Graeme Hughes represented New South Wales in both rugby league and cricket, as a reliable upper-order batsman. With his brothers, Mark and Garry, he was an integral member of the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs sides known as “The Entertainers” and was one of the instigators of the famous try that sealed the Bulldogs’ grand final victory in 1980.

Dogs at War

Triumph, Treachery and the Truth

By Graeme Hughes

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2010 Graeme Hughes
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74237-086-6

Contents

Introduction,
1 Young Hearts,
2 Padding Up,
3 Bullfrog,
4 Picked to be a Berry,
5 Brothers in Arms,
6 Nowhere to Hide,
7 Halcyon Days,
8 Into our Stride,
9 Enter The Entertainers,
10 Facing Dennis Lillee,
11 When the Going Gets Tough …,
12 Painful Progress,
13 At the Top of the Mountain,
14 Back to the Field,
15 Behind the Microphone,
16 Career and Marriage,
17 Rugby League Warriors,
18 Death of the Bullfrog,
19 The Salary Cap Scandal,
20 Scandal at Coffs Harbour,
21 The Sacking of Garry Hughes,
22 Corey in Strife,
23 Assassination by Email,
24 Battling for the Bush,
25 Disintegration,
26 Dirty Tricks,
27 A Bitter Defeat,
28 Truth and Justice,
29 The Ultimate Insult,
Afterword,
Postscript: Me and Us,
Acknowledgements,

CHAPTER 1

YOUNG HEARTS

It all started with my dad, Noel. He inspired me, and he taught me and my brothers, Garry and Mark, by word and deed. Everything I am today I owe to him and to my mother Pat. They both grew up in Lewisham, in Sydney’s inner-south-west, and after they married they lived at Beverly Hills in the heart of St George Dragons territory.

Noel Hughes was a boilermaker by trade and a sportsman by heart. Cricket and rugby league for Lewisham Catholic Youth Organisation in his early years, were his chosen games, just as, no coincidence, they would be mine and my brothers’. Dad played for the NSW Colts when he was a teen, and it’s family lore that he hit a marvellous, swashbuckling 69 to save the side one day. Then, in his early 20s, he decided to chance his arm in England.

It was cricketer Jock Livingstone who suggested to my father that he play county cricket in England. Livingstone had gone to England to help set up the Fearnley cricket gear company, maker of the renowned Duncan Fearnley bat, before doing a similar job for Fearnley’s rival bat-maker Gray Nicholls. Dad was intrigued by Livingstone’s suggestion, and he packed his bag for England. Mum followed with Garry. English county cricket in the ’50s was the best cricket comp in the world. In 1953, Dad was signed by Worcestershire county. Mark was born in England the same year.

In a recent conversation with the former Australian Test cricketer and now commentator and author, Kerry ‘Skull’ O’Keefe, Skull said to me, ‘Heaps, I was looking at your dad’s playing records in England, and he was quite a player’. I replied that Dad was indeed quite a player. He held his own in England against some of the finest bowlers of all time, men such as Freddie Truman, Brian Statham, Tony Lock and Jim Laker. He hit 120 one day.

In the English winter, Dad swapped his cricket whites for a Halifax rugby league club jersey. In a portent of things to come, Halifax’s playing strip was blue and white, the colours of the Canterbury-Bankstown Berries, later known as Bulldogs, which Mark, Garry and I would wear with pride and of the club that Dad would support with his usual passion. Playing fullback or five-eighth for Halifax, Dad held his own in the English competition at a time when the Poms were strong and regularly beating Australia.

Dad, Mum, Garry and Mark returned to Sydney in 1954. My father joined Petersham-Marrickville cricket club and played the next 29 seasons straight with them. The Petersham blokes nicknamed him ‘Pommy’ because he’d played in England.

