Second Brisbane club must be local, not a Sydney reject
No-one loves the North Sydney Bears more than Mike Colman - but even he can’t see a future for them on this side of the Tweed.
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The Big Black Bears marching into Brisbane?
How great would that be eh?
Well, to be perfectly honest, not that great at all.
Now here’s the thing: no-one loves the North Sydney Bears more than me. I still have my cassette tape of those two unforgettable anthems, Stand Aside (Here Come the Mighty Bears) on one side and The Big Black Bears, on the other.
I play it every night. Or I would if they still made cassette players.
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I once won an on-air radio competition that went like this:
Host: “Who am I? I played rugby league. I was born in Leeton …
Me: Larry Kelly.
The host couldn’t believe it, but then he’d never stood under the Moreton Bay fig at North Sydney Oval, won the race to grab the corner post at full-time or told Pete who ran the shop under the grandstand that his Smith’s Crisps were stale just to see how red his face would go when he told you to piss off.
I felt like crying the night the Bears were beaten in the final of the 1976 Amco Cup (I still say Pommy matchwinner Brian Lockwood should never have been able to play for the Tigers that night because … well, just because) and I’m certain I did shed a tear when we won the big one, the Channel TEN Cup the next year.
Oh the unbridled joy as my mates and I marched up and down the road that night, banging saucepan lids and singing, “stand aside or we’ll crush you where you stand, the power and the glory is in our hands …” at the top of our lungs.
Not that it was ever in doubt. The Channel TEN Cup was a competition for teams that hadn’t made the finals. A losers’ comp if you will.
No way we weren’t going to win that one. When it came to losing we were in a class of our own.
Ah, such wonderful memories, as warm as an old red and black blanket wrapped around your shoulders as you made that short walk across the road to Claude’s pub at full-time to discuss yet another defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory over a cold schooner or six.
As you can tell, I’ve never got over the axing of the Bears. For years I’ve dreamt of them returning.
Oh sure, I knew they could never be the North Sydney Bears. Those days are gone, like the Roman Empire or the Holden, but that didn’t worry me.
The Central Coast Bears would be okay. Just over an hour’s drive up the M1 to Gosford, and as long as they played Manly at North Sydney Oval every year, it would almost be like old times.
I even flirted with the idea of the Bears buying the Gold Coast Titans. They were in financial trouble, we had money, why not?
But this talk of the Bears becoming the second Brisbane team is different.
More than that, it’s stupid – and it just wouldn’t work.
The second Brisbane club has to be just that, a Brisbane club.
Not a transplant from somewhere else; not an import, an outsider – even if that outsider did once boast Queensland Origin players like Kerry Boustead, the French brothers, Les Kiss, and the dynamic duo Gary Larson and Billy Moore.
And believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve lived in Queensland for almost half my life and I would never presume to call myself a Queenslander.
To do that you have to be born on this side of the Tweed or, at the very least, gone to infants here. You have to have taken your lunch to school in your port, downed a bottle of sars in one gulp and handed your dad the Refidex when he got lost.
Which is why Brisbane would never accept a Sydney club – even one as loveable and inoffensive as the Bears.
And that’s another problem, the name.
We’ve already had a Brisbane Bears – and look how well that turned out.
Originally published as Second Brisbane club must be local, not a Sydney reject