"Stabbed in the Nuts": An extract from The Milk
We'll get a big match preview up on Friday ahead of the Tigers game but for now a little bullishness about destiny in the finals and an extract from Chapter Six of the Milk about our man Stick.
I WATCHED the 1991 grand final in the downstairs bar at Raiders Club in Mawson and it was clear in the second half that the Raiders would lose. Paul Dunn, Mark Geyer, Paul ‘Nobby’ Clarke and Brad Izzard were fairly hurling themselves at the Canberra line again and again. Greg Alexander’s kicking pinned the Raiders like bugs in their dead ball. And when Canberra did have the Steeden, Ricky Stuart and Laurie Daley couldn’t kick it far enough away.
Stuart’s groin was off the bone. He shouldn’t have played. He couldn’t train. Before each match he’d get a needle in his groin. At half-time he’d get another one. “You could hear the screams coming from the doctor’s room,” Mal Meninga said on the Queenslanders Only television program.
Stuart had had groin surgery after the 1990 Kangaroo Tour but it hadn’t worked. He and Tim Sheens headed to Sydney on a secret mission to see a specialist. The doctor told the pair that Stuart could have surgery and sit out the season or play every game with a needle – one before the match and one at half-time. The doctor added that the needles would hurt. A lot.
Sheens told the doctor that he wanted to get the injection, too, to see how bad the pain was because he was concerned for Stuart, according to Stuart in Rugby League Week.
“The doc said, ‘Ethically, I can’t do that, but if you insist, I will. So I went first … he whipped out this massive needle and it felt like someone had stabbed me in the nuts with a screwdriver.
“Tim saw the look on my face and said, ‘Well, doc, if it’s unethical I don’t want you to risk your career’ and he wimped out … I still give him a hard time about that,” Stuart said.
So yes - a tough bit of kit, Stick.
Growing up he’d played league for Queanbeyan United and rugby for his school, famous St Edmund’s College. The brothers had seen Matt Giteau, David Furner and George Gregan. They’d seen Carlton legend Alex Jesaulenko. But ask any of them, they’ll tell you: Stuart was the greatest schoolboy footballer they’d ever seen.
Aged 20 he toured Argentina with the Wallabies, this pup from the poor cousin province, ACT. He returned, played some trials for Manly Marlins before he was poached by Canberra Raiders.
And from there, well ...
If Andrew Johns and Johnathan Thurston are equal top the list of Greatest Halfbacks There’s Ever Been, Stuart sits on the next rung in the post-war pantheon with Peter Sterling, Allan Langer, Keith Holman, Billy Smith, Steve Mortimer, Tom Raudonikis, Cooper Cronk. You’d be leaving out Alexander. Of the sevens today he’d be equivalent of Nathan Cleary: if he doesn’t play, Canberra don’t win the premiership as they did not in 1993 when Stuart did his knee. Yet he did win as many premierships as Johns (two) and Thurston (one) combined. So, there is that.
Stuart did things on the footy field Wally Lewis couldn’t do. In days of fat leather footballs Stuart fairly launched the Steeden downtown, mighty spiralling torpedo punt kicks dropped from beautiful soft hands onto a mighty right boot. Boom - they soared through the crisp, high Canberra air; you could almost hear them fizz.
His long-passing was, perhaps, the best the game’s ever seen. Daley and Gary Belcher and his highness, Meninga, just waited, far out there in the backline for Stuart to hoick them the ball. He had the hands of Mark Ella on the wrists of Jean-Claude Van Damme. He could fling a wombat across Queanbeyan.
And yet his greatest trait was borderline insane competitive spirit.
“He’s never been a good loser,” long-time mate Gary ‘Fritz’ McDonell says. “He just hates losing. Hates it. It’s what makes him such a prolific winner. He’s got a drive in him.
“We’d play pool at the Kingston Hotel for two bucks. You lose you pay for the next game. And Ricky would just about break cues if he’d lose. And it wasn’t for theatrics – he was that bloody disappointed he lost. Like, ropable. It talks to how competitive he was. He’d get beaten by a couple of knuckleheads playing for two bucks and take it to heart.”
Early in 1988 Stuart was living in Manly on Sydney’s northern beaches in a unit with Perry Smith (who’d follow Stuart to Canberra and play two games off the bench in ’89). Stuart had played three trials for Manly Blues (later Marlins), recruited by current President Cameron Douglas.
“He did a pre-season with us after the Wallabies’ tour of Argentina the end of 1987,” Douglas says. “But I went away for a 21st in the bush, got back and found a message on my machine to call him. Seems the leaguies had heard how good he was going and Canberra had signed him. Rugby’s loss!”
For the record, the local leaguies already knew.
For something to do in one of the lockdowns, Douglas named an all-time Best Manly Marlins XV and included Stuart in the No.9. It put local noses out of joint given it excluded club legend and Wallabies halfback Phillip Cox.
“It would always take a bloody good player to knock Phil Cox out of the starting XV,” Douglas wrote. “But Ricky Stuart is that player. Simply, he made the team because he was the best, most skilful and competitive bloke I ever played with.”
Stuart had told the Raiders that he’d be having a season of rugby with Manly in 1988. He also assured them that if any other rugby league clubs made him an offer, he would let the Raiders know. Sweet-talkin’ Keith Barnes at Balmain Tigers came a-calling. The money sounded good. Stuart let John McIntyre know. The Raiders made “an offer to good to refuse,” Stuart told The Manly Daily. He added that he was sorry for letting the club down but that he “[was] always going to play league one day.”
Manly coach Joe Rota was disappointed but said “if I was his age and received an offer like that, I would probably take it too.”
“He is a very nice youngster and a very hard worker at training so I think he will do well in rugby league,” Rota predicted.