Gladiators: Norm Provan and Arthur Summons on rugby league's most iconic moment and its continuing legacy

by Norman Tasker

Overview

When rival captains Norm Provan and Arthur Summons came together in a momentary embrace at the end of the 1963 Rugby League grand final, they could never have imagined the tradition they were building. They became the subject of one of sport's most enduring images, and ultimately the centrepiece of League's premiership trophy. Fifty years on, that moment is still celebrated as an iconic reflection of the game and its people. It is also a symbol of the changing face of sport, and of the role that sport has played in the Australian way of life. This book traces the legacy of Norm Provan and Arthur Summons and the champions of their time. In their own words, they tell how the game was, how it has changed, and where it is headed. They bring insight that only time and experience can fashion, and they do so with jaunty good humor. Provan and Summons remain two of the most recognized players in the game. They were champion internationals in their own right, and they each went on to become coaches of high achievement. Provan is perhaps the most successful player of all time, having played in 10 grand finals and won the lot. They were the fiercest of rivals through three successive grand finals. Yet through the image that has immortalized them, they have become lifelong friends. This is their story and their sometimes provocative reflections on what has happened to Rugby League since.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781743433799
Publisher:	Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited
Publication date:	12/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Norman Tasker has spent a lifetime writing on rugby league and is author of 8 books, including Beaver: The Steve Menzies Story.

Read an Excerpt

The Gladiators

Norm Provan and Arthur Summons on Rugby League's Most Iconic Moment and its Continuing Legacy

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By Norman Tasker

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2013 Norm Provan, Arthur Summons and Norm Tasker
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-379-9

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CHAPTER 1

THE SCIENCE OF SPORT

Nothing changes the world like science. From Isaac Newton to the space race, great scientific minds have shaped the way we all live. Science is changing sport, too. In Rugby League, computerisation and the use of global positioning satellites have forged new frontiers for coaches and altered the way players train. Clubs have employed sports scientists to maximise competitive advantage with dietary regimens and supplements. Some, it seems, have plunged further into the dark arts of sports science than is generally regarded as ethical or proper. As the 2013 season was getting into gear, an Australian Crime Commission report laid bare claims of widespread illegal drug use and potential match fixing, of blackmail and organised crime. It was a broad brush applied with a flourish to a range of sports, and it threw suspicion about with abandon.

The affair was a living metaphor for the way Rugby League has changed. Fifty years ago Norm Provan and Arthur Summons played a memorable grand final on a Sydney Cricket Ground sea of mud. After the game, as the captains walked off together, a photographer shot a famous photo. It has been replicated as the league's premiership trophy, and it stands today as a metaphor for the Rugby League ethos of the time, when life was simpler and the game was the thing. Nobody spoke then of human growth hormone, or considered injecting calf 's blood to improve performance. Provan and Summons look back on those days with wry amusement. Scientific help was limited largely to a bottle of liniment and a packet of Bex. A bit of a rub and a headache powder.

As the two champions of another age look back on more than 50 years in the game, there is some disappointment but little surprise in the revelations so spectacularly made in early 2013. The eternal search for a competitive edge was always going to lead to cheating. That's human nature, and when an illicit market develops there is no shortage of suppliers. Suspicion about drug use in sport has been about for decades, and tests have uncovered more than one offender. The issue for today is how to deal with it. And on this front, Norm Provan and Arthur Summons have slightly different views. Provan is an unswerving devotee of the standards that he lived by through his playing days. Arthur Summons has a more pragmatic view, raising the question of how long administrations can keep their finger in the dike, and to what extent they must.

NORM PROVAN

A few things about drugs in sport are clear. First, I am sure Rugby League as a whole is pretty clean. There undoubtedly are a few bad apples who will seek to grab an unfair advantage if they can, but only a few. The other undeniable truth is that those bad apples have been about for a very long time. They are risk takers, both in terms of their own health and in terms of the trouble they can bring upon themselves, their clubs and the game. But I have seen too many players over time who have bulked up tremendously, then suddenly shrunk when their playing days are done. That is rarely a result of natural change. They have taken something, then stopped taking it, and the effects sometimes are dramatic. But I don't think many do it. The great surprise about the spectacular way the issue was raised through the Crime Commission at the start of 2013 was the way it threw a blanket over everybody. It was almost a case of guilty until proven innocent for the many, many players who would never countenance using drugs.

Looking back, I think I might have been a bit of a pioneer in the field anyway. It was not uncommon in the years that I played in the Australian team to play a Test on Saturday, then back up for your club next day. We were used to playing injured or knocked about at best, and backing up for your club was the done thing.

In those days the Sun-Herald had a man-of-the-match award of ten pounds for the best player. I won it in a Saturday Test against England, and next day I turned up for the club game looking battered after a hard game against the Poms. The team doctor looked at me, grabbed a very small pill and a glass of water, and said, 'Take this.'

