The Gladiators

by Norman Tasker

  All of us who played in those years admire how athletic the players of today are and how strong they are. There is no question that they spend a lot more time building themselves up than we ever did, and most of it seems to be about building bulk. The collisions are hard and the game is still hard. But it is not as hard as it was then. It has been cleaned up a lot. Nobody gets blindsided the way we did. But amid all the hard stuff we still had a lot of football in us, and Killer Kearney is a good example of that. He brought an enormous range of skills with him when he joined St George, skills he had learned in English club football, and so much of his game was very, very clever. It was the base on which St George built their winning years.

  •

  In attitudes to the scrum, the 1960s Wests hooker Noel ‘Ned’ Kelly was of like mind to Kearney. When it came to the rest of his game, he personified the sort of macho mayhem that Kearney saw as a base element of Rugby League in his time. Kelly was an exemplar of his era, a hard and uncompromising forward who would not take a backward step. He played nine seasons with Wests, made three Kangaroo tours, and was a fine player with 25 Tests to his credit. Yet he is perhaps remembered less for his many achievements than he is for the way he played. Kelly copped plenty and he gave plenty, and he won such renown among the referees of the time he was sent from the field on seventeen occasions. He reckoned the referees had him lined up, and that the reputation was sent off more often than the man. But his reputation was well won. Arthur Summons fed a lot of scrums in which Kelly was his hooker, and he too marvels at the change that has overtaken the hooking role.

  ARTHUR SUMMONS

  I think it is hard for a modern player to imagine just what it was like in those days. I remember one of my early games at Wests when an opposition prop was giving us some trouble and the boys decided to sort him out. It was all very clinical. Our big second-rower Kel O’Shea simply asked prop John ‘Chow’ Hayes to move aside a touch so he could get a clean shot, and he let a punch go from the second row that claimed a few of our troublesome rival’s teeth. I was new to the team at this stage, and the extraordinary thing to me was that it was not considered anything out of the ordinary. It was just something that was done. They were ruthless. The scrum certainly was no place for the faint-hearted.

  I had come from Rugby, where the football was certainly tough but scrums were a different thing altogether. Front rowers and second rowers were too involved in pushing or trying to hold their ground. Letting a grip go to punch somebody would have crippled their scrum. I had played five-eighth mostly, and it wasn’t until I got into first grade in 1961 at Wests that I became a regular halfback. I thought feeding the scrum was just putting the ball in between the two front rows. Noel Kelly quickly enlightened me.

  Kelly had only just come down from Queensland as an international and he didn’t like people getting the better of him. We played Souths early on, and their hooker Fred Anderson was putting it all over Noel. Kelly grabbed hold of me and said, ‘Look, put it under my feet’ in a way that seemed to carry a lot of threat with it. He was on my team but he was pretty intimidating. But it didn’t matter where I put it, Anderson kept winning the ball. Kelly rounded on me something fierce. ‘You’re the worst #@&*% halfback I’ve ever played with,’ he roared. I learned quickly after that. Everybody cheated in scrums, and the team that cheated best won.

  Kelly was typical of many of the hard men who were part of every team in those days. If someone was getting the better of him, he would do whatever he felt he had to do to discourage them. Some of it was not pretty. He was a tough and at times cruel player on the field, but he was a fabulous bloke and a great man to have in your team. Off the field, like so many of the strong-arm blokes of that time, he was a model citizen, a great family man, considerate, funny and a total gentleman.

  The skills of the modern hooker are very different. I look at some of them and wonder where I would have ended up playing in this sort of environment. Maybe I would have been a hooker as well. The skills they need now are the same skills I tried to develop as a halfback, and you can’t help but admire them. Most of the good teams have them—Cameron Smith, Michael Ennis, Matt Balin and the rest. But the transformation has come about not to add to the appeal of the scrum, but to destroy it. It is a common complaint of the players of my generation that the absence of a genuine contest at the scrum has taken away one of the central planks of the game as we knew it. The game has grown very predictable, very patterned. So much reliance is placed on a clever kick to a leaping winger. There is so much mindless repetition in the tackles that lead up to that kick.

