Phil Morehead was a partner in Thomas Marsden Advertising the advertising agency and design studio that supported Panthers for many years. Phil also was a long-time active member and President of the Penrith Valley Chamber of Commerce. In this contribution he recalls how Penrith P Panther came into existence and became a recognisable community figure.
All images courtesy of Phil Morehead and Thomas Marsden Advertising.
I believe Penrith P. Panther was one of the first mascots to represent a rugby league team in Australia.
I am not sure of the exact year, but I think it was probably in the late 1970s. Ron Workman was the football manager at the time, and he was a little difficult to convince that a mascot would be a good promotional tool.
Years later, at a function, Ron took full credit for Penrith P.’s creation, saying it was an idea he picked up when they went to America on an excursion looking at promotional ideas. I think the cheer girls may have been one idea adapted from America, but Penrith P. was home birthed.
The idea came to me from watching Humphrey B. Bear with my young son
Certificate of Registration of Design for Penrith P. Panther — click to enlarge.
At the time I was doing Max Wright’s Kingswood advertising — new Holdens, used cars and later Viscount Caravans. Max financed the project as part of his advertising.
I negotiated with Stafford Bullen to supply free kids’ passes to Bullen’s Animal World and Warragamba African Lion Safari, which Penrith P. would distribute at home games. Panthers’ contribution was to allow Penrith P. to parade at half-time and give out the tickets.
At the first game, we had Penrith P. distributing the passes from the back of a Max Wright sign-written ute, driving around the inside perimeter of the ground.
It turned into a nightmare.
We also brought 2KA into the partnership and did various pranks at games, with Frank Ley calling them live and promoting Max Wright, Bullens and the others involved.
Most of it was contra. Effectively, all parties were building community goodwill while getting promotional value at the same time.
When Max Wright passed away, 2KA took over ownership of Penrith P., which I think soon came under the control of the football club.
Later, Penrith P. was discarded due to the intellectual property disputes between the ARL and Super League. During the Super League year (1997), Super League came up with Penelope Panther but the suit was too difficult for the person wearing it. When the NRL formed they financed the development of club mascots and Paws and Claws. Claws are still active.
But the O.G. was Penrith P. Panther.
Max’s Note: Reggie Rabbit, with help from TV star Don Lane, debuted for South Sydney at the 1968 Grand Final. Despite Reggie preceding Penrith P. by some years, Penrith P was still one of the first mascots to take the field in Australian Rugbu League.
A removed section from the original Chapter 7: The 16 Year Struggle to Streamline Rugby League.
Cowan says that at the time of his campaign for one board, the NSW Rugby League was run by a clique. This was a widely held view within rugby league circles at the time. The General Committee consisted of delegates and vice-presidents from every club – more than 40 delegates attended the monthly meetings. It was extremely unwieldy and inefficient. It is difficult enough for a 15-person board to get to good decisions in reasonable time, says Cowan. He recalls his time on the NSWRL executive in the early seventies.
What’s really funny is that for a while I thought that I was in the clique. We used to meet before every general committee meeting and decide what we were going to support that night. There were about eight of us, and we all thought we were involved in the important decisions.
But I found out later that I was never really “in”. The “in” team was quite small. It was a bit like an archery target – you have the inner and outer circle of the bullseye. So, even though I was on the executive, I was on the outer circle. It took me till 1974 to work it out, and one night I publicly resigned from the executive over a decision they made, but I stayed on the committee as a delegate.
The week after his resignation Cowan crossed paths with Jack Gibson, the coach of Eastern Suburbs, who congratulated Cowan on making a stand. He said a lot of people were sick of the fact that a small group were running the league to suit themselves. The clique still existed in some measure until Super League came on the scene in 1995.
Tom Wilson also remembers the workings of the clique. At the time of the Mulgoa Road purchase, he was a delegate to the NSWRL. The league was concerned about the bad state of many of the playing fields and was pushing clubs to make improvements.
Back then, the Penrith ground was leased to us by the Department of Lands. For us to commit to spending any large sums of money on doing anything, we would need them to guarantee us something like a forty-year lease. Anyway, there was some talk of having our own playing field on the new land. When I tried to explain all this at a league meeting, the chairman, Kevin Humphreys, accused me – in his inimitable fashion – of hedging. Basically, he said I was bullshitting. I objected and asked for an apology, which I got.
