Nick Shehadie was a rugby legend who became ‘a giant of a man’

Sir Nicholas Shehadie achieved greatness through charm and personality, qualities that stayed with him until his death.

Sir Nicholas Shehadie with wife Dame Marie Bashir in 2000. Picture: Mark Williams

Eric Tweedale, the oldest living Wallaby, recalls the time Nick Shehadie, later Sir Nicholas, approached him just before the 1948 tour match against Cardiff with a bottle of liquid that he assured him would do wonders for the shoulder injuries they both were carrying.

It was not, surprisingly, to be taken orally. Instead, Shehadie applied it liberally to his affected areas, rubbing it right in. Taking his cue, Tweedale did the same and the two props ran on to do battle with the Welshmen. Within minutes their shoulders were aflame and blistering. There was nothing they could do, however, but soldier on to half-time when they hotfooted it off to the showers.

None too politely, Tweedale asked Shehadie what in blazes he had put on them. Shehadie, unsure, fetched the bottle. “Sloan Linament,” he read, going on to announce that under no circumstances were the contents ever to be rubbed deeply into the skin.

“Next time you get any bright ideas, Nick, read the instructions,” Tweedale chided him.

But Shehadie never did. It wasn’t his way. He was a trailblazer but a most unusual one. He played his first Test in the second row but then switched to prop for most of the next 29 — a positional switch that today would be unthinkable.

Some men achieve greatness through drive and ambition. Shehadie did it through charm and personality, qualities that stayed with him to the moment he died in Sydney on Sunday night, aged 92.

Never was that more in evidence than when Queensland approached him in the mid-1980s with an idea to stage a rugby world cup. As radical as the proposal was, Shehadie embraced it and, as head of the Australian Rugby Union, he convinced his New Zealand counter­part Dick Littlejohn to accompany him to London to persuade the Home Unions.

They were very much inclined to veto it but Shehadie had charmed the Brits from his earliest days as a Wallaby and eventually they succumbed and allowed Australia and NZ to co-host the first World Cup in 1987. Such a roaring success was it that they decided to do it again. In Britain.

“If it wasn’t for Nick, and his charm and charisma, there might not be a Rugby World Cup today,” said Lyn Crowley, who served on the ARU executive while Shehadie was president.

It was to Shehadie that former Wallabies coach Alan Jones, the radio presenter, turned for help when he wanted to take an assistant coach, Alex Evans, on the 1984 tour of Britain. No national side had ever had one before.

There was no money in the ARU budget to take him and Jones had volunteered to fund a hire car so Evans could trail the team bus around Britain. Needless to say, the hire car wasn’t needed. The money was found to make Evans an official member of the party — and the Wallabies won their first and so far only grand slam.

“Nick Shehadie headed Australian rugby at a time when the word ‘bureaucracy’ hadn’t been thought of,” Jones said. “With him as president of Australian rugby, with his experiences as a player and as lord mayor of Sydney …. he just knew how to get things done, how to delegate authority and support those people that had been chosen. And consequently, all of that happened at the one time. We won a grand slam, we got the Rugby World Cup.”

Australian Olympic Committee boss John Coates also recalled Shehadie’s stint at City Hall. “He was a visionary whose long association with the Olympic movement dated back to his time as Sydney lord mayor (1973-75) when he proposed a bid to host the Olympic Games of 1988,” said Coates. It didn’t come off but by that scale, he was 12 years ahead of his time.

Sydney-born, the son and grandson of two heads of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in Australia, Shehadie spoke proudly of being the first Lebanese-Australian to play for the Wallabies. For another Lebanese-Australian, current Wallabies coach Michael Cheika, he was an irresistible exemplar.

“Sir Nick was an icon to a young fella like myself from strong Lebanese roots … he was able to show what Australia was all about as a multicultural paradise,” said Cheika, who trod the same path as Shehadie, from Coogee Surf Club to Randwick Rugby. “I saw him the day after the 2015 World Cup final (where the Wallabies were beaten by the All Blacks). As proud an Australian as ever. Thanks for your example.”

Shehadie, the husband of former NSW governor Dame Marie Bashir, was SBS chairman from 1981-99, trustee of the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust for 23 years and chairman for 11. He was just as Jones described him: a “multi­dimensional success story, a giant of a man in every way”.

He was one of only two Wallabies ever knighted. The other was Weary Dunlop.

That pretty much says it all.