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Beaver
The Steve Menzies Story
By Steve Menzies, Norman Tasker Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2008 Steve Menzies and Norman Tasker
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74176-618-9
CHAPTER 1
HIGH HOPES
BEN KENNEDY is one of those guys who radiates toughness. The shaved head adds to the image, but his size, his strength and his manner all build an aura around him that makes him stand out in a crowd. For an emerging football team, he had a terrific presence. When Ben Kennedy spoke, people listened, and most of what he had to say was what young footballers might term 'footy smarts'. When Newcastle grabbed a stirring grand final victory against Parramatta in 2001, there was no doubt that 'BK' was at the heart of it. He was always the ultimate competitor, hard, tough and uncompromising.
Ben Kennedy came to Manly from Newcastle in 2005, and to my mind it is no coincidence that things started to get better for our team almost immediately. His football and his attitude were contagious, and he arrived at Manly at a time when a new wave of impressionable young players was on the edge of something special. Of all the factors that turned Manly around in the years from 2005 to our grand final appearance in 2007, Kennedy was certainly one of the more significant.
Eleven games into the 2007 premiership, Manly came up against Melbourne — our eventual grand final nemesis — at Brookvale Oval on a Friday night. At that stage we had won nine games from ten outings and the team had built a fantastic self-belief which made defeat pretty much unthinkable. It worked for the team that night, too, when Matt Orford potted a late field goal to make it 13–12 and give us our tenth win from 11 games.
Having been reduced to a spectator for all but the first of those ten games, I was sitting in the stands with Ben Kennedy that night. He had retired at the end of the 2006 season, triggering a lot of dire predictions about how much Manly would struggle without his leadership. As the game against Melbourne built to a thrilling finish, I turned to BK and lamented the position in which we found ourselves.
'It's great, isn't it?' I said. 'I haven't played any games, you haven't played any games, and look how they're going. They really miss us, don't they? They're really struggling.'
BK just grinned. For both of us there was a quiet satisfaction about the way things were developing, because in fact it was great that the team could succeed so well without BK ... and maybe they even missed me, too. It was that wave of new blood that was doing it, and I'm sure Ben took a lot of heart from the fact that they had responded as he knew they would. And for the rest of us, we well understood the huge contribution he had made.
It was a Melbourne game two years earlier when the Kennedy factor first started to bite at Manly. He hadn't been able to train all week because of a torn calf muscle and he shouldn't have played. They say the calf tear is the 'old man's injury', but BK wasn't the sort of player to concede either that he was old or that he was injured. He led the team with his customary drive and commitment, despite his handicap, and the win put Manly on top of the competition for the first time since 1997, when we had last made the grand final. It was late March, so the season had a long way to go, but the turning point in Manly fortunes was perhaps more clearly spelt out by some of the young Manly players who rallied behind Kennedy to shine that day.
Anthony Watmough was a local junior starting to show some real promise at the time. He was a tearaway kid who loved the physical side of the game, but who also had a surprising turn of pace and a penchant for scoring tries. He had a very strong game in that encounter with Melbourne, and he wasn't shy about throwing some of the credit Kennedy's way.
'He's just incredible,' Watmough beamed to a clutch of reporters after the game. 'He's got so much courage. If half of the rest of us in the team had as much courage as he's got, we'd never lose.'
Brett Stewart, in the early days of a rise that was to take him to the Australian fullback role two years later, was similarly impressed. 'It's awesome having him around, with his class and experience. He revs the guys up. He's always got something to say and it's always the smarts of the game,' Brett enthused.
As Watmough and Stewart and a string of other young players rose to the challenge in 2007 and took Manly to the grand final for the first time in a decade, the Kennedy legacy was strong and enduring. The young players had learned how to win, and discovered how good it felt. And Kennedy's example had helped them to know what it took to earn that feeling.
In my time at Manly, there has been no shortage of peaks and troughs. I came to the club as a raw local junior in 1992 when they were on the edge of one of their greatest eras. We played three successive grand finals through the mid-1990s, winning only one. We should have won all three.
By the end of the decade we were on our knees. We had ended an unhappy marriage with the North Sydney club as the amalgamated Northern Eagles and we had fallen into deep financial strife. Our team struggled to be competitive in a competition which seemed to get harder and faster all the time. They were hard days, and though we never conceded it as players there had to be grave concerns that Manly would never again be the powerhouse they had been for the best part of 30 years, if indeed they survived at all. It took great resilience to climb back to the position of strength that we reached in 2007.
