Wayne Bennett’s new book: Tears shed for broken marriage

There are two times in a new book when Wayne Bennett cries. One involves talking about his first love Trish.

Wayne Bennett with wife Trish during the master coach’s time at St George Illawarra

Rugby league super coach Wayne Bennett has broken his silence on the breakdown of his 42-year marriage and his secret affair, shedding tears as he described ex-wife Trish as a “special person”.

Bennett’s revelations come as his new long-term partner, Dale Cage, opened up on her own heartache, claiming she has been labelled a homewrecker and a victim of social-media abuse for the past seven years.

In a new book, The Wolf You Feed, written by Sydney sports journalist Andrew Webster and released on Monday, Bennett speaks for the first time about his bust-up with Trish, his two years of infidelity with Dale, and their roles in Australian sport’s bizarre love triangle.

The 73-year-old also shares intimate details of meeting Dale, the strength of Trish in largely caring for their two heavily-disabled kids and the repercussions of broken family bonds over the affair that shocked a nation.

“Nobody thought I’d do what I did,” Bennett says candidly.

His daughter Beth speaks with candour about her father’s obsession with rugby league, while Trish takes aim at former Broncos CEO Paul White for his role in the super coach’s sacking at Brisbane in 2018 amid the Bennett family fallout.

It’s a complex story with raw, complex threads, none more so than the relationship triumvirate that is Wayne, Trish and Dale.

Wayne Bennett with his wife Trish at the Broncos ball in 1992

THE BENNETT BOMBSHELL

In September 2016, Bennett announced he and Trish were separating after more than four decades of marriage.

They were seemingly Australia’s unbreakable couple. It was a sentiment fuelled by the ABC’s famous Australia Story profile on the Bennetts on May 3, 1999, when rugby league’s greatest coach opened up like never before, showing his softer side as he and Trish spoke of the challenges of raising two disabled kids, Justin and Katherine.

It was one of the most watched stories in Australian Story history. ABC producer Vanessa Gorman said Bennett reached “saintlike proportions” as Australians shed tears at the sight of tungsten-tough Wayne stroking his disabled son Justin’s hair.

So when Bennett confirmed he was leaving Trish, to begin a relationship with a mystery woman, later revealed as Dale Cage, 22 years his junior, the halo had slipped.

“That’s the whole key to it. Wayne Bennett was never supposed to do that, OK?” he says in his authorised biography, penned by leading sports journalist Andrew Webster.

Asked if the Judgement was hard to take, Bennett says: “No. Not hard to take at all.

“Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. We’re all entitled to make our own decisions, OK?

“If I made a decision that you think I shouldn’t have made, that’s not your business.

“You can use your own judgement on this.

“The journos have absolutely nothing on me. I’m not a punter. I’m not a drinker, I’m not a womaniser who has been in fights, blues, whatever.

“But in that moment (when he left Trish), there was a sense that this guy’s human.

“This guy is human so let’s give it to him now.

“It was way over the top.

“The people writing the stories had a shitload in their own closet. That’s the murky world we live in at times and I had to accept it and get on with life.”

THE AFFAIR

For the first time, Bennett confirms what was suspected – that he began a physical relationship with Cage while still married to Trish.

Bennett reveals he first met Cage late in 2013. He was coach of Newcastle. She was practice manager at a nearby office run by Newcastle doctor Neil Halpin, who would treat injured Knights players.

The Knights had suddenly stopped paying Halpin for his services. The NRL club was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Knights staff told Bennett about Halpin’s “cranky secretary” who had refused appointment because Newcastle weren’t paying their bills, so the coach tried to sort out the mess.

“I’m here to see Dale,” Bennett recalls in the book.

“Well, you found her,” she shot back. “But you might have to make an appointment because I’m going to lunch.”

“Oh, you’re Dale.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not what I was expecting.”

“What were you expecting?”

“Someone who was old and cranky.”

Webster writes Bennett joined her for lunch. The super coach, then 63, was, according to Cage, 41 at the time, “taken aback by my confidence”.

Four days later, Halpin’s bill was paid.

In the months that followed, Bennett would regularly pop up in Halpin’s waiting room holding two coffees.

“From then on, we became best friends,” Cage recalls. “There was an instant connection.”

Wayne Bennett with the other woman, Dale Cage

THE FALLOUT

In the book, Webster writes: “For years, Bennett had moralised about people’s behaviour, but in the eyes of many people, particularly those with an axe to grind, his unfaithfulness to Trish was the lowest of acts.

“For many, a switch had been flicked: Wayne Bennett, coach and former Father of the Year, was now just a man with a dirty secret, and the dirty secret was plastered all over the front of the Sunday rags.

“What about this bloke?” one of his former players said to the author. “It’s a disgrace that he has done this to Trish.”

When Bennett was sacked by Brisbane two years after his marriage breakdown became public, there was a view his off-field love dramas were impacting his work. Broncos insiders often referenced the Wayne soap opera. But Bennett hits out at suggestions his affair tainted his commitment to coaching.

“Dale was a distraction to everybody because nobody thought I’d do what I did,” he said.