I didn't even think about it. I just did as I was told. I was always stimulated playing football. When I ran on to the field I grew six inches. This day I grew about three feet. I had never felt stronger. I was bursting with energy. I had a whale of a game, and at the end of 80 minutes I was running as strongly as I had at the start. Tom Goodman was the Herald man at the game, and he was full of apology afterwards. 'Norm,' he said, 'I can't give you the tenner again, because you won it yesterday and we don't allow two in the one weekend. But you certainly deserve it.' Indeed, but as the years passed I began to realise that had I got the tenner I might have been winning it under false pretences. I must have looked crook that day, because I had never been offered a pill before, and I was never offered one again. I don't know what the pill was, but given the emphasis on drugs in sport these days, I think I might unwittingly have been one of the early beneficiaries, if ever so briefly.

The crews of Bomber Command in England through World War II used to take some sort of stimulant — amphetamines, I suppose — to keep them going through tense missions over Europe that sometimes lasted as long as ten hours. They called them 'wakey-wakey' pills, because they were designed to ward off drowsiness. Ken 'Killer' Kearney was captain–coach of our team at the time and had also played in the Test match the previous day. In World War II as a very young man, 'Killer' had been seconded to Bomber Command from the RAAF. He saw action in Lancaster bombers over Europe as a wireless operator. I'm sure it was all very innocent, and maybe they were just glucose tablets, but whatever they were, they certainly enhanced performance.

My attitude to drugs is simple. It's not on. Rugby League should always be a clean game, where matches are decided not on who has the best chemist but on who has the best team. That was certainly the case when I was playing at St George. We trained hard. We had excellent systems that Ken Kearney and Harry Bath had introduced, and we were extremely fit. We lasted better than other teams and we were very successful. We had no need of needles, or sports scientists or chemical supplements. It is a damning critique of modern sport and modern society, I believe, that such things are now considered by many to be beneficial, even necessary.

ARTHUR SUMMONS

When I was playing Rugby League, sports science and science fiction fell into roughly the same category. Our game was, as Roy Masters once put it, more about 'clouds of dust and buckets of blood' than it was about science. We had a club doctor who was probably a volunteer, but there was no physio or sports psychologist or nutritionist or any of that. Self-help was more the order of the day. I broke my nose many times, and mostly just whacked it back into place myself. The only supplement we got involved with was a few beers at the pub after training, and calf's blood made good gravy with a nice roast beef, but certainly wasn't injectable.

As an example of how lacking in sports science we were, there is no better example than the Kangaroo tour of Britain in 1963–64. I was captain–coach, and we had a couple of managers who usually were appointed as a reward for services rendered. They were good blokes but they didn't do much. If we needed physio or treatment it was usually off to the hospital or a doctor's surgery in town. We were lucky at one stage to pick up some unofficial help from a lovely bloke called Bill Hunter, who had made himself into a pioneer 'rubber' at the Parramatta club in Sydney, and joined our tour on a sort of freelance basis. Bill was a huge boon to us in circumstances where injury management was a much-neglected art. Bill was not young, but he was an enthusiastic helper. He set up a treatment room and would lug his gear around the hotel without complaint. After our big second Test win on that tour, Bill had a heart attack. He was bedded down in the expectation that he would recover, but a short time later he died. I was with him at the end. He was a much-loved tour character, and his passing affected everybody.

That's the way it was in those days. Bill Hunter was a good man who was thrilled to be with us and worked perhaps beyond what was reasonable. Whether that contributed to his heart attack we don't know, but the remarkable fact was the team did not have a better arrangement for medical support. This was one of the great Australian teams, the first ever to win the Ashes in England, and it was loaded with some of the greatest champions the game has seen. But there was no real effort made to protect them or to enhance their performance in any of the ways that modern sports science would suggest. Reg Gasnier was arguably the finest player the game has seen, yet when he dislocated a finger, who was the expert to reduce the dislocation and get everything pointing in the right direction? I was. Looking back, we could have done with a little sports science, however limited it might have been in those days.

The furore that erupted in early 2013 certainly proved sports science has come a long way. I have no idea whether human growth hormone helps when it is injected into an elite athlete, or whether injected calf blood improves recovery. I know that to a Rugby League player of my vintage, it sounds weird and a little frightening. But is it really much of a surprise? We have heard stories off and on over many decades about people beefing themselves up with performance-enhancing drugs. It used to be anabolic steroids that were the popular choice. Now it seems the range of available assistance is much more sophisticated. And there's the rub. The more things get banned, the more sophisticated the next drug will be. Clever biochemists are always going to get ahead of sports administrators when it comes to complex performance enhancement, and the products produced will keep stretching the limits of what is manageable. In all likelihood they'll just get more dangerous. I don't know what the answer is. But there are a few things I do know, and one of them is I find it hard to blame the young players who get led into this sort of thing.

I consider my own career. I was a little bloke, and I took a fair bit of punishment. I would have given anything to be able to bulk up. But all we could do in those days was drink a lot of milkshakes and eat a lot of bananas. Even weight training was in its infancy, and the quick blokes in the backs were often told it was bad to use weights because they would slow you down. So we stayed light and nippy and got bashed up a lot. If someone then had said to me that this pill or that injection would help me put on weight and build some power, what would my reaction have been? I probably would have looked at the maths first. If a bit more weight and power meant a big contract, I reckon I would have had a lot of trouble saying no. I think that is probably happening today as well. And because it is all cloak-and-dagger stuff, the vulnerabilities that the Crime Commission talked about, with criminals offering drugs and hooking players into match fixing, become possible.