But of course, that was not the end of it. When we all went downstairs for the usual drink after the meeting, I was completely ostracised. The only person who came near me was Peter Moore [former Canterbury CEO]. It was a strong lesson.
Charlie Gibson was widely regarded as part of that inner circle. He was a good friend of Humphreys, and the man that Mackie and the Super Six recommended for the job of rugby league secretary for Penrith.
Leo Armstrong Image Source: The Panthers: Men in Black
Murray Leo Armstrong
Director, Chairman Penrith Rugby League Club Ltd
Murray Leo Armstrong — Leo — was one of the most significant and well-respected figures in Panthers history. A distinguished World War II veteran, respected community leader and long-serving chairman, he helped guide Panthers through some of the most important and turbulent years in its development.
Leo Armstrong (2nd from left) and crew in front of Lancaster bomber G for George. On an “away” to Canberra, the 2003 Panthers squad visited the Australian War Memorial and were inspired by this photo and the story of Leo’s service. (Photo: Australian War Memorial)
Armstrong served on the Panthers board from 1980 and became chairman in 1984, following the unification of the licensed club and football club boards. He remained chairman until 2000, making him the longest-serving chairman in the club’s history.
His chairmanship spanned many of the defining events of the modern Panthers era, including the move to Mulgoa Road, the club’s first premiership in 1991, the Super League conflict, the transition to the NRL, and significant growth in both the football and licensed club operations.
Role in the Narrative
Leo Armstrong appears throughout the Panthers, Passion & Politics narrative as chairman during many of the events described in the Roger Cowan years.
His relationship with Roger Cowan was generally characterised by mutual respect and trust. Armstrong frequently found himself chairing the organisation through periods of intense debate, organisational change and external pressure. His calm demeanour and measured approach were important stabilising influences during some of the club’s most challenging periods.
He was also instrumental in supporting the unified governance model that ultimately transformed the management of Panthers.
Background
Born: 4 November 1922, Gayndah, Queensland Died: 22 June 2015, North Parramatta, New South Wales
Military Service: • Royal Australian Air Force, World War II • Served with 460 Squadron RAAF • Navigator, Bomb Aimer and Front Gunner • Flew 32 operational missions over Europe • Flew the final three missions aboard the famous Lancaster bomber G for George
Profession: Commonwealth Bank of Australia, retired (1984) as Manager of the Penrith Branch
Recognition by Panthers • Life Membership, Penrith Panthers (1991)
Relevance to Events Described
Armstrong became chairman at a pivotal moment in Panthers history. The newly unified board had adopted a radically different management structure, the Mulgoa Road development was underway, and the football club was struggling both financially and competitively.
Throughout the following sixteen years, Armstrong chaired the organisation during a period of extraordinary transformation. Under his leadership, Panthers grew into one of Australia’s most successful licensed clubs while simultaneously establishing itself as a competitive force in first-grade rugby league.
His tenure was not without controversy. Board disputes, the Super League war, questions about governance and growing political tensions within the organisation all occurred during his chairmanship. Yet Armstrong’s personal dignity and steady leadership earned him widespread respect from many who worked with him.
For many involved with Panthers during this period, Leo Armstrong represented a style of leadership that was thoughtful, measured and deeply committed to both the club and the wider Penrith community.
Although the new structure fell short of the model Cowan had long advocated, it was seen at the time as a significant step forward.
Both Cowan and the board were pleased with the appointment of Charlie Gibson. He was part of rugby league’s inner circle1, a close friend of Kevin Humphreys, and the man recommended by Mackie and the Super Six for the role of rugby league secretary at Penrith.
The ad appearing in the SMH in August 1980 produced a large number of applicants and resulted in the appointment of Charlie Gibson.
Gibson came with excellent credentials. He had been secretary of the South Sydney club for ten years and was there during the club’s winning streak of four premierships between 1967 and 1971. While the structure fell far short of the ultimate solution Cowan had been fighting to achieve for more than ten years, it was a huge step in the right direction. The Board and Cowan made an agreement that he would concentrate on the licensed club and take no further part in rugby league management. Cowan recalls;
We all thought – great! Charlie really knows his way around the rugby league world and that is what we need. We thought it could be the turning point in our rugby league fortunes.