“But it never stopped me from coaching.

“We made the 2015 grand final – I was taking her out then. We made the semi-finals the year after. The preliminary final the year after that. The Broncos didn’t like Dale, but they all knew Trish well. I get it.

“There were staff there who had been divorced. I wasn’t Robinson Crusoe. But there’s different rules for Wayne. There always has been. Wayne’s never been in that other place; he’s always been judged differently. That’s OK. He’s handled it.

“My players didn’t care. There was one person who put himself in that place of being the judge and jury.

“That’s the only person I can think of.”

Bennett refuses to name that person but the finger is often pointed at former Broncos boss White, the man who sacked the super coach by voicemail in December 2018.

The pair were friends for 34 years. A devout Catholic who attends mass every Sunday, White is married to long-time wife Angela, who remains a close friend of Trish Bennett.

But White refutes suggestions he sacked Bennett partly because of his off-field dramas.

“I’m not the moral police,” he says in the book. “I never made a moral judgement. I thought I was good support (for Wayne). He’s completely misinterpreted that.”

THE OTHER WOMAN

In the book, Webster describes Bennett and Cage as the ‘Brangelina’ of Brisbane.

The pair made their first public appearance at Brisbane restaurant Montrachet in March 2017, six months after Bennett announced his marriage with Trish was over.

“I was called a homewrecker,” Cage says. “They also misreported my age. I copped a lot of abuse online at the time and it’s still happening.

“No-one has asked me for my side of the story. It’s been really weird.

“All this stuff has been printed and said about me and I’m thinking, ‘Why has nobody rung me to fact-check or get my side of the story. Not one person. Maybe they were too scared to call me.”

The Sunday Mail has made several requests since late 2016 to interview Cage. She rejected every request.

Now 51, the mother of three says she struggled to come to terms with initial descriptions of her. They included secret blonde, buxom blonde, vivacious blonde and Benny’s blonde bombshell who was “a good sort, popular and fun”.

“All these labels that were being thrown around about me,” Cage says.

“I saw my face on the front page, the back page, the middle pages.

“The buxom blonde bombshell ... I’ve never recovered from that day.

“Whether it was my paranoia or not, I felt like I couldn’t walk down the street without feeling these things.”

It has been reported previously that Bennett and Cage have split several times. Both insist that is rubbish. Cage was by Bennett’s side at the Redcliffe Dolphins’ inaugural NRL awards night on Thursday night.

Cage believes she was never accepted by the Broncos because of the club’s loyalty to Trish. She says Bennett cannot go a single day without talking to her.

“He liked me to come to matches and functions, but I wanted to stay at home and be a hermit,” Cage says.

“Wayne’s very good at blocking out outside noise and just focusing on his job. But I had no idea. I was thrown into it.

“People picked a side and Wayne worked out quickly who his friends were, and who wasn’t.

“We can spend days together, and not do anything nor see anything, not get sick of each other.

“Then when we are apart, he’ll call me three or four times a day. From the time we’ve been together, he’s called me every morning and every night.

“He comes across as arrogant, but he’s definitely not that. He’s just shy – with very old-school values.”

Queensland Father of the Year Wayne Bennett and wife Trish in 1998

TRISH BENNETT

There are two times in the book when Wayne Bennett cries. One involves talking about his first love Trish.

The author had asked Bennett if he could assist in setting up an interview with his ex-wife.

“No,” Bennett said, lowering his head into his hands.

He then raises his head choking back tears.

“She’s a special person,” Bennett says of Trish.

Seven years after the split, the pair are not legally divorced. They have a private financial agreement to ensure their three children, mainly disabled Justin, now 46, and 41-year-old Katherine, never have to struggle.

It is understood Bennett and Trish still talk most days, mainly in relation to care requirements for Justin.

When former Broncos chairman Don Nissen died of cancer in 2022, it was Trish who called her ex-husband to pass on the sad news. Bennett calls her ‘T’ when he answers the phone.

“She is his North Star,” says Bennett’s daughter Beth.

“She still is. Without her, none of this (Bennett’s remarkable coaching career) happens.”

Trish’s closest friends have described her as a “saint”. In the Australian Story documentary, there is one segment where Bennett and son Justin are watching a replay of a Broncos-Souths game. Trish is beside Wayne, glasses on, behind a desk, studiously counting each tackle made by a Brisbane player and jotting it down on a piece of paper.

In the book, Trish declines to discuss Bennett’s affair, but says the key to their relationship, ironically, was her honesty with him.

“I tell him the truth,” she says. “I let him go away and think about it.

“People don’t always tell him what he needs to hear. Sometimes, he doesn’t see the real picture.”

Asked if Trish has ever spoken poorly about her father, Beth replies: “Never.”

BATTLING DISABILITY

It took more than 40 years for the Bennetts to get a formal diagnosis for their disabled son Justin.

In 2019, Justin was diagnosed with Dravet syndrome, a rare and lifelong form of epilepsy that begins in the first year of life.

In 1977, Justin had an allergic reaction to the whooping-cough vaccine. It was a one in 300,000 event.

