Almanac Rugby League: A league lamb no longer lost

I don’t claim to be a card-carrying ‘leaguie’.

 

I remain of the one true faith (Bishop Barassi, Deacon Doull etc), but I might pass as a co-traveller with those who follow ‘the greatest game of all’.

 

Perverse is probably the right way to classify my links to league.

 

Raised in Canberra and living there again now after a chunk of the 1980s on Sydney’s northern beaches, I have been known to cheer home Mal Meninga scoring the winning try in the north-east corner at Brookie – and to head out to Bruce Stadium in a Sea Eagles beanie.

 

I’ve finally, formally and firmly decided I’m a Raider, but it’s been a winding road.

 

First contact was playing league, really poorly, in our primary-school side, complete with no knowledge of the off-side rule and no capacity to tackle opponents anywhere south of the navel.

 

Around this time, late-60s into 70s, Canberra was more Aussie rules than anything. If kids weren’t in the majority, rocketing around in a No 25 Carlton jumper, they might be sighted in a Saints, Souths or Easts one – but they were a definite minority.

 

That all changed in 1982 with the birth of the Canberra Raiders, or, as my old colleague from The Sydney Morning Herald, Brian Curran, insisted on calling them, the ‘Queanbeyan Swans’. South Melbourne had been transplanted to Sydney in the same year and both sides weren’t exactly immediately setting their worlds on fire.

 

But the enthusiasm for a side in a national competition was palpable. Sure, we’d had the Canberra Cannons make a National Basketball League grand final in their first year, 1979, and go on to win three in the 1980, but the Raiders played a brand of footy.

 

The town was hooked. Within five years the Raiders played in the last grand final at the SCG. Two years later they won a famous grand final, and then repeated the dose in 1990 and 1994, virtually providing the core of both State of Origin sides over those years.

 

But while the Raiders were starting out at home, I had headed off at the end of 1983, to a unit overlooking Freshwater Beach, surfing all day, subbing at the Herald by night and walking up to Brookvale on the odd Sunday to watch the mighty Manly belt Parramatta or whoever else had rocked up at the fortress. In time, I came to have one eye Green, one Maroon.

 

I fell back in line when appointed news editor at The Canberra Times in 1988, and remain exceeding proud of some of the front pages and spreads we put out during the 1989 finals series. The pinnacle was a poster we had done up, just on sus: a caricature of Meninga holding the Winfield Cup beside a three-deck screamer “WE DID IT!”  Several hundred were printed and various of our staff and friends took some to the Sydney Football Stadium, instructed to either rush to the fence and get them on TV if we won, or burn them if we didn’t. The telecast’s siren-time observation of how quick off the mark the Times had been was priceless cred for the masthead.

 

That grand-final breakthrough in 1989 was achieved out of the Raiders’ old home, Seiffert Oval, Queanbeyan, with the shift to Bruce jagging a huge crowd for the first match (and win) of 1990 against St George.

 

Around this time, I used to make the pedestrian trek up the hill from O’Connor with my dear Mum, Helen, a Glen Innes girl who was a good judge of league. ‘The Little Champ’ had decided on arrival, recently married, in South Canberra in 1959 that she would follow South Melbourne and South Sydney. But she too fell to the Raiders’ bug, given she was watching them quite a bit more than she got to see the Rabbitohs.

 

It came to pass that we headed down for the Raiders semi against the Bunnies at the SFS in 1989, Souths having finished minor premiers by the length of the straight but inexplicably dropping their first semi to Balmain. They were odds-on v Canberra.

 

So, in we go with me in a host of Raiders’ gear and the Champ with her Souths’ scarf prominent. Meninga crashes over in the corner in front of us. Mum’s on her feet: “Good on you, Mal”. I can still see the complete consternation on one particular Rabbitohs fan’s face as he took in the impossible sight.

 

After a dozen years as Times’ news editor or chief of reporting staff (in which support for the Raiders was mandatory), I went back into the federal parliamentary press gallery where my supposed political insights often included footy analogies, and where I also had to remember to be a bit even-handed.

 

I fell back into some Sea Eagle dreaming and went back and forth in my allegiance between Manly and Canberra for several years.

 

Such bifurcation probably should have barred me from attendance at the Almanac’s league luncheon on Saturday, which was a simply wonderful occasion, worthy of 10 times and more the attendance it received.

 

Souths chief exec Blake Solly, historian and author Alan Whiticker, sport-and-community writer and specialist Patrick Skene and raconteur, author and Souths tragic Mark Courtney were a fantastic panel. It was like a tag-team rumble with four different perspectives creating something even greater than the sum of their comprehensive parts – all under the masterful direction of the Almanac’s Ian Hauser.

 

I’d love to tell you all about it, but Chatham House Rules, OK? You’ll just have to get to the next one. It was magic.

 

Having shown myself so ambivalent a league supporter for so long, perhaps I can redeem myself in the eyes of my fellow diners with one last yarn.

 

As a Times cadet, I interviewed a young teenager called Ricky Stuart of St Edmund’s for our ‘School and Junior Sport’ section. The young gun had just had himself selected for the ACT in league, union and athletics. The headline ‘Ricky’s amazing feat’.

 

A few years back, I was able to remind the champion half and master coach of the earlier contact when we ran into each other at a coffee shop down the coast. He remembered it well, noting the clipping had been used in recent weeks on a TV bio about him.

 

That was enough for this big kid: GO RAIDERS!

 

 

More from Dougie (Andrew) can be read Here