I thought the board was making a mistake by having him report direct to the board, but I was willing to give it a go. I even agreed to have my contract changed to reflect that rugby league was no longer part of my responsibilities.
Charlie’s role was going to involve a lot of co-operation with the licensed club management in areas of accounting, ground maintenance, and in football-related marketing and promotions.
My vision for the club had always been a structure that united all the expertise available. For example, the club’s catering manager was far better qualified to manage rugby league functions than honorary committees or a rugby league manager. The club’s maintenance and cleaning managers could look after the ground. Financial management could come under the club’s finance manager. Making rugby league successful would require a united effort and a high degree of co-operation.
Problems began to emerge quite early.. They were used to working as a team with overlapping needs, and they felt there was a lack of co-operation that was making their jobs difficult.
The fact is that we were not ready for such a radical departure from the way football was managed in those days.
Although no one realised it at the time, we were again seeing culture at work. This time it was a clash of cultures. Charlie was new to the organisation and we probably should have done more to talk through the tensions that were building. Culture can be a building force but it can also be destructive.
Keith Rhind says that Charlie Gibson was very much a part of the old rugby league ethos. Penrith was developing a culture that was unique, and Gibson often found it hard to adapt. It started out well enough, but eventually the cracks began to appear as the management culture developing at Penrith came into conflict with the rugby league culture that had helped Gibson achieve success at South Sydney.
Tension between the club and rugby league was growing. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. The Gibson appointment would also create a bitter division within the board and ultimately destroy a long-standing friendship between the chairman and Cowan. It would also light the slow-burning fuse that culminated in Detective Sergeant Mick Howe’s raid on the club a few years later.
When the election was held in 1980 for the first joint board, John Hewett became chairman. He had held that position on the licensed club board for the previous ten years, and he and Cowan had become good friends and built a strong working relationship.
Rhind says that Gibson also developed a close relationship with Hewett, taking him to events and functions to meet the high-profile people in his rugby league circles. Hewett was enjoying the attention. Another director from those days describes him as ‘basking in the reflected glory’.
When a Kangaroo tour was coming up, Hewett told others on the board that Gibson was going to use his influence to take him on the tour. It seems likely that Hewett was pushing for this favour and Gibson was doing his best to accommodate him. But there was disquiet among other members of the board, and Gibson himself also appeared unhappy about it.
Looking back, it was a relatively minor issue. Yet it became one of those moments where personality, disappointment and misunderstanding combined to produce consequences far beyond the original dispute.
Hewett believed that he was about to be invited to join league heavyweights on a Kangaroo Tour2, but that belief was against the designs of the heavyweights themselves. When it didn’t happen, Hewett was devastated and the conflict within the Board intensified. His disappointment, and the atmosphere of conflict on the board, caused him to resign as chairman in 1982. But his bitterness remained.
Deputy chairman Barry Hubbard, who was Hewett’s close friend, also resigned, leaving two vacancies on the board executive. Both men remained on the board. Keith Rhind, then deputy chairman, moved into the chairman’s role, which he held until the following AGM. At that meeting, Leo Armstrong was elected unopposed, and would become the club’s longest serving chairman.
Few could have known it at the time, but Armstrong would go on to become the longest-serving chairman in Panthers history and preside over some of the most significant years in the Club’s development.
Nevertheless the tensions that had been building were far from resolved — and the consequences were only just beginning to emerge.
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Readers of Parts 19–21 may wonder why Roger Cowan spent more than sixteen years arguing for what appeared to be a relatively simple administrative reform. Why did the issue matter so much to him? Why did he keep returning to it despite repeated setbacks, opposition and criticism?
The answer lies in a question that had troubled Panthers almost from the beginning:
How could the Club pursue a unified direction when rugby league and the licensed club were governed separately?
The issue was not new.
Readers familiar with the events of 1971 may recognise some familiar themes. The removal of football club secretary Merv Cartwright and treasurer Ron Partridge arose from concerns about the administration of rugby league affairs and accountability for financial decisions. Although the circumstances were different, the disputes that emerged again in the late 1970s centred on many of the same questions. Who should make decisions? Who should be accountable for those decisions? And what happened when agreements were not honoured?
From the time Penrith entered first grade rugby league in 1967, the football club and licensed club operated under separate governance structures. The arrangement was common in rugby league, but Roger increasingly came to believe it created problems that could never be fully resolved.
