Vale John Sattler: South Sydney owner Russell Crowe’s poetic tribute to club icon
South Sydney owner and Hollywood icon Russell Crowe has revealed John Sattler’s role in saving the Rabbitohs and the special image that defines the club.
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This is the emotional image of two South Sydney greats, John Sattler and Sam Burgess, that prompted Rabbitohs co-owner Russell Crowe to say: “You can’t get a more South Sydney image than that.”
Crowe, who owns Souths with James Packer and Mike Cannon-Brookes, has paid a moving tribute to Sattler, who died in a Gold Coast retirement village on Monday, aged 80.
And the moment when Sattler embraced Burgess after South Sydney’s 2014 grand final win will forever be etched into Crowe’s red-and-green memory.
“For so long, John Sattler has represented the cultural torchbearer of the club,’’ Crowe said. “The glory, the struggle, the belief. A great player and a great ambassador.
“He will be missed, and I count myself lucky to have got to know him just a little bit.
“There’s a photograph of him and Sam Burgess together post-game on that same October day in 2014, Sam wearing the Clive Churchill medal, and the scars of his mighty effort.
“The old warrior and the young warrior. How things change and how they stay the same. You can’t get a more South Sydney image than that.”
Crowe said Sattler helped privatise the club in 2006.
“I had shaken John Sattler’s hand briefly once at some gathering but it wasn’t until 2006 and the ‘Yes’ campaign had begun that I talked at any length with John,” Crowe said.
“I wanted to talk to John to gauge his level of support for the takeover.
“The first thing he did was sing me a song, and then lament over the lack of melody in team songs post-game these days. He had a very pleasant singing voice.
“We had a good conversation. I told him my principle reason for taking this idea on was to protect the legacy of players like himself, and to ensure the club lived on. He was a gentleman.
“As time went on, and the vote went our way, John stayed very close to the club, came to games, joined in the Return to Redfern touch football and certainly loved the success we started to achieve.
“Seeing him sitting next to Bob McCarthy on grand final day in 2014, big grin, his eyes sparkling, it was a wonderful moment for me and it validated all the effort.”
The Daily Telegraph ran a back-page story two days after that grand final about how Sattler, who played in the 1970 grand final with a broken jaw, had inspired Burgess.
When the Englishman had his cheekbone fractured in the first tackle of the decider, then-Souths coach Michael Maguire ordered his trainer to “run out and tell him ‘John Sattler’’’.
“John will be remembered for his heroics when he broke his jaw and led his team to victory,” Burgess said on Tuesday. “There is a hole in many people’s hearts.
“He was extremely influential, especially at South Sydney. His heroics are etched in the history and the walls around the place. He will forever be remembered.”
Rod Churchill, the son of South Sydney Immortal Clive, said: “Dad saw a lot of great leadership qualities in John. Dad treated John like a second son. They had a special bond.
“John epitomised the virtues rugby league aspires to. He was a huge figure through his playing career and post-career.”
SATTLER PASSING A STARK REMINDER OF WHAT NRL HAS LOST
- Paul Kent
There was nothing dishonest about John Sattler.
He was a man who stood in front of other men. Whether it was to confront those coming forward, or to protect those they were coming after, he didn’t mind it either way.
In a world that gets more confusing by the minute, that is the man he was.
His values were simple and filled with honest intent and chiselled in stone.
Sattler, who died on Monday aged 80, always knew who he was and what he stood for.
It’s what Clive Churchill saw when he made Sattler Souths’ captain in 1967, even though he was just 24. The thought around the game at the time was that Churchill had gone slightly crazy settling on Sattler, but Churchill knew leadership, too.
Sattler was young but already getting himself into enough trouble on the field that Churchill, applying a little reverse psychology, wondered if a little more responsibility might be good for him.
He wanted Sattler to become more accountable to his teammates and not go getting sent off so easily.
Churchill had already seen that the South Sydney players always seemed to gravitate towards their young prop. When things began to get a little tough in the game, he saw, Sattler was generally the man the rest were waiting on to change something.
