Cameron Smith-Craig Bellamy rift over coach’s friendship with Ricky Stuart
This is the explosive untold story that nearly ripped apart one of rugby league’s most successful partnerships and two innocent bystanders became caught in the middle thanks to one paranoid player.
NRL
Don't miss out on the headlines from NRL. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The relationship between Craig Bellamy and Ricky Stuart provides a moment of clean comedy every season when the pair, who face each other in Friday’s preliminary final, perceive every slight or clumsily made remark as an assault on their person.
Those who know them explain they know each other too well, and more importantly they know what they are each capable of.
So to keep the peace they circle like two bantam roosters wondering if they can share the same yard, each waiting for the other to strike, and happy when it fails to materialise. But they remain vigilant.
Watch the 2020 NRL Telstra Premiership Finals on Kayo. Every game before the Grand Final Live & On-Demand with no-ad breaks during play. New to Kayo? Get your 14-day free trial & start streaming instantly >
It is born out of a competitive spirit that fails to dim even in the summer months, when thoughts turn to quieter pursuits, but perhaps strangest of all it somehow finds its greatest peace in the immediate aftermath of the dressing room after a game, when the fire is momentarily extinguished.
Then, for reasons neither can ever explain except to say they are mates, the rivalry quietens and the two share a beer in the loser’s dressing room.
Yet it almost broke down for good last season when news broke on a Friday under this byline that Cameron Smith’s wife Barb was presented with a pricey diamond ring in commemoration of his 400th game.
It was a polarising story.
The NRL knew it was a poor look but tried gamely to defend it, against sound advice.
“We make no apologies for honouring the amazing role Barb has played and the sacrifices she has made throughout Cameron’s career,” then NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg said at the time.
That the ring was not covered in the official register of gifts the NRL announced for Smith, like the Waterford crystal football and other celebrations, and that the NRL publicly underpriced the ring at $5000, it was concerning the administration that had little feel for public sentiment.
That even the ARL Commission did not know the ring was going to be presented, becoming aware of it only when it was happening, was a sure sign it was intended to slide through without inspection.
It added to the belief League Central had no sense of rugby league’s real economy.
The game was drowning in costs, junior football was costly and in decline, and every junior club in the land knew down to the last pair of socks how far the $15,000 could stretch at their club, so they wondered why the NRL would splash such money on one of the game’s wealthiest players.
But, as one of the Storm’s defenders, a reporter, said to me later, in a year where the game was beset with allegation of violence against women, was the ring so costly?
Smith was upset that his family was brought into it, a reasonable consideration except for the fact that the moment he accepted the ring he allowed his family to be brought into it.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
Despite Greenberg’s spin, not everybody at headquarters saw it that way.
“This will become Todd’s legacy,” a highly placed NRL official said.
Indeed, the casual defence of the ring coupled with the public outrage helped shift the sand on Greenberg’s tenure and played a part in his eventual demise.
The following night the Raiders beat Melbourne 22-18 at AAMI Stadium and after the game Stuart picked up a couple of beers and headed to the Storm dressing room.
It was a tradition that goes all the way back in their coaching careers to when Stuart was coaching the Roosters and Bellamy was still an assistant at Brisbane.
MORE NEWS:
This moment sums up why Cordner must miss Origin
Flanagan under threat as Roosters survey damage
Tedesco injury clouds NSW Origin push
Whoever won picked up the beers and went into the other dressing room. It was a nod to a friendship that began in 1988 when Stuart signed to play with the Raiders and Bellamy, who had been at the club since their inaugural season in 1982 and will always be one of their great clubmen, took him under his wing.
Stuart, who went on to do everything in the game, always appreciated that.
Yet this night last year Stuart failed to recognise the drop in temperature when he walked into the Melbourne dressing room.
Bellamy sat with Stuart and shared a beer.
Off to the side Smith sat incensed.
For reasons that can only be attributed to a distorted sense of paranoia, he believed the ring story was planted by Stuart in an attempt to unsettle him.
The evidence was nothing more solid than Stuart’s friendship with me and its timing, which was unfortunate but unrelated.
And irrelevant.
The small act caused a fissure between Bellamy and Smith.
Smith believed it to be disloyal.
He was certain Stuart had leaked the story in an attempt to unsettle him before the game and that Bellamy was now sharing a beer with a man who set out to bring him down.
Stuart was oblivious to it and, for a while, Bellamy was as well.
“It almost cost Cameron and Craig their friendship,” the Storm reporter said.