It would be easy to assume the conflict was simply about money. Certainly finances played a part. Rugby league required increasing investment, while the licensed club was trying to strengthen its financial position and pursue long-term development projects. Yet Roger’s frustration was not that football sought resources. In his view, the licensed club had repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to support rugby league and invest heavily in its future.
The real problem arose after decisions had been made.
Budgets would be negotiated. Agreements would be reached. Plans would be approved. Yet time and again, football expenditure exceeded agreed limits or new commitments were entered into without the knowledge or approval of those responsible for managing the Club’s overall finances.
From Roger’s perspective, this was not simply a financial problem. It made long-term planning almost impossible.
A licensed club board could approve a football budget, commit to major development projects and make decisions based upon expected cash flows. If those assumptions later proved incorrect because spending commitments had changed, the consequences extended well beyond rugby league. The entire organisation could be affected.
By the late 1970s, these tensions had become increasingly public. In December 1979, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on financial difficulties and disagreements between the football and licensed club administrations. Around the same time, Panthers was preparing for the enormous financial challenge of constructing its new Mulgoa Road complex.
SMH 1979 Dec 9 – click image for full article.
Reports to members in 1980 revealed the extent of the concern. Directors reported that the football club had exceeded an agreed annual budget of $485,000 by more than $100,000 during 1979, while additional commitments had already been entered into for the following season. To the licensed club board, the issue was not simply the amount involved. It was that decisions affecting the future of the entire organisation had been made outside the framework that had previously been agreed.
These events helped bring the governance debate to a head, but they do not fully explain Roger’s determination.
For him, the issue was ultimately one of organisational unity.
He believed Panthers would never achieve its potential while parts of the organisation operated according to different priorities, different assumptions and different lines of accountability. A football club and licensed club could share the same colours, the same members and the same ambitions, yet still find themselves working against each other.
His solution was straightforward.
One board would determine policy and direction for the entire organisation. Management would then be responsible for implementing those decisions. Everyone would work towards the same agreed objectives and everyone would be accountable to the same governing body.
Not everyone agreed.
Some viewed Roger’s campaign as an attempt to centralise power. The perception is understandable. After all, he was advocating a structure that would eventually place responsibility for football and licensed club operations under a single administration. His persistence over sixteen years inevitably raised questions about motive.
Yet there is another interpretation.
Roger was not arguing that football should receive less support. Nor was he arguing that rugby league was less important than the licensed club. Rather, he believed the entire organisation should operate according to a common plan and that all parts of Panthers should be accountable to that plan.
Many years later, Panthers would use concepts such as “twin citizenship” to describe the idea that people belonged not only to their immediate team but also to the wider organisation. While that language did not exist in the 1970s, the philosophy behind it helps explain Roger’s thinking. He wanted rugby league, club management, directors and staff to see themselves as contributors to a single enterprise rather than separate interests competing for influence.
The first major breakthrough came in 1980 when a single board was finally established. Yet even then, the model remained incomplete. Rugby league and the licensed club continued under separate chief executives. As described in Parts 20 and 21, the compromise produced its own difficulties and did not resolve the underlying tensions.
It was not until the end of 1983 that the structure Roger had advocated for so long was fully implemented. One board and one chief executive became responsible for the entire organisation.
Whether that decision alone explains the improvements that followed is impossible to know. Organisations are rarely transformed by a single reform. Nevertheless, the years that followed saw a stronger emphasis on cooperation, planning and shared ownership. The workshops that led to the Five by Five program, closer relationships throughout the rugby league district and a more integrated approach to football and club operations all emerged during this period.
Reasonable people may still disagree about whether Roger was right. They may also disagree about the extent to which later successes flowed from the governance reforms he championed.
What is difficult to dispute is that he regarded the issue as fundamental. For more than sixteen years he returned to the same argument, often in the face of resistance and disappointment.
Ironically, that persistence contributed to one of the enduring myths about Roger Cowan — that he was somehow anti-rugby league.
The evidence suggests a more complex reality.
His long campaign for “One Board, One CEO” was not driven by a desire to diminish rugby league, but by a belief that Panthers could only achieve lasting success when every part of the organisation was working towards the same goals and operating under the same commitments.
Whether one agrees with that belief or not, it became one of the defining ideas in the history of Panthers.
