On Wednesday night, those more used to getting down and dirty in the rugby league trenches will dust off their penguin suits for the NRL’s Hall of Fame dinner at the SCG, at which the sport’s next Immortal will be announced.
It’s a stellar field to choose from, and it would be difficult to argue with any of the likely candidates, headlined by the stars of Queensland’s golden generation. Most expect the NRL’s most decorated individual player, Cameron Smith, to get the nod.
After all, the criteria for players to be inducted into the Hall of Fame – a prerequisite for Immortal eligibility – has been changed, which means Smith could probably have been sized up for his blazer yesterday. Players previously had to be retired for five years, but now only need to have been out of the game for three. Smith hung up the boots at the end of the 2020 season.
But what if rugby league had a chance for its past and present to be intertwined, with two inductees on the one night?
The NRL has given no public indication it will veer from plans to induct just one former player as the 14th Immortal, which has been decided after a secret vote of 15 panellists. The same panel members helped choose the 11 players recently welcomed into the larger Hall of Fame, causing a stir by giving former hardman Les Boyd the nod despite an awful judiciary record.
The beauty of the Immortals concept – founded by the old Rugby League Week and taken over by the NRL – lies in the quality of those not included rather than those who make the cut. If in 20 years’ time, say, a Billy Slater or Johnathan Thurston has not reached the Immortal threshold, is that such a bad thing? Bigger is not always better and the smaller the group is, the more gravitas membership confers.
South Sydney and Roosters legend Ron Coote (left) and Melbourne Storm champion Cameron Smith.Credit: Sydney Morning Herald
The most vexing question for those deciding the next Immortals intake is this: what to do with Ron Coote?
Given he finished his career in 1978, a case could easily be made that time has passed him by. If Coote wasn’t included in the last mass induction in 2018 – when five players were elevated, including pre-war heroes Dally Messenger, Frank Burge and Dave Brown – then how can he be included now?
Coote’s numbers are compelling: a combined six premierships with the Rabbitohs and Roosters (the clubs play after a cup named in his honour each year, perhaps the only thing they can agree on), three World Cup wins, 24 Tests for Australia, a Clive Churchill Medal.
But maybe the more enduring memory of Coote for younger generations is of him shuffling through the car parks of McDonald’s franchises in the early 1980s, picking up rubbish from the ground. He made a post-football career of running fast food restaurants, and later passed it down the family. Diehard footy fans were often shocked to see the great Ron Coote under the golden arches, making sure nothing was out of place, and would nervously ask: are you who I think you are?
“Mate, you have to do something to get a quid these days,” Coote would reply.
That’s to say nothing of the work Coote later did establishing Men of League, the foundation set up to help rugby league people who have fallen on hard times (it’s now called Family of League), and the way rebuilt his own life after losing his NSW south coast home in the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20.
In a later interview with Fox League, you got a sense of how much it would mean for Coote to be able to call himself an Immortal after all these years.
“I think it would be a great thing,” Coote said. “It’s something I’d like to have. I don’t know whether it’s going to happen. I think I’m past it all, [but] we’ll see what happens.”
Rugby league is famously unsentimental. When it comes to judging something as prestigious as an Immortal, emotion must be left at the door. The concept is so special because even people of Coote’s stature can spend a lifetime watching from the outside.
Yet is this the chance for the past and present to be honoured on one night?
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