The Newtown Jets vs Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles minor semi-final at the Sydney Cricket Ground is two minutes old when the game’s first scrum erupts into what will forever be referred to as the ugliest all-in brawl in Australian top-grade rugby league.

“We didn’t speak about putting the blue on, but the blue happened because of me and Manly and what we were about,” Jets’ then halfback Tommy Raudonikis would remember later in an interview for a video clip celebrating the sport’s centenary in 2008.

“Mark Broadhurst clashed with Steve Bowden after the scrum, who gave Broadhurst the two best head-butts you’ve ever seen,” the feisty stalwart remembered.

Legendary TV commentator Rex Mossop’s call of the all-in brawl sounds like he’s describing a boxing bout rather than a ball sport: “There are three separate groups fighting. Broadhurst handling Bowden, Bowden a left. They’re going about it hammer and tong – like two heavyweight fighters, these two. And on the quarter line, another melee, five or six involved ... What’s going to be the upshot of all this? Is it going to be a scrum, a penalty? It’s a penalty to Newtown ... Well, I don’t know how he gets a penalty out of that lot. And I’ll never know.”

Manly prop Broadhurst ends up with, according to Mossop, “two black eyes, by the look of it”, while Newtown front-rower Bowden and Manly’s Terry Randall are marched off by referee John Gocher for head-butting and kneeing respectively.

Just as cultural, political and sporting figures grow in legend year by year (Ned Kelly, Don Bradman etc.) so too the Newtown/Manly “all-in” will be ever-uglier as the decades tick over. Today, many of us watch this and similar incidents from Australian footy’s (pick your code) 1960s, ’70s and ’80s with a heightened awareness of what physical damage and psychological trauma a punch to the head can cause.

Everybody find a partner! (Image via YouTube)

Some of us shudder, but there are many who miss the days of landing on the couch, beer in hand and witnessing not just athletic freaks of nature, but some of the gnarliest, toughest men ever to lift their knuckles off the ground.

There will never be another John “Dallas” Donnelly, the Wests Magpies’ larrikin of the ’70s and ’80s who became edgy (epileptic fits and all) whenever he skipped his medication. Likewise, the mould was broken when Leigh Matthews – Hawthorn’s tough, ruthless and physically unparalleled brute of the late ’60s to the mid-’80s – entered the world. People went to the footy to see these guys hurt the same way petrol heads flock to speedways to watch the shrapnel-spreading demolition derby.

Today, it’s important to consider the legalities of delivering people what they paid for (chaotic violence at $40 a ticket) in the sphere of the law of the outside world. Many think law-enforcement stops at the turnstiles, with whatever happening on the field long-forgotten when that first stubby (or these days lolly snake) is consumed after the siren.

A stray head butt kicked pleasantries off all over again. (Image via YouTube)

But the law is everywhere, keeping an eye on everyone, whether they’re the star halfback landing a get-square for that earlier love tap, or some drunk fan ready to hurdle the fence and throttle the opposing full-forward because he hates his guts.

Even today, the jury is still out on whether everyone is convinced that this violent, punch-happy era disappeared for good. When the NRL last year banned punches forever a few seasons back, plenty of fans and players vented their frustration on social media and the various footy discussion panels, proclaiming the authorities were taking the “manliness” out of the game, and that “they’re trying to turn the game into netball”.

Really? If this is what netball is like, I’m getting tickets …

Dr Rex Mossop diagnosed Manly’s Mark Broadhurst with TWO black eyes ... (Image via YouTube)

(Originally published as “A History Of Violence” in Inside Sport magazine, October 2014).