Source Material*
The following documents are extracts of the relevant sections of larger reports:
Despite the promise shown in 1974, the underlying problems did not go away. Ashurst and Stephenson had settled in — the team had shown promise by reaching the finals of the Amco Cup and the budgeting and financial controls were in place. Cowan recommended that it was time for him to hand over to ex-player, Ron Workman.1
The committee agreed and Cowan stepped aside to concentrate on the management of the licensed club.
The potential shown in 1974 was never realised. The first-grade team finished in the bottom four of the competition for most of the seventies.
Cowan’s growing frustration with a system that he considered wasteful, inefficient and noted only for a succession of failures fuelled his determination to convince both clubs of the advantages of a united effort.
If I analyse that history, I can see that the real cause of a lot of the internal problems through the seventies and early eighties was my unequivocal belief that Penrith would never achieve success as a rugby league competitor while it had separate administrations. I harped and nagged boards for ten years before I finally won the argument, and even then, the win was only because of the involvement of the NSWRL [New South Wales Rugby League] executive.
Later critics would portray Roger Cowan as a CEO surrounded by yes-men. The events of the 1970s suggest otherwise. They must have been either unaware of or had forgotten those years. It was an ongoing battle to achieve his ‘one board, one CEO’ ambition. He often thought he would never win. Neither side was willing to make the concessions necessary to bring the two together. Cowan laughs at the ‘yes-men’ tag.
For more than ten years, I did my very, very best – put my absolute best efforts into getting one board, one management. I kept going back, and going back, and it didn’t happen. So, no – they definitely weren’t yes-men.
One time in the late seventies, I was getting so frustrated, I thought I’m really going to make the effort here. I prepared a 19-page booklet for the next board meeting. It had graphs, and charts – every piece of information I could pull together to try and convince them. I was determined to make them see that “this is the only way this club is going to succeed”. I gave it to them a couple of weeks before the meeting to give them time to read it.
On the night of the board meeting, I made sure it was on the agenda. The item came up, and the deputy chairman, Murray Clarke, said: “I move that this document be received”. Somebody else said, “I second that”.
And that was it, there was no discussion, nothing – they just moved on to the next item! I blew my top, lost my temper completely.
It was really stupid putting a 19-page document before a board anyway – boards need concise documents. But I’d tried those for years and they hadn’t worked either.
It took me another couple of years, and a lot more frustrations to win that argument. And we haven’t looked back since. Many other clubs now operate the same way.
Cowan’s commitment to the cause was also used by his opponents to brand him as anti-rugby-league. This is one of the major Cowan myths, and it would be used against him many times by many people. It was also another factor that contributed to his appearance before Ian Temby in 2004. That one small trickle that began as a frustration with failure in rugby league in 1971 combined with some other small trickles along the way, became a raging torrent 33 years later.
Editor’s Note: Roger’s long campaign for “One Board, One CEO” was about far more than administrative structure. It reflected a deeply held belief about accountability, organisational unity and the future direction of Panthers. Readers seeking additional background may wish to read Why One Board, One CEO?
Barry Hubbard says that at one time, Cowan and the board executive even travelled down to the NSW rugby league office in Sydney to talk to Kevin Humphreys [then NSWRL president] to see if there was some way for the licensed club to take over the rugby league club. Hubbard was dead against the idea but still felt it should be explored. Humphreys told them in no uncertain terms that it was impossible. It was unconstitutional, and if they tried, they could be expelled from the game.
Local butcher and prominent cricketing identity, the late Trevor Wholohan OAM2 interpreted Cowan’s trip to rugby league headquarters very differently. His opinion, expressed with his characteristic passion and vehemence, was aligned with those branding Cowan as anti-rugby-league. He declared with his characteristic passion and vehemence, that Cowan’s meeting with Humphreys was “to get rid of rugby league”.
Cowan’s reaction to this was disbelief. He wonders how any rational person could come to such a conclusion.
Imagine meeting with Kevin Humphreys to talk to him about getting rid of rugby league. Any sane, logical person would know that you wouldn’t do that. Humphries would chew you up and spit you out.
Hubbard said Cowan had returned from the meeting with Humphreys undaunted.
Roger was never one to take no for an answer. He had tunnel vision. He went back to the club and resolved to have a meeting with the football committee to decide on holding a joint election for a board that would have responsibility for both clubs.