The 2007 grand final saw us well beaten by the Melbourne Storm — as good a football team as the competition has produced in my experience. As the score blew out in the late stages of the game it became a major calamity for the club, as grand final losses always are. There was a lot of distress. Our coach, Des Hasler, was analysing and re-analysing the game for months afterwards, tearing his hair out in the process as he posed to himself the eternal question: 'How could we be that bad?'
I felt as bad about it as anybody, but my long years in the Manly side give me a somewhat wider perspective. I was there when it was really good, and I was there when it was really grim. And hard as the shellacking of the grand final was to take, it came at the end of three years which not only restored Manly to respectability but ushered in a group of players that I believe will keep the club near the top for a long time. We'll come back to the grand final and how that particular disaster might have happened. But let's be grateful first for the revival that has dragged the club back from the brink, and promises better times ahead.
My own 2007 was a roller-coaster of frustration and exhilaration. I was injured in the first game, missed the next 12, and as the depth of winter set in I was at the lowest point of my career. But when I came back in Round 14, the team had lost only two of those previous 13 games, we were sitting with Melbourne at the top of the premiership table and the two clubs had virtually streeted the rest of the competition. It felt again like Manly felt around the mid-1990s, when we were easily the best team in the competition.
Adding to the frustration of those early weeks on the sideline was the fact that nobody could tell me what was wrong with me. I had damaged something in my groin, that was clear enough. I just couldn't run. But repeated scans showed nothing. Doctors poked and prodded and offered a range of theories, but nobody could say with certainty what was wrong. They could just as easily have said there was nothing wrong with me, but for the fact that I was crippled.
Fear of the unknown can be a terrible tyrant. Had my leg been broken, my mind would have rested more easily. I would have had a set time frame for recovery — a date to fix in my mind for my return to the team and the run to the finals. But with a mystery injury like mine, there was never an end in sight. The inevitable question of whether I would ever play again weighed on my mind like a great dark cloud, and as I watched the team grow from strength to strength my delight for them and for the prospects they were building was tempered by a certain despair for my own predicament.
Any footballer will tell you how hard it is to sit and watch. And it's not just on game day. When they're training, you're at rehab. You lay on a table while the medical people work on you, or you do your exercise regimes or swim or whatever. You do all this on your own while the rest of the squad is together, living off the camaraderie that a successful team develops in spades. It is a fairly lonely existence. You're with them but you're not with them. You see them in passing, you wish them well, you support them in every way you can, but you still feel strangely distant. It was a hard time made worse by the mystery of it. There was talk of muscle sheaths in the abdomen and various little things that might not necessarily show up on scans, but to this day I'm still not really sure what the injury was.
Eventually, and thankfully, it just went away. I started to jog, always with the fear in the back of my mind that it would go on me. Then I started training lightly with the team, still in fear of recurrence. Then I started to push myself harder, still terrified. It was 15 June before I got back into active duty on a miserably wet night at Brookvale. I warmed up for the game against a much-improved South Sydney with a sort of make-or-break attitude. Either I would survive or I would not. There was no point in going quietly, no point in trying to nurse myself through it. But once on the field the mind cleared and I just started doing all the things that come naturally. There was no time for caution. Eight minutes into the game Matt Orford put up a kick, Michael Robertson got a hand to it and flicked it infield, and I was there to pick it up for a try. Suddenly I felt that I was back.
That was a big night for me in many ways. The game was my 310th for Manly, equalling Cliffy Lyons' club record, and there was much song and dance about that before the game. Records are nice and this one was important to me I guess, not because of the record itself but because it defined just how much of my life had been bound up in the Sea Eagles, how much I enjoyed it, and above all how much I owed the club for the opportunities I had been given. It also brought home to me how much I would miss it when all this ended.
That nagging fear that had lived with me for months was the keenest emotion I felt that night. It was a marvellous feeling to be back with the boys in a team that was firing. But the personal battle within was more about survival. I had trained well enough that week, but I could still feel soreness at the top of my leg and I was not absolutely convinced that I was out of the woods. I didn't want to be tentative though, and I knew I couldn't give anything less than everything I had if I was to fit back into a team like this, flying as high as it was. So I gritted my teeth and went for it.
I can't remember that much about the game itself. I remember the pre-match stuff about the Cliffy Lyons record, I remember that it was wet and I remember that South Sydney, climbing back to respectability under the club's new management and coach Jason Taylor, were not easy to crack. But the thing I remember most was the sheer relief when I survived the game without any soreness at all. My mystery injury, still niggling at me only a few days earlier, had simply disappeared. I had taken the field that night with all sorts of things running through my mind. Would it be my last game? Would I be able to play anywhere near my former standard? As we celebrated a 14–2 win — our 12th for the season — I was back in the thick of it. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I might yet get a chance to play in a fourth grand final?
