South Sydney Rabbitohs

The Resurrection of the Rabbitohs TRANSCRIPT
"Sunday" The Nine Network - TV news show - December 2001

NORM LIPSON: Everyone should care about what happened to South Sydney because it's more than football, it's more than sport. This was a question of human rights, in my opinion.

CROWD: (All chant) South Sydney!

RAY MARTIN, SOUTHS SUPPORTER: This team of battlers took on two of the media moguls of the world, in terms of Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer.

SOUTHS SUPPORTER: We're coming for you Murdoch! We're coming for you!

ROY MASTERS: George Piggins, who was the president of Souths and his wife Noelene, inspired vast numbers of Australian people with their fight for survival.

GEORGE PIGGINS, CHAIRMAN OF SOUTH SYDNEY: I'm staying right to the end, I promise you.

JOHN LYONS, REPORTER: How nasty did the whole battle get?

GEORGE PIGGINS: About as nasty as you can get without hitting each other on the chin, I suppose.

REPORTER: This was the moment that many thousands of sports fans around the country had been waiting for, the return to the playing field of one of Australia's oldest and most famous football clubs.

CROWD: (All sing) Glory, glory to South Sydney.

REPORTER: What made this event more special for supporters was the way South Sydney, a club from the wrong end of town, fought a battle for reinstatement to the league against one of the most powerful and determined media organisations in the world.

IAN HEADS, RUGBY LEAGUE WRITER: Yeah, it's an amazing story, it really is the mouse that roared. They won because of belief in very basic things, in the rightness of them being in the competition.

NORM LIPSON, SOUTHS MEDIA LIAISON OFFICER: When people bind together, when they team up for a principle or for a cause, they're unbeatable, absolutely unbeatable. No-one can win against people power.

REPORTER: This is the heart of Rabbitoh territory, Redfern Oval. For 40 years after World War II, the club played all their home games here. The area's fallen on very hard times, but this is still a tribal link to the great victories and memories that built themselves into a movement that took on the $60 billion Murdoch empire. It's a story of modern day people power. It's a story of how the Rabbits beat Rupert.

ROY MASTERS, 'SYDNEY MORNING HERALD': Well, South Sydney actually got its name, nickname, its emblem as the Rabbitohs, because many of the players in 1908 and the early days prior to the First World War actually supplemented their income by walking through the streets of Redfern and Surry Hills - Strawberry Hills as it was then - and they would be yelling out "Rabbitoh, Rabbitoh" selling the actual rabbits that they'd caught and skinned in the nearby fields of Mascot.

REPORTER: Despite their poverty off the field, Souths became the glory team of the league. More premierships, more test players than any other side. Great players such as Clive Churchill, the little master, came to symbolise the grittiness that has made Souths the most successful team in Rugby League history.

IAN HEADS: Clive Churchill has been voted the greatest Rugby League player of all time in two separate polls. He sort of summed up the finest qualities of Rugby League, I think. He was a small man with a lot of courage and somehow he epitomised the Rugby League spirit.

REPORTER: South's last purple patch came at the end of the 1960s. They won four premierships in five years but faded to also-rans in the 1980s. Then the world changed. In 1995, Rupert Murdoch's News Limited launched what amounted to a takeover of Rugby League in the search for content for pay television.

IAN HEADS: There were a succession of raids by agents acting for the News Limited forces designed to sign players, clubs and coaches, some of which were successful and that was really the beginning of this war, the internal war, which really tore Rugby League apart in those successive seasons.

REPORTER: The fight to control the game fell into two camps - the NRL, or National Rugby League, backed by News Limited promoting Super League, or the ARL, or Australian Rugby League, backed by Optus and Kerry Packer.

IAN HEADS: During the period of the Super League war the game was in an appalling situation really. Friendships of a lifetime were ended and I think at times there was genuine hatred on both sides as - particularly from the ARL side, the affront that they felt at corporate interlopers coming in to take over a game which essentially belonged to the people.

WAYNE PEARCE, FORMER INTERNATIONAL PLAYER: The thing that upsets me most about this concept and the whole deal is the lies that have been told, the friendships that have broken up.

REPORTER: The early days of the war saw positions strongly taken by many in the media.

RAY HADLEY, RADIO 2GB (2UE until end of season 2001): There was a lamentable performance on 'The Footy Show' when I crossed swords with John Ribot.

JOHN RIBOT, CHIEF EXECUTIVE SUPER LEAGUE (from the Footy Show): The vision is about taking the game to the rest of the world. It's about giving the patrons and the fans a better deal than what they've had in the past.

