Tommy: The Extraordinary Career of Tom Raudonikis book extract

He was one of rugby league’s great characters who made a big impact on the sport. Tommy Raudonikis, who lost his battle with cancer earlier this year, has been honoured in a new book. Read the exclusive extract.

The first time Ian Collis met Tommy Raudonikis, the NRL legend invited the author for a meal with a difference.

“When you get to Brisbane come around to my place. I just live in a little old caravan. I haven’t got much but I’d love to make you a sausage sandwich,” Raudonikis said.

When Mr Collis arrived at the address, he found a lovely home with Raudonikis’s wife Trish making a delicious dinner.

Tommy Raudonikis in his early years as a rugby league player. Picture: Supplied

“He would take the mick out of us, it just summed him up — he was a larrikin,” Mr Collis said.

Mr Collis and Alan Whiticker have now paid tribute to the late Raudonikis with a book detailing his life and career. Raudonikis died in early 2021 after a long battle with cancer.

What stood out to Mr Collis from writing the book was how different the game of rugby league was in Raudonikis’s time, with violence an everyday part of the sport.

He was the mastermind behind the infamous “cattle dog” call, essentially a code word for players to start a brawl on the footy field.

Blues legend Andrew Johns was famously knocked out in the 1997 State of Origin “cattle dog” brawl and told a radio station Raudonikis yelled at him for letting the side down and sent him back out on there after being stitched up.

Mr Collis said when Raudonikis was playing not every match was telecast and what happened on the field, stayed on the field.

“He was such a tough player, he wouldn’t take a backwards step but away from the paddock he was a really nice guy, someone people liked to be in the company of,” he said.

BOOK EXTRACT

Tommy: The Extraordinary Career of Tom Raudonikis - by Ian Collis and Alan Whiticker

The decision to appoint Tommy as coach of Wests in 1995 was not so much a strategic masterstroke by the cash-strapped club as the universe having a good wink at us; there was no better person to take charge of the proud foundation club for what would be their final years as a standalone club.

The Magpies had made the semi-finals for two seasons (1991 and 1993) under Warren Ryan, but the club was on the downward slide when Tommy took over from caretaker coach Wayne Ellis at the end of the troubled 1994 season.

There were enough good players at Wests to remain competitive – 1986 Kangaroo Paul Langmack, former rugby international Andrew Leeds, hooker ‘Cherry’ Mescia, hardworking halfback Steve Georgallis and the McGuinness brothers, Ken and Kevin. Tommy even brought down his teenage son

Lincoln, a Byron Bay junior, to play for the club and he would make 24 first-grade appearances in the 1998 and 1999 seasons.

Raudonikis in an Australian v New Zealand Third Test. Picture: Supplied

Raudonikis improved on his first season results (thirteenth of 20 teams in the ARL competition) to take his underrated team to the quarter-finals in 1996 at the height of the Super League war. The undoubted highlight of Tommy’s five seasons at Wests (and there would be many lowlights), was the Magpies’ last-minute 23–22 win over Norths at Campbelltown in August 1996.

With a final-eight finish very much in the offing, Wests five-eighth Andrew Willis broke a 22–all deadlock with a field goal from halfway. The crowd of 13,186 cheered like the old days, while Tommy got so excited he almost jumped out of the coach’s box. Standing behind him was his old mate, John Singleton.

Wests qualified for the play-offs, but the fairytale ended soon after when they were knocked out of the finals by Cronulla, 20–12. The ensuing years would not be so kind at club level, but Tommy’s success that year helped him land his dream job – coach of NSW’s State of Origin team.

Paul Vautin had coached Queensland to a memorable State of Origin victory in 1995, utilising the now famous ‘Queenslander!’ rallying cry as a motivational tactic for his inexperienced team. When Raudonikis took over as NSW coach in 1997, he hatched a plan that hopefully would rattle the opposition in the opening match of the series at Lang Park. It was straight out of the Tommy playbook – at the given moment, someone would call out ‘cattle dog!’ and his players were to start a brawl.

All the NSW players were on board, but when the ‘cattle dog’ call came at the first scrum in the 10th minute of the match, a serious flaw in the plan was quickly revealed. Andrew Johns, who was playing hooker that day, couldn’t fight. During the wild melee started by NSW prop Mark Carroll, Maroons hooker Jamie Goddard felled Johns, who left the field and required 27 stitches in a mouth wound.

Raudonikis in 1972. Picture: Supplied

NSW won the match narrowly, 8–6, however, and went on to secure the 1997 Origin series in Melbourne in the next match.

Tommy retained the NSW coaching role in the newly formed NRL competition for 1998, but the Wayne Bennett-coached Maroons bounced back to win the Origin series, 2–1. ‘I was quite successful,’ Tommy later reflected, ‘but the head blokes at Wests said if I went for it again that I wouldn’t have got it. They wanted me to concentrate fully on Western Suburbs, which I ended up doing. But we came last anyway.’

Wests’ final two seasons in the NRL competition hastened their eventual demise as a standalone club. In 1998, the Magpies finished equal last in the 20-team competition with just four wins but were handed the wooden spoon by the Gold Coast Chargers because of an inferior ‘for and against record.

In 1999, their record was even worse: outright last with just three wins.

‘I made some bad mistakes in the final couple of years and one of them was listening to other people rather than backing my own judgement,’ he later admitted. ‘The press gave it to me and we finished with the wooden spoon again. It was tough – we struggled through the year with the merger with Balmain hanging over us.’

The new book about Tommy Raudonikis, by Ian Collis and Alan Whiticker.

Even in the darkest moments, Raudonikis could find the light side, searching for that competitive edge that would pull the club out of the doldrums. ‘We were going dreadful and there was a shovel [in the dressing room],’ Tommy later recalled. ‘How it got in there in our dressing room I don’t know. Andrew Leeds didn’t play that day and asked if I wanted it taken out.

‘I said, “No. Just leave it there. I might need that”. At half-time we were going awful and when they came in, I smashed up the windows in our rooms.

The CEO wanted me to pay for the damage but there was no way I was doing that.

At presentation night they gave me a big photo … it was me dressed as Braveheart with a blue face and a shovel. All the boys saw the funny side of it.’

Perhaps having Tommy at the helm when the axe fell on the Wests club at the end of 1999 – forced into a shotgun marriage with Balmain to form the Wests Tigers – made the decision a little more palpable for the army of Magpies fans.

Either way, the end of the century drew a line through Tommy’s extraordinary career in rugby league.

Tommy: The Extraordinary Career of Tom Raudonikis - by Ian Collis and Alan Whiticker; New Holland Publishers, RRP $40. Available from all good book retailers or online at newhollandpublishers.com

Originally published as Tommy: The Extraordinary Career of Tom Raudonikis book extract