  I don’t suggest that the game today is lacking skill. There is plenty of that among a lot of very talented athletes. But the demise of the scrum has taken away an area of competition that, in the game’s original design, was fundamental to it. The play-the-ball was established as a legitimate contest as well, with two men opposed to each other in a genuine rucking duel, with the ball supposedly dropped between them and both attacker and defender able to strike for it. It was supposed to be an equal contest. Maybe the sort of world in which Kelly and Kearney did their thing made the scrum impossible to manage, although I don’t know that a lot of imagination was shown in trying to save it. Kelly reckons the modern scrum is a ‘lean-to’. He wrote in his book that they were ‘a pale and limp-wristed masquerade of what they were supposed to be’.

  For those of us who played through another time, I think we all agree.

  Ken ‘Killer’ Kearney was at the end of his career when I started with Wests, but it was no secret to any of us that he was a very good hooker and an even better captain–coach. Whatever Kearney might have done as a ball-winner, though, was probably secondary to what he had done for Saints as a tactician, as a pioneering coach, and ultimately as the man at the heart of what the club had become through that long premiership run.

  NORM PROVAN

  One of the worst features of the modern scrum, where there is no longer any contest, is that it leads to smothering defences. If you know with absolute certainty which team is going to get the ball, defenders know exactly where they stand. It gives defenders a big advantage over attackers. It is the same at the play-the-ball. It was always the case that the man playing the ball had a big advantage, but back in the days when a defender could strike for it there was always a chance. That chance tended to keep defenders back a bit in case they needed to attack rather than just line up ready to smash somebody.

  The old scrums might have been a bit of a donnybrook, but they had a character to them as well. As much as anything, they typified the sort of battle that a game of Rugby League was supposed to be, when tough men stood up to each other and fought hard for the ball. Rugby League today has plenty of big hits and nobody says it is not tough. But in sacrificing the scrum they have lost that extra edge, where a group of players came up against a group of players, and everybody had to contribute. It was teamwork in every sense of the word.

  14

  A TOUCH OF ENGLISH CLASS

  MANY REASONS HAVE BEEN advanced for the extraordinary run of eleven successive premierships that fell to St George from 1956 to 1966. Norm Provan played in ten of them, and he has his own theories about what made the club special through that time. The foresight and the dogged efficiency that the club administration brought to team-building were a big part of it. The natural bounty of the area in producing champions like Provan himself, Reg Gasnier and Billy Smith was also crucial. But there was a tactical and strategic element too, built around the English experience that Ken Kearney, and later Harry Bath, brought to the club. To Norm Provan, the input of Kearney, later complemented by Bath, was the singular factor that lifted St George above the pack.

  Kearney had played four seasons with Leeds in England after completing a successful Rugby Union tour with the Wallabies in which he had been a Test match fixture. He found English Rugby League to be as smart as it was ruthless, and when he joined St George in 1952 he marvelled at the different approaches in the two
countries. He found it hard to understand the lack of sophistication in Australian league at the time. It was all one-out, hope-for-the-best stuff, he reasoned, without the tactical nous that had been the bread and butter of English football. He set about changing that. Kearney played eleven games in his first year with Saints, was captain the following year, captain–coach in 1954 and 1955, captain under coach Norm Tipping for the first of the premierships in 1956, then captain–coach until his retirement at the end of the 1961 season.