RAY HADLEY (from the Footy Show): What a load of crap! It's all about pay television, John! It's all about lining people's pockets with money and for you to sit here and say anything different is just an absolute farce!

RAY HADLEY: I made a really fatal mistake. I let my emotions rule my head. I was really emotional about it and I haven't seen it since. I'm quite embarrassed by how I conducted myself. The worst part was after the show, people came up and slapped me on the back and said "Oh, that was fantastic" and you go home and you think you've done a good job and your wife looks at you and says, "Are you a complete idiot?"

REPORTER: The competition was split in 1997, with 10 clubs in the Super League and 12 in the ARL. This lasted for only one season as crowd numbers and TV ratings plummeted. Both sides realised splitting the code would destroy the game.

PETER FRILINGOS, SYDNEY 'DAILY TELEGRAPH': Well News Limited's vision for Rugby League was quite simple at the time. They wanted a global game of Rugby League. They said that they would be able to take the game to a lot of countries where it had never been before. Also, they wanted a streamlined game.

REPORTER: The NRL answer was a smaller, combined competition. They put in place a set of criteria that would rank the clubs with only the top 14 surviving. Souths was vulnerable. The club was performing poorly on and off the field and their once-great army of loyal supporters was dwindling.

PETER FRILINGOS: Well, of course they were partly responsible, but who wants to support a loser? Even a club like South Sydney with its great traditions. You don't want to go out there every week to see your side getting flogged. I mean, it's an unsophisticated form of masochism. It's silly.

RAY MARTIN: My son's never seen, he's only 11, he's never seen Souths win a game, and we've been to about probably 20 now and they've never won. But you see people who clearly - that's their main entertainment for the week. It's not going to the pub necessarily, it's not going to a theatre, it's not going to a club, it's going to see Souths play and in recent times seeing Souths lose. But that didn't matter. It wasn't about losing, it was about your football club.

REPORTER: By the end of 1999 it seemed Souths would not meet the criteria imposed by News Limited. The swirling suspicions were confirmed on 15 October.

GEORGE PIGGINS: The NRL has took us out of the competition for the year 2000.

NORM LIPSON: I saw men, women, blubbering, hugging each other, kissing, swearing vengeance.

SOUTHS SUPPORTER: I feel like I could die now. That's how I feel.

NORM LIPSON: I saw the gamut of people's emotions and it made me very emotional too and it just built up everyone's resolve that we're not going to take this. If by your actions, by closing down a football club, you can cause so much devastation, so much hurt and pain to people, by crikey, you know, it's going to be a pyrrhic victory because we're going to make you pay.

GEORGE PIGGINS: As you've seen the reaction out there of our fans, we could do nothing less but to take this to the highest court in the land.

NORM LIPSON: The day after we were kicked out about a dozen of us went to the boardroom of South Sydney. Now, in contrast to the previous day, it was grey, it was overcast, it was drizzling, it matched our mood, and I'll never forget sitting there and thinking to myself, "We've got nothing. We haven't got our football club, we haven't got a penny in the bank." I mean, we knew a court case was going to take a great deal of money and I'll tell you something now, that was probably the most depressing day of all because we started from zero. We had zero.

ROY MASTERS: Almost-penniless South Sydney were able to take on and beat one of the world's biggest media empires basically on the generosity of kids, through to as young as six years of age through to grandmothers, grandfathers as old as 90. Essentially they got a fighting fund, South Sydney, I think of about $2 million and it just came from mums and dads and little kids everywhere.

ANDREW DENTON, SOUTHS' SUPPORTER: That's it. $2 and we'll take 20 cents GST - excellent. REPORTER: Heading the fight was a one-time player and coach, now club chairman, George Piggins.

GEORGE PIGGINS: And we're prepared to fight this one all the way.

REPORTER: A legend as a player, he was renowned for his toughness.

IAN HEADS: There's a famous try he scored one day at Lidcombe Oval against Western Suburbs in which he was just simply unstoppable. George is seen taking the ball and bumping off opponent after opponent in his determination to get to the line. A tremendously determined bloke and that carried through to his working life.

PETER FRILINGOS: I think that anybody who witnessed the George Piggins - Malcolm Reilly fight at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1973, the game probably has never seen anything like it.

IAN HEADS: It was an unbelievable incident in which George wouldn't back down from Reilly, who was the bigger man.

