Vale Andrew Johns

Ok, so it is definitely not the done thing to even acknowledge the existence of Rugby League in an AFL related blog. But until this quest is over, i remain a paid up member of one team only and that’s the Newcastle Knights.*

Due to a neck injury, Andrew Johns has announced his retirement, effective immediately from the game.

If you don’t know anything about Rugby League, the closest thing i can imagine in AFL to Johns is what Gary Ablett must have experienced in Geelong in his heyday. If Ablett is God in Geelong, Johns is the entire Holy trinity in Newcastle and gets all the same scrutiny and then some. Without question he is one of the truly great players ever to play the game and he has been the focus of the hopes, fears, aspirations, prejudices and dreams of most of the population of Newcastle for over a decade. On the field, at his best he was without par. Almost perfect. Off the field he was imperfect, but given the scrutiny, the rumours, the temptations, the accolades and the standards set by Gary Ablett it would be unfair to say he was particularly imperfect.

I have met Andrew Johns once and once only. It was the Thursday after Newcastle had an extraordinary win in the 1997 ARL Grand Final – their first premiership. That game was one of the greatest games ever played. With BHP about to close in a city with double digit unemployment, the poorest club taking on the richest, the working class versus the silver tails, and with Newcastle’s players having rejected Murdoch’s Super League raid, it was a game loaded with all the symbolism you could ever invest in a sporting event. Johns had famously played the game against medical advice after being released from hospital days before with a punctured lung. In no small part due to Johns, Newcastle had triumphed in the last seconds.
It was a bit of a surprise then, that i found him (or more accurately, he and about a dozen other players and hangers on found me and everyone else) at about midnight at Pucko’s retro disco upstairs at the Lucky Country Hotel in Newcastle. From the look of it they were 4 or 5 days into a celebratory pub crawl and were taking advantage on the free beers on offer at every pub in Newcastle. One of the strangest sites i have ever seen was former golfer, Newcastle Knights stalwart and now Australia’s most famous armless sports commentator Jack Newton and a few others carrying a (temporarily) legless 110kg and 2 metre tall Paul “The Chief” Harragon and propping him up on a bar stool.

Unlike the chief, Joey was still going strong – punctured lung and all. There were only a twenty or so people in the room, and he singled me out came straight up to me and i put out my hand and he shook it, i muttered something along the line of “great win! Have you guys stopped since Sunday?” and he nodded in agreement, took my thick black glasses off my head (as was the fashion at the time as seen in this picture of me from that era) and proceeded to dance with them on for the next two or three minutes. He then returned, politely returned the glasses to me, gave me a half hug, muttered that i was a “legend” or something like that and then returned to the team and the next round of beers.

So, while the papers are full of eulogies and polls about whether he was the greatest player or simply one of the greatest, i will simply take this opportunity to return the compliment.

Andrew Johns, as of yesterday you are officially a legend.

* I will remain a member even after all this is over (although i have never had the VIP treatment, been to the rooms or met the CEO hint, hint) – you can take the boy out of Newcastle…