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Dramatic way in which Brisbane Broncos secured signatures of Wally Lewis and Gene Miles
February 6, 2018
IN the second part of our special on the establishment of the Brisbane Broncos 30 years ago foxsports.com.au reveals the key to signing Wally Lewis, the reaction to three Sydney imports and why Gene Miles was threatened with being thrown out of a 30-storey window.
AT the end of the 1986 Brisbane Rugby League season Wynnum Manly superstars Wally Lewis and Gene Miles had agreed to join Manly-Warringah in the New South Wales Rugby League.
The Kangaroos captain and incumbent centre had stayed in Brisbane while others sought riches south of the border, their value to the Queensland Rugby League and Brisbane competition underpinned by the QRL retention fees paid to keep them in the Sunshine State.
But as year after year passed without payment from Wynnum they decided enough was enough and met with Manly officials and club benefactor Kerry Packer.
“That was the time where we said at the end of it, ‘We’re going.’ That was ’86,” Lewis tells foxsports.com.au.
“We went and met Packer, had the meeting and basically said yes. We were quite determined to go.
“The only thing that stopped us was that the Manly deal was split in two, half from Manly and half from Packer. The QRL came back and said that they were going to assist Wynnum in being able to pay us.
“That was for half of the money that was coming from Manly, and half of that money was coming from Wynnum.
“Wynnum didn’t pay us so we effectively ended up with a quarter of what we could have got at Manly.
“So we just looked at each other and said, ‘Well there goes another year.’”
When it emerged that the Brisbane Broncos would be admitted into the NSWRL competition in 1988 Lewis had no hesitation in joining the new franchise but Miles would prove to be a more difficult signature to secure.
One of the most damaging centres the game had ever seen had also had preliminary talks with the Gold Coast-Tweed Giants who were building their own inaugural roster but founding Broncos director Paul ‘Porky’ Morgan wanted a decision.
“Most of the Brisbane players at that stage didn’t want to leave Brisbane,” says legendary Broncos coach Wayne Bennett.
“Wally Lewis and Gene Miles had huge offers. They met with Packer in Sydney because Manly wanted them and to their credit they did stay (in Brisbane).
“We were all in the city because Geno was procrastinating and wouldn’t make a decision.
“Paul wasn’t used to people not making decisions. He told me he threatened him and Geno even told me, that he said, ‘I’ll f****** throw you out this window if you don’t make a decision’.
“That was the way he talked. They were 30 floors up.”
“Geno said he would sign but that he couldn’t until he’d spoken to one other club because that was the promise he’d given them,” says founding director Barry Maranta.
“Next thing ‘Porky’ rips into him and threatens to throw him out the window. They tell me Wally was outside shitting himself.
“Porky was that sort of guy, very emotional. He got us into a lot of trouble with his emotions at times.
“Wally walked in and said, ‘Where do I sign?’ That was done within a heartbeat.”
Securing the services of two of the biggest names in the game gave the Broncos the instant credibility they needed to build a team that would be competitive from the get-go, a team that in Round 1 would include seven players who had represented Queensland the year prior.
Targeting Queenslanders was a priority for the directors and Bennett from the outset, not only to build from the bonds they had created playing Origin together but to win over a rugby league fan base that was still largely sceptical.
“We all wanted it to be a predominantly Queensland team,” Bennett tells foxsports.com.au.
“At that time we had a great Origin team and there were seven or eight Origin players that came straight to the Broncos.
“Bryan Niebling, Greg Conescu, Wally Lewis, Gene Miles, Greg Dowling, Colin Scott, they were hell bent on getting those guys and keeping them in Brisbane. I was, we all were.
“We wanted to have a really strong local brand of Queenslanders.
“A lot of our wonderful players were towards the end of their careers — they weren’t at the start of their careers.
“We did have a plan and the plan was that there was a whole group of those kids who were in the club — Allan Langer, Steve Renouf, Kerrod Walters — or were to come a year later.
“But we had to buy time to get these guys up to scratch. Wally was well into his late 20s, Geno as well but we needed their experience and we needed what they brought and we needed their credibility to get us going.”
Only three players were brought in from Sydney-based clubs, Chris Johns and Billy Noke from the St George Dragons and young Eastern Suburbs lock forward Terry Matterson.
The 24 points that Matterson scored in the club’s first premiership game (more on that later) was a club record that stood for 14 years and only ever been bested once but to get to that point he first had to prove he belonged.
While winning over his Broncos teammates wasn’t so much of an issue, Matterson remembers some negativity from Brisbane footy fans that he, Johns and Noke had taken positions that could have been filled by a homegrown product.
“When they came in and you could see the calibre of players that they’d signed, I thought I’d give it a crack,” says Matterson, who would go on to play 155 games for the Broncos after eight top grade games for the Roosters.
“It was a tough decision. I’d had a couple of years at the Roosters as a young fella, always lived at home, never lived out of home and I had two or three other offers in Sydney.
“They were better offers but I thought I had to get out of the Roosters who had Hugh McGahan playing lock who was captain of the club.
“I know there was a little bit of angst from people in the local comp that maybe some players didn’t get an opportunity because two or three of us came from down south but within the group I didn’t feel any of it.”
But unlike the fanfare that accompanies any new signing in the modern game, when Matterson arrived in Brisbane there wasn’t even anyone from the club there to meet him let alone a media scrum waiting to meet him at the border.
“From when they signed me they just said I had to be up there by a certain date,” Matterson says of his arrival as a Bronco. “So I packed my car up with my life in it and drove from Sydney.
“I’d only been to Brisbane once or twice before and when they signed me they put me up at the Mayfair Crest.
“I drove to the Mayfair Crest and got on the phone — we didn’t have mobiles then — and I rang Robyn Maranta and said, ‘I’m here, what do I do?’
“There was only Robyn and ‘Reebs’ (John Ribot) working out of Paul Morgan’s office in Eagle St and she told me to hang on the phone while she sorted it out because she wasn’t expecting something like that to happen.
“She got back to me and said Chris Johns can put me up at his pub, the Sportsman Hotel in Spring Hill.
“I basically lived out of my car there for two weeks until Greg Conescu took me in.”
With only three players with any NSWRL experience it was then up to Bennett and head trainer Brian Canavan to prepare their new team for a year of physical endurance they were in no way ready for.
“They just didn’t know what they were getting into,” says Bennett.
“What they knew was that they could play at any level because they’d proven that but they didn’t know they had to do it every bloody week and every week was going to be a bloody tough game.
“That was the part they had to learn, you can’t teach that. You’ve got to learn that.”
And they learnt it the hard way.
Source: Fox Sports