Once more, he combined cricket with league. He joined Newtown, the Bluebags, because in those days you had to play for the team in whose district you lived. He had good hands and refined footy nous without being a real speedster, I suppose a bit like my brother Garry. But because he was having trouble unseating the incumbent Australian Test fullback, Gordon ‘Punchy’ Clifford, from the fullback spot at Newtown, and was spending time in reserve grade, Dad trialled with the Western Suburbs Magpies. Newtown complained. Before he’d played another game he suffered a badly broken ankle, and in those days of rudimentary medical care for sportsmen, it was a career-ending injury.

From then on, cricket was his only game. He played first grade until the very end of his three-decade career and was a top performer in an era when Richie Benaud, Neil Harvey, Alan Davidson and Co were at the height of their careers, and every club team was a gun team. In those days, New South Wales could have fielded five Sheffield Shield sides and each one would have been competitive with the other states’ teams.

I was born in 1955, the last to come along of the Hughes boys. My first memories are of scuffing around in the backyard or the local park with Mark and Garry and with a rugby league ball if it was winter, and a cricket bat if summer, under my arm. There’d be Dad with us, bowling to us or kicking the ball, watching us closely, and offering gentle suggestions about how to hold the bat or catch the footy as it spiralled down from the blue suburban skies into our outstretched arms.

Being older, Garry and Mark played league and cricket for our school, St John’s College, Lakemba, before me, and it drove me mad, even at ages three and four, to be sitting on the sideline watching my brothers. I just wanted to get out there and compete.

Finally the great day came when I turned five and was old enough to play rugby league in Mark’s team. In my first match, as I was still a couple of years younger than any of the other kids, I was picked out of harm’s way, on the wing. I forget who our opponents were, but not the venue. It was Wiley Park on King Georges Road, Canterbury, a ground which had a footy field circled by a bicycle track because in Wiley Park’s heyday, in the ’30s and ’40s, bike races were all the rage. I was all spruced up in my school jersey, socks and clean white shorts that in photos looked about three times too big, polished boots with whitewashed laces and gleaming metal sprigs, and shoulder pads up to my ears. Not that I needed shoulder pads, however, because for my first half-dozen games I did not have to make a single tackle, let alone receive one pass. Then, late in the season, came my big chance to prove that I could play this game. A teammate broke into the clear, drew the defence and, with the try line wide open just 10 metres away, he passed me the ball. I dropped it. I cried.

I played in that same team for two years until I was finally playing against blokes my own age. By then, I had moved to five-eighth — through our junior years, all three Hughes brothers played five-eighth — and I was a participant rather than a passenger. All those backyard and park games of footy against Mark and Garry and the neighbourhood children started paying off. I was suddenly one of the best players in the team. I could tackle, set up a teammate, make a break. One day, playing for St John’s I scored five tries. By the time I was in the under-12s and under-14s, I, like my siblings, was making the junior rep teams.

As Dad did, I mixed football with cricket. As soon as the footy season ended I couldn’t wait to play cricket, and vice versa. Again, because of what my father had passed on to me in countless backyard cricket matches, I had become a good player. I batted at 3 or 4 in the St John’s team when I was in senior school. One incredible golden day in the under-14s, when bowling my swinging medium pace I took 10 wickets for 0 runs. It’s a record that stands today. It was one of those rare occasions and I’ll never forget it. It so nearly didn’t happen. I’d taken a wicket or two when our wicketkeeper moved the wrong way when the batsman snicked the ball off one of my deliveries, but incredibly he had the reflexes to change and dived back the right way and the ball caught him on his thumb and just managed to stick. Thanks mate, wherever you are today.

We played cricket for St John’s on Saturdays, but because Garry, Mark and I all played for different age-based teams, this meant Mum and Dad had to spend their day in separate cars tearing from one cricket field to the other dropping us off, trying to see at least a little of each of us playing, and then picking us up again. And in the afternoon, of course, Dad himself would be batting for Petersham-Marrickville and Mum, my brothers and I would all turn up at whichever suburban oval he was playing at to cheer him on. Frantic days.

