Death threats, recriminations and fear: Inside Penrith's redemption story

Every good redemption story has a rock bottom. For Ivan Cleary, it came staring out the glass of the coaches box at Panthers Stadium last May: "F---, I'm responsible for this?" he asked himself watching his team play.

For Panthers chairman Dave O'Neill, it came in the form of chief executive Brian Fletcher using private security guards to protect them from their own fans as they left their own stadium to walk to the nearby car park.

Ivan and Nathan Cleary.Credit: NRL Photos

"Why the f--- did you bring Ivan back", one fan yelled. "Bring back Gus", said another.

"I didn't kill anybody," O'Neill remembers thinking at the time. "I'm not a mass murderer. You walk around town and hear little old ladies say, 'He's the guy destroying our club'."

Even the local police were concerned.

"I got a call saying, 'We're following a lot of the social media and there have been quite a few death threats pointed at you directly'," O'Neill recalls.

There were times Nathan Cleary wished he never signed that million dollar deal. "I wanted to sign a new contract on half the money just so the pressure wasn't there," he says.

His mother, Bec, watched from afar as the drama ripped away at the happiness of her family. "There were days I just thought, 'Oh my gosh, is this worth it? Should Ivan have just stayed at the Tigers?'"

It wasn't that long ago the Clearys were the feel-good story of rugby league. However, the unblemished reputation of the honourable coach took a battering upon his acrimonious exit from Wests Tigers, and with it went some of the shine of his superstar prodigy.

"My son became the villain because of me," an emotional Ivan admits.

"He shouldn't have been feeling that way because the drama and the scrutiny that was surrounding us, that was because of me. Because of the way the Tigers thing went, I got cast as the villain, which is fair enough, but people threw Nathan in with me.

Life was far more simple when father and son were at different clubs.Credit: James Alcock

"The narrative changed. All of a sudden people thought it would be good if we failed. People wanted us to fail because that was the best story. That was the biggest story. I dragged him through that and it's hard to take watching your son struggle as a result of your own actions."

Those actions were the result of a meeting with O'Neill mid-way through 2018, when the Panthers chairman approached the then Wests Tigers coach about the future of his son, only for the meeting to end with an impromptu invitation for Ivan to return to Penrith.

"I was getting frustrated with the media constantly ringing and asking who is going to be your halfback next year," O'Neill says. "Everyone kept saying he's going to the Wests Tigers, Nathan is going.

"I was going to meet with Ivan to find out what the plan was with Nathan so we could put our mind at ease. If Nathan ended up going to the Wests Tigers, then so be it, but we needed to be ready to deal with that."

The conversation then took a dramatic turn when O'Neill, who had already decided that Anthony Griffin wouldn't survive as Panthers coach beyond the end of that season, opened the door for Cleary to return home.

Penrith chairman Dave O'Neill.Credit: Daniel Munoz

"All I know is once I got asked, I knew what I wanted to do," Ivan says.

"Your heart can only be in one place. That's hard to say but that was the reality. Deep down I wanted to be at Penrith. At the time I didn't realise how much emotional baggage I would carry. There was definitely a hangover from the Tigers thing last year, and I wasn't at my best. I wasn't really in the right head space.

"I'm still not comfortable with how it all went down. There was a lot of shit going on. It doesn't sit well with me. I understand my role and agitation, but I'd do it all again, because I know this is where my heart is and this is where I should be."

According to his wife, the wound of how his first tenure at the club was brought to a sudden end hadn't healed.

"It was hard for him sitting there watching his son be happy in a team that he had helped develop get to that stage," Bec says. "I always knew Ivan had unfinished business here with the way it ended."

End of an era

When O'Neill lured Cleary to the club on a five-year deal, he knew there would come a time when Phil Gould's role as general manager at Penrith would become redundant – if it already wasn't the moment he signed the coach that Gould had sacked a few years earlier.

Ivan Cleary and Phil Gould.Credit: ninevms

"If you're going to be the head coach, you need to be the most critical personality in the place," Ivan says. "With Gus here, that was never going to be the case."

To blame Penrith's horror start to 2019 on Gould's presence at the club would be unfair, especially given the toll the sex tape saga had on the playing group when it erupted on the eve of the season.

But the club knew that if Cleary was going to be held responsible for his team's performances, he needed to have greater autonomy.

"I think Ivan was just struggling with the fact that he was second-guessing himself a little bit when Phil was around because he never had full control," O'Neill admits. "I think once Phil moved on, I felt more comfortable that it was going to work. It had to be Ivan's team.

"We were copping it from everywhere. Gus is such a big personality that sometimes you don't know if they're firing the bullets at us or firing the shots at us because Gus was here."

Phil Gould during his final days at the Penrith Panthers in 2019.Credit: Wolter Peeters

No one at Penrith speaks a bad word of Gould. Without him, the club would likely not exist, and they certainly wouldn't be training in a state of the art facility that is the envy of the NRL.

"This would not have happened without Gus," Ivan says pointing at the club's academy. "It's his legacy. This thing is his vision. Other people may have had the vision, but he did the leg work and the hard yards to make it happen. It was a massive grind when we got here the first time, like a proper rebuild in every respect.

"Whenever a coach does that you need support big time and he was enormous support the first couple of years. He's taught me the most, daylight second, in terms of rugby league and my coaching. Most of it, the framework, comes from Gus in terms of footy. But there comes a point in time where you have to let the rest takeover, and that's what happened."

A broken shed

The night Ivan refers to as rock bottom, the same night Penrith bosses were ushered out of Penrith Stadium by security, was a 30-10 Friday night loss to the Warriors that saw them slump to their sixth defeat on the trot and drop to the bottom of the ladder.

"I remember walking into the sheds that night and Ivan came up to me and said, 'I apologise for that performance'," O'Neill recalls.

"I told him, 'You don't need to apologise for anything, we'll be right'. When I said that, I had no idea how we would be right, I just had to show I wasn't down. But I looked around the shed and mate, the shed was broken. The players were just broken."

Nathan Cleary during darker times in 2019.Credit: Getty

None more than Nathan. "I felt like I had anxiety going into games," he says. "It didn't even feel fun because I was just so worried about the outcome and what people would say."

The pain and pressure of the scrutiny the once adored Cleary family found themselves in as a result of Penrith's failures pushed Ivan to the brink of throwing in the towel.

"Yeah, he did," Bec says of her husband's thoughts about quitting.

"I definitely had to have some encouraging words at times, telling him, 'You've got this, it's going to be OK'. He wouldn't have been human if he didn't feel like that at some stage. He'd lost his confidence.

"Going from one club to another, and he was meant to be bringing this team into the top four, but it just wasn't happening. Penrith made a big call bringing Ivan back and they were amazing with the support and that helped Ivan knowing they would stick by him. Now they're reaping the rewards."

Winners are grinners ... Nathan Cleary and Josh Mansour last Saturday with the JJ Giltinan Shield.Credit: Getty

The reward so far is the club's third minor premiership on the back of a record 15-game winning streak. But the ultimate prize awaits.

"I've been chasing it for 30 years," Ivan says of his quest for premiership glory as a player and coach.

"It almost feels like it's a dream. I'm still chasing it. It's not hard to think about what you want when you wake up each day, I tell you that much."