Below Deck Down Under: Captain Jason Chambers opens up on rugby league career

These days, Jason Chambers is the captain of the hit TV show, Below Deck Down Under. But what many of his followers may not realise is that Captain Jason was also a pretty handy footballer.

He is the former lower grader 20 years out of the game who has become an overnight celebrity, amassing as many Instagram followers as some of the modern day NRL stars.

These days, Jason Chambers is the captain of the hit TV show, Below Deck Down Under.

But what many of his 302,000 Instagram followers may not realise is that Captain Jason was also a pretty handy footballer in his day.

Good enough to be signed by a young Craig Bellamy to play under 21s for the Canberra Raiders in the early 1990s.

He also had a couple of stints at the North Sydney Bears, as well as a season in reserve grade at the Newcastle Knights.

Below Deck Down Under’s Captain Jason Chambers opens up on his former rugby league career.

That was in a crack team boasting the likes of Danny Buderus, Brett Kimmorley, Darren Albert, Matthew Gidley and Owen Craigie.

And while the Knights ended up winning the first grade premiership the season after Chambers left, it’s fair to say the former apprentice mechanic from Gosford never looked back.

From hitchhiking his way around the world before jumping aboard a boat one day in New York that ultimately changed the course of his life.

It’s taken him to some of the most magical places on the planet, to captaining an $80 million super yacht owned by Aussie billionaire Frank Lowy, while along the way doing a stack of charity work.

In between ‘Changa’, as his mates call him, has also kept himself in pretty good nick.

To the point where the now 51-year-old is something of a late-blooming heart-throb, who was recently even sounded out for a stint on The Bachelor.

Which is a hell of a long way from where he kicked off his NRL dream as an 18-year-old hounding Bellamy for a go at the Raiders.

Captain Jason Chambers features prominently in the promo for Below Deck Down Under

BELLYACHE AND BIG MAL

It was the summer of 1991, when Bellamy was just starting out on his own journey to coaching greatness.

Chambers was playing first grade on The Central Coast as a teenager and had been identified by a couple of NRL clubs.

But his ambition was to play for one club – the Green Machine.

“They were the best team in the world back then and I just wanted to trial for Canberra,” Chambers recalled.

“I’d rung them up and they said, ‘We have all our trials starting this weekend and there are no spots left. Sorry, but we can’t do it’.

“But I called back again and I got a hold of Craig Bellamy personally.

“He said, ‘If you can be down here on Friday, I will give you a run’.

“So I went down there and there were about 100 people trialling, and we had to play the existing 21s.

“I remember sitting in the dressing rooms and we were all wearing different coloured socks and different coloured shorts.

“And I turned around to the guys and said, ‘We can either play as a team, or we can go out and play as individuals’.

“Anyway, we ended up toweling them up and I scored a couple of meat pies.

“So after the game Mal Meninga (the then Raiders first grade captain) walked up to me and said, ‘I will see you next week’.

“Four days later Kevin Neill (the former Raiders chief executive) was at my home and I signed a little contract.

“I was living at the back of Seiffert Oval with David Westley and Steve Trindall (future first graders) and I lived with them for about five months.”

Chambers rugby league career started at the Canberra Raiders, earning a trial run after he got a hold of Craig Bellamy personally.

But just as the season was about to kick off, Chambers returned home for a hit-and-run visit to see mum and dad and got struck down by homesickness.

“So we rang up Peter Louis (former North Sydney coach) and got a transfer to the Bears,” he said.

“I went back to Canberra to tell them and Craig Bellamy couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘We’re two weeks from the start of the season. You sure?’

“But I told him I was homesick, so he let me go.”

The problem was in his first game for the Bears, Chambers busted the scaphoid bone in his hand. So it was back to the coast for some local footy and good times with his mates.

“Fast forward and a few years later (1996) I got a phone call when I was about 23 and Newcastle was saying we want you to trial,” Chambers continued.

“It was a good side and I ended up playing every game reserve grade that year.”

But at the end of the season he decided it was time to see the world, and off he went.

SOUTH AMERICA TO CAIRO AND BACK TO NEW YORK

“I could have probably stayed and played longer,” Chambers continued.

