kept hearing things in the dead of night. False alarm after false alarm seemed to irritate my superiors. I also suffered by befriending Herbie Sternberg, who was a good mate but absolutely hated the Army. Herbie wasn’t quite as bad as Corporal Klinger in MASH, but he had similar outlooks and ended up with a reputation as a bit of a malingerer. I suffered by association, and the pair of us ended up with lots of potatoes to peel and lots of wood to chop. I bumped into Herbie years later in England, where he had become a successful surgeon. He also had a rare talent for music, and ended up touring Europe as an accomplished concert pianist.

  By teachers’ college time I had developed enough self-confidence to think that I could give Rugby Union a go, although I enjoyed both codes. But all my college mates were playing Rugby, so I played some trials with Sydney University and did OK. The coach there was a bloke named Barney Walsh, who later coached Australia and w
as one of Rugby’s great characters. He graded me in first grade as a centre. I ventured the opinion that maybe I wasn’t big enough to do the job that being centre required. He took that on board, then summarily dismissed me. I didn’t even make the fourths. I think he simply forgot about me.

  One of my teachers at Liverpool Tech had been Brian Moffat, who at the time was halfback in a champion Gordon side and had played for the NSW Waratahs. One of my college mates, Ernie Johnson, was also playing at Gordon. They rang me, commiserated with my failure to get a go at Uni, and suggested I might be very welcome at Gordon. There followed six of the happiest years of my life, embracing two premierships, a couple of Wallaby tours, ten Test matches, an army of lifelong friends, and some of the greatest experiences sport could possibly offer.

  9

  A MATTER OF TIMING

  FOR MOST OF HIS junior years with the Sutherland Woronora ‘Gravediggers’, as they were respectfully known, Norm Provan did not take a lot of interest in the big club up the road at Kogarah. Saints had won a premiership in 1941, when Norm was nine and still living the country life of the Riverina, but they had not done a lot since, and for a kid learning the ropes at Woronora they were not top of mind. That changed a little after a few trials with Easts and what Provan considered to be total rejection by them. A new attitude to St George grew out of the 1949 premiership season, and suddenly the club with the big red V became his mission in life.