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The Sydney Morning Herald, another Sydney institution facing hard times, on 25 February, 2009 carried the brilliant and sad headline about the fate of rugby at Sydney Boys High, Worst XV: Sydney Boys Drops The Ball After 100 Years Of Rugby.
The story beneath the headline carried the news that Sydney Boys High would no longer be part of the Greater Public Schools First XV rugby. The iconic chocolate and blue striped rugby jersey is now relegated to Second XV and lower grade rugby.
And so an adventure that started in 1906 with Sydney Boys High being the first and only government school in the GPS rugby First XV rugby tournament has ended.
After two seasons of losses, with the ‘best’ result a 43-5 thrashing by Newington in 2006 and 2007, and a final defeat in 2008 at the hands of St Josephs 112-0, it is clearly time to bow to the inevitable and concede that Sydney Boys High will never in the future be able to put on a competitive First XV to play the GPS heavyweights.
For many decades, rugby was carried in a sense by a head master Bob Outterside (a former Wallaby) and a gifted coach, Tony Hannon.
Hannon, particularly, developed a number of backs who went on to have professional rugby and rugby league careers: Jason Jones-Hughes, Duncan McRae, Marc Stcherbina, Chris Whitaker and Craig Wing (the best of all his talented youngsters, Hannon once told me).
In the long history of the school’s involvement in the GPS First XV tournaments, players and coaches like John Brass, Peter Crittle, Bob Dwyer, Alan Gaffney, Peter Johnson, John Thornett (one of the greatest of all Wallabies) and Phil Smith played with distinction for the Sydney Boys High First XV.
But I think, too, of the thousands of boys who got their first taste of rugby playing at MacKay Oval in Centennial Park.
For most of them, the closest they got to making the First XV was lining up to make the tunnel when the team trotted out on to the field. But they got a taste of the great game, something that enhanced the lives of many of them.
These kids went on to become Prime Minister (Sir Earle Page), judges (Lionel Murphy), the NSW Governor-General (Sir Roden Cutler), Rhodes Scholars (ten of them, starting with Ethelbert Southee in 1913), film-makers (George Miller), actors (Russell Crowe, Jack Thompson), authors (John Kingsmill, John Pilger), a Nobel Prize winner (Professor John Cornforth), and conductors (Richard Bonynge, who married Dame Joan Sutherland and shaped her career and her singing).
And this short list gives the clue to the demise of serious rugby at Sydney Boys High. The school has produced more Rhodes Scholars than Wallabies. In 2001, it was ranked as the fifth-ranked school in Australia for entries in The Australian Who’s Who.
This is a story I’ve told before, but I think it sums up the dilemma for Sydney Boys High and the improbabilities of an academically selective high school having enough youngsters of body mass, brawn and speed to create formidable First XVs.
As the school became more and more selective, covering the whole of Sydney rather than the best of the eastern suburbs, this dilemma intensified.
The changing ethnicity of the bright kids from the Anglo-Celtic kids of the working classes around Bondi Junction and the Jewish kids from Bondi to the smaller Asian kids who have started to dominate the HSC top scholar lists in the last two decades meant that football was going to be the sport of choice of most of the boys, not rugby.
I was chatting with Tony Hannon near the Sydney Boys High entrance gate one sunny afternoon when a small Vietnamese boy, dressed to the hilt in his new uniform, came towards us. He was carrying a violin.
“Look at that lad,” Hannon said to me in a sort of mock despair. “I’m supposed to produce strong first fifteens from kids like that.”
He was, and for many years he did.
I remember one memorable year in the 1990s when Sydney Boys High actually defeated a very good Joeys side. The next year, if I remember correctly, Joeys exacted a terrible revenge thrashing SBH 76-0.
The Joeys side, which had Matt Burke in it, played so well I told one of my sons at the end of the match when the Joeys youngsters were racing around the ground in high spirits that “We were lucky to get 0.”
Many rugby people, especially those from the western suburbs, believe that there is too much media attention and interest invested in GPS rugby. And, in recent years, this is probably correct.
The days are now long gone when NSW and the Wallabies were virtually all manned by former GPS old boys, with the occasional player from Newcastle and the western suburbs.
Professional rugby since 1996 has led to youngsters from government schools all over NSW aspiring to careers in rugby where once only rugby league could give them a chance of playing rugby and making money from their skills in the code.
This is a great thing for Australian rugby with players like George Smith becoming rugby legends when in previous years he would surely have been snaffled up by one of the rugby league clubs to become one of that code’s star players.
Some of us, though, will always get a special thrill when we watch a GPS First XV match.
This is a storied tournament that started in 1892. It is probably the longest and most famous school tournament in the rugby world. Until the last couple of decades, most of the great names of Australian rugby started off their playing days in this tournament.
Some of them, such as Nick Farr-Jones and Phil Kearns, famously never made the First XV. But for decades the Wallabies took their character and their style from the GPS tournament.
In the first edition of Jack Pollard’s magisterial Australian Rugby Union: The Game and the Players, on page 694, there is a photograph of Sydney Boys High’s famous premiership side of 1963, with the blond-haired Phil Smith as captain, and on the far right of the front row of players and coaches a determined-looking John Brass.
Pollard’s caption for the photograph reads: “One of the most entertaining of recent Australian Schoolboy sides.”
So that’s how I want to remember the First XV’s of Sydney Boys High: entertaining, tough, often beaten but never defeated in spirit.
As the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Nic Lochner, a recent old boy, saying: “The boys trained and put in their best. No one was afraid to go out there every week and take on the other schools.”
Photo from the High Rugby Friends website