John Quayle was wrestling with the recommendation he was about to make to the Australian Rugby League board on which two of four 1995 expansion bids should be admitted when Ken Arthurson phoned him at 6am wanting to meet.
Quayle, the ARL CEO, had told the chairman that each of the four bids – Auckland, North Queensland, Perth and South Queensland – was ready to become the premiership’s 17th and 18th teams but the board wanted him to nominate two.
“You’re right about these presentations,” Arthurson told Quayle over breakfast. “Why don’t we bring the four of them in.”
“I attribute that decision to Ken because we were only going to go to 18 teams, and it was out of the four of them,” Quayle told pan66.com.
“Ken recommended to the board that these four presentations are as good as each other, so let’s give it a go.
"He said, ‘I know it’s a big challenge, but John is confident, with his staff, that we can do it in these next two years’ and so the decision was made.”
Expansion was at the heart of many of the changes overseen by Quayle and Arthurson, who are among the latest inductees into the NRL Hall of Fame, as they transformed the game on and off the field from 1983 to 1997.
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The pair came to power amid sweeping changes to the way rugby league was administered, with the league becoming incorporated and run by a new board, which included two independent directors - Alan David and Graham Lovett.
The game was struggling on the field because of the violence and foul play that overshadowed the skill of the players, and off the field for financial reasons, with up to six of the 14 clubs being broke.
Between them, Quayle and Arthurson took a game battling for credibility and money to one so sought after that it sparked the Super League war as Australia’s biggest media companies fought to broadcast matches on their fledgling pay-tv networks.
Among the most significant changes introduced by the pair were:
- Empowering judiciary boss Jim Comans to clean up foul play;
- Taking control of referee’s appointments;
- Broadcast of live matches on TV;
- Playing a State of Origin match in California in 1987;
- Admission of Brisbane Broncos, Gold Coast Giants, Newcastle Knights in 1988;
- Engaging Tina Turner to head the game’s marketing campaign in 1989;
- Introduction of the salary cap and draft;
- Taking State of Origin to Melbourne for the first time in 1990;
- Replacing leather balls with synthetic balls;
- Introduction of Monday night matches in the mid-1980s, and;
- Admission of Auckland Warriors, North Queensland Cowboys, Perth Reds, South-East Queensland Crushers in 1995.
“It’s a great honour for me personally, but to be acknowledged with Ken, my chairman for that period of time, is very rewarding for both of us,” Quayle said of his and Arthurson’s induction into the Hall of Fame as Contributors.
We both started together at that time of change to the board and change to the structure, and that gave us that opportunity to make massive changes.
"We could never have done that without a board and a chairman, in Ken, who was prepared to back management for the changes that were needed.”
Lesson in loyalty
Quayle and Arthurson are best known for ensuring the game’s survival during the Super League war, but their greatest achievement was building it to a position where outside forces were prepared to spend up to $1b fighting for control.
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Until their appointment to take charge of the newly incorporated league, the game was largely controlled by a powerful faction of clubs and their first task was to deal with the decision to axe Cronulla and Western Suburbs from the competition.
The Sharks rallied and led by former Cronulla great Monty Porter, raised enough money to ensure their survival while the Magpies won re-instatement through the courts.
However, Newtown fell by the wayside, despite Quayle and Arthurson convincing John Singleton to back a relocated Campbelltown Jets – a concept rejected by the local league who wanted their own team.
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“It is one of my regrets that we didn’t just pursue it because we would have been in Campbelltown a lot earlier, but we had no money to do those sort of things,” Quayle said.
“The game had bought in Canberra [and Illawarra] the year before and we knew we wanted to expand further but we couldn’t expand until we had our own place in order.
“Wests took the game to court and Wests won that case, but it taught us all about the importance of loyalty and the fabric of the game.
“The new board was then given the task of looking at the restructure of the game properly.
"We had no money as a league, a lot of the clubs were insolvent, but we knew we had to change and [NSWRL chairman] Tom Bellew and Ken were able to recognise that change was needed.
“A lot of the clubs didn’t want that change. But that gave the game right to change without the clubs. We just moved to try and change the image of the game, and to try and change the financial structure of the game.”
A new era
The game’s administration, under Quayle, at NSWRL Leagues Club was separated into four key departments:
- Premiership
- Marketing
- Finance
- Development
“There were so many things the clubs were against – live television, for instance. We knew that the future of the game was television - and live television - so we were able to have a mandate to do that,” Quayle said.
