And what about Wendell Sailor?
GL: Don’t ask me about that. Sure, he’ll try his heart out, but I can’t understand St George’s thinking. They let so many young blokes go and then they pick up someone who’s 32. Why would you do that?

JR: Oh, you know … We all get in trouble at times, don’t we? I know he won’t do it again. His sentence has been too hard for him, the embarrassment’s been too much for him. He’ll lift his game.

What’s the most irritating part of the game today?
JR: The scrums. Shithouse. Bloody terrible. In the old days, you’d pack in the scrum and stay in the scrum. Even a bloke like myself, a lock, had to stay in the scrum. And in those days, we used to see the wingers score more tries than what we do today. Look at blokes like the great Reg Gasnier or Harry Wells or Kenny Irvine - they would’ve been stuck today. Unless you pack a scrum and keep those bloody pigs in the scrum, we won’t see it again.

GL: A good point there is that most tries are now scored from kicks. There are no moves any more. We used to always go through our moves. We’d have half a dozen in the forwards and a dozen in the backs, and that’s how we’d score tries - unless someone like Reg Gasnier would get the ball and off he’d go … But there was none of that kicking game and I think that’s taken a lot out of the league.
But the game’s nothing like it was years ago. Back then, anything went. I’m glad the head-highs have gone. But then again, a lot of things they pull ‘em up for now … Fair dinkum, they’ll be wearing skirts soon. Sometimes I’m watching a game and I think, ‘What the bloody hell was that penalty for?’ It’s embarrassing sometimes, what they get pulled up for …

Do you reckon the players today have as much fun as you blokes had?
JR: Well, the world today, with all the modern technology, with the cameras and everything, it just doesn’t allow them to do what we used to do. We used to get away with plenty in my day – don’t worry about that. I used to have a good time. Life was about having a good time for me. A real good time. But I never had cameras following me around the whole joint. I used to go up the Bourbon, I used to know all the characters up there, all the film stars, all the singers, all that sort of thing. But the press didn’t follow us around. The pressure wasn’t on me like it’s on these young blokes today.
But, then again, when you look at these young blokes, with the amount of money they’re getting … If you were the executive of a company, earning that sort of money, and you carried on, you’d get the sack. They’ve not only got to be stronger, they’ve got to be wiser than we were in the old days.

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