With no fanfare, James Graham quietly breaks one of the game’s great milestones
James Graham’s 400-game career has been built on blood, sweat and tears. But there’s much more to this Ricky Gervais-quoting prop with a higher footy IQ than most halfbacks than the tough stuff, writes PAUL KENT.
Royce Simmons has one of the sharpest eyes for talent that comes from the trust and knowledge of knowing his character.
Men with character are often the ones who best recognise character, and also the lack of it.
A first-class player, he became a first-class coach and built a roster at Penrith that was coming like a steam train in the early 2000s until he was white-anted from within, and the Panthers board, which was unable to identify the difference between fact and fraud, sacked him and handed Johnny Lang a team that won a premiership two seasons later.
It goes without saying that one of Lang’s first jobs was to sack the white ant, who didn’t do much after that.
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Simmons took himself to St Helens after Penrith and when he came home at the end of 2011 he walked up at a function with a tip that is still paying dividends.
“Gee, the Bulldogs have got a good one,” he said.
He was talking about James Graham, who was 224 games into his St Helens career and at 26 had signed a deal with Canterbury to challenge himself in the NRL.
Now, nearly eight full seasons later, Graham will run out on to Jubilee this Saturday for what will be his 400th first grade game.
The NRL went into carnival mode when Cameron Smith played his 400th game a month ago. He got the full boat, a dinner and a roll-up of NRL heavyweights. Graham is doing it how he prefers, with less fuss.
The difficulty of Jimmy Graham is finding what to admire.
There is plenty there, but the best tends to be hidden. Every week St George Illawarra coach Paul McGregor watches Graham get his way around training and has to fight a small doubt whether Graham will even make it onto the park. But there is no measuring desire or want.
You can’t coach into a player to chase a runaway winger, when there is no hope of catching him, all because you want to push him to the sideline to make the conversion harder.
Earlier this year he broke his leg against Cronulla. It was not the worst kind, it was the small bone in his shin, but it was snapped all the way through. Graham thought it was nothing more than a bad cork and so spent halftime jumping on his broken leg to convince McGregor he could continue playing.
“The thing I really like about him,” says McGregor, “really like about him, is that he won’t change his opinion for someone else’s if he doesn’t think it is worthy.”
It is a regular occurrence on Tuesday nights in the green room before NRL 360. A Tuesday night regular, Graham walks in and the conversation can go anywhere.
It can go from his small obsession with UFOs to the embarrassment of his dad driving a big old bus because it was all that could fit the kids, how many vegetables it takes to offset his fried chicken, what you have to see on Netflix, to quantum theory, which will make most footballers’ eyes cross.
Earlier this year when he was used as the pin-up in the concussion debate, Graham, who long ago changed his opinion, answered eloquently in a column on the Dragons’ website. Each is a clue to his intelligence, which is well above normal.
Graham’s peculiarity, then, is he has been able to subdue his high intelligence to make himself perform the way he must every week through what is now 399 games of football.
The dumb guys often don’t realise what they are putting themselves through. Graham is acutely aware.
When he left St Helens and got to Canterbury, Des Hasler needed six months to understand him but soon worked out he was dealing with a footballer of extreme intelligence.
“When I first sat down with him, the impression I walked away with is that he has got a really high footy IQ,” Hasler says. “Not just okay, a really good footy IQ.”
Graham soon revealed himself as so much more than that. In his early days at the Bulldogs they ran a kangaroo court for all types of minor offences. And if an accusation was made, if somebody was accused of being late for training or being poor on an effort, you could not point them out.
There was a fine for pointing, and so when one player pointed out the failings of another, he went down, too.
That’s where Graham concocted the crooked finger, the one that came out later in his confrontation with the referees.
He quotes Ricky Gervais at will and when he broke out in David Brent’s quote on Des’ree at a press conference — “Money don’t make my world go round, I’m reaching out for higher ground” — the joke was lost on most.
He didn’t care. Whatever it is, it comes from within. Always has.
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