PETER FRILINGOS: It ended up with George actually grabbing Malcolm around the eye area with one of his claws, George I believe, later said that he told him that if he didn't stop he'd pull his eye out, and I think Malcolm Reilly agreed that that was about to happen.

IAN HEADS: They did each other terrible damage in that fight and yet afterwards they had a drink together and they settled it, which as George said, it was just football.

ALAN JONES: George is just a storyteller. He doesn't pretend to be anything else and the reason there are people here and reason the people follow George Piggins wherever he goes is that there's nothing synthetic about him, there's nothing made up, he just says it and if it upsets people it upsets people.

REPORTER: But as the battlelines were drawn, the toughest strategist of all emerged, Noelene Piggins, George's wife.

ROY MASTERS: Noelene Piggins is in fact tougher than George. In fact if the US Government really wanted to find bin Laden all they'd have to do is get Noelene go find him. She would, and then she'd probably give the $500 million reward or whatever it is, to charity. Many a Rugby League player has said "God, wasn't George tough in the middle of the scrum "but how would you have liked to pack in against Noelene?"

NOELENE PIGGINS: Well I first met George when I was 5-years-old and we started school together but we probably didn't become friends hanging around in a group until we were about 13.

REPORTER: Half a century later the couple would hold the key to a battle with one of the world's largest companies.

NOELENE PIGGINS: I was angry. It was unacceptable to me personally and it was immoral that any organisation could just say a club that had been part of a competition for nearly 100 years had to go.

SOUTHS SUPPORTER: We will fight and fight and fight and we fix them all!

REPORTER: The South's fight, like the Super League battle, was waged through the media. This time it was the journalists from the Fairfax organisation and those from News Limited caught in the crossfire.

ROY MASTERS: There was no friendship beforehand with myself and many of the prominent Rugby League writers from News Limited and if there had been any chance of a relationship developing and becoming friendly, the war and South Sydney situation certainly destroyed it.

PETER FRILINGOS: What he said is spot on and there is no doubt that whatever problems there were, the Super League war exacerbated them.

REPORTER: Even friendships within the same programs came to grief. Ray Hadley and Darryll Brohman fronted Radio 2UE's popular weekend football show. Brohman now claims Hadley inexplicably switched support to the Murdoch side and stopped pro-South's callers getting to air.

DARRYLL BROHMAN, FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR: There's no doubt some callers would have rung through, wanting to get through on the station, and depending on the direction the station was taking or Ray was taking, they wouldn't get through.

RAY HADLEY: The one thing that Darrell has proved over the last two years, he knows nothing about radio. It didn't make good radio. It was call after call after call about South Sydney and I made a decision, I said, "That's it. If we keep taking calls about this issue every day and we're on air for six hours, when the ratings come out there's an asterisk next to our name because nobody will listen to us, because there are other teams in the competition." And so I said, "Look, I've had enough of it. No more of those calls, we move to the next step." So then it's turned around and said Hadley censored South Sydney people.

REPORTER: Here inside the South's boardroom, all was not well. Some board members were secretly considering a merger with neighbouring club Cronulla. When George Piggins found out about the secret talks he exploded. He went straight to the Fairfax journalist Roy Masters, leaked him details of the talks and scuttled it once and for all.

ROY MASTERS: Late one afternoon when I was sitting at my desk at the 'Sydney Morning Herald' I got a phone call from George Piggins. When he made a phone call you knew it was a big one and I wrote the story on the back page of the 'Sydney Morning Herald' - scuttled their plan.

REPORTER: Souths' financial position remained parlous. One board member, NSW Minister Eddie Obeid, resigned because he feared the club was insolvent.

EDDIE OBEID, NSW MINISTER: We had the accountants and auditors there and I think we grilled them for practically hours, we had the lawyer there, and I certainly wasn't satisfied that we were solvent and I certainly couldn't get a clear undertaking in very simple terms that the club was solvent and if that's the case, then having known that, my duty was to resign.

REPORTER: But George Piggins makes the astonishing claim that by year's end, most NRL clubs are at or near bankruptcy.

GEORGE PIGGINS: At the end of the year, yeah, like what I mean, it's a thing where you get your budget, you think that's the target we're going to get, and we'll spend most of that on players and if you have a blow-out in any area, you're just flat out making your budget and that's that.

ALAN JONES: It is 100% correct that these clubs are technically bankrupt. That you know, they're getting a hellish lot of money from Rugby League clubs in some instances or they've been massively subsidised by News Limited. I mean, it wouldn't bear heavy analysis, I can assure you. It would be very embarrassing.