“But some friends went to play in Hull (in England) and I thought, I will go and follow them.

“But I went to Brazil instead and stayed in South America for a year.

“I hitchhiked all the way down to Patagonia and hitchhiked all up through Chile and finally got to the UK a lot later.”

Chambers travelled around the world before eventually returning to Australia to work for Frank Lowy. Picture: Brendan Radke

By that stage the opportunity to play for Hull was gone. So he went to London to work as a plumber, before heading off on another hitchhiking adventure from Turkey to Cairo.

From there he put out a feeler to try and get a game in the United States.

“I had an offer to go to the Philadelphia Raiders,” he said.

“But I went to visit a mate who was working on a boat at Newport Rhode Island and the bloke on the boat next to us asked if I was looking for work.

“When the crew came back it was all the crew from the Wolf of Wall Street.”

Asked if the infamous Jordan Belfort was still the owner, Chambers said: “No, he was in jail by then, so it was just the crew.

“I started out as an engineer’s assistant and did that for a year travelling around the Caribbean.

“I then went back to Australia to play for Erina and Wayne Lambkin (now Manly Jersey Flegg coach) picked me up for the Bears the last two games.

“I remember that last game. We had Mark O’Meley playing for us, Matty Orford. That was the last game Norths played at Campbelltown.”

“So I went, ‘Stuff this, I’m going back over to check out more boats’.

“I remember I was up in New York cruising around and we’d gone out for the day when the World Trade Centres went down.

“We were actually supposed to be docked underneath them.

“Then we went down to Florida and I was babysitting a boat that was for sale and the boat didn’t sell.

“The owners were a Mexican family and they rang up and said, ‘We want to take the boat to the Mediterranean’.

“I said, ‘Okay, I will find you a captain’.

“And they said, ‘No, we want you to drive it’.

“I said, “I don’t know how’. They said, ‘Learn’.

Captain Jason with Below Deck Down Under co-star Aesha Scott. Picture: Getty Images.

FROM FRANK LOWY TO BELOW DECK

“I came back and worked for Frank Lowy for eight years,” he said.

“Fours years in the Harbour and then I went over and drove his big boat, the 73m IIona yacht.

“That was in the Mediterranean, all through Israel, all through Turkey … then I met a girl, had a child, built a little resort in the Philippines, and I spent the last eight years cruising around Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and working for American families doing a hell of a lot of stuff.

“Like in PNG, we’d actually refit the hospitals that needed help. Helping them out with solar powered panels, giving them lights, putting water tanks in as we cruised around these areas.”

He’s also heavily invested in the charity Classroom of Hope that uses recycled plastic waste to rebuild schools.

BECOMING A 50-YEAR-OLD HEARTTHROB

Even as a youngster, Chambers was a pretty good style of a bloke (I worked under his dad Ray who was sports editor for The Central Coast Express, and played a bit of footy with ‘Changa’).

But safe to say, he was certainly never considered the heart-throb he is today.

He laughed: “I work on my health a lot.

“I am big into reiki and ice baths. I try not to get to the gym. You know what it is like having old football injuries. You get into the gym and start lifting weights and they all come back.

“So I do yoga, I do callisthenics every morning, I do a lot of band work. And just more body weight stuff and that keeps me fit.

“I watch what I eat. I like a little play up but I know when to put my head down, I have a balanced life.”

‘MUM DIDN’T KNOW WHO I WAS AT WORK’

After Covid locked him down in Australia, he got a call out of the blue from the producers of Below Deck looking to start a Down Under series, which will be heading into its third season in 2024.

“It has been great to be able to showcase Australia,” he said.

“But this show also has been able to allow me to try and get back to land more and be closer to my daughter.

“And it has also allowed my mum and dad to finally see what I do for work.

“Mum didn’t know who I was at work for all those years I was away.

“But now we go to the coffee shop in Wagga and someone might come up and ask for a photo, and she is just so proud and happy.

“My parents have finally seen what I do.

“The crux of the matter is I had opportunities to play football … but how many stories have we got of people who could have, would have, should have?

“I was one of those.

“But I chose another life to see as much as I can, and I have transferred that into a life of adventure.”