An Anzac Day footballer is one who, having been smashed in a tackle, demands the ball at the first opportunity to run directly at those who monstered him.
The toughest players I coached always wanted to take the ball up early in Anzac Day matches to honour those soldiers at Gallipoli and the Western Front who climbed from muddy trenches to run across land enmeshed in barbed wire as their comrades fell before them in a hail of machine-gun bullets.
To force your body to perform an action that your mind may be dead set against requires a sense of something greater than individual gain, be it faith in comrades, or love of club and country.
This is not to equate sportsmen earning $800,000 a year running on freshly mown grass and protected by a referee and sideline doctors with two-bob-a-day soldiers lying in craters waiting for a stretcher bearer. The toughest of all rugby league players, Tommy Raudonikis, a former RAAF aircraftsman, noted the almost obscene comparison between sport and war.
As we struggled along the Kokoda track a decade ago, in single file, mud up to our ankles and carrying heavy packs, he repeatedly said, “Imagine doing this with blokes firing bullets at you,” a reference to Australian soldiers who held back Japanese troops intent on capturing Port Moresby.
George Orwell, the famed British writer, said something similar when he described professional sport, with its players dressed in uniform and soccer managers acting like little generals, as “war minus the shooting.”
Tom Raudonikis laying down the law playing for Newtown in 1981.Credit: Fairfax Media
Tommy was the epitome of an Anzac Day player. Whenever he received a rare penalty from opposition players roughing him up, he retaliated by seizing the ball at the tap and running straight at those twice his size, ignoring the carefully planned move his coach had for restarts.
It’s less likely to happen today because big collisions usually end in an HIA, with the ball carrier forced to the sideline. A recent example is Justin Olam whose Storm team plays the New Zealand Warriors in Melbourne, one of the NRL’s two Anzac Day games.
Olam was monstered at Brookvale this month in a tackle unanimously acknowledged as the hit of the year. Two Manly forwards hit the Storm’s most fearless runner’s mid-riff simultaneously from either side with their preferred shoulders, a rare combination of lethal force.
Olam played the ball but was clearly rattled and taken to the sideline. He did return but ignored in the ferocity of the moment was what could be called an Anzac Day challenge. Who would signal to take the ball forward on the next tackle, in contrast to anyone who might position themselves in no man’s land?
Haumole Olakau’atu’s hit on Justin Olam.Credit: NRL Photos/Gregg Porteous
The other NRL Anzac Day match – the Roosters versus the Dragons – features a player universally regarded for his toughness, the 14-year veteran Jared Waerea-Hargreaves. His clashes with the Storm’s giant prop Nelson Asofa-Solomona in a match in Melbourne last year endure. The Kiwi pair ran directly at each other following a flurry of penalties, with neither refusing to back down.
Both are brave men but, like their peers, have mercifully been insulated from an era of warfare, unlike players of a half century ago. Bob Fulton, Raudonikis’s Australian teammate, also served in the armed forces. He was a national service PT instructor on an aircraft carrier ferrying troops to and from Vietnam. He was eligible for a war service loan but rejected it, telling me, “I didn’t deserve it the way those on active service had.”
“Bozo” died nearly two years ago, only six weeks after Tommy, who, in one of his final guest speaking appearances, regaled the audience with his RAAF stories. He told them he was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, embellishing it with descriptions of piloting the chopper upside down through a hangar. When there were only a couple of adoring believers left in the room, did he tell the truth.
“All I did in the air force was pump up tyres of planes in Wagga,” he said, never equating himself with airmen who risked being killed.
His RAAF career may have been restricted to inflating tyres but when his rugby league team played on April 25, he always pumped up his teammates, charging up-field and honouring the Anzac Day fallen.
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