Graeme Langlands’ legacy under a cloud

GRAEME Langlands’ reputation around rugby league was crusty and tough. But now there is a far darker shadow hovering over him.

Graeme Langlands faces six charges of indecent treatment of a child.

THE day it was all to begin I called Johnny Lewis to organise a time to talk about this book we were going to write and he told me he was having coffee in the morning with Chang and to meet them at the first coffee shop at the top of Erskineville Rd.

Chang was Graeme Langlands, obviously, and the first thing he said when he sat down at the table the next morning was he could not believe somebody was going to do a book on Lewie, as he called him, because that was the role he played.

Every morning was a complaint and a laugh, and even the coffee became its own character.

“Paul,” Johnny said in a call one evening, “we’re not at the same coffee shop tomorrow. We’re at the next one down.”

“Everything okay?” I said.

“Chang’s got the shits because his coffee wasn’t hot enough this morning so he’s barred it.”

We met at the next coffee shop down, every morning, for several more weeks. Very little interviewing got done as a thousand old stories got told and Langlands played to character, grumpy and short and likeable. I told him I was going to put him in the book.

One morning a slight rain fell and he pushed his coffee away, a look of disgust crossing his face and Johnny rolled his eyes because he knew what was coming.

“Coffee’s cold,” Langlands said.

The following morning we met at the next coffee shop down, the previous one barred too. By the time we got ­finished we’d gone all the way down Erskineville Rd, back to the top and halfway down again.

His reputation around the game was crusty and tough.

But now there is a far darker shadow hovering over Langlands, who has been charged with six counts of indecent treatment of a child under 16 on the Gold Coast in the 1980s.

Graeme Langlands faces six charges of indecent treatment of a child.

Langlands was not the hero of my childhood. His was the era before I fell in love with rugby league but I grew up hearing about him and the Dragons and Raper and Gasnier and Provan and it was easy to believe they could be so good because the stories were so large.

They were mythic.

A modern conversation that often jumps from the mouths of athletes is about their legacy and what they are trying to leave behind.

Legacy is the sum of your actions. It is for others to decide what that is.

It helped that Langlands played in an era where the game survived on imagination.

The Dragons played most often Saturdays at the SCG where the match of the round was always held and they played in front of crowds of about 10,000 to 15,000 until they got to the big end-of-year games.

For much of it there was no television and so the greatness of them all belonged in the imagination. Stories that originated from witnesses or pictures created from the words on radio and they grew larger with each telling.

The game was built on such legends. It is remembered that way, and Langlands left a legacy that needed to be corrected.

Graeme Langlands played in an era where the game survived on imagination.

When the original Immortals were named in 1981 the judges locked themselves away in a hotel room at the Wentworth and whittled down a list of a hundred names until they got deadlocked on the five that were left.

They knew they could name only four.

The stalemate lasted for hours until the four Immortals were named: Clive Churchill, Reg Gasnier, Johnny Raper and Bob Fulton. The fifth, the one who missed the last cut, was Langlands.

There was always a feeling Langlands deserved to be there so in 1999 Rugby League Week launched a competition to pick the next Immortal even though it was nothing more than a boat race to give ­Langlands his due.

The only surprise was when Wally Lewis was also named.

Now, when all this gets resolved legally, the game will have to decide what to do.

Off-field character was never a consideration for the Immortals process.

Langlands was a vocal critic when Andrew Johns was named the eighth Immortal after Johns admitted using social drugs during his career.

Nobody ever picked too hard through Langlands’ background.

The Immortals has all changed, though.

The NRL bought the award from Rugby League Week to link it more closely to the game and the use of social drugs against such charges as ­Langlands is facing is entirely different.

Now, that legacy gets rewritten again and there will never be any coming back from it.

Langlands remained in the game right up until his health took ill, mostly because of his status as an Immortal.

Graeme Langlands has been battling dementia.

Some years back I sat down at my table at the Dally M Awards and around the table were Langlands and his partner, Raper and wife Carol, Wally Lewis’ sons Lincoln and Mitch, myself and Paul ­Langmack.

“I’m just thinking,” Langmack said, “by the end of the night I reckon one of us might be an Immortal.”

Langlands looked across the table.

“Last page,” he said.

“I had to read that whole bloody book to see my name in it because you waited until the last bloody page to put it in.”

I don’t know the truth of what happened on the Gold Coast back in the early 1980s, or of the allegations in the fact sheet tendered in court. Langlands’ friends and family are shocked but this means nothing, of course. A key characteristic of many sexual predators is an outward appearance of normality.

Those who know the truth are a woman in Queensland and a man with dementia in a nursing home.

It is quite probable Langlands will never properly understand the nature of the charges against him let alone be able to competently defend himself against them and so how that plays out in court ­remains to be seen.

It rests with the weight of evidence.

If the allegations are true then it is unforgivable.

Either way, it is now inevitable there will be a murky postscript to a life that was once going to be remembered very differently.

Originally published as Graeme Langlands’ legacy under a cloud