“There was criticism back then of the referees, so we changed the structure of the referee's appointments, and I was also given the right to cite players. I had to do all of those things because of the foul play, and clubs doing deals.
“We had to eliminate violence from the field of play and we were fortunate then to have someone like Jim Comans in charge of the judiciary.
When players did things in those days – the elbows, the head highs, the gouging – they were put out for a long period of time.
“That started to give confidence to the clubs, the players and more importantly the fans that we were changing, and we did things like change from a leather ball to a synthetic ball, which again were hard because for the great footballers of the past the pigskin was it.
“I was fortunate to have a board and I was fortunate to have a chairman in Ken who was prepared to take risks in backing management to make change.
“Then as we started to get better sponsorship and better TV returns, we knew that expansion was the next step.”
20-team vision
Newcastle, which had a team in the inaugural 1908 premiership, was ready to rejoin the competition, while Brisbane and Gold Coast were identified as the first areas outside of NSW for new teams in 1988.
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“We had a vision for a national game exposure, and the expansion of Newcastle and Brisbane was the first step,” Quayle said.
“People knew that would be detrimental to the Brisbane competition and to the Newcastle competition, but we believed in it.
Others argued that the Broncos would merely be the Queensland Origin team playing in a different jersey and would therefore dominate the competition.
“It took six years for Brisbane to win their first premiership, and they have only won six,” Quayle said. “The next step was Auckland and bringing in the four clubs – Auckland, North Queensland, the Crushers and Perth.
“People fought against it and said it wouldn’t work, but the Dolphins have now come in as the second Brisbane team and there is talk about Perth.
"When people ask me now whether Perth is ready for a team, I say they were ready 30 years ago.”
Simply The Best
Another major decision which changed the image of rugby league forever was agreeing to make Tina Turner the face of the game.
Turner’s ‘What You Get Is What You See’ campaign in 1989 was a massive hit and was followed up the next year with a new song – ‘Simply The Best’.
Vale Tina Turner
It’s hard to believe now but the move to engage Turner was met with strong opposition at the time and one of the most successful advertising campaigns in world sport could have been shelved if Arthurson and Quayle hadn't stood firm.
“We knew at this stage of expansion that the biggest problem we had was that the game was played by men and supported by men, and we wanted to change that image to attract women,” Quayle said.
“That became the anthem of the game, but when the news broke that Tina Turner - a black American grandmother - was going to promote the game of league, you lot in the media all went ballistic.
“Bill Mordey, Peter Frilingos and Geoff Prenter all just said, ‘you’re kidding’.
Ken got a phone call from Rex Mossop, who said, ‘tell me, Arko, that’s not going to happen’.
“They were going to pull that commercial, but Ken said the management of the league, led by John, and [advertising company] Hertz Walpole are confident this would change our image and as much as people will criticise it, I think we should give it a go. The rest is history.”
A world view
Arthurson moved into the chairman’s role after two decades in charge of Manly, during which the club became one of the most successful on the field – winning premierships in 1972, 1973, 1976 and 1978 – and powerful off it.
In many ways, the now 94-year-old, was poacher turned game-keeper and he was able to use his relationships with club powerbrokers to convince them of the merits of some of the decisions the game made under his and Quayle’s control.
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“I knew that I was in trouble on many occasions when I would get an early morning phone call from Ken, saying, ‘mate I need to talk to you’, because I knew the backlash that was coming from people ringing Ken,” Quayle said.
The two of us had a wonderful relationship but we had some fights.
"I would say ‘we are going to have to do this’, and he would say, ‘no mate you can’t do that’, and then he would come back to me and say, ‘are you sure’.
“When we started to make changes, Ken always allowed it to be challenged but then if the facts were there, he would support it and so did the board.”
Arthurson was also chairman of the International Board, and he and Quayle were determined to see the game prosper around the world, as well as in Australia.
“We took State of Origin to Melbourne, we took State of Origin to America. We wanted to break into America, but we didn’t have the money, and we didn’t have the support of an organisation like FOX, or News Corp, at that time,” Quayle said.
“We wanted to promote the game on an international level and Ken led that. Everything was working on an international stage, with 80,000 at games at Wembley and the [Kangaroo] tours.
“Then the Super League fight happened and that destroyed Ken - and both of us really. The fight was about pay television, not about anything else, but again that’s history. In my eyes the game was always great, and it is great today.”