Aussie footy stars who padded up to play with the helmeted septics are few and far between
JARRYD Hayne has signed with the San Francisco 49ers, following in the footsteps of a very select few from Australia to have played at the elite level in the US.
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THE 2015 rugby league season kicks off tonight, but one star player who will miss the action is former Parramatta player Jarryd Hayne.
Hayne has signed with a major NFL team, the San Francisco 49ers, hoping to join a select few Australians who have played gridiron at an elite level in the US.
One of them was Pat O’Dea. Although he never played in the National Football League, which was only formed in 1920, he was the first Australian to crack what was then the highest level of the American code, becoming a national celebrity there over a century ago.
Born in Victoria in 1872, O’Dea first came to fame as a swimmer at the age of 15, when he rescued a woman from a shark at Mordialloc Beach, south east of Melbourne. It earned him a bronze medallion from the Royal Humane Society of Australasia.
A star player as a junior he made his first grade debut with Melbourne in 1892. He developed a reputation as one of the best drop-kickers in the code. In 1895 while Melbourne was riding high, half way through the season he made a switch to Essendon.
He played out the rest of the season but then suddenly, in 1896, he went off to the US where he ended up playing football for the University of Winsconsin’s team. One story says that he was originally on his way to Oxford to study law but stopped off to visit his brother who was a rowing coach at the uni and something convinced him to stay and play American football.
A broken arm put him out of action early in the 1896 season but by 1897 he was a full fledged star.
Because the game had originated in American colleges, at this time the game was mostly only played at colleges, so O’Dea was playing at the elite level of the sport. Nicknamed the “Kangaroo kicker” he eventually turned to coaching at the University of Notre Dame, where he also finished his law degree.
He gave up the game in 1917 and headed off to practice law in San Francisco, but he then seemed to disappear for 17 years until, in 1934 he emerged to reveal he had been living under and assumed name. The reason he gave was that he didn’t like the fame, but it may have been to avoid legal action for money he allegedly stole from a client.
He died in 1962 after being elected to the College Football Hall of Fame.
The winner of the inaugural Brownlow Medal, Edward Carji Greeves also had a brief shot at gridiron fame. Born in 1904, in 1928 he was wooed by the University of Southern California to come over for a couple of months to give some of the American kickers some tips. He was immediately compared to O’Dea, but he didn’t stick around and was back in Australia in April 1929.
Olympic high jumper Colin Ridgway, born in 1937, played for Carlton’s under 19s Aussie rules team in 1954 and made the reserve side in 1955, but gave that away when he qualified as a high jumper for the Australian Olympic team at the 1956 games. When he missed out on making the team for the 1960 games he was offered a scholarship to Lamar Tech in the US. He took to playing American football and was discovered by the Dallas Cowboys and in 1965 became the first Australian to play in the NFL.
It was only a short career in the game, but he stayed in the US where he had some success in business, but he was tragically shot dead by an intruder at his Texas home in 1993. The case remains unsolved.
It would not be until 1987 that another Australian would be signed up to the NFL. Colin Scotts, born in 1963, was a member of the Australian Schoolboys Rugby team in 1981 when he was spotted by a college football scout and offered a scholarship to the University of Hawaii. He would play five years of college football before being signed to the Arizona Cardinals in 1987.
He quit the game after five years and went into pro-wrestling before becoming a successful businessman.
Since then there have been several others who have made it in American football, with varying levels of success including Darren Bennett, Brad Craddock, Jon Ballantyne, Jy Bond, Tom Hornsey and Ben Graham.
Most have been from Victoria, recruited as kickers from AFL teams, players like the rugby recruit Scotts, league star Hayne and Blue Mountains rugby player Hayden Smith are more rare.
Originally published as Aussie footy stars who padded up to play with the helmeted septics are few and far between
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