  Bath first played senior Rugby League in Brisbane in 1940, was selected for Queensland, and then moved to Sydney, where he won NSW selection and figured in Balmain premiership sides in 1946 and 1947. He was chosen to play for Australia against England in 1946, but injury cost him a game in any of the Tests. He went off to England, played 346 games in nine seasons with Warrington, and played many times for Other Nationalities, an international equivalent for overseas players domiciled in England. Along the way he captained Warrington to two Challenge Cup titles, kicked mountains of goals, and developed skills above and beyond the norm. He played three seasons with Saints at the end of his career, twice topped 200 points, and was an important cog in three premierships. He retired at 35 to move into a celebrated coaching career. They said he was the best forward never to play for Australia. Norm Provan describes him as simply a genius.

  NORM PROVAN

  Ken ‘Killer’ Kearney became captain of St George in his second season, but he really started reshaping the club before that. Killer made no secret of the fact that he didn’t think we trained very well or had any real tactical insight. He reckoned we were all heads down and bums up, without any subtlety in what we did. Ken had played a lot of football in England, where they played a couple of games a week and generally thought a lot more about the creative side of the game. On top of that he thought we were generally ill-prepared. He didn’t think we were fit enough, and he was critical of the happy-go-lucky attitude that was the Australian way in those days, and not just at St George. He brought a very strong discipline to the club that became embedded in the way we operated, and that continued long after Kearney was gone. The thing Killer did most of all was make us serious about winning. He gave us a professional edge long before anybody talked of such things.

  When Kearney took on the coaching as well as the captaincy in 1954 he was already the most dominant character in the club. We had come runners-up to Souths in Killer’s first year as captain in 1953, then finished third in the next two years when he was captain–coach. The club’s ultimate success was taking shape in those years. He brought in a trainer in John Gurd, who was a physical education instructor at Sydney Teachers’ College and a good bloke who won the respect of the troops. It sounds strange by today’s standards, I know, but Gurd introduced various programs of circuit training, and it was considered very scientific at the time.

  The Saints boys had always trained hard. I ran every day and so did a lot of others, and we pounded away on bush tracks and sandhills, and did sprints until we were sick of them. I hung on to the pair of spikes I had been given in my first season for sixteen years, and all the running I did certainly helped me. But Gurd talked of strange things like aerobics, and the variety of his circuits was designed to prepare us for every facet of the game, not just being able to run for long periods. It worked, and it was enjoyable too. One of the effects of Kearney’s attitude to conditioning was that we all became very competitive among ourselves. That stuck through all of my years at Saints. People like Reg Gasnier and Billy Smith especially would not allow themselves to be beaten at anything, and the most basic training routine to them became a mighty contest. It made Saints the fittest side in the competition.

  Kearney, of course, was a fantastic hooker who could fight for the ball in so many different ways that we were all amazed. He wasn’t a dirty player as such. He certainly wouldn’t start anything, and he didn’t want any of the rest of us to go looking for a fight either. But neither would he cop anything. He did some fierce damage to anybody who tried to get over the top of him by unfair means. And he also brought to Saints an emphasis on the value of forward play that was, for all the brilliance of the backs we had, the bedrock of the club’s success.

  It was Killer’s way to get on top early in the forwards, even if that meant giving the ball to the opposition for a while. Occasionally he would deliberately kick the ball through the scrum so that Saints could marshall their straight-line defence and hammer the opposition. He called it his softening-up period. He had introduced a defensive line at Saints that was near impregnable, and later on, when we got John Raper flying about the field as a cover-defending missile, that only added to it. I could see Killer’s point in making a weapon of our defence, and you see a lot of it today, although I don’t think the ball is ever conceded. I wasn’t totally in favour of it then, either. It was hard to score tries without the ball, and giving it away just lessened opportunities. The only blot on an unbeaten record in 1959 was a draw against Balmain in which Killer let them have a lot of possession they didn’t deserve, just so he could get stuck into them. Saints rattled plenty of teams playing that game, and I played my part, but I have to say I preferred it when we had the ball.

