Supporters of other sports might be inclined to dispute the perceived primacy of Rugby League, the greatest game of all according to the bloke who called the local football every Sunday on Townsville’s 4TO, but it’s hard to come up with a high profile sport that provided the possibility of seeing someone who had played at the highest international level going around in the local competition.
You could, should you be so inclined, head off to the hockey field and see dual Olympian (Rome and Tokyo) Merv Crossman going around, but hockey didn’t have the same profile, and while it seems to have been a sport with a high participation rate and a fairly enthusiastic following it didn’t dominate the local press the way that Rugby League did.
You might say the same about Soccer, particularly in regional centres with a strong migrant community, but you didn’t hear the soccer from wherever the local fixtures were played on 4AY, coming out of Ayr. You would, however, get the league call from Ayr’s Rugby Park.
Much of that prominence came from the fact that there was an annual succession of trial games that led up to State representation and the series of games against New South Wales that eventually (and with extreme reluctance on the New South Wales side of the state divide) morphed into State of Origin.
From around the Easter long weekend this succession of trial matches led gradually up to a Queensland jersey for someone like eighteen-year-old Kerry Boustead, who went from playing on the wing for Souths in Innisfail to become the youngest player selected for Australia and, a fortnight after his Test debut against New Zealand he was going around for North Queensland against the Kiwis at Townsville’s Sports Reserve.
Boustead, however, was the last player to go straight from playing in regional Queensland to national selection, and twelve months later the vortex that drew most of the up and coming talent into the Sydney and Brisbane club competitions had him playing on the wing for Easts in Sydney and pulling on a blue jersey in the interstate series.
That same vortex had already accounted for the remarkable situation where Australian players could actually move into regional centres and maintain their places in the national side. In an era when every other sport had ambitious youngsters heading for the metropolitan centres, there were Rugby League players heading in the opposite direction. They tended to be big robust forwards moving into the hotel business, and, in most cases, their best playing days were probably behind them, but you didn’t run across too many other examples of reverse migration among talented sportsmen.
Boustead, indeed, came right at the end of a remarkable era when local Rugby League delivered a viable competition with a definite regional hierarchy. Talking to Jimbo on the morning walk I ventured a question as to inter-town League back in his relatively brief stay in Hughenden.