Trish recalls Justin being four months old when he had his first seizure, which lasted two hours.

“That’s when brain damage occurred,” Wayne Bennett says. “With each seizure, he suffered more brain damage.”

Today, Justin is 110kg and wheelchair bound after undergoing a hip replacement. Bennett says he has about 30 tablets a day, but since the Dravet diagnosis, the seizures have eased.

During his most recent stint at the Broncos, Bennett had a mattress in his office in case Justin needed a sleep.

“It’s taken a long time to diagnose the epilepsy that he has,” Trish says. “He’s had all sorts of seizures.

“The worst drug for Dravet is Dilantin. Justin had been on it since he was 18 months old. It took us six months to wean him off that and since then, there’ve been no seizures.

“He was given to us to look after.”

Almost four years after Justin’s birth, sister Katherine arrived. She was born with arthrogryposis, a complex congenital condition that relates to thin, weak and atrophied joints and muscles throughout the body.

Wayne recalls walking into the delivery room to find a “mangled mess”.

“It was a shock because she was very twisted,” Trish says. “We’d never heard of the condition that she had, which is arthrogryposis. She had club feet. Her feet were sitting on her tummy. Her arms were extended because she couldn’t bend her elbows.

“People say to you all the time, ‘I don’t know how you do it’. You start to worry, ‘How do I do it?’

“You do it because you don’t have any choice. You want to go places but then Justin has a seizure and you can’t go. Anyway, that’s life.”

Wayne adds: “Justin doesn’t care about my dramas in life. He needs his dad and he needs to play a game of cricket now, and he needs me to be silly, and he needs me to laugh and cuddle him.

“I haven’t been able to come home and really brood and be sour and lock myself away. I tried to, but then Justin comes looking for me.”

Wayne Bennett in 1999 with son Justin and (rear, from left) wife Trish and daughters Katherine and Elizabeth

THE OTHER CHILD

Beth Ikin (nee Bennett) is entitled to have middle-child syndrome. Now 44, the mother of four is married to former Broncos premiership-winner Ben Ikin, whose relationship with his father-in-law became highly strained after revelations of Bennett’s affair.

While Justin and Katherine needed most care, Beth built a fortitude steeled by the sentiment that her famous father was wedded to two people _ Trish and rugby league.

“You get to an age when you start to realise that you’re coming second,” Beth says in the book, recalling Bennett leaving the family to embark on another football camp.

“There was always an open dialogue, but football was his whole world.

“If he didn’t talk about that, there was nothing else to talk about.”

When Bennett left the Broncos to join Souths in 2019, a Rabbitohs staffer spotted him writing on a birthday card.

“This is for one of my grandkids,” Bennett said. “My daughter (Beth) doesn’t talk to me anymore, but I still send them a card so they know I care for them.”

Bennett recently attended his grandson’s 21st birthday, but the super coach is not sure he will ever totally repair the cracks with Ikin.

He says Beth is like “talking to myself”, but her adoration for her mother is palpable.

“Maybe I can convince you to write a chapter called the X-factor and cross out the X and put a T (for Trish),” Beth says.

“Without her, even if he was single, he couldn’t have done what he’s done.

“We grounded him. When the pendulum shifted, and everyone loved him, he’d come home and get sledged by us.

“(Mum) looked after the house, made sure it was all tickety-boo. He could fully focus knowing he had a beautiful home to come back to, knowing that he could take off without missing a beat because mum made sure it all ran properly.

“The North Star.

“Rugby league is where he felt safest. Because it embraced him when nothing else in his whole world did.

“There was a certainty to it. You only grow out of that when you deal with your trauma, and I don’t think he has.

“He did a really good job of trying to grow out of it, and separate himself from it, but I don’t think he’s dealt with it.”

New Wayne Bennett book The Wolf You Feed

MAN IN THE MIRROR

The trauma to which Beth refers may have deep-seated roots in his alcoholic father Jim, who walked out on the family when Bennett was 12.

It could be the trauma of Justin and Katherine. Or the trauma of a broken marriage no-one saw breaking.

Whatever the trauma, it seems to drive Bennett, even today as Dolphins coach.

There’s another traumatic memory that drives him, one not even Trish knows about ... until now.

“I’m a policeman,” Bennett recalls.

“I’m on the corner of Queen and Edward Streets in Brisbane.

“I’m 20 years of age. I saw this young man selling newspapers on the corner.

“He was intellectually disabled: that’s how he got some income. He had a seizure, hit the gutter and busted his face open. I was there so I had to do something, get an ambulance.

“I was not to know that I was going to have an intellectually disabled son. I remember that guy every day of my life because I didn’t want my son to have nothing; to go out and do a job like that.

“It’s stayed with me all these years. Still now.

“All the things I have done have been for those two children of mine because I never want them to rely on the government when I’m not here.

“Because the government will let them down.

“Trish and myself, we’ve never let them down.

“That’s the thing that’s driven me. More than anything else in my life.”

The Wolf You Feed: Wayne Bennett – The Man, The Myth, The Mayhem by Andrew Webster. Macmillan Australia. RRP $36.99. Publishing September 12