We’d arrive at Dad’s ground and look straight at the scoreboard to see if he had batted yet. If he’d got out before we arrived, we would all be shattered. We wanted so much for him to do well. Once Dad was out of the equation, Garry, Mark and I wouldn’t bother watching the rest of the game. We’d go and have our own impromptu match with a bat and ball up against the dressing room wall. They could be long days. Especially for Mum. After the game, the players, including our father, would remain in the dressing room celebrating or commiserating over numerous beers, and Mum and all the other wives and girlfriends and kids would be left to languish outside as night fell. Finally Mum would have had enough and she would despatch me or Garry or Mark into the dressing room to fetch Dad and take us all home for dinner.

My brothers and I were close, our closeness resulted naturally from a loving family environment created by our parents. We were never happier than when playing sport, and our parents encouraged us to get outside and play at every opportunity.

Like all brothers, we had squabbles of course, often started by me. I was a niggler. I loved to tease them and they would, naturally enough, lash out. My tactic was to refuse to play backyard cricket with Garry and Mark unless I could bat first and then I’d block all day so they’d never get me out. It drove them mad. Dad would hear the squawking and come out to adjudicate. When we played footy out the back I’d keep up a running commentary, a la Frank Hyde, about how lousy my opponents were. Mark would rush in and thump me and I’d yell in my best gravelly Frank voice, ‘Oh, Bluey Wilson [the take-no-prisoners St George prop of the era] has just hammered Peter Dimond [the blockbusting Wests winger and my hero of the time]! What a cowardly act!’ We haven’t had a physical blue since we were about 16. Today we can disagree without being disagreeable. We are, and have always been, best mates as well as brothers.

Whether engaged in a heated backyard footy match or clustered together in the lounge room sipping on Mum’s hot chocolate after a match on a winter Saturday afternoon, we always had our radio tuned to 2SM and the late, great Frank’s call of the match of the day. He brought those games vividly to life. Later when I became a commentator, he was my inspiration and I figured if I was half as good at taking a listener by the scruff of the neck and transporting him into the middle of a match, I’d be doing alright.

One year, don’t ask me how, Dad got hold of a load of beautiful soil and brought it home in the back of his ute. He dumped it in our backyard in Coolabah Road, Beverley Hills and then borrowed a light roller from Petersham-Marrickville’s curator. Over a weekend we made a half-length cricket pitch, 12 metres long, out the back. We rolled that earth, and rolled it and rolled it until it was firm and smooth. When we bowled to each other with a tennis ball, the pitch played true.

My father taught us to be proud of ourselves — not be vain, but to have self-confidence and self-respect. He said it was important to look the part on the sporting field, to make sure we carried ourselves straight and tall and that our gear was in good shape. His other oft-repeated messages were to master the fundamentals of attack and defence and support play, and always be where the action was on the football field. Always concentrate and watch the ball. Simple stuff, but lessons that made a difference.

Yet perhaps Dad’s greatest lesson to me, one I lived by in my sporting career and try to today as a broadcaster, was to have a go. Find out what you were good at, and do it to the very best of your ability. I listened to him because he was only advising me to do what he had always done himself. Yet the great thing about my father was that he was never a stage parent like some mates’ dads were, yelling and shouting and browbeating their children, instead he imparted his wisdom to us quietly and thoughtfully. When I played for the Bulldogs my father would rarely come into the dressing room, believing that that was the domain of the coach. Even when we won the comp in 1980, we had to drag Dad kicking and screaming into the dressing room at the Sydney Cricket Ground to share our great moment — one Mark, Garry and I would never have experienced in the first place had it not been for our father.

When he was playing, Dad had wonderful hands and in our backyard and park sessions with him he turned us all into ball players. He showed us how to hold the ball, how to send a pass and receive one, how to cut a man out of play with a deft pass, how to promote a ball and draw a bloke to create the gap and then send a teammate through it into the clear. He made ball playing and reading the play second nature for us.