REPORTER: The internal battle at Souths escalated with a devastating report from Complete Marketing that said the running of the club lacked professionalism and that it was virtually bankrupt.

GEORGE PIGGINS: I said "Because you were here one week and you said it" I said "So can you show me what you base it on?" They never had an answer. Like they were under the opinion that the 1.5 million that was owed by the other people wasn't going to come to us. Well, you know, they must have had inside information to know that. I didn't know that.

REPORTER: The merger issue led to a bitter clash between Piggins and NSW Labor MP and fellow board member Deirdre Grusovin.

GEORGE PIGGINS:Well, it was the night they were going to take it to Cronulla and more or less they said that "We're beat, we've got to look at mergers and all of that". And I said "Well, look, I've been here for close on 40 years" and I said "I don't think we are beaten. I won't be merging my football club with anyone." I said. "So if that's the direction you're going to take I'll resign tomorrow morning." And I got up to walk towards the door and she says, "It's got to be unanimous".

I said, "It won't be with me. Now move out of the way or I'll move you out of the way and I'm going and I'm not being" - I didn't want to be left in that room where they could try to break me down. I knew - my mind was made up. And then she just, all of a sudden she said "George is right, we've got to fight this." And we both sat back down and that was the start of turning it around I suppose.

REPORTER: Souths Norm Lipson had a blunt warning for those in his own camp he regarded as rats.

NORM LIPSON: Well, in probably more colourful language I told them that if they persisted, they'd be necked and I meant that figuratively - necked. They'd be exposed and then if they wanted to carry on and go over the park and settle it like the working class settle things, that could be arranged too. In trying to ignite the public's passion, Souths found that TV, radio and film celebrities were willing to support the club. The likes of Andrew Denton and Ray Martin pitched in, and the public followed. Influential radio host Alan Jones had been involved with the club for years.

ALAN JONES: Ours was an emotional and a psychological armoury that we brought into play.

RAY MARTIN (AT PROTEST RALLY): How good it feels to protest like today instead of sitting on your bum at home and watching it on television tonight, to do it as we've done it today when the cause is right. This cause is right.

REPORTER: With Souths locked in a legal battle with the NRL a dramatic turning point came when 80,000 people marched into the centre of Sydney on a Sunday afternoon to support the club.

ANDREW DENTON (AT PROTEST RALLY): Thank you for coming, stay strong, be smart and please welcome the president of South Sydney, Mr George Piggins.

REPORTER: It was one of the largest rallies since the Vietnam moratoriums and its numbers shocked executives inside News Limited.

GEORGE PIGGINS (AT PROTEST RALLY): And I promise you too, you people walk away, I won't. I'll stay and fight.

NOELENE PIGGINS: I think that was the day that really saved us. That was the day that made South Sydney a force. Because we always thought the only way that we could win the fight wasn't really in the courts, that it was with the people. I suppose that was the best day of my life.

ELDERLY MAN ADDRESSING PROTEST RALLY: I know we're here in the name of South Sydney. But really we're in the name of Rugby League. We're here praying, praying.

ROY MASTERS: I reckon about half the crowd were non-South Sydney supporters. There were many Newcastle and North Sydney jumpers in the crowd. Essentially that half of those people that marched were protesting the arbitrary execution by a sporting organisation of a football club, exactly the same hysteria that took place in Melbourne in the early '90s when the AFL attempted to force a merger of Footscray and Fitzroy.

REPORTER: Rupert Murdoch's 'Daily Telegraph' which had marketed itself as the Rugby League paper, buried the story on page 44, even though TV and radio led with the rally. Supporters were not happy.

NORM LIPSON: Bloody dirty. Bloody angry.

REPORTER: News Limited journalist Ian Heads resigned in protest.

IAN HEADS: I felt that indicated an agenda. From a journalistic point of view, the paper that I worked for had done the wrong thing. But I probably felt just as strongly that the decision not to cover it was disrespectful to a great sporting club.

REPORTER: Then 'Telegraph' editor, Col Allan, has conceded the rally coverage was a mistake.

COL ALLAN, FORMER EDITOR 'DAILY TELEGRAPH': I think both the 'Daily Telegraph' and the 'Sunday Telegraph' made an error in the way that they didn't cover the South Sydney rally. I think it was a mistake. I have accepted responsibility for that.

REPORTER: The battle became even more bitter. Channel Nine's Ray Martin had been asking News Limited to help support the reconciliation march across Sydney's Harbour Bridge.

