Ahead of Johnathan Thurston’s final NRL game, we look back an his inspirational journey
FROM a skinny kid too small for the Broncos to a once-in-a-generation player, from the very beginning there was one person who believed Johnathan Thurston’s determination to succeed.
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“WAIT till you see the mongrel in my son”.
Debbie Thurston is talking to former Canterbury Bulldogs first-grader Mark Hughes, the first NRL recruitment chief to show interest in her son Johnathan.
It is 2001 and the Thurston family have been flown to Sydney to thrash out the $5000 contract that will change their lives and spawn a rugby league legend.
They meet at a Chinese restaurant in Chester Hill, the western Sydney suburb deep in the heart of Bulldogs territory that produced Canterbury playmaking great Terry Lamb.
Now Hughes is working on another Bulldogs gem.
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Amid the spring rolls, dim sims and fried rice, Thurston sits quietly.
He has just turned 18. Hughes has been tracking the kid from the Brisbane suburb of Sunnybank for the best part of 18 months, prepared to put his footballing judgment ahead of the incessant criticism of the skinny kid sitting before him.
Hughes is aware of the street-corner whispers from rival footy scouts about Johnathan Dean Thurston. Too small. Too slow. A ratbag off the field. Too risky.
Debbie, a one-time indigenous police-liaison officer who doesn’t mince words, puts Hughes at ease.
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“I remember talking to his mum and she said, ‘Mark, he has mongrel’,” recalls Hughes, who staved off late challenges from the Roosters and St George Illawarra to secure Thurston’s signature.
“From the moment I saw Johnathan as a teenager, he just had a determination to succeed. His mum saw it. That was his greatest trait.”
Fast forward 17 years and the words of a mother who best knows her son have been vindicated.
When Thurston runs onto Cbus Super Stadium for the Cowboys against the Titans this Saturday night at Robina, the NRL fraternity will stop to admire a living, breathing paragon of greatness one last time.
Thurston will play his 294th and final game in North Queensland colours.
After 322 NRL matches, including his three-season tenure at Canterbury, 37 Origin games, 38 Tests for Australia, four Dally M Medals and two premierships 11 years apart, the 35-year-old will punch out another 80 minutes, then fight back tears as he walks down the Robina tunnel into a confronting world of retirement.
Thurston accepts this, his 2018 swan song, has not been the type of fairytale afforded other NRL stars. He won’t win a premiership. He won’t play finals.
But when 27,000 fans at a sold-out Cbus Super Stadium rise as one to applaud Thurston, his legacy — and personal evolution — will stand as his greatest triumph.
“I am getting a little bit emotional thinking about it,” Thurston says of his NRL farewell.
“Speaking to past players, what they miss is the locker room and savouring those moments, so I’m taking all that in.
“I’m extremely touched by all the attention I’ve had.”
After all, is it fanfare Thurston rarely received in his formative years. His love for the game was stoked as a five-year-old when he would watch his father Graeme, who has Maori blood, from the sidelines, earning $1 as a ball boy.
But the love wasn’t reciprocated. When he was 15, Brisbane Broncos talent chiefs put the red line through him at a schoolboys carnival, with one scout’s report card saying simply: “Too skinny”.
But amid the visible skin and bone, the formidable intangible was Thurston’s mongrel. Hughes scoffs at suggestions he lacked ability as a teenager.
“People who say he couldn’t play, that’s not right,” Hughes says.
“Johnathan was small, very small, but in those early years I never ruled any kid out based on size.
“Johnathan had all the skills. There were no guarantees of course, but he had a step. He probed. He had the courage you see today.
“Most importantly, he had that fire in the belly.”
Thurston’s physical maturation, and indeed spiritual reformation, is a journey not without heartache.
While he is now feted at the Cowboys, as much as a poster boy for his football talent as his burgeoning passion for indigenous affairs, there was a time when the club wanted to sack Thurston.
In September 2010, he was arrested in Brisbane’s CBD for an alcohol-related incident at Brisbane’s Treasury Casino, just 2km from Suncorp Stadium, the scene of so many of his Origin heroics.
The seven-man North Queensland board voted, by majority, to tear up Thurston’s contract.
But there were two powerful dissenters. Cowboys chairman Laurence Lancini and football operations chief Peter Parr went to war with the board, declaring if Thurston was sacked, they would walk out with him.
Amid the drama, Thurston’s management spent $4400 hiring a private investigator, who accessed CCTV footage of the casino incident.
His report, which was tabled to the board and cleared Thurston of any wrongdoing, convinced the Cowboys board to give him a second chance.
When he was released by Brisbane police, Thurston flew home to Townsville. Ashamed, he looked at Parr and Lancini and uttered two words: “Never again”.
“That was the turning point for Johnathan in his career. That is why he is now a champion of the game,” Lancini recalls.
“I just disagreed with it because as young people we all make mistakes. I just felt Johnathan needed another chance.
“I wasn’t going to stand there and let us kick him out the door.
“The episode was a real wake-up call. From that point on I knew ‘JT’ would be committed to becoming a great player and ambassador for the game.”
Thurston’s metamorphosis has extended to his on-field growth. It is as much physical — Thurston is some 25kg heavier than his teen years — as tactical.
“JT has evolved as a playmaker,” says former NSW and Test pivot Matthew Johns.
“When I first saw him, he was like a rabbit looking for a hole in a barbed-wire fence. He was a ducker and a darter and a good runner of the ball, but he evolved slowly into a brilliant game manager.
“I remember watching the 2013 Indigenous All Stars game. He put attacking formations around him. He wasn’t rushed. He was in total control. I thought, ‘Yes, this is a bloke entering his peak years as a champion’.
“He has played in an era where it has never been more difficult to be excellent. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was barely any video analysis of our greatest playmakers. Now, players watch footage from every angle. There are no secrets … and yet Thurston has continued to find ways to dominate.”
Now, the Cowboys’ big dog is ready for one last scrap. Even without the fairytale, he is up for the fight. Blame the mongrel in him.
“I never thought it would finish like this,” Thurston said.
“But I’m not naive enough to think all dreams come true. I’m just blessed and very lucky to have had a career like this.
“I’m savouring what is left … one game to go.”
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