Crash Tackle: How being a furniture removalist and $120 a week made Allan Langer a champion

If you thought Tom Raudonikis was a fierce force on a football field, you should have seen him with a tomato in his hand. It was all part of the era when a players were more than just footballers.

Pictured at the Ivory Tavern at Tweed Heads during the Origin sportsmans lunch Guest speaker Tom Raudonikis .Picture Mike Batterham

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Long after he stopped throwing great rugby league passes Tommy Raudonikis could still throw a great tomato.

The rugby league great used to mix coaching Ipswich in the 1980s with his fruit business at the Rocklea markets where he would frequently run into his former representative sparring partner turned great mate and rival Norths coach Greg Oliphant.

It was not unusual for one of the duo to ambush the other from behind a crate, hurling a tomato or three with accompanying sledges then vanishing to avoid retribution, all the while knowing payback time would come eventually.

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Tom Raudonikis worked at Rocklea markets.

They were back in the days when footballers and coaches mixed work and sport and they may yet be returning in the cost cutting tsunami certain to follow the coronavirus era.

Former Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy has already tipped there might be more of a “work and play” feel about the professional codes and if it does happen there will be many lessons for the new generation about life and all its challenges.

Before he was a rugby league star, the great Allan Langer was a furniture removalist for Waltons and was once accidentally tossed out of the van and rolled down an embankment near the Ipswich turn-off, somehow emerging unscathed to collect his $120 a week pay.

His pay later rose to $200 a week when he became a “Stop-Go'” sign holder for the Ipswich City Council and later a labourer, once quipping “Ipswich would not be the same without me. I built roads, footpaths, you name it.”

But those experiences, humbling though they were, taught Langer how to mix with older people, battlers, bruisers, the nameless and shameless and gave him an appreciation that no matter how painful a Broncos loss, a sweltering Ipswich day pouring hot tar was tougher.

During his life as a policeman, Wayne Bennett used to say the best thing about Sunday was Monday because no matter what sort of performance your football team put it, hard-nosed police life soon put it into perspective.

Allan Langer worked for Ipswich City Council.

Langer became one of the greats of the game.

There is a theory in modern sport the lack of great leaders and captains is partly due to the fact young sportsmen are not exposed to the tumble dryer of life's pressures outside their nurturing bubbles.

Fellow policeman Mal Meninga was the first rugby league player to break the $100,000 a season mark with Canberra in the 1980s yet kept working until the early 1990s because he liked the life balance.

Another policeman, fast bowler Luke Feldman, who recently retired after a decade-long stint with the Bulls, was remembered for a classic dressing room quote he once gave to a young fast bowler after a tough night in the field in a Big Bash game.

“I know you are disappointed but somewhere in Queensland tonight there is a police officer knocking on someone's door to tell them they have lost a loved one - that’s what I call a tough day,” he said.

It’s this type of “sport isn’t everything” perspective modern dressing rooms crave.

The most chastening moments at work were often a bonus for some sporting greats.

Wayne Bennett during a street demonstration in 1978.

One-time schoolteacher Ian Healy may never had a decade-long stint as Australia’s Test wicketkeeper had not he been exposed to a rebellious grade nine class at Kingston High School that initially drove him to tears.

The teacher before Healy lasted just six weeks before having a nervous breakdown but Healy, after some brutal exchanges doing nothing more than teaching them simple manners, won them over and was a stronger, wiser man for his rugged journey by the time he took the gloves for Australia a couple of years later.-