Because of our age difference, Garry, Mark and I were in different teams. The traits we would exhibit as senior players were already in evidence when we were young. Garry was a constructive five-eighth rather than a dasher; a consummate ball player, he could jink, create a gap and put a man through it. He could read a game to perfection and slow play down to suit himself. Mark was a good ball player and defender, too, and was fast and a brilliant sidestepper. I was a ball player and a defender, like my brothers, but was stockier and more robust. It was inevitable that I would move to the forwards in due course. Like when I was playing in the backyard as a kid, I was a bit of a niggler — though not a fighter. My go was to upset opposing players, try to put them off their game, draw a penalty when they lashed out at me. My nephew Corey Hughes, Garry’s son, did the same when he played. In time, we found our natural positions: Garry at five-eighth, Mark in the centre, and me in the second row.

Inevitably, we came to read each other’s games intimately. We would know precisely what each of us was going to do two plays before we did it. When we were going to pass, kick or run, what foot we’d step off, the other two would know. Call it brotherly telepathy. The Ella brothers and the Mortimer brothers and later the Johns brothers had it in spades. If one of us threw a pass, put a kick in, broke the line, the other brothers would be there to take advantage.

St John’s was far from the strongest team in our comp as we moved from the under-12s to the under-15s. As I recall, we usually copped a hiding from our opponents, and especially from Bankstown Sports United, Riverwood United and Greenacre. They were tough boys in those sides, and many of them grew up to play for Canterbury-Bankstown. It was only when I was 17 and had left school and was playing for Brothers, a team my Dad founded and coached for, in the C grade comp that teams I was in managed to turn the tables and give those blokes a good dollop of their own medicine. I remember either playing with or against or watching future Canterbury teammates such as George Peponis, Geoff Robinson, Peter Cassilles, Don Moseley, Stan Cutler, John Peek, Chris Skelton and Greg Scahill. No wonder we gelled when we became teammates in the late ’70s and ’80s.

Our coach at Brothers was Bill Anderson, who would go on to coach the South Sydney and Balmain first grade teams and enter the media as a TV and radio commentator and analyst of rugby league. My father had convinced Billy, who played cricket with him at Petersham-Marrickville, that he had the makings of a good footy coach. He took the tip, and so it proved.

When I was playing C grade for Brothers, I remember how one day heavy rain prevented the junior teams playing on Belmore Oval, our home ground, and the Berries’ as well. They didn’t want the junior teams to mash up the wet field so they made them play in the car park! This was 1974 and our first game of the season. Remarkably my final game that year was to sit on the sideline at the Sydney Cricket Ground as a reserve for the Berries in the first grade grand final against Easts.

When summer rolled around, I would put on my cricket whites and while at St John’s I captained the New South Wales schoolboys’ team. The blokes under me included Allan Border, Andrew Hilditch and John Dyson. And I joined my father and my brothers playing first grade for Petersham-Marrickville. Football to me was always a serious business, hard, unforgiving and physical, whereas cricket was an outlet, a chance to have some fun.

It was no secret that as a rugby league player I was inspired by the deeds of the great players of my era. But back when I was starting out in the game, from age five to around 13, I wasn’t a Canterbury fan. I followed the Western Suburbs Magpies with a passion because my mum’s parents had supported them. Every weekend when Wests were playing on their home ground at Pratten Park, Ashfield, Dad and Mum would collect me, Garry and Mark from our junior game, all of us still in our gear, including those massive square shoulder pads, pile us into the back of his Holden ute alongside his tarp and boilermaking tools, and we’d rattle off to watch Wests.

The Maggies were flying high then, and the crowds were so huge we’d have to park miles from the ground and make our way shoulder-to-shoulder with the streams of fans wearing their black and white gear, through the back streets of Ashfield to get a good possie at the ground. As we approached Pratten Park, the atmosphere would envelop us — the smells of hot dogs boiling, beer, cigarettes, and the roar of the crowd, rising and swelling in sync with the action of the lower grade game. I would be so excited I felt I would burst.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Dogs at War by Graeme Hughes. Copyright © 2010 Graeme Hughes. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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