Luke Lewis’ mum reflects on riding the highs and lows of her son’s respected rugby league career
LUKE Lewis’ retirement meant so much to the rugby league community, but it meant so much more to his mother who was in his corner during every high and low of his career, writes Paul Kent.
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THE job is almost done now. The man she raised, to do what he always wanted to do, has nearly done it.
She should be feeling elation.
It turned out so well.
She remembers her time as a young single mum, raising a small boy and his sister on not much at all and all the boy ever wanted to do was play footy.
Her brother played footy, her son was always around the game.
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At school the teachers asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.
“I want to play footy for Australia,” he said.
The dreams of small boys are always big. It is the magic of small boys, after all.
“I never doubted him,” she says.
“I don’t know why. I just ...
“I was a single mum, I said you better knuckle down, it only happens to one in a million ...”
She knew how tough life could get. There were times it kicked you in the guts and left you no option but to get up and get on with it and show your kids the person you want them to be and so — what other option did she have? — she got on with it.
“I was robbing Peter to pay Paul back in those days,” Sharon Harrison says.
Sometimes, kids get lucky. For Luke Lewis, you could say he was born lucky.
His mum worked in supermarkets and anywhere else she could pull a wage.
She gave him her appetite for hard work and reward, and he caught on early.
She cannot recall him ever once not wanting to go to training.
This, for the boy who got hit with chicken pox as a small boy and insisted he still must go to training.
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He couldn’t, she told him, he was sick and infectious.
“So we went to training and sat in the car and he watched his team train,” Sharon says.
“He just wanted to be there.”
Sometimes, the mother’s sacrifice goes unnoticed.
He began playing Under-7s when he was still four. By the time he finally reached his age limit he began playing up a year.
“He’d play the game and we’d race from one field to the next so he could in the next game,” she says.
“Sevens then the eights, eights then the nines.”
He missed all the big junior rep sides when he was young but the dream remained big.
He was far from discouraged. He still wanted to be a footballer.
Then he came home one night at the end of the 2001 season with news he made it.
He was 18 and on the bench for the Melbourne game.
Something goes through a mother at this point. The elation of a dream realised.
It was beginning to happen, and it truly was just the beginning. By 2003 he was integral to the Panthers and they went on a roll they still talk about today, winning the minor premiership and then premiership after beginning the season as 100-1 outsiders.
A Kangaroo tour followed at the end of the season and it all began happening quickly.
She supported him wherever she could.
She flew to New Zealand to watch him play the Warriors. To Townsville to play the Cowboys.
By then she had met a man and married him, a good man named Gary Harrison. Hard work was bringing the reward.
They moved into a new home. She took a phone call from Luke one day.
“Have you checked your mortgage?” he asked.
She was stunned.
“That’s thanks,” he said.
More games for Australia. He gets picked for the Blues.
He runs on to Suncorp Stadium one night and she watches him looking around the grandstand.
She whistles, his head turns, he spots her.
It’s a whistle he grew up with.
“He just grown up with it,” she says.
“I’d give him a whistle and he’d find me in the grandstand and he’d know ... you’re going ok, you need to lift you game ...”
He signed with Cronulla and it confused her. She was a Penrith girl. Brad Izzard grew up down her street. She always followed the Panthers. Could she support Cronulla?
Her son remembers the time Izzard spoke to his team and asked who was the most talented?
“Talent won’t make it,” Izzard said when a hand went up. “The one who works the hardest will make it.”
It was nothing he needed to say to Lewis, who saw it every day in his mother. Still, it stayed with him, and when he finally said goodbye to Penrith she followed him to Cronulla.
He was married and moving on in his life but still she made every game.
At Cronulla he bought her a private box. Now she could watch the game in style.
Life was changing. It was filled with fun and good memories.
“He has made it that I’ve never wanted for anything,” she says.
“In the beginning, I never thought it would have ended like this.
“Luke got his dream and I ended up with someone who was decent and was there for my kids. Gary has given them everything they ever needed.”
Was it any wonder he was so popular. If you have made it with him he calls you “Groover”.
There are 40 different Groovers around the game. All good fellas.
The regard he is held is what makes her proudest.
“He seems to have a lot of time for a lot of people,” she says.
“Both my kids do.”
Then it all changed.
Earlier this season he was doing a pool session, recovery, and he popped his head out of the water with one cold and foreign thought.
“I don’t want to do this anymore.”
He called his mum and told her.
“Are you geeing me up?” she said.
He was serious.
“I cried my eyes out,” she says.
“It’s been a great ride but ... what am I going to do now?
“It’s very emotional for me. I’ve had a week to think about it before he made it public.”
But the elation is not there, not like it might be. For nearly 30 years he has played footy and dreamed, and made the dream real, and she was there for every step.
“I really can’t put my finger on it,” she says.
What she feels is loss.
“Maybe because I didn’t have a lot and I’ve watched him get what he wanted and its going to be over.
“I just hope he got everything he wanted out of it.”
He got that. Some might say he got more than that.
TIME FOR NRL TO OPEN UP AND JUSTIFY MASS EXPENSES
THE NRL is becoming expert at releasing good news, seemingly for the reason of receiving positive publicity.
What is the strategy for America, after the NRL announced this week it was considering taking the Australia-Tonga Test match to New York, which comes after a Test in Denver last month?
There has been no clear message from the NRL what the junkets to America are meant to achieve.
Is it to build participation across the country?
Is it to build a television audience?
Is it to build brand awareness?
Whatever the answer is, and the NRL will surely come up with only one (it would be embarrassing to agree to them all) then what is the strategy, working backwards, to achieve that?
So far, no strategic plan has been revealed to justify why the NRL is spending so much money, which is odd given the way some inside headquarters were deathriding the success of the England-New Zealand Test.
So what else do they have in mind besides airfares and luxury accommodation a private boxes filled with backslappers?
When the Australian Rugby League Commission told club bosses earlier this year that the Kiwis would play England in Denver, then-chairman John Grant was asked why the game was being played in Denver?
Why not somewhere like Los Angeles, with its huge ex-pat population and where some Hollywood A-listers might be talked into attending for extra publicity.
“No idea,” Grant said.
Why Denver, where the Colorado Rockies were playing right next door?
Mostly, how much money is being spent on taking games to America, and for how much financial return, with no strategic plan, while bush football is grossly under-funded and slowly dying.
It really is shameful administration.
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Originally published as Luke Lewis’ mum reflects on riding the highs and lows of her son’s respected rugby league career
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