‘I’m obviously having trouble growing up’ says embarrassed John Singleton of Finger Wharf 'fight’
JOHN Singleton speaks exclusively to Phil Rothfield about the images of him in a bizarre confrontation with mate Jack Cowin which he admits have embarrassed him for one of the few times in his life.
NSW
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JOHN Singleton picked up yesterday’s Daily Telegraph and was absolutely horrified.
“Anyone who would be happy about those photos being on the front page would have to be a lunatic,” he says, “I’m many things but I’m not a lunatic, although it might be hard to tell sometimes.”
JOHN SINGLETON FIGHT WITH JACK COWIN SUBJECT OF POLICE PROBE
The images of the multi-millionaire media man in a bizarre confrontation at Kingsleys Steak & Crabhouse on Woolloomooloo’s exclusive Finger Wharf with his mate Jack Cowin have embarrassed him for one of the few times in his life.
“I’m obviously having trouble growing up,” he says, “I really am.
“Maybe I need to lock myself up in a retirement home with a licensed bar and no photographers.
“We all do silly things. I’ve done silly things in the past and not been photographed. That’s the only difference this time.”
We’re sitting in cafe on the Central Coast with the Telegraph on the table as he starts explaining himself, flicking through the news pages until he gets to his double page of pictures.
“The photos look bloody terrible, “I’m sorry it’s in the paper.
“I don’t want my grandchildren to grow up with those sort of images.
“Billy is four, he’s Jack’s son and he saw me on TV this morning.
“He called out to his dad ‘pa’s on TV’ and it’s a bad look.
“Maybe I’ll have to only go out in private. Maybe I need a reality check.
“But I thought we had a great day. It was a very funny day.”
Singleton insists it was all a joke. Until the photographer arrived.
“We play physical jokes on each other all the time,” he said.
“I’d been bagging him about becoming a billionaire on the latest Forbes list and he’s bagging me about drinking Rose.
“He puts his arms around my neck and half chokes me.
“If Jack put you in a headlock you’d know what I was talking about.
“I didn’t break the glass — it fell off the table — and I picked it up.
“I know it looks bad but since when has it been wrong for mates to have a bit of fun.
“It doesn’t matter what age you are, you go out and have a bit of a laugh.”
He insists he was sober at the time of the incident.
“I’d only had two beers and half a bottle of wine,” he said. “Later on at the pub I got pissed.
“When I got home last night I said to my driver we should have more fun days like that.
“It was just so funny. A great day out. But then you realise in this day and age, the Finger Wharf is not the place to be doing that sort of stuff. Mind you everyone had left when it happened.”
I ask if it was as good as the Packer v Gyngell Bondi brawl last year, the last time two of Sydney’s rich and wealthy slugged it out in public. And also got sprung by a photographer.
“Not at all — they were seriously fighting — we were joking,” he said.
“I’m not silly enough to fight Jack Cowan. I’d give you every penny I own and back him if it was a serious blue. It would be a slaughter. I’m not that stupid.
“It was just a crook end to a great day. Neither of us are embarrassed because it was a nothing incident. I had no idea it could be made to look so terrible.”
Singleton has had much support from his legion of mates since the photos were published.
Johnny Raper and his wife Carol drove all the way from Miranda to the Central Coast and turned up on his doorstep unannounced to check he was okay.
Text messages arrived from the Johns brothers Andrew and Matthew while we were in the cafe.
Before we leave he gets Cowan, the Hungry Jack’s owner, on the phone.
“I listened to Ray Hadley this morning and he said these two old guys should be embarrassed,” Cowan said. “When’s there been a law that you can’t have a few laughs at lunch?
“Some of Johnny’s comments that followed didn’t help the cause.
“Then he went to the pub and got carried across the street. That’s Johnny’s type of way of geeing up the media.
“He’s got one quarter of the game left, there’s not much time in life.
“And you know he’s always going to make the most of it.”
A former wild man harks back to bad old days
John Lehmann and Janet Fife-Yeomans
OCKER radio man John Singleton’s violent long lunch at Woolloomooloo on Monday was a return to his wild days of the 1970s and 1980s.
“In his younger days he was a really volatile drunk,” his biographer Gerald Stone said yesterday. ‘‘He’d have a few beers and go off his head. He’s a very smart man, still is, but that is what he would do.’’
Mr Stone’s biography chronicles a series of violent confrontations. John Desmond Singleton was often “but an impulse away from disaster”, Mr Stone wrote in his book Singo: Mates, Wives, Triumphs, Disasters back in 2002.
‘‘Yesterday looks like a return to a chapter I thought he had closed,’’ Mr Stone said.
‘‘You have to remember he grew up in a time when pub fights were pretty normal in Australia — people didn’t sue.”
Mr Stone, a former executive producer of 60 Minutes, tells in the book how picking a fight was at the extreme end of Mr Singleton’s repertoire but he was known to rampage through a room.
Occasionally the multi-millionaire tipped over a dinner table or pushed a waiter reluctant to bring another round of drinks but the damages or the insults were followed by a generous cheque the next day.
“He can be a totally different person when he’s had a few drinks,” a friend, Jan Ryan, told Mr Stone.
Mr Singleton has eased back on alcohol in recent years after serious heart problems but, once more under the influence, blew up at his lifelong mate Gai Waterhouse over the running of his horse More Joyous, which came second in the All Aged Stakes at Royal Randwick in April 2013.
At the height of the feud, trainer Ms Waterhouse labelled him “old”, “a drunk” and “an absolute sham”. They have since made up.
Only a week ago, he was lapping up the Mediterranean sunshine aboard his old mate Jack Cowin’s yacht.
Mr Singleton told The Daily Telegraph last week he was in St Tropez, in the south of France, after attending the wedding of his daughter Sally Singleton in Rome, Italy.
The trip would appear to be a far cry from this week’s episode between the friends.
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