Fifty years of televised Australian Rugby
Bugger Gordon Bray, here's to the REAL voice of Australian Rugby!!! :cheers:
I really hope the bring Norman in to guest commentate the first ARC fixture this year.
The day rugby was a vision in b&w
Greg Growden
Friday, April 6, 2007
Ruck & Maul
Fifty years ago to the day, a vital moment in the history of Australian Rugby occurred. On April 6, 1957, several trellis tables were erected on the sideline on the railway side of Chatswood Oval, big cumbersome television cameras were situated strategically around the ground, and several ABC employees looked nervously at large microphones placed in front of them.
Club footy was ready to enter the modern age. The first live telecast of an Australian rugby match was about to begin. The Gordon and Manly reserve-graders ran on to the field, with the first person to call the action being none other than Australia's "Gold, Gold, Gold" master of sporting commentary, Norman May.
May was edgy. Only a few weeks earlier, he had been involved in his first commentary for the ABC - covering a surf carnival. Now he had been enlisted to call the reserve-grade action with Mick Cremin, with the microphone handed over to Dick Healey and Cyril Towers for the first-grade match. His memories of that day - which basically transformed his professional career - remain vivid.
"It was vastly different to rugby broadcasting today," May said yesterday. "It was a three-camera coverage in black and white with no video replay. After calling the reserve grade, I rushed straight over the road to the Gordon Rugby Club, where they had a room with a little 17-inch TV set, and it was packed with all the lower-graders who were milling around watching the main game."
They were rudimentary times. Behind the Chatswood Oval grandstand, a producer, assistant and five audio and technical people were crammed into the production van, sending the pictures back to the Gore Hill studios via microwave dish. As the signal required "line of sight" contact to the Gore Hill tower, Chatswood Oval was fine. However, when they telecast from Coogee Oval, ABC technicians had to put an extra relay dish on a block of flats at Taylor Square to ensure the broadcast went ahead.
For May, that Chatswood Oval afternoon began a 22-year association with rugby - he called more than 600 matches for the ABC.
And from the start, he discovered the bureaucratic nightmare that is the ABC. Shortly after that first broadcast, May was summoned to the office of Healey, who doubled as the ABC's sports supervisor for NSW. As Bill McGowan recalled in the book, The Australian Rugby Companion, Healey was unimpressed that May had claimed a six-mile vehicle allowance to travel from the ABC's William Street offices to the North Shore.
"Why are you claiming six miles' allowance, when I only claim five miles?" Healey asked May.
"That's OK for you, Mr Healey, but at least I own a car."
When May was reminded of that incident yesterday, he laughed uproariously. It prompted him to recall numerous other funny moments wandering around the Sydney club rounds, microphone in hand. Such as the time in the 1960s when he was left speechless after Sydney University had won a major finals match. May rushed on to the field, and had started interviewing the Uni skipper, when a group of students jumped the fence, lifted the captain on the shoulders, carried him away, leaving May on his lonesome.
For more than a decade, May worked with Towers, before teaming up in the 1970s with Trevor Allan. Allan and May became a close partnership, with May understandably saddened by the Wallabies captain's recent death.
One of his most vivid memories of working with Allan occurred off the field.
"We were up in Brisbane in 1971 covering the Springbok Test, and staying in the same hotel as the touring team," May said. "Outside the hotel, which was on top of a hill, were hundreds of protesters, shouting out slogans demanding the South African tour be stopped because the team were a bunch of racists.
"The local coppers started marching down the street, until a sergeant yelled into a loud hailer: 'You have one minute to disperse, otherwise we will take action.' Of course, the demonstrators took no notice. The cops just walked across the road and pushed the demonstrators down the hill.
"After that, Trevor and I walked down to the RSL club for a beer, and a joker walked in with a black T-shirt, jeans and blood dripping off him. He said to us: 'Those rotten bastards. Those Queensland coppers. I'm a plain-clothes cop and I'm standing in the crowd, holding up my badge, and they just pushed me over the hill as well."'
May remains an avid rugby follower, and has seen all of the great performers of the past 60 years. When asked to pick a team of the best Australian players he had seen since his first call in 1957, May readily agreed.
The "May XV" is:
1. Jon White,
2. Phil Kearns,
3. Ewen McKenzie,
4. Steve Cutler or Rob Heming,
5. John Eales,
6. Jules Guerassimoff,
7. Willie Ofahengaue,
8. Mark Loane,
9. Ken Catchpole,
10. Mark Ella,
11. Brendan Moon,
12. Tim Horan,
13. Stirling Mortlock,
14. David Campese,
15. Roger Gould.
And the best player he had seen: "Easy ... Catchpole."