In discussion, the football committee had agreed, in principle, to hold the electionBut when the actual motion was put to a vote, a division was called, and people were asked to vote by moving to opposite sides of the room. It was narrowly defeated. A couple of the committeemen who had agreed to an election now crossed the floor and voted against it.
The internal squabbling at Penrith – and the poor performance of the team – was becoming an embarrassment to rugby league administrators. The executive of the NSWRL offered to help, bringing in Alec Mackie, a highly respected rugby league administrator, who was chairman of St George and a vice president of the NSWRL. A committee – dubbed the Super Six3 – was set up to find a way forward, with three representatives from each board. Roger Cowan was also a part of the committee. Mackie chaired the meetings, which eventually concluded that there should only be one board at Penrith. The two committees, for the second time, came to an agreement.
When the joint election was held in 1980, the new board comprised all the directors of the licensed club. No-one from the football committee had been successful. It became the first board in rugby league history to handle the affairs of both a licensed club and a football club. However, it was only halfway towards the model that Cowan had been recommending.
I believed that a structure comprising one board employing two chief executives would be just as difficult as having two boards dealing with two chief executives.
In many ways it could even be worse. It missed the whole point of the recommendation.
When the boards came together, that is what they did. Rugby league was controlled through a newly appointed chief executive, Charlie Gibson, while I retained responsibility for the licensed club.
A promising coaching strategy for the 1974 season was derailed by a committee modifying it for the wrong reasons. It was years before its time and it might have been successful had it been given a chance. Here we were in 1980 and I had a feeling it was happening again. The system I had been advocating was being half introduced and again the modifications were for all the wrong reasons. You can’t half bake a cake.
And that was exactly the position the Club found itself in.
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Ron Workman is Panthers player number 13, a member of the 1967 foundation team, he retired as a player in 1973 after playing 93 1st Grade matches. In 1975 he was appointed as the Secretary of the Football Club, a role he held until 1978. ↩︎
Trevor Wholohan was a long-standing critic of Roger Cowan, with tensions between the two dating back to 1974 when Wholohan’s butchery supplied the Club. A dispute over an account led Wholohan to claim that Cowan had impugned his honesty. He later attended most sittings of the 2004 Temby Inquiry as an observer. ↩︎
The committee was in fact: Kevin Humphreys (NSWRL), Alec Mackie (NSWRL), John Jennings (Penrith Distric Club), Tom Ellis (Penrith District Club), John Hewett (Penrith Leagues Club) Rocky Davis (Penrith Leagues Club) — that’s the “Super Six” — and Roger Cowan. Keith Rhind (Penrith Legues Club) was on the bench for this team. ↩︎
In the winter of 1973, Penrith found itself searching for answers.
The club had entered the first-grade competition only six years earlier and was struggling badly. Results were poor, confidence was low and the future looked uncertain. The low point came when Manly-Warringah inflicted a humiliating 70–7 defeat on the Panthers. The result became part of club folklore and reinforced the belief that dramatic action was needed.
Penrith’s response was bold. Rather than look only within Australia, the club turned its attention to England.
Club president Wally Ward and director Bruce Welladsen travelled to England with a clear objective: find experienced players who could strengthen the team and help establish a culture of professionalism. Their first target was Bill Ashurst, one of Britain’s leading second-row forwards. Negotiations were successful and Penrith secured his signature for what was reported at the time as a record rugby league transfer fee. Contemporary reports noted that Penrith had committed more than $27,000 to secure Ashurst’s services.
But Penrith wanted more than a forward. They also wanted leadership.
While in England, Ward and Welladsen turned their attention to Mike Stephenson, captain of the English champions, Dewsbury. Stephenson later recalled receiving an unexpected approach while working on a building site in Yorkshire. A workmate shouted up a ladder asking whether he was Mike Stephenson. When he answered yes, he was told that visitors from Australia wanted to speak with him.
The meeting that followed would change the course of Stephenson’s career.
Ward and Welladsen outlined their vision for Penrith and offered Stephenson a long-term contract. At first he was uncertain. Penrith sat at the bottom of the premiership table and had just suffered one of the heaviest defeats in its history. Yet the honesty of the approach impressed him. Rather than paint an unrealistic picture, the Penrith representatives openly explained the club’s position and their plans for the future.
