Nothing taken for granted Harry’s on road to glory
Melbourne Storm’s captain was born to be a Bronco, now he is plotting the club’s downfall and add to the grand final nightmares of a great family friend.
Suncorp Stadium was shaking, literally. For once, rugby league really was rocked to its foundation. Apparently, big venues are designed to “flex” when people get a tad excited watching heart-stopping and breathless sporting events, ala the Broncos’ miracle comeback last week, finally slaying the Penrith dragon. Reece Walsh can do that to you.
On another day, a one-time Broncos diehard named Harry Grant might have been in the middle of the creaking stadium. Sorry, flexing. Instead, his parents packed up the family vehicle this week with purple Storm paraphernalia and did everything they could to stay as far away from the spiritual home of rugby league in Queensland en route to the NRL grand final.
Of all the peculiar ways people are making the pilgrimage to Sydney’s Accor Stadium, theirs is up there: a two-day trek inland from Yeppoon in central Queensland through Miles, a dusty speck on the regional Queensland map with a population, at last count, of less than 2000, onto Goondiwindi, across the NSW border, through Inverell, onwards towards banana country in Dorrigo and Bellingen before a stopover in Port Macquarie. Then, an easy drive down from Port to Sydney? Nah, they’ll fly the last bit.
It’s a road less travelled, perhaps only travelled by them.
“We don’t do cities,” laughs Grant’s mother Margie.
They’re hoping the journey is worth it: watching their son, the Storm’s captain, one of the NRL’s best players and the youngest of four boys tick off one of the remaining boxes on his CV – a premiership ring.
At the family home in Yeppoon, there are still a couple of rooms largely untouched from “H’s” childhood. His bedroom is one. On the walls, there have always been posters hinting at a kid who worshipped the Broncos and could rattle off Darren Lockyer’s statistics better than his times tables.
“Every Queensland kid loved the Broncos in those days,” Margie says. “There’s torn corners on those posters now. We had four boys under six. Don’t ask me how he did in those earlier years because I can’t remember half of them, but it made him tougher. And he loved the Broncos.”
It’s not the first time the Broncos have let a generational hooker slip through their grasp, but it could be the first time one comes back to haunt them in a grand final.
Like Cameron Smith, Grant spent the majority of his childhood wanting to play for the Broncos. He had an in, too: the family’s close friend, then Brisbane recruitment guru Paul Bunn.
“I did say to him one day when he was fiddling around playing in the backyard at Yeppoon, ‘I’ll be back to sign you when you’re old enough’,” Bunn says.
He was true to his word.
“When I went to the Storm, there wasn’t a heap of interest in Harry,” he says.
Apart from his parents Margie and Paul, better known as Piggy, not many apart from Bunn know the trauma Grant went through in his early years before getting a shot at the Storm. When Harry was just 12 Margie and Paul were told there was a chance he wouldn’t survive the night in hospital after contracting a staph infection.
“We just went, ‘What? Last week, he was just running around with his surfboard’,” Margie recalls. “He had three operations in the space of 10 days. What saved him was how fit he was. They told us that. He was always a fit lad who was playing a lot of different sports.”
The following year, Grant suffered a gruesome compound leg fracture when an all-terrain vehicle crushed his limb while on a beach. He lost another year of his development. By the time Bunn had convinced the Storm hierarchy they might have found hooker Smith’s eventual heir, Grant was ready to flourish.
But the opportunity came with biding his time behind Smith, a future NRL immortal who grappled with retirement until months after the 2020 grand final win, reducing Grant to just two games for the Storm in 2018 and 2019.
The last of those was the final round of the regular season in 2019. Named an interchange player, Grant stalked the sideline for an eternity waiting to replace Smith, who famously hated not playing every minute of every match. Phil Gould joked in commentary Grant had already done “480m on the GPS … more than (fullback Ryan) Papenhuyzen”. As Smith orchestrated set after set, peppering North Queensland’s line, he finally trotted off the field having set up a try and then kicked the goal. Grant got the final six minutes.
