It’s rugby league’s answer to the butterfly effect.
By STEVE MASCORD
“TABLE one.”
The kind lady on the door of the Kangaroos reunion at the Sydney Cricket Ground doesn’t even have to look at the table map when I introduce myself. It is October 27, 2024 – the day after the grand final.
I had worked at the Penrith-Melbourne game and in five days I’ll be jetting back to England. As perhaps only an expat can appreciate, I still feel like I’m on holiday in my own past. Every familiar face and friendly aside is a like an emotional harbour bridge or Big Pineapple, something of which to take a mental snap to cherish forever.
I have NRL media manager Glenn Jackson to thank for putting me on table one. More broadly, Glenn does a good job of honouring the role of journalists past and present – but in my case it’s past that’s applicable, really. Ray Chesterton is over the back with Ray Price, Gary Lester is on the table nearest ours.
But who is on table one?
Wayne Pearce is on my left, then Mal Meninga, Peter V’landys, Andrew Abdo and Graham Annesley. I’ve been gone from these shores too long to have ever met V’landys and Abdo.
They are both very pleasant and, like the school reunion a week or so before and the night at Rugby League: The Musical, this is an occasion that is vivid to the power of 10 as a result of where I now reside. I digest it as a vindication of all – well most – of the decisions I made in my first half century, to have these relationships I can revisit. To be part of a community that spans hemispheres and age groups and is central to so many lives.
“How’s the game going over there?” V’landys asks, referencing – of course – rugby league in Britain.
“They’re waiting for you to put on your cape and go over there and save them,” I respond, sipping on – maybe – a Hahn.
PVL asks what I am doing in England but there is a distraction – Andrew Voss will kick off the formal part of the afternoon soon as the spring sunshine streams through the full-length windows overlooking the sacred ground of Sydney sport.
But later the chairman – from the ‘Gong like myself, I must add – says “what’s that Simon Moran like? He called me the other day and I have to call him back.”
I almost gasp.
Simon Moran – aside from being one of the most successful rock promoters in the UK, one of the key figures in the Oasis reunion – is the owner of the Warrington Wolves.
Warrington was one of the first towns outside of London I visited on my initial trip to Britain in 1990. This was on account of the fact that my penpal, Jim Savage, lived there.
Jim had written to me when I was 12 after I sent away to Harry Edgar’s Open Rugby looking for a penpal. Years later, it transpired that Fox Sports analyst Aaron Wallace knew – through a mutual friend – the author of the letter above mine.
Anyway, despite there being 24 hours on a plane between us – and Jim, like the Beatles, visited Australia just the once – we became best friends.
We were very different, I would say, in many personality traits but in that curious way men bond, it was our shared passion for rugby league and long-haired rock bands (although far from them being all the same ones) that left us using both sides of foolscap when we corresponded and drinking enough for me to lose a shoe on one night out.
Jim – who moved to Boston in the US and spent his adult life there – never wanted to be an insider in rugby league. He was a fan. And when he visited in 1996 at the height of the Super League War, he was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald as “The fan: Jim Savage.”
But it’s not the mere mention of a Warrington luminary that made me gasp that Monday in October..
Jim died in his sleep of heart failure in New Orleans three Christmases ago, aged 55.
Earlier in 2024, with the help of now Wests Tigers chief executive Shane Richardson, Moran had allowed myself, my wife, Jim’s sister Sarah and her partner Mike and his beloved nephew Rob and good mate Howard to honour Jim inside the Halliwell Jones Stadium before the doors opened for a match.
The club meant so much to Jim, he would buy a season ticket and when he came home from Massachusetts he’d buy another one for the match.
I breathlessly relayed this detail – and more – to PVL, a man I had met just half an hour before. You know how it is with grief … sometimes it outlasts the sympathy of those around you. By months, by years, permanently. It was probably an awkward moment for Peter, hearing about this stranger helping honour another stranger who was also a stranger to him.
Even some long-term readers, I’m sure, will have a similar reaction to this subject matter. Anyway….
Weeks later, during Samoa’s tour of England, news broke that the Ashes were being switched to Britain from Australia this October and November.
“I hear there is a mystery promoter involved,” a “source” whispered to me. I relayed this information to readers right here.
Arriving at an England media opportunity at Headingley, the RFL’s Andy Wilson – who had known Jim and attended his send-off in Warrington – asked if I had withheld the promoter’s name for a reason. Yes, of course: that reason was I did not know who it was.
Eddie Hearn? Jason Moore?
Andy (who like Jacko does a great job in recognising older journos) was not budging.
Heading up to York by train, I hit the SMS on my phone trying to solve this riddle. A promoter who convinced the Aussies to come to England in what will be boost for a beleaguered British game, both spiritual and financial.
Who?
Then for some reason, I was reminded of the Kangaroos reunion a month before. Maybe it was a a burst of sunlight into my train carriage.
Damnit, he called him back.
Look, Peter was always going to return Simon’s call. He didn’t need my somewhat over-emotional character reference.
But, you know, Jim hated his birthday so much that he would take his Facebook profile off so people could not wish him many happy returns. These days we call it SavageFest and invite dozens of people in cities around the world because he’s not here to stop us.
And Jim didn’t want to be a mover and shaker in rugby league. He was happy on the terraces, hills and bleachers. He would have called them ‘Mr V’landys’ and ‘Mr Moran’.
But I’d like to think he’d accept just a little bit of credit for his posthumous role in bringing back one of the most significant institutions of the sport, that defined him and brought us together.
To me, in death Jim Savage – sort of – brought the Kangaroos back to England.