His toughness was and remains well-known to everybody.
What few recall nowadays, and not enough black and white television exists of it to remind us, is that Sattler had ball skills that marked him as different from the normal prop of the day.
And as he developed as a captain, invariably, when Churchill would issue basic instructions before the game, Sattler would go out and see that they were implemented to the letter.
Even if it meant that, sometimes, he was required to go above and beyond.
Souths won the premiership in Sattler’s first year as captain and he would finish the season touring with the 1967-68 Kangaroos, where the Poms turned just a little pale reading his name on the tour sheet.
Reputations back then were won the hard way.
Playing Yorkshire in a tour game a young prop named David Hill kept jamming his elbow into the necks of Sattler and hooker Elwyn Walters at each scrum. He knew Sattler’s reputation.
As Jack Reardon wrote in Rugby League World in May 1969: “Sattler and Walters took it for a while.
“Then Satts, blue eyes blazing, reacted quickly and explosively. The punch travelled only about nine inches but young Hill was carried off.”
Retribution was part of the game back then.
The justice system was largely self-administered. The judiciary existed but players had their own boundaries of what was acceptable behaviour on the field and countless stories survive of young men, like David Hill, overstepping their mark and being taught to behave.
Sattler took those rules into his life.
A non-drinker his whole life, a brewery gave him a job running a pub in Gladstone when he retired and Friday and Saturday nights were filled with young men dropping in for a small shot at glory.
It was a more violent world and few would readily want to revisit it, yet inside it there was an integrity to it that does not exist today.
Action did not come without consequence.
Countless times, even over the weekend just gone, modern NRL players are bulldozing into melees on the field where not a punch is thrown or a chance of being thrown, yet they go in with chests puffed forward and shoulders pulled back like, peacocks on parade, like there is a certain kind of recognisable heroism to it.
Bravery is not bravery if there are no consequences. Instead, it is just posturing.
Jumper punching a rival, yanking a collar, sneak shots … little covers the modern player in glory.
John Sattler played the game tougher and more violently than most. He was no wide-eyed innocent kid, let’s be sure.
But he was a man who expected as good as he gave and never complained when it came.
In perhaps the most violent era of rugby league, a violent game in itself, Sattler was the toughest of them all.
All these years later, he remains the gold standard.
He goes as a reminder of what the game has surrendered, and what we all have lost.
BUZZ: BRUTAL REALITY BEHIND RUGBY LEAGUE’S TOUGHEST MAN
—Phil Rothfield
Rugby league has lost the toughest man to have ever laced on a football boot.
John Sattler, legendary South Sydney Rabbitohs front-rower, and the man who played the 1970 grand final with a broken jaw, defying the most extraordinary pain.
Plenty will be said and written about Satts’ remarkable courage and bravery on a football field.
But we also need to raise the issue of concussion and head knocks that were never treated seriously in his day.
It was a badge of honour to get back up and keep on playing, no matter the injury.
One day Satts even played a full half of football with a dislocated elbow.
Sadly, Sattler struggled with dementia.
As his son and former rugby league star Scott pointed out, in his latter years, Sattler paid the price of a brutal era in rugby league where there were no HIAs or mandatory 11-day stand-down periods, like the one the NRL has recently introduced.
Back then, a concussion was treated with smelling salts and a wet sponge over your head.
“It’s sad to see, what I’d give to be able to sit and talk rugby league like we used to for hours,” Scott Sattler said in 2021.
“I’ll never get that again, this is the effect of rugby league.
“Current players, be thankful for Peter V’landys, Andrew Abdo and Graham Annesley who are ensuring that you can sit with your families in your 60s and 70s and hold a healthy conversation and enjoy your grandchildren.
“This is the reason the rules are being implemented, to save you in years to come, so you can have those healthy discussions.”
There will never be another John Sattler.
And, as far as player welfare is concerned, the NRL will ensure there never has to be.
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