League, As Literature, Is A Winner At $495

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday November 14, 1991

DANIEL WILLIAMS

In 1986, you could have browsed in a medium-sized library and stumbled across attractive hardcover books about rock climbing, badminton and woodchopping. It is unlikely, however, irrespective of effort, that you would have found even a skinny paperback about an obscure sport called rugby league

There had been a few written by Australians-Vic Hey's A Man's Game (1949)Clive Churchill's They Call Me The Little Master (1960) and Ian Walsh's Inside Rugby League (1968), as well as life-in-football stories by former English greats Alex Murphy and Eric Ashton - but none of these is easy to find.

The Sydney premiership started in 1908, and yet, as league historian Ian Heads observes, the sport was "studiously ignored for 75 years".

Ignored, that is, not by the media (tabloids have for decades filled their sports pages with league trivia) but by writers of works longer than several hundred words.

In contrast, look at sports like golf - or better still, cricket.

There has been scarcely a tour, scarcely an elegant stroke, which has not inspired expansive prose by cricket writers both prolific and gifted-England's John Arlott and Neville Cardus, Australia's Ray Robinson and Jack Fingleton.

If a sport's importance or intrinsic worth is measured by the quantity of literature it inspires, League was a non-event until 1987, a watershed year in the history of its chronicling.

Adrian McGregor wrote King Wally, an incisive biography of Wally Lewis which sold over 50,000 copies (15,000 in the first two days), and former Parramatta warhorse Ray Price collaborated with journalist Neil Cadigan to produce Perpetual Motion. Since then, there have been at least another 20 books written about the sport, not all masterpieces, it must be said, but each a part of what Heads calls "modern rugby league's greatest growth industry" -publishing.

There are two questions. Why was league ignored for so long? And why the boom?

Between 1908-87, publishers saw no market for books about the working man's game, dismissing its supporters as non-readers.

It is no coincidence that the publishing explosion followed a NSW Rugby League campaign aimed at taking the game upmarket and broadening its appeal. Tina Turner's two-minute commercials and State of Origin tickets worth $32 are evidence of a changing game.

And now, proof we have reached the point of no return: the latest release from Ironbark Press, Days of Glory: Ten Years of the Winfield Cup, 1982-91, a cloth-bound, limited edition pictorial celebration of a once humble game -costing $495 a copy. And there are 750.

A very different book, indeed, to that co-written by Walsh, who can claim to be a pioneer.

Walsh discovered, as future players-cum-authors would 20 years later, that league people seem inordinately sensitive to criticism.

Bucket-tipping has been the selling point of many League books. In Inside Rugby League, Walsh, who played 25 Tests and captained St George to their eleventh successive premiership in 1966, berated the Saints management for sloppy recruitment in the mid-1960s, and the NSWRL for introducing the four-tackle rule.

"The first run of 10,000 copies sold out. They (the publishers) wanted to do another run, but I said no," Walsh recalled this week.

"It was before its time."

King Wally, penetrating and elegantly written, contained numerous, mostly unsourced, criticisms of high-profile players and coaches, which ensured sensational headlines and a perfect promotion, but nearly cost Lewis the Australian captaincy.

Lewis's life and career received a sequel-Wally and the Broncos - and numerous other players- Price, Peter Sterling, Steve Mortimer, Mal Meninga, Greg Alexander and Michael O'Connor- have been immortalised in autobiographies-biographies, hitherto the staple league book, and there will be more of these.

But what of quality? Mixed.

Some, it must be said, would be more useful as paperweights or kindling.

The biographies have tended to be in the genre of, "I'll never forget, ha, ha, ha, ol' Bruiser's practical joke on the '83 end-of-season trip when he, ha, ha, ha, put a dead rat in the coach's bed". Yeah, beauty. You had to be there.

They have been eulogies - heavy with cliche - with anecdote as a substitute for rigorous and objective character analysis.

Most projects have been a financial success. The most recent release, Rex Mossop's autobiography, The Moose That Roared (co-written with Larry Writer)headed the non-fiction paperback best-sellers list for three weeks. The Wayne Pearce book, Local Hero, sold about 40,000 copies, as did Jack Gibson's collection of pithy quotes, Played Strong, Done Fine. And Sterlo sold about 30,000 copies.

Less of a triumph was Five-Star Brandy, Alexander's tale - 10,000 copies. Heads surmises that perhaps it was perceived as premature.

Among the non-biographies, the most worthy have been Simply the Best, Adrian McGregor's graphic account of the 1990 Kangaroo tour, and Roy Masters's Inside League, which comprised essays on players, fans, commentators, administrators and players' wives.