CHAPTER 2
DISASTER UNEXPECTED
SO MUCH of rugby league is played in the mind. When a side builds momentum it can feel almost invincible. An elite footballer will always feel he can win, but there are those rare times in which you feel that winning comes as a matter of course. You can't do anything else.
It felt like that in those Manly teams of 1995–97, when we could get through a season losing only a couple of games. It felt like that again in 2007. When you can stand behind the goal-line, taking your third goal-line drop-out in a row, and know that the opposition can never score. When you can be down a couple of tries and quietly encourage each other, just knowing you will climb your way back. These are the signs of a team that believes in itself, and believing in yourself is fundamental to any team that aspires to winning a premiership.
This is the way it was with the Sea Eagles of 2007. The 2006 season was a pretty good year for us, but at the end of it nobody would have suggested we were specials for the 2007 grand final. Even six games into the season, when we remained unbeaten, plenty of people were waiting for us to fall over. We had done it so often in the past, after all, and Manly somehow are not looked upon by the football fraternity at large as a team that is mentally tough. 'They'll crack' was popular consensus.
None of the players thought like that. With six wins under their belt they were rolling, and by the time they had chalked up 12 from 14 there was not a player there who didn't think we had a serious chance of taking the premiership. Winning teams create a snowball effect. The players bond as they never can when you're losing. Training is fun, the social scene off the field is more vibrant, and the games themselves are sheer joy. A team that feels like that plays like that, and the results simply follow. High-level professional sport it may be, but it is still great fun to play and an absolute riot when you're winning.
One of the undeniable successes of 2007 was the way in which almost every player — and particularly the emerging players in the team — rose to the challenge. If you went through them one by one, you could say that the great majority of them had their best-ever season. Michael Monaghan at hooker played better than he had ever played before, and was at the centre of so much of our success. Matt Orford might have had some great seasons with Melbourne, but he too was at a peak through 2007 that meant so much to our season. Those two guys drove the side throughout. Hooker and halfback are the creative influences of the modern game, and Manly was lucky to have two of the best. Nobody in our team would argue that it was their work on which our rise to the grand final was based.
Brett Stewart also was a key element of what we did. He was our spark, the man who could create a try from nowhere, and his best season was rewarded with a Test match jersey. Chris Hicks and Michael Robertson on the wings also fell into the 'best season' category, as did Luke Williamson at lock, Anthony Watmough and Glenn Stewart in the second row, and Steve Matai in the centre. For our young players on the rise it was a coming of age, and the experience of it can only improve them into the future.
For his part Des Hasler, street-wise coach that he is, kept looking ahead and guarding against unforeseen hurdles. Mid-season he even went so far as to register Ben Kennedy, retired for more than six months and by the standards of his recent playing days very relaxed. Des wanted a backstop in case injuries hit the forward pack and Kennedy certainly would fit the bill. Getting him formally registered and on the club contract list would keep the option open. Kennedy, for his part, reckoned he would be flat out beating his nine-year-old son in a race around the oval, but he knew, and we all knew, that four or five weeks of hard work would get him back near where he needed to be should a call to arms be necessary.
To make it all legal and above board, however, a contract had to be signed and lodged. Des tried to negotiate a one-dollar deal for one year. Kennedy held out for three dollars. It might have seemed like a joke, but when two proud men hammer out a contract, no matter what its size, there is a competitive edge that has to be satisfied. In the end they agreed on a two-dollar deal. That left Des complaining that he had been 'screwed' for twice the contract's value, and BK chuffed that he had managed to double his money for what certainly would be the last playing contract he ever signed. As things turned out, the Kennedy resurrection was never necessary. It would have been great fun if it had been, since further negotiation would have had to be entered into.
As the season's victories mounted and the smiles broadened, the way in which the players got on with each other became a significant factor. A key to this was our Tuesday night poker club, where the stakes might have been small but the competition was intense and the comedy rich. Every Tuesday through the season we gathered, often at my place in Harbord, but occasionally at 'Choko' Watmough's down the road. One of my most prized purchases is my poker table, gloriously felted with leather armrests and the works, and we play with spectacular chips that would not be out of place in Las Vegas. You feel like an old Mississippi riverboat veteran when you take a place at a table like this, and the Manly set of 2007 lost little in comparison when it came to the seriousness of their effort and the romance of the game.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beaver by Steve Menzies, Norman Tasker. Copyright © 2008 Steve Menzies and Norman Tasker. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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