Let’s pretend Tony Abbott never lost power as Australian Prime Minister and that knights, dames and creepy winks in radio interviews were still a thing. From the past two decades who would you have knighted for services to rugby league?

I’m not talking purely about on-field performance (we already have the Immortals), but for the advancement of the sport as a whole?

Given the current level of communal emotion, would you nominate Johnathan Thurston? A faultless public face of the game like Petero Civoniceva? Or someone most people have never heard of who works tirelessly at grassroots level?

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Steve Mascord and Craig Bellamy are about as diametrically opposed as tequila and a quiet night on the couch.

But I had cause to consider them both last night as I sat down to write my weekly column.

I did so with Mascord’s recently released memoirs Touchstones sitting on my coffee table, freshly arrived in the mail, and with Bellamy’s Melbourne Storm side running rampant on my television.

The two figures are certainly poles apart in most facets, save aside from wildly different manifestations of perfectionism, obsessiveness and a deep-seated love of rugby league.

The two planets they come from are probably best exemplified by the first time I met Bellamy, introduced to him by one of my former coaches at a suburban footy club somewhere around 20 years ago.

“So you want to become a journalist hey? Why would you want to do that?” Bellamy said, with deadly seriousness etched on his face.



It was like he was trying to save a young kid from a life of hard drugs.

“How anyone could follow in the footsteps of someone like Danny Weidler is beyond me.”

(AAP Image/Paul Miller) (AAP Image/Paul Miller)

So scathing of journalists was Bellamy that my old footy coach butted in to try and defend the profession, even though he too had experienced what it was like to be burnt by a reporter.

“They’re not all bad apples. They’re not all the same,” was his rationale.

Which takes me to the first time I met Mascord – or at least what I recall it to be – at roughly the same point in time.

It would have been at the old ANZ Stadium on Brisbane’s southside, home ground to the Broncos between 1993-2003.

The way I remember it, there was a guy that rocked up to the press box in a KISS tee-shirt, skater shoes, jeans and holding a carry bag with a few rock’n’roll badges on it.



Of everyone in the room, he was the most unprofessional looking. But he conducted his job with a professionalism that was peerless.

He’d have one eye on the field, one eye scanning an obscure newspaper or magazine, one ear listening to the live radio broadcast, another listening in on the referees’ microphones.

He’d know all the scores from the foreign leagues (probably watched them too if they were televised), was constantly dashing in and out of the room to take and make phone calls, checking on player updates, and was regularly flying between three cities to cover three games on consecutive days.

Mascord was loud, he was grungy, and he had the nickname ‘Stinky’ for a reason – but he only ever allowed the tiniest gap possible for a great story to pass him by.

I quickly noticed people gravitated towards him, because of his skill at the craft, his approachability, mostly though because he had an enthusiasm for the game that was refreshingly raw.

You felt like there was a guy in the room who was experiencing the game the same way they had watched it as an adolescent, and it allowed you to be unguarded and simply enjoy the action.

Ever since the backlash to Mal Meninga’s “rugby league has given me nothing” comment in the mid-1990s, people are extremely wary of ever saying the sport owes any individual anything.

However, I believe that in the cases of Bellamy and Mascord, rugby league has probably treated them unfairly at times – and they deserve to be better acknowledged for some remarkable contributions.



Bellamy is often maligned as the man who flooded the game with wrestling tactics, a guy who brought structured, grinding play to rugby league.

Except, well, it was always a part of the game. He just perfected it and made an artform of an aspect that others weren’t as dedicated towards.

The truth is attention to detail on the defensive end opens the way for his team to play some fantastically attractive footy on the flipside, as they wear down and exploit weaknesses in opposition.

I’m saying all this after Bellamy’s Storm belted the club I supported as a kid, the Broncos, 42-12 last night. Sometimes you just have to sit back and applaud the better side.

Let’s not forget that Canterbury’s ‘Entertainers’ team of 1980 averaged home crowds of 14,582 at a time where TV offered minimal impact on gate takings. Bellamy has his team playing a brand of footy that has them averaging 19,818 fans through the gate at home games this season.

Last night there were 41,741 fans at Suncorp Stadium for their away game. Crowds don’t show up in droves like that for boring footy.

I have a female friend who moved to Australia from a small town in Chile and she has adopted the Storm as her favourite sports team, even though she lives in Brisbane. People don’t suddenly gravitate to a particular club in a foreign sport for no reason.

A greater accomplishment than Bellamy’s success on the field, and the marked improvement he brings to most players under his tutelage, has been his role in consolidating the game’s foothold in Melbourne.



It doesn’t seem so long ago that people were saying the game would never catch on in Victoria, the Storm should be booted from the competition, and crowds struggled to hit the 10,000 mark.

The current scenario is close to the dream of an expansionist – someone like Mascord, who has always championed testing out new territories, spending tens of thousands of dollars of his own money and sending himself broke flying to watch games in obscure parts of the world.

On face value some people would say he’s been pretty lucky to have lived the life he has.

But I’d argue Mascord has given the game far more than he ever took from it: a moral conscience when administrators have struggled to differentiate right from wrong, a conduit for new ideas, a hunter of truths at a time when journalists have become almost impotent against the NRL PR machine.

And if you’re ever tempted to think he’s lived a blessed life, just pick up a copy of his book and thumb through the personal revelations in the opening pages.

Sometimes people give and give to the game until there’s very little left at all.