Opinion
Why Wayne Bennett loves the game, but doesn’t chase the game
Roy Masters
Sports ColumnistMaybe Wayne Bennett fears retirement and joining that “mass of men” whom American philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote “lead lives of quiet desperation”.
After all, Bennett’s 2007 book, written with Steve Crawley is titled, Don’t Die With The Music In You, a paraphrased quote from American polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes, a 19th-century contemporary of Thoreau.
It’s the fear of a life of emptiness that drives many long-term coaches, a nagging angst at the loss of a creative future. Craig Bellamy put it simply when explaining why he would coach into a 22nd successive season at the Storm, saying, “I’m not sure what else I would do when I retire.”
On Friday, he announced he will make that at least 23 seasons.
Bennett coached Bellamy at the Raiders in 1987, back when his contemporaries were part-time, holding day jobs as school teachers, policemen, or poker machine salesmen. Players were also part-time. Their full-time job paid more than their football contract and they were therefore less disposed to travel across the city to join another club. Clubs were also restricted to just 13 players from outside their own area – across three grades. Training sessions were on weeknights. A head coach had no assistants and most clubs had one permanent employee – a “secretary” – which was a misnomer considering he couldn’t type.
Video replay was in its infancy. Only two games were televised per week and players often had to wait until the Tuesday night training session to know whether they were playing Saturday or Sunday. Competition between the two Sydney afternoon newspapers – The Sun and Daily Mirror – for scoops was intense, although TV criticism was restricted to a few barbs from Rex Mossop on Channel 7. Players queued up for a place on the massage table and training was usually held on the club’s home ground, meaning wet weather ruled out ball work and the club doctor appeared mainly on game day.
A Bennett return to South Sydney and a reunion with Latrell Mitchell appears a fait accompli.Credit: Getty
Today, Bennett is considering a contract with South Sydney, followed by taking charge of an expansion club, meaning both deals would take him past his 80th birthday.
All his rivals are now full-time, as are players who have dedicated days off. A NRL club’s football department includes assistant coaches, training, rehabilitation and welfare professionals, backed by an office staff where total club numbers are evenly divided between players and non players. Full fixtures are known before season kick-off. Coaches and players have access to well drained fields, modern gymnasiums, theatrettes, hot meals and cutting-edge technology, including video of training sessions captured by drones.
No wonder “Old Man Winner” keeps rolling along. Sure, he can sit on one of his tractors at one of his five Warwick properties and check on the fences, but where is the creative future in that?
Plus, his group of assistant coaches do all the tedious and physically demanding tasks which were once solely the domain of the first grade coach in the era when a club fielded three grade teams. Assistants do the session planning and sift through the hours of video to cut highlights for the head coach.
Wayne Bennett’s man-management skills are always top of the list when discussing his virtues.Credit: Getty
Visit an NRL training session on the wrestling mat, observe an assistant coach in the midst of all the elbows and knees of a collision and you understand why a head coach aged in his 60s or 70s stands comfortably against the wall. In an era where so many players are self-entitled, it is the assistant who plays the good cop/bad cop role as required by the head coach.
And it’s not as if the head coach is compelled to come up with an innovative strategy to surprise next week’s opponent. All NRL teams have left and right defences; they play the same way, waiting for the opposition to make an error or concede a penalty to set up for a try.
Sure, the multi-camera TV coverage means more far players are caught by headquarters and suspended than a half-century ago but the upside is assistant coaches can use this vision to enhance player skills.
Other “lifer” head coaches, such as the Roosters’ Trent Robinson, Canberra’s Ricky Stuart, Gold Coast’s Des Hasler and Bellamy, are more hands-on than Bennett. But given the degree of delegation by a head coach to his assistants, it’s no surprise the most common praise of Bennett we hear from his former players is his “man management” skills.
Wayne Bennett could well coach into his 80s … at a seventh club.Credit: Illustration: Bethany Rae
One-on-one, Bennett can cuddle a player down on confidence better than anyone. Addressing the group, he can be scathing, but it suits him to be sparing in his language.
It also explains why – other than his first term at Brisbane – he doesn’t stay long at a club.
He is comparable to the Coach of the Century, Jack Gibson, in this respect. Gibson coached at six clubs over 20 years, including the Roosters twice. Bennett has coached at six clubs over nearly 40 years, including the Broncos twice. Like Gibson, if Bennett can’t have total control, he leaves.
Another reason why Bennett endures is his disinterest in the problems which confront today’s mentors. There were no agents back in the 1980s, apart from solicitors who negotiated a player’s contract with the secretary. A player now has a closer relationship with his manager than his head coach. It is the manager who protests on his behalf when the player is relegated to State Cup.
Head coaches complain agents are insulated from criticism because journalists depend on them for information. While the salary cap contributes to a bigger churn of players than in the past, agents exploit it for their commissions.
But Bennett, by “club hopping” as it was called in the old days, is not as affected by agents and player movement as the coaches like Bellamy and Penrith’s Ivan Cleary who develop talent only to see it leave.
More coaches are sacked mid-season now than when Bennett began in the then-NSWRL. However, because of his exalted status as a seven-time premiership-winning coach, he is largely spared media criticism. In any case, the media pile-on is more gentle than 40 years ago, despite the width and depth of coverage including a dedicated NRL pay TV channel.
As for social media, Bennett probably thinks it’s a term for journalists who write for the gossip pages. Nor does he appear affected by the losses as much as his rivals who sometimes appear shallow, sunken, defeated after games. Like today’s players, he “moves on.”
So, the Skinny Coach is comfortable with the routine of the job. He’s Robert Duvall as Lt Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, saying, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
He probably would like Parramatta to come in with an offer to force his anticipated move to South Sydney into an auction, allowing him to buy a sixth farm in Queensland’s Southern Downs.
But when he takes charge of a Perth or a PNG team approaching his 80th birthday, his rivals will still be confronting the legacy he institutionalised: the deep, debilitating demand of success.
Love the game, don’t chase the game, he might say, as he delays the day when the music dies and there is no creative future.
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