Stephenson later said that this honesty was one of the decisive factors in his decision. The club was struggling, but it had ambition. Just as importantly, it had a strong junior base and a growing district. He believed there was an opportunity to help build something meaningful rather than simply join an established powerhouse.
Penrith eventually secured Stephenson’s release after complex negotiations with Dewsbury. The reported transfer fee of almost $40,000 established a new benchmark and attracted national attention. The press described the signing as a record-breaking deal and evidence of Penrith’s determination to improve its fortunes.
The arrival of Ashurst and Stephenson generated enormous excitement. Two of Britain’s finest players were heading to Penrith. Expectations rose accordingly.
The results, however, were mixed. Despite the quality and commitment of both men, rugby league success remained elusive. Penrith finished with the wooden spoon in 1973 and continued to struggle for consistency. Yet the significance of the signings went beyond wins and losses. They demonstrated that Penrith was prepared to think differently, act boldly and invest in its future.
Those qualities would become recurring themes throughout the Roger Cowan years.
Cowan continues with further thoughts on the bad decision to place Clare as head coach:
It was a ridiculous decision. Jack had some strange ideas about the strategies of the game and started clashing with the captain, Mick Stephenson. Mick was a passionate competitor and was quick to argue with Jack if he thought the coach was talking nonsense. Jack said he would take him out the back of the grandstand and sort him out.
My response was something like: “Jack, if you think the answer is to fight our captain, I want you to know that you will be doing it over my dead body”.
It was one of the many signs that we had made a bad decision.
This episode reinforced Cowan’s belief that Rugby League decision-making should be seated in one body, looking after the interests of the entire club.
Tom Wilson gives an example of the way the football committee worked at the time.
Les Boyd was a brilliant newcomer at the time, only a very young kid. The coaching committee had invited him and his father to come to the club to talk to us. His father was a little short stocky bloke. Les wasn’t much bigger, but he was a very strong looking, solid boy. And he had already started to make a name for himself.
We’re all standing around talking, and Pat Russell — who was on the football committee — is down at the end of the bar, holding court. He says to me, ‘Look Tom, look at the kid’s old man, the size of him. This kid will never grow up to be any decent sort of a footballer.
That’s what we were up against. Les Boyd did grow up, and he became an outstanding footballer — a mongrel, but a great footballer. It was only one man’s opinion, but that’s all it needed back then. It was like that all the time — how would the bloody schoolteachers know?
Appointing Jack Clare as head coach, the football committee cited Masters’ lack of first grade experience, saying he only had coached school football. In fact, his credentials were very similar to Jack Clare’s, but Masters had a far better CV.
So, the 1974 season began with Clare in the driving seat. Masters was to look after tactics, Harris coached the forwards, and Wilson the backs.
It soon became apparent that there was a problem, says Masters. The team lost its first four games and conceded a total of 107 points.
So on a wet Sunday at Warragamba, after a club family day up there, Roger gathered all four coaches in his car, and gave us an ultimatum. He said, “It’s obvious that this is not working, and I’m going to appoint Roy as head coach. You can accept it, or we go back to the board – who will no doubt go to the media, and wherever else it goes from there.
Cowan made it clear it was up to them — handle it quietly and confidentially or suffer the glare of media coverage and the uncertainty of how the committee would handle making a new decision.
For the remainder of the season, Harris became second grade coach, Wilson coached third grade and as far as the world knew, Clare was the head coach. None of us ever revealed to the press what the situation really was. We maintained that situation only to preserve Jack Clare’s dignity, but the reality was that I was first grade coach for that season.
The entire Penrith experience is one that Masters would prefer to forget. He felt very let down at the time.
My significant problem was that Roger … didn’t give me any support … I had to make my own arrangements … I just had to cop it sweet.
I thought that I had made a significant investment in a life change and ended up being dumped pretty much high and dry
In a recent exercise to select Penrith’s best team and coach of the past 40 years, Masters is named as the first-grade coach for 1974, but it’s taken 40 years to acknowledge it. Cowan told a meeting held in 2006 to discuss that 40-year team, that Panthers has treated Roy Masters abominably.
Masters speaks highly of Cowan,
I have a very great affection for Roger. But my admiration for him is based on what he’s done for the club since I left, not any problem that I had at the time with him.
See, you’ve got to be measured in this world – you just don’t define your