  In 1956, when we won the first of our eleven premierships in a row, Killer lost the coaching role to Norm Tipping, who had been a winger and fullback in his playing days and the previous year had coached the President’s Cup side. They said he got the job because the committee was upset that Killer was having a running feud with Darcy Lawler, who had become the leading referee by then. Kearney was not the sort of bloke who would back down, and neither was Darcy. Unfortunately Darcy had the whistle, and Saints were copping more penalties than was comfortable. Tipping was a good coach, but there was immediate friction between him and Killer. Killer was not happy that he had lost the job, for starters, but he didn’t respect the way Tipping wanted to coach the team either.

  Killer wanted to get the forwards right first, and he wanted to base the game on forward control. Norm Tipping was very good at developing tricky moves and all sorts of plays in the backs that often worked very well.We had some real good backs that year, too. But once we were on the field Kearney was in control, and he made sure the forward stuff was right before anything much happened in the backs. There was a lot of tension between them, but we still played some great football, and in the end there was probably a lot of influence from both of them in the way it all panned out.

  We beat Balmain 18–12 in the grand final that year. It was Saints’ first premiership in fifteen years, and we won the grand final with twelve men for all but the first thirteen minutes of the game. Our centre Merv Lees, a wonderful player in those early sides, smashed his collarbone early on, and replacements were not part of the game then, no matter how badly injured you were. Billy Wilson had to move to the centres, leaving us a forward short. It didn’t much matter. Billy had a crook leg, but he didn’t give an inch . . . he even made a few runs and put his wingers away. But despite the victory and the huge celebrations that followed, it wasn’t much help to Norm Tipping.

  We had chaired him off after the grand final, but Killer wouldn’t have a bar of him, and worse still Norm had a huge feud running with Frank Facer. Frank had taken over as club secretary during the year, and though he became a legendary administrator who was a large part of the St George success story, he was wild in those days, especially when he had had a drink. He and Tipping had come to blows more than once. Norm’s card was marked, and he was shattered when Killer was returned to the captain–coach role, which he held for the next five premiership years. It probably wasn’t very fair, but there was a ruthless edge to Facer and to Saints generally when it came to what would give us our best winning chance. Killer was the dominant personality in the club, and as events proved, he was right for the job.

  Before we had kicked a ball in 1957, Kearney made a call that turned St George from a very good side into a great side. Harry Bath had proved a real champion in ten se
asons in England, and when he came home that year he was looking for a bit of a wind-down to his career. He was 32, and both Balmain and Manly knocked him back on the basis that his best football was well and truly behind him. He was recommended to Saints, and Facer asked Killer what he thought. Kearney didn’t have to think. ‘Harry Bath,’ he said. ‘Grab him!’

  Killer had seen Harry at first hand in England over four seasons and knew why many knowledgeable people there rated him the best forward in the world. He had all the creative skills that made English football as good as it was in those days, and Kearney well knew the impact he could have on St George. Facer took Kearney at his word and signed Bath there and then. Facer pulled in some great players in his time—Johnny Raper, Brian Clay, Kevin Ryan, Graeme Langlands and Dick Huddart among them—but as far as I am concerned Bath was the most important signing of them all.

  Harry was up front about where he stood. It had been eleven years since he last played in Sydney and seventeen years since he first made first grade, and at 32 he knew he wasn’t going to be the physical force expected of most forwards in Sydney Rugby League. But he knew he could make a huge contribution to the way we played. Kearney had introduced many of the English ways to St George, but Killer would never put himself in Bath’s class when it came to tactical precision with the football. On top of that Harry was a great communicator, a natural coach in so many ways. He knew all the theories about what he was doing and why, and he had a great knack for imparting all that knowledge to the rest of us.

  Much of what he did was very simple. He kept the ball in his hands, for a start, and moved his eyes around so that opponents could never be sure what he was going to do next. And he seemed to have a seventh sense about where people were going to be—both attackers and defenders. He would amble up to suck in defenders and he had the rest of us supporting on either side and in depth, so there were always options about where the ball would go. He found holes and he made holes, and before long we all knew that following Harry around the park would bring us lots of breaks.