In an ideal world we would rid sport of drugs altogether. Sport in my time was a relatively pure thing, and barring the odd incompetent referee, games were won and lost on the merits of the players. But it's not an ideal world. The reality is you don't have to look very far to realise that drug use in sport is everywhere. Recent revelations about cycling proved that at least seven Tour de France events were powered by drugs. Olympic Games stretching back generations have been found to be tainted, and especially among the very best athletes. Sport administrations just can't keep up. There is also the question of how much resolve administrators have. If big drawcards are sprung, are officials going to ban them for two years? I doubt it. There is too much money at stake, and money, of course, is at the root of all of sport's evils. So the question to be asked, I believe, is what is practical? What is practical not in the pure environment that we would like to have but in the enviroment that actually exists? The final question, I suppose, is whether performance-enhancing drugs that are proved safe should be legal.

The undeniable truth is that vices seem to be popular. Every effort has been made to deter people from smoking, but they still do it, often at great cost. America tried to ban alcohol and triggered one of the greatest illicit businesses in the history of the world. Gambling is under constant fire from governments and others, yet it is has never been more popular. And herein lies the next big problem. It has been determined that match fixing in soccer is rife on an international scale. The Crime Commission in Australia has said that all sports are vulnerable here.

Yet every time you turn on the television to watch sport, the gambling ads are everywhere. It has never been easier to get a bet on, and betting on humans is the current big thing. It has been proved that most match fixing is triggered by gambling syndicates and organised crime. But will sport give up the millions that gambling advertising brings them? I think not. The bottom line is that sport these days is big business. Big business revolves around big money, and big money will always bring its issues. In a way, Norm Provan and I were very fortunate. We played in an era when Rugby League was a game with no strings attached, and sport was something you did for fun. We loved it. We still love it. But the game is not the same, and we don't kid ourselves otherwise.

CHAPTER 2

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE ...

The high moments of Rugby League football follow a natural order. If it's intensity you want, State of Origin football is your thing. The entrenched rivalry between New South Wales and Queensland demands no-holds-barred confrontation as a matter of course. Then there are Test matches. They have an aura of their own — though perhaps not at the level they once did — because they bring nation against nation, and they represent the ultimate recognition for any player. But when it comes to the raw emotion of extended tribal conflict, nothing rivals a grand final.

Comparatively few players get to play a grand final. Those who do cherish the experience for life. For those players who actually win one, it remains forever a unique high point of their sporting existence. Norm Provan played in ten grand finals and won the lot. He was captain–coach of a famous St George team for the last four of them, so he knows a thing or two about what works and what doesn't.

For Arthur Summons, grand finals have always held particular interest. He played three in a row for Western Suburbs in their classic encounters with St George. Wests lost all three as Saints powered on to their eleven straight titles between 1956 and 1966. Move forward to 2012, and the grand final at Sydney's Olympic Stadium has special relevance. Summons still feels the pain of the 1963 grand final, immortalised in the photograph that captured the two captains, Summons and Provan, as they left the mud-swamped Sydney Cricket Ground. Summons believes to this day that Wests got a raw deal from referee Darcy Lawler, and the perceived injustice of it has never left him.

Now, as the 2012 combatants parry and thrust in pursuit of the trophy that bears their image, both Summons and Provan feel the emotion. The decider between the Melbourne Storm and the Canterbury Bulldogs was always going to be an absorbing contest. The Bulldogs had come from nowhere under their new coach, Des Hasler, to be serious contenders. The Storm were seeking redemption, having had two recent premierships stripped from them for salary cap breaches, and having been ruled out of the 2011 contest for the same reason. Summons can empathise with the Melbourne Storm and the pain of having hard-won premierships taken from them. Provan studies the artistry of Billy Slater and Cooper Cronk, and his mind instantly goes back to a time when his 'boys', Reg Gasnier and Graeme Langlands, were working their way to Rugby League immortality.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Gladiators by Norman Tasker. Copyright © 2013 Norm Provan, Arthur Summons and Norm Tasker. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword by John Grant,
Introduction: A moment in time,
1 The science of sport,
2 The more things change ...,
3 An image for the ages,
4 Cast in bronze,
5 Fame and infamy,
6 Different era, different world,
7 The makings of high achievement,
8 Shaping a generation,
9 A matter of timing,
10 A cocky wee Gordon,
11 War with England,
12 The Wallaby hop,
13 From Killer to Cameron,
14 A touch of English class,
15 Magpies and millionaires,
16 The subtle shades of greatness,
17 The generation gap,
18 Days of green and gold,
19 Right place, right time,
20 England swings,
21 The coaching dilemma,
22 A team for the ages,
23 Boys will be boys,
24 A time for heroes,
25 The mentor challenge,
26 Sharks on the prowl,
27 Call of the bush,
28 Wild ways at Wagga Wagga,
29 Rules and other disasters,
30 Shaping the game,
31 A working life,
32 Afternoon conversations,
Postscript,
Acknowledgements,