Origin has kicked off with a cracker.
Match One at Suncorp had everything. Drama. Theatre. Power. Pressure. Courage. Cool. Relentless attack. Desperate defense. Even nostalgia.
It produced the best of what League can celebrate. It produced the worst of what League must eradicate.
The game was played in the shadows of the deaths of some of footballs greatest legends. Reg Gasnier, Arthur Beetson and Tom Hafey. Two of these three were my childhood sporting heroes.
Reg Gasnier was, arguably, the greatest Rugby League player in history. He was, indisputably, one of the greatest three.
Tom Hafey was, by every measure, a mediocre Australian Rules Football player. He played 67 senior games across six seasons. But he was, arguably, the greatest coach in VFL/AFL history and certainly one of the greatest three.
They were among my heroes because they played for the teams I loved, and still love, from boyhood; the St George Dragons and the Richmond Tigers.
Beetson, and even Churchill, I never could have loved. They always played for the enemy.
There’s family story that doesn’t reflect well on me. One Sunday back in the 90’s I arrived home for Sunday lunch after preaching at the two morning services at St Peter’s Richmond, west of Sydney. As I entered the house and we assembled at the dinner table, my son, aged about fifteen at the time, asked me how Richmond went.
I respond by saying, “I don’t think they play until this afternoon, Steve.” (Duh.) My son was interested in the preaching of the gospel while I was preoccupied with park footy!
I never had the privilege of meeting Puff the Magic Dragon (Gasnier). I came close on two occasions. With a bunch of mates after playing a schoolboy game one windy Winter Wednesday afternoon in Wollongong we spotted the St George Reserve Grade coach, Paul Boughton. He was obviously there doing a bit of talent scouting. I can assure you that I wasn’t within a Brahman bull’s roar of his radar.
We introduced ourselves and he invited me into the St George dressing room for the half time break at their next home game. A month later, there I was, rubbing shoulders (well, almost) with Reg Gasnier, Johnny Raper, Graham Langlands, Elton Rasmussen, Johny King, Poppa Clay and company. Ian Walsh, the captain-coach was stripping paint off the wall with his half-time spray. I was 14 and more than a little awed by the experience.
Years later, and twice the age but still in my twenties, as a freshly minted young minister in the Sutherland Shire, I was taking a funeral at the local crematorium. I recognised Gasnier among the mourners. He seemed much smaller than I remembered. Less assured. Not as comfortable in a suit at a funeral than his footy clothes on Kogarah Oval. Death levels the playing field for all of us.
There was a wonderfully heartwarming story, with more than a heartbreaking twist, by Peter Fitzimmon’s in his column in Saturdays’s Sydney Morning Herald on May 17:
One man who was instrumental in the making of Reg Gasnier, in more ways than one, was his father Bill. In 1957, it was Bill Gasnier who firmly rejected the demands of St George that his genius 17-year-old son turn out for the Dragons, and he held that line for the next year too, insisting his lad have time to develop his natural game before going up against the adults. It worked. By the time Gsnier made his grade debut his genius was hard-baked and so was able to withstand the hard men so that his first-grade, NSW and Kangaroo debut all came in the same year. The staggering thing however? When they farewelled the rugby league “Immortal” at Woronora Crematorium on Thursday afternoon, there was Bill Gasnier, now 99 years old, sitting up the front on the right, as proud of his boy as ever - to that boy’s dying day, and no doubt to his own. Well done sir, and our condolences on the death of your fine son.
In an age when parents see seven figure cheques rather than the child in their own children; in a crazed world where greedy fathers bully their talented children towards premature burnout rather than nurture their talent towards maturity, encourage their humility and affirm their humanity, the Bill and Reg Gasnier story is one that needs to be told to every new generation right across the world.
Another Fitzimmons reader reflects in the same column on an encounter with Reg Gasnier when as a twelve-year-old boy, he met the Magic Dragon when the team were at training one Thursday night:
This event had a life-long effect on me. It taught me many things. I have thought about it often in the ensuing years, and came to a realisation that it was not Gasnier’s sporting prowess or ego at play that night but his humanity, his decency and his sense of responsibility to rugby league. He was a man who transcended mere sport. And this in an era when the term ‘role model’ was not in the English language.
Reg Gasnier’s state of origin has much to teach every one of us:
• The role of wise parenting.
• The place of a father (and a mother) in a child’s life.
• To serve, and not spoil, the child. (Bill Gasnier may, or may not, have spared the rod, but he didn’t spare making the hard decisions we hardly see being made today.)
• Life is much larger than sport.
• Character is more important than being a celebrity.
• “Immortals” are in fact mortal and we will all one day meet our Maker.
• Even the human hallmarks of humility and integrity are wanting and exempt none from the searching judgement of a Holy God, before whom our only hope is the mercy and forgiveness we can receive through Jesus.
As the epitaph reads on the headstone of First Fleeter Lt John Gowen, buried in the church grounds of Christ Church Kiama:
Strangers, friends, as here you see,
The sad truth of mortality.
Let each one ask himself, “Am I,
prepared, should I be (when I am) called to die?”
Feature photo: Peter Byrnes
