Cult of the Burgess clan: Darkness behind fairytale of footy’s first family
The footballing family comes as a package deal and with their Cinderella fairytale now in tatters, the Burgess clan will once again close ranks — and will not break them, write Annette Sharp and Miranda Wood.
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It was a Cinderella story that could have been made for the big screen. Four strapping brothers, imported from the UK, lured by Oscar-winning movie star Russell Crowe to play for an iconic Australian rugby league club, the perennial battlers of the competition, the club diehard fan Crowe was desperate to save.
Mixed in with their working class backgrounds, the rough and ready cult of rugby league and images of big teary champion South Sydney signing Sam Burgess cuddling Crowe and paying tribute to a dead father, the Burgess brand was born.
Souths fans and the media were soon on board, peddling the dream as Crowe extended the working visa offered to Sam to include older Burgess brother Luke and younger twin brothers Tom and George.
Their mum Julie, a schoolteacher who had buried her husband Mark – her estranged husband as it would emerge later – when the boys were still teens, decided to follow her sons.
The Burgesses became one of Australia’s most adored and feted sporting families, a remarkable achievement in a nation of Chappells, Ellas, Waughs and Campbells.
But as with all Cinderella fairytales, the Burgess tale had a backstory far less glittering – though maybe more revealing – than the one projected by the South Sydney Rabbitohs public relations department.
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Growing up in West Yorkshire, in northwest England, rugby league ruled the Burgess household.
As Julie worked as a teacher, her sons continued to climb the footballing ranks.
It was in their blood: their father Mark had played the sport.
“He was just an out and out front-rower,” Sam said of his dad.
“A big barrel. He was just under six foot, but square. Massive shoulders. Massive back and chest and shoulders and legs.”
When Sam was just 15 years old, his parents sat him and his brothers down to break the devastating news – Mark had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
“Me and my older brother went off and did some research on it,” Sam recalled.
“We realised then that it was really serious but, as a kid of that age, I still didn’t really understand it. I didn’t know how quick it would all happen. I just figured that as time went by, he would be all right; he’d overcome it.”
The Burgess patriarch died in 2007, at the age of 45.
Mark and Julie’s marriage was by then over and she had found love with another, an Australian she’d met while visiting this country to play touch football as part of an English women’s team.
The romance wouldn’t last – though Julie’s love for Australia lingered.
According to sources, she was always going to be easily persuaded by Crowe when he made his offer to her son Sam in 2009, while Crowe was shooting Robin Hood on location in England.
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
As Sam packed his bag and headed to Australia, Julie – the product of a broken home herself and let down by love repeatedly before her boys were raised – would teach her sons that romantic love might come and go, but bond to family must always be honoured.
In Australia, the Burgess boys were dazzled by what passes for Sydney society.
The media loved them on sight, so too nightclub proprietors who threw open their doors to the four strapping athletes, who had taken on the attitude of Crowe’s adopted Princeling sons with gusto. Savvy marketers and a changing parade of pretty models also hovered.
As “Big Sammy” dipped in and out of love affairs, Luke attached himself to one of the stars of Australia’s Next Top Model, Yolanda Hodgson, and the couple soon welcomed a daughter, Grace. The relationship wouldn’t last.
George would fall for lingerie model Joanna King, who he would marry in 2016. The pair have three children.
Tom, the only one of the brothers still playing with Souths in 2020, would also fall for the charms of a pretty girl and find love with Miss Universe hopeful Tahlia Giumelli in 2017. The couple have also welcomed a daughter and are expecting a second child.
CLASH OF THE CLANS
But all eyes were, as ever, on Sam, whose marriage to journalist Phoebe Hooke, who he met in 2014 and married a year later, was hailed as the “wedding of the year”.
However, for those watching at first-hand, the nuptials looked more like a staged event, witnessed by “godfather” Crowe, for an ill-suited couple.
The lavish celebration highlighted the economic chasm between the two clans, with the groom’s big brother Luke said to be among the first to identify a potential clash of cultures that was worrying matriarch Julie.
Yorkshiremen are renowned to be tight with their money. The Hooke clan are anything but.
While the Hookes are wealthy, their daughters the products of a Frensham education in the Southern Highlands, the Burgesses in contrast are rough and ready – the kind of men who took their shirts off at the dinner table.
Sources this week said that by the time Phoebe was pregnant with the couple’s first child, daughter Poppy, the Hookes were concerned about the influence Luke had over Sam.
But like any tight-knit family, the Burgess clan comes as a package deal – through good times and bad, injuries, premierships, scandals, migrations and marriage breakups.
They are as formidable off the sporting field as on it – and when the shine on their name is tarnished, they close ranks and shut up shop.
That was the strategy until this week when claims from Phoebe, Sam’s ex-wife, put a pin in Crowe’s South Sydney dream.
The allegations published on Friday, detailing Sam’s alleged bender in November 2018 and the couple’s tumultuous relationship, has exposed an alleged darkness behind the Burgess fairytale to the world.
But one thing will be certain: the Burgess clan will not break ranks.
Originally published as Cult of the Burgess clan: Darkness behind fairytale of footy’s first family
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