Part 43 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 12: The Anti-Football Myth
This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.
The anti-rugby-league tag is the one that angers Cowan most. It was such a ridiculous claim; he says.
I fought for years to bring about a more streamlined administration of Rugby League despite the conflict, and the criticism that I was bringing down on myself. The results speak for themselves. I was single minded about the need to run a profitable club. If we had spent all our money on football in the seventies, we would not have grown from that very tiny base to one that continues to compete at the top level. Whenever the football club was in crisis I stepped in and did both jobs.
Panthers’ group chairman Barry Walsh worked with Cowan for most of those forty years. He says that on a number of occasions when the team was going through a series of losses and nothing seemed to be working for the coach, Cowan assisted with player motivation. He adds that only very few people ever knew of Cowan’s involvement at that level.
It involved many hours of preparation and attendance at every game. On many occasions he was providing weekly counselling sessions for individual players who had specific problems affecting their performances.
Cowan recalls:
One of my greatest interests for many years has been the power of the unconscious to affect performance. There are many ways of tapping into that power. Meditation, yoga, hypnosis and NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) are all examples and the benefit different people in different ways. I found that a sequence of losses could always be altered by changing patterns of thinking. The majority of athletes, even in losing teams, respond to some of the techniques. I also discovered some of the pitfalls of trying too much.
I only ever offered help after the team had suffered a string of defeats, and on every occasion, there was a turnaround at the very next game. Every time. There was no personal gain – my only motive was to help the team perform better and assist the coach.
My critics say that I would not pay the cost of having a good team. Yet some of them held a majority on the board and made the policy decisions. They never suggested any changes to the budgets for rugby league. When a coach was going through a tough time some of them held secret meetings with players. This brought bad publicity and further demoralised a coach who already had enough problems.
Supporting Rugby League goes far beyond cheering the team from free seats in the grandstand or a private box, rubbing shoulders with the stars of the game, grandstanding at annual meetings, and enjoying spectacular Rugby League events as an invited guest. Directors – and the patron of the club – held that privileged position. It was always disappointing to me that Ron Mulock did not appreciate it to the extent that he would at least accept an invitation from the Chairman to settle his differences quietly and privately in the Boardroom, rather than with very public criticisms.
The reader might be just a little puzzled at this stage about who was really anti-rugby-league – it always puzzled me.
BEYOND THE BOOK
Phil Gould remembers Roger putting these ideas into practice with the Panthers in 1978.
The Mental Game — Roger, Gus and an Idea Ahead of Its Time
If Cowan really had been anti-rugby-league, he could have saved himself a lot of anguish by leaving the hard decisions to others. He could have left the stress that goes with changing coaches and staff, running workshops, writing recommendations and fighting for a united administration to others, and kept right out of it. It is difficult to criticise someone for doing nothing.
It wasn’t as if there weren’t other things to think about. The Club was embarking on a brand-new path – to amalgamate with other clubs. Although totally unrelated to football, this new strategy would be used by some to feed the fires of the anti-rugby-league myth.
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Panthers, Passion & Politics - The Roger Cowan Years 