'Weak as piss': Brutal camp that almost broke Broncos

[Super Freak]

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Wayne Bennett’s brutal introduction to full-time training for first Brisbane Broncos squad

February 7, 2018

IN the third part of our special on the establishment of the Brisbane Broncos 30 years ago foxsports.com.au reveals the brutal pre-season camp that brought the team together and the doubts that plagued coach Wayne Bennett.

THE mood as players gathered at Broncos Leagues Club in November 1987 was one of giddy excitement.

Finally given the opportunity to play in the New South Wales Rugby League without the need to leave Queensland, the first Brisbane Broncos squad were boarding the bus thinking of a weekend of bonding sessions and belly laughs.

But coach Wayne Bennett had something different in mind, instructing the bus driver to point his coach towards the Canungra Army Barracks west of the Gold Coast and the rude shock waiting for his star-studded playing group.

“I remember blokes getting on the bus with their own pillows, we had an Esky and Tim-Tams and packets of barbecue chips thinking we were going on a camping trip,” inaugural Bronco and Queensland great Gene Miles tells foxsports.com.au.

“We got the shock of our lives when we turned up out the front of Canungra. We didn’t know where Canungra camp was but the bus pulled up on the main road and they told everyone to get off the bus.

“We just thought we were getting off to take a comfort stop.

“When we got off there were the sergeants and the SAS and they whipped us straight into line quick smart.

“They marched us straight into Canungra complex in formation like soldiers mucking around but these Army blokes couldn’t have cared less who we were, they clicked us straight into gear.

“Wasn’t that a little eye-opener for us.”

After a punishing first day of Army-inspired torture tests the Bronco players were offered a reward of a night in the sergeant’s mess and the temptation of 50 cent schooners that they gladly accepted.

What they didn’t know was that there would be an additional price to be paid in the early hours of the following morning.

“We’d come in the day before and a few of the guys weren’t sure what was happening,” says Terry Matterson, one of three players from Sydney-based clubs recruited to that first Broncos team.

“There were a lot of us that stayed up until about 4 o’clock and then got the shock of our lives when we got woken for this 10k run the next morning.”

“I’ve never heard so much abuse coming out of tents,” recalls Miles.

“Things wound up about midnight or 1am and we had to go back to our tents and after a solid four hours sleep old mate was out the front banging on a saucepan screaming at us to get out of bed.

“All you could hear from the tents was abuse.

“No one had any idea what was expected. We just thought we would go back to bed, sleep it off, jump in the bus and go home.

“We still talk about it to this day when we all get together, the sergeant’s mess and the dickheads coming around at 5 o’clock in the morning waking us up.

“That was our introduction to fair dinkum training.”

For captain Wally Lewis, it also gave he and Bennett an early indication of how a team pulled together from the bitter rivalries of the BRL clubs and two Sydney teams would function when the game was at its toughest.

“It took a while but that’s what all the training was about, including Canungra, making blokes work together,” Lewis says.

“While it was an individual exercise there was plenty of group exercises as well, making blokes work together to achieve success. Two or three blokes helping each other get up and climb these big log things and over ropes.

“It would have been impossible to do by yourself and that’s the way the Army works.

“They all assist each other and you always had to be prepared to request assistance from your mates and always be prepared to provide it to those who needed it.

“And I can guarantee you, every bloke needed it while we were there.

“In different ways, shapes and forms but they needed it.”

‘We were as weak as piss’

Despite assembling a roster of Test and Origin stars that would make existing NSWRL teams tremble, the first Broncos team was nowhere near the physical level required to play in the grinding Sydney competition week-to-week.

This was an era of Tuesday and Thursday night training runs and when Origin players not only backed up for their clubs on the weekend but were expected to show up for work the next day, battered and bruised.

Weight training was only a recent phenomenon gradually working its way into the bigger clubs and given his experience at the Canberra Raiders in 1987 Wayne Bennett knew just how far behind physically his side was.

With current NRL head of football Brian Canavan in charge of fitness training, the master coach knew that they couldn’t bring them up to speed physically in a single pre-season but understood that they had to set a grounding that would become the foundation of the Broncos teams to follow.

“I know what a shock it was to a lot of them. We had a lot of high profile players there and they certainly had never encountered that situation before,” Bennett said of the Canungra camp.

“I’d coached in Canberra in ’87 so I knew what they were going into and they didn’t.

“We brought a couple of Sydney-based players up with us like ‘Matto’ (Terry Matterson) and Billy Noke and Chris Johns but the bulk of that team were superstars of Origin, superstars of Australian Rugby league.

“It just had to be my way or the highway those first couple of years.

“I just couldn’t negotiate on things because I knew they hadn’t been there and done it.

“I’d spent 12 months seeing what they were going into. I couldn’t prepare them in two-and-a-half months for that but over a period of three or four years we got it right.”

For 20-year-old Terry Matterson now training alongside legends such as Wally Lewis and Gene Miles, the greatest shock was how much more physically advanced he was after three pre-seasons with Eastern Suburbs.

“I was stronger than all of them,” Matterson says.

“I’d had three off-seasons and I was 20 years old and way stronger than Geno, Greg Dowling, all those guys.”

Adds Miles: “We learnt a lot of things along the way but one of the major ones was that we weren’t even in the ballpark strength-wise.

“We had to up the time spent in the gym and that’s when Wayne brought Kelvin Giles on board.

“I can remember distinctly they were measuring our strength and to be honest back in the days of the BRL there were no gym junkies.

“We’d never pushed too many weights at all. That was an interesting time because we all got to stand around and see how weak as piss we all were.

“We were so underdone in hindsight but we had to start somewhere.”

Rather than any concerns about the roster at his disposal, it was this physical preparedness that provided the only seed of doubt for Bennett as he prepared the squad for their NSWRL entry in round one against the defending premiers, Manly-Warringah (more on that later).

“I would have had a lot of fear in myself with regards to our season but I was an experienced coach. I’d done eight years in the Brisbane comp so I knew about pre-seasons,” Bennett recalls.

“There would have been times where I wondered how these guys were going to get up to speed.

“We weren’t great trainers at that period of time. Some of the players couldn’t train the way they train today.

“But that was the way they were and they were the best players in the game some of them.

“They did change their training habits and the next two years their training habits were to change and to their credit they all bought into it.”

Visit foxsports.com.au on Thursday for the extraordinary build-up to the Brisbane Broncos’ first premiership game and the shockwave it sent throughout the NSWRL hierarchy.

Source: Fox Sports