“In an age where everyone is in a rush or trying to get to the top as quick as they can, Harry sat back and was very, very patient,” NRL legend Matty Johns says. “It showed a great amount of maturity.
“He’s a very old fashioned kid, too. He’s got great parents, grown up in a rugby league household, an earthy kid who can do everything, as good a surfer you’ve seen without being professional.
“Whatever mistakes he made and all his development, it really happened before he had a crack at the big time. I think that is so essential and so underrated. The longer it takes you to get there sometimes, the longer you’ll stay there.”
Johns has had a close affinity with Grant, primarily through his son Cooper, a former Storm player who roomed with Grant. Johns jokes the first time he laid eyes on Grant was a Melbourne under-20s game when he was playing against his other son, Jack. “Jack went in to make a try-saving tackle on him, and Harry changed tack and clipped him,” Johns recalls. “He scored and knocked Jack out in the process.”
What else he saw left an indelible mark.
By the time Grant was excelling with the Storm’s then feeder club, Sunshine Coast, Johns was tipping him to reach the top. He sat down with now Queensland Rugby League chief executive Ben Ikin one day as they discussed Queensland’s best prospects. Ikin reasoned he had found a future Origin captain.
Said Johns: “Let me tell you something Benny, have you ever heard of a bloke called Harry Grant?”
“I haven’t.”
“He’s just started playing for the Sunshine Coast Falcons. Check him out because he will be Queensland captain sooner rather than later.”
“F..k off.”
“The only thing standing in his way is Cameron Smith.”
If not for Queensland coach Billy Slater’s surprising and inspired decision to name Cameron Munster as captain after Daly Cherry-Evans’ axing following game one this year, Johns’ prophecy would have already been right.
While Grant waited for Smith, former Wests Tigers coach Michael Maguire pounced, signing Grant to a loan deal from the Storm for the 2020 season. Grant won the Tigers’ player of the year, set a standard other senior Tigers players could not match and his NRL career took off before returning to Melbourne. Maguire knows Grant well, but also might pay for it this week as he plots from the Broncos’ coaching box.
So, what has made Grant, 27, so good in the years since?
“He’s quite a deep thinker and a real student of the game,” Storm owner and chairman Matt Tripp says. “He’s regularly picking up the phone to Bunny, myself and others to talk about players off contract, what we should be thinking about and where we can improve. He’s 24/7 on it. You might have your captain who just does his thing, but he’s so invested.
“He was a pretty young guy to be anointed as captain given the senior guys who had led the club. The more time I spend with him, the more I realise making him captain – and hopefully a 10-year captain – was the right thing for the club.”
Says Queensland assistant coach Josh Hannay: “Like the great players in those key positions, the game tends to go a little bit slower for them. They see things others players might not. They’ve got that split second more time and he has, to be honest, what 90 per cent of players in his position don’t have.
“What complements his vision is deception. The time allows him to look at the options, and his deception allows the defence to think he’s going to take one option, when in his mind he knows he’s going to take another.
“That’s his gift.”
Not everyone gets one at the NRL grand final.
No one knows that better than Brisbane veteran Ben Hunt. Hunt infamously botched a catch from the kick-off during golden point of the grand final 10 years ago. Johnathan Thurston kicked the Cowboys’ winning field goal moments later. Few felt Hunt’s heartbreak more than the Grants.
Hunt went to the same St Brendan’s College in Yeppoon as Grant, who would run the kicking tee out to him during junior matches. They’ve been representative teammates since.
The Grant family will catch up with the Hunts in Sydney this weekend and have travelled through the United Kingdom together when their boys toured with the Kangaroos. All of Harry’s brothers will be at Accor Stadium: Billy, George and Paul, affectionately known as Monkey and another who has faced his share of trauma with open heart surgery.
Accor Stadium might not shake as much as Suncorp, but who would have thought a kid with a room once adorned with Broncos posters would be standing in the way of Brisbane breaking a 19-year title drought?
“It’s crazy,” Margie says. “But I just wish he and Ben were on the same team.”
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