Captain Grasscutter - Steve Mortimer
Pic: NSWRL.
It’s an indelible image - Steve Mortimer, sweaty, bloodied captain of NSW Blues, hoisted onto the shoulders of team-mates. And there he is, reaching for the heavens like Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe) in the publicity shot for Platoon. Except Mortimer is not crying because he's being shot and killed by the Viet Cong after betrayal at the hands of Sargeant Barnes (Tom Berenger). Rather because, finally, Blues had beaten Maroons in State of Origin rugby league. It was 1985. Mortimer had been a gun for a decade. But this was surely his last chance. And he knew it. Didn’t see him play? You missed out. The game’s best chip-and-chase. The game’s best grass-cutter cover-defence. The game’s best tongue, stuck to this top lip like he was working out equations in a hurry.
The Imposter - Allan Langer
Pic: QRL.
It’s funny what you remember. It would’ve been 1988, State of Origin, Lang Park. And there’s Allan Langer taking a quick tap instead of kicking for touch in his own half. And away he ran, this snowy-haired little imposter, jagging across field, throwing dummies before shooting out a wide spiral bit of kit to winger Alan McIndoe who burned away for a try. And it was just outrageous. No-one would have thought of doing it. The man tried things. Grubbers at speed, the ball seemed to be attached to him. He was like Lionel Messi, except dribbling the ball through the meaty feet of the biggest men in the game. And all of them - and we’re talking madmen, beasts like Ian Roberts, Peter Kelly, Les Davidson - intent on savaging the annoying little rooster who’d dare to take them on in their house. Yet Langer ripped it off. For such was his go.
The King of FNQ - Johnathan Thurston
Pic: NRL.com
The great Johnathan Thurston, the champion, the King of all North Queensland. When the game is on the line, you want the ball with “JT”. You want him cradling it in those soft hands. You want his eyes scanning the line for weakness. You want him throwing that massive dummy, the one they know he’s selling yet are powerless to resist buying. Thurston’s dummy is like a Big Mac - you know it’s bad but you’ve just got to have it. Yet what gets him into this paragraph and one day, surely, into the pantheon with Johns, is the accuracy of his work, at speed, under the pump. Be it kicking, passing or knowing when to run, the man was a marvel, the standout player of the post-Johns generation and, some reckon, even better than Johns. How do you separate 'em?
The Champion - Peter Sterling
Pic: NRL.com
Someone say Big Mac? Our Sterlo used to eat one on the way to Cumberland Oval. In days when Benny Elias was in Rugby League Week extolling the virtues of pre-match bananas, and Wayne Pearce was a walking advertisement for tee-totalatarianism (which may be a thing), Sterling would pull into the drive-through at Macca’s and order a nice fat Big Mac. And then he’d drive to the footy and kill ‘em. What a player. Crab-like running style and wiry physique, Sterling owned games. His combination with Brett Kenny for the Eels and NSW and Australia was one of the best there’s ever been. Second best could be Sterling’s combination with Wally Lewis. Not to say he made those men look good, because they did that on their own. But Sterling helped. Most of Jack Gibson’s moves ran off him somehow. He won four premierships. He’s very comfortably among this class.
The Eighth - Andrew Johns
Pic: NRL.com
Ah, Joey. The holy Joseph Johns, the son of a coal-miner’s son who came from Cessnock and smashed up everything. What a player. Ridiculous player. Brute defence, barge-arse, brilliant kicking. He invented kicks. He kicked one from the sideline at Newcastle, Bill Harrigan said "that will do me" and blew full-time early. Why? Because Johns had placed it inches from the opposing try-line and cut it in like a low-flung boomerang. Wooshka. Johns could do things, at speed, under the pump, in the biggest games, that other players wouldn’t try mucking about on the beach. So yes - a bit special, our Eighth.
Lair and Larrikin - Billy Smith
Pic: NRL.com
Like this journo, you may have never seen Billy Smith play. But you almost don’t need to have. Because the stories abound. All those yarns, those great yarns. And they’re still talking about him today. And if you’re a footy nerd like me, you’ll hang off those old boys like a kid with his grandad, and ask them to talk of his combination with Graeme Langlands, his integral part in the never-ever-again 11 premierships on the trot, how he pretended to drive a Penfold’s van into a pond in the Hunter Valley. There he was playing for Australia in England, in the frozen bogs of Wakefield and Widnes, this impish character, this hard little critter, and he’s just shredding ‘em. He could play in the centres. He scored thousands of tries. He was fast, unpredictable. And they’re still talking about him 40 years after he played his last game. Fair mark of a footballer.
The Last of His Kind - Tommy Raudonikis
Pic: NRL.com
They'll be talking about Tommy a while more, too. Stories abound. Some may even be true. He did bite Johnny Gibbs on the bridge of the nose. He did once say that if he’d seen Steve Mortimer in the car park pre-match he’d have tried to run him over. And he did once start laying into opponent and arch-rival Greg Oliphant while the Queenslander was being treated on the ground by medics. Such were the blood-soaked and knuckle-dragging times. Yet he could play, too, Tommy. Really play. They don’t make mugs captain of Australia. He could dart from the scrum base, slip through a hole. He could offload. He was a chunky man but there wasn’t much of him. But what there was he threw at opponents like a pit-bull going hard at a chunk of osso bucco. Great competitor, super player. And absolutely fucking fearless. Halfback of the ‘70s. Nuff said.
The Competitor - Ricky Stuart
Pic: Raiders.com.au
Ricky Stuart did things on the footy field Wally Lewis couldn’t do. In days of fat leather footballs Stuart fairly launched the Steeden downtown, mighty spiralling torpedo punt kicks dropped from beautiful soft hands onto a mighty right boot. Boom - they soared through the crisp Canberra night, you could just about hear them fizz. His long-passing was, perhaps, the best the game’s ever seen. Laurie Daley and Gary Belcher and his highness, Mal Meninga, just waited out in the backline for Stuart to hoick them the ball. Stuart could fling a wombat across Queanbeyan. What a pass. And yet his greatest trait was a borderline insane competitive spirit. People would play him at pool for $2 and let him win because it seemed to mean so much. Imagine him after the grand final in '91.
The Cooper Cronk - Cooper Cronk
Pic: NRL.com.
A singular hep-cat, our Coops, who didn’t just land field goals his entire being came into focus. Or something I don’t know, it was like weird beat poetry one assumes other people get. But what a rugby league player. What a winner. Killed ‘em all for the Storm in concert with Cam Smith and Billy Slater. Went to the Roosters and killed ‘em all again. What a player. He didn’t just pass the ball to forwards it was like he threw them at the opposition like mobile slabs of beef, taunting the opponents as if to say, Here tackle this, and this, and this… May have been Immortal had there been no Smith or Thurston. Daley and Stuart (and Fittler, Rogers, Kenny, Lazarus, few others) could perhaps say the same for Meninga and Johns.
Vintage Brandy - Greg Alexander
Pic: NRL.com
There are some guys you just loved to watch move. Steve Rogers, Brett Kenny, Greg Inglis, Matt Bowen. Today I like Mitchell Moses and Kalyn Ponga. Awesome players, sure. But the way they look doing it… gliding around, smooth, liquid … just movers. And Greg “Brandy” Alexander was among these people. What a player. What a halfback. Turned up in ’84, only 18, the best schoolboy player some people had ever seen. Straight into first grade, straight among the best there were. And in a particularly, shall we say, physical (brutal) era, still managed to rip off the beautiful moves without that Lego hair getting particularly messy. Once scored a try in France on a Roo Tour and did a backward somersault, which at the time I didn’t know people other than gymnasts could do. Top stuff.
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