Greg Clark goes from a 13-year-old racecaller to the voice of rugby

As Greg Clark prepares to call his final rugby game for Fox Sports he recalls his favourite players, biggest regrets and why one player proved a tougher challenge than the rest.

Veteran sports caster Greg Clark at Fox Sports studios in Sydney. He will call his final game for Fox Sports this weekend. Picture: John Feder

If Greg Clark’s commentary voice rose an octave or two while Reece Hodge’s long-range attempt at penalty goal against the All Blacks was in the air in Wellington, flying towards the distant uprights, spare a thought for his own situation.

He had never called a Wallabies win over the All Blacks on New Zealand soil. Time was up on the clock. If the kick succeeded, the match would be over and Australia would win 19-16, its first win over the men in black on NZ soil since 2001. But it is not called Windy Wellington for nothing and as the ball drew closer to the posts, a stiff breeze was pushing it further and further right. Then it hit the posts and ricocheted away.

Not only did the All Blacks survive, but play stubbornly carried on until the 88th minute and by that stage it was Australia pinned on its own line and happy to take the draw.

As it happens, that was Clark’s last realistic chance of calling a Wallabies win on the far side of the ditch over the All Blacks with the curtain set to come down on Fox Sports’ quarter-century of coverage of rugby this Saturday when the Wallabies take on the Pumas in the final match of the Tri Nations Cup at Parramatta.

Nine has claimed the rights to broadcast the rugby from next season and while he has not called a halt to his career as a rugby caller — it’s possible he will call the rugby sevens at next year’s Tokyo Olympics — he recognises that Nine intends to take a new direction and that means leaving him and other veterans of the Fox Sports commentary team behind.

“I have no regrets,” Clark told The Australian. “Well, except that I never did call a Wallabies win over the All Blacks in New Zealand. But I’m owed nothing. I owe everything to Fox and to rugby.”

Perhaps there is a debt, as well, to his boyhood self, the one that used to spend hours imitating the race calls of Vince Curry, Ken Howard and Bert Wright. One day, when he was just 13, the race caller failed to arrive at the track at Longreach and a call was put over the public address system for anyone brave enough to call the races. Clark responded and the rest, as they like to say in commentary, is history.

Ask him if he has his own favourites as a commentator and he quickly pays homage to three of the greats of the game of rugby, Scotsman Bill McLaren, Keith Quinn of New Zealand and Australia’s Gordon Bray. But his personal preference is more a man of the people, Ray Warren, the voice of rugby league. How could anyone not like “Rabs”?

But it also appears that Clark is not one to forget a favour. As a youngster, he wrote to Warren asking for advice on how to be a commentator and received back this invaluable advice: “Always be yourself, don’t try to copy anyone.”

Favourite players? Joe Roff is first mentioned, so too Andrew Walker but it is George Smith who comes out on top of the Clark list.

“I saw him do stuff that, as a loosie, he shouldn’t have been doing … his grubbers ahead, his work over the ball. And he just kept doing it.”

Wallabies flanker George Smith was Greg Clark’s favourite player to call

When he reached his 200th Test, appropriately when the Wallabies trounced the All Blacks in Perth last year, he was asked whether he still had another 200 Test calls left in him. Clark expressed his doubt, recognising that his 60th birthday was just around the corner. It didn’t occur to him — didn’t occur to many people at all — that Australian rugby and Fox would be parting company in little over a year. After 20 seasons of calling the game, it will be Test 213 for him.

He called three Australian Super Rugby titles, the epic win by the Brumbies in 2004, the Reds’ victory in front of 52,113 spectators at Suncorp Stadium in 2011 and the last-gasp win by the Waratahs in 2014, when Bernard Foley sealed his reputation as the Iceman by landing a pressure goal. All against the Crusaders. He insists he has no favourites but, as a Queenslander, calling Will Genia on every centimetre of his angled 55m run to the line in the 2011 Super Rugby decider must have been a treat. If there is a moment in commentary he would like to relive, it is that he did not allow himself to get more emotional when his son, Cam, gave chase to Blues winger Rico Ioane after he had intercepted the ball at Brookvale Oval in 2018. No one gave the Waratahs winger a hope against the All Black flyer but, showing the speed that made him such an asset to the Australian sevens team, he reeled him in and cut him down metres short of the line. As a commentator, Clark would have been completely justified in shrieking hysterically into the microphone but, ever the professional, he reined himself in. Perhaps a little too much.

Commentating on matches featuring his son Cameron Clark was a challenge for Greg

“I always tried to treat him as another player with a number on his back,” Clark said. “But now I will have more time to watch his games and be a dad.”

Clark has nothing special planned for Fox’s final rugby Test. He will take his place with co-commentators Tim Horan, Phil Kearns and Rod Kafer, while back in the studio George Gregan and Justin Harrison will pull it all together with Tony Squires.

Just another Saturday calling the rugby.