Reading of Darcy Lussick’s mother’s passing last week and his wonderful tribute to her reminded me of the time I had to deal with a similar loss.
I don’t know Darcy or his family, but I can understand part of what he is going through.
My mother passed away ten years ago, aged 51. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in February 2005, and by January the following year it had taken her life.
My mother was an intelligent, generous woman and well liked by those who knew her. Among other things she was a chartered accountant, built a successful small building company with my father, raised three children, and was the first female president of Guildford Leagues Club.
I don’t know what else she would have achieved had her illness not consumed her. It’s the sort of cancer that no amount of money can restrain: Luciano Pavarotti, Steve Jobs, Patrick Swayze and countless other people all died from the same disease.
But Roarers, this is a sports site and I want to explain how it affected my sport.
Of course, I was not a sports person. I was a rugby league match official. Yet a lot of the demands, especially the mental ones, are very similar. I want to try give some context to what I was feeling and the impact it had on me.
I was graded in 2003 in the period where there was a significant gulf between the expectations of the first grade (NRL) officials and the rest of us in the graded squad (second or third-tier referees and touch judges).
While Robert Finch had recently come along and introduced professionalism to the top tier of refereeing, the rest of us were going about things the way they had been done for 20 years or more.
The first-grade guys were training as a group three times per week and had individual fitness requirements on top of that. The most we did was having a run around Belmore Oval on a Wednesday night from 6:30pm to about 7:45pm.
At least, that was when we didn’t have a NSW Referees’ Association meeting on. We didn’t train those nights. Or Origin nights – on those nights we trained from 6pm to 6:45pm so that we could watch the game. If it rained, we didn’t train those nights either.
That sort of training schedule suited a guy like me, who loved refereeing but loved training one tenth as much as I did game day.
So when my mum’s illness was detected in February 2005, we were in the middle of trial games leading into the season. My parents rang to invite me over to the family home, saying it was important that I visited that night: my sister and brother would be there too.
It was then we received the news. All those emotions of shock, denial, steadfast defiance – they are all real. As soon as I started to look up the survival rates of pancreatic cancer I sank further.
I became very selfish about my life at that stage too, where I decided that I needed to spend as much time with my mother as possible. I was appointed to a NSW Cup trial at Leichhardt between Balmain and North Sydney that Saturday night, and when I found out they wanted to play four quarters, each 40 minutes long, I almost quit on the spot.
I was fortunate it was 2005, because my rugby league commitments were still only Wednesday night plus game day. No more of my time was taken up with the game. I spent a lot of my downtime trying to get away from my own emotions, rather than confronting them.
So the year continued, my mum’s treatment continued but her condition deteriorated, at first slowly. As an illustration of how much football was at the centre of my life (as it is for all officials who want to progress through the grades) I was married on the last Friday in September and was a touch judge for the Jersey Flegg grand final that Sunday.
We left for our honeymoon that night, and watched the NRL game between the Tigers and the Cowboys at the airport.
By late October what I described as a ‘New World Order’ swept through the second tier refereeing ranks. We were being integrated into the NRL program so that the gulf between the two could be narrowed. It was a necessary step in the development of officials. We hadn’t been conditioned to the demands that the leap to the NRL level required.
We mirrored what the first-grade guys were doing, which meant Monday night video reviews, Tuesday and Thursday night training, two weights sessions per week, weekend road cycle, and additional running for someone like me.
It was a shock and from November 2005 I experienced my first proper pre-season. It was gruelling, but it also gave me a focus away from what was happening to my mother, who was going downhill fast by this stage.
It was a turbulent, emotional time, where my mum left Westmead’s palliative care unit to come home for Christmas and the New Year, while my dad administered the chemotherapy drugs (or whatever they were). Mum was back in Westmead shortly after and didn’t leave the ward again.
Shortly before midnight on January 30, 2006, Mum passed away. My dad and I then spent the next two days organising the funeral for Thursday, February 2, so we could have clear air for my sister’s wedding on Friday the third.
“I’m not letting this hang over the wedding”, is what my dad firmly instructed. I therefore had the unusual and uncomfortable honour of delivering a eulogy on one day and being MC for a wedding the next.
It took a long time to get over. I had a lot of trouble on concentrating on training for the rest of that pre-season. We got to the season proper and I was appointed in March to a Jim Beam Cup game on the Central Coast.
At one of those local grounds, one particular lowlife leant over the rope with a crude remark about my mother. My blood boiled and the adrenaline of what I was about to do to this bloke almost took me over the fence to choke him with my flag. But it was the middle of a game.
I needed to keep my emotions in check or my career would have been over. I balanced the pros and cons or retaliating in a split second, and moved up the touch line.
I let the emotion out at the end of that game. I know how Dane Gagai felt on Sunday in Newcastle, having lost his grandmother that week. He had to concentrate on his game. He needed to display the professional attitude required for 80 minutes, then he could afford to allow that weight to collapse on top of him.
We’ve all had some sort of family tragedy to deal with. Life gets in the way of sport and we are reminded of what matters most.
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