RAY MARTIN: We needed the 'Telegraph' to support us and get the tickets organised for the Sunday and they were very happy to do that and we were grateful for their involvement. And then they went cold and I rang one of the executives, one of the senior executives, and said "What's the problem?"

And I was told the problem was South Sydney, because I'd also been high profile in supporting Souths and it was made very clear to me that I couldn't have it both, I had to have it blackfellas with the reconciliation march or I had to have South Sydney and make my mind up on both. In the end they came in strongly and supported the march in the last week or so, but this particular executive, who was very senior, made it clear that there was a conflict of interest here, that I had to support one or the other.

REPORTER: More people became disenchanted with News Limited's position and started boycotting the company's products.

ROY MASTERS: There was far more than just a boycott of the 'Daily Telegraph' by South Sydney supporters and many working class Rugby League people. There was also cancellations of the subscriptions to Foxtel and interestingly enough, the taxi drivers who would be generally called to the Fox Studios in Moore Park which is the headquarters of the National Rugby League and the film studio owned by Murdoch, they boycotted the place.

REPORTER: Hostilities reached new heights in late 1999. Alan Jones broadcast his radio program from a soundproof booth inside a hotel ballroom as News Limited executives attended a Grand Final breakfast.

RAY HADLEY: So Jonesy was editorialising about what a disgrace News Limited were, and what a disgrace the NRL were and what a disgrace this was and what a disgrace that was. And I was there with him. And I was thinking "Oh geez, I hope they don't hear this." Because while he's saying that behind a glass partition, there's Ian Frykberg and Malcolm Noad, John Hartigan and all these people from News Limited.

ALAN JONES: I would have made one of my usual modest and inoffensive remarks which caused offence to somebody else apparently. But they didn't hear it. They were sitting inside there. But someone must have told them. Someone got a transcript and someone got upset. It was at the time sadly about silencing the critics and that's what it was about.

REPORTER: Soon after that incident, 2UE lost the multimillion-dollar rugby league broadcasting rights. Do you think that 2UE losing the broadcasting rights was the result of your comments that morning at that breakfast?

ALAN JONES: I'm sure it was, yes.

JUDGE: The orders of the court will be - one, that the application be dismissed...

REPORTER: By now South Sydney had lost two court cases.

SUPPORTER: I've been following them for 55 years ...

REPORTER: They were down to their last chance. George Piggins was to take the stand.

ROY MASTERS: It was always known that George was going to have trouble in the witness box because I think he left school when he was about 12, but George Piggins was also famous for inventing a method of roll-on/ roll-off vehicles, a patent which earned him millions of dollars. So one hoped that in the final analysis, that the judge could see the essential character of the man. That while he might not have been academically intelligent, he certainly was streetwise intelligent and had the desperate hopes of the club at his helm.

NOELENE PIGGINS: I hated those QCs that represented News Limited and the NRL. The way that they tried to make out that he wasn't well educated enough to hold his position and George has been too successful in his life, in business, for it to have been any fluke and I think that they probably pulled the wrong rein in trying to attack him personally.

REPORTER: Against all predictions, Souths had their sweetest victory, the full bench of the Federal Court ruled in their favour and the NRL welcomed them back for the 2002 season. News Limited did not object to their re-admittance.

GEORGE PIGGINS: I think his newspapers would have been hurt, I think Fox Studios would have been hurt and he just realised we weren't going to go away. We are are like the pesky rabbits that have been in this country for hundreds of years. We're hard to exterminate. So we just become like that. And I think that he realised that he was going to have a lot more hurt on his hands before it healed.

NORM LIPSON: George Piggins and myself and Noelene Piggins during the fight made it quite clear to people the men in suits have taken away your hospital beds, they're closing police stations, they're closing schools on you, they're taking away facilities, bank branches are closing and now they've got the hide to take away your football club? You're bloody well kidding. No way in the world. That's what the fight was all about.

REPORTER: By the time the club's celebrity supporter and benefactor Russell Crowe rang in South's return, an extraordinary story had emerged. Despite all the bitterness and acrimony, the club has risen from the ashes through legal battles and chook raffles to become the competition's biggest drawcard.

IAN HEADS: The greatest irony of all is that the chance for rebuilding of league probably focuses around South Sydney club. The fact that their greatest club is now back in business is the greatest positive that News Limited, the NRL or the game of rugby league could have.

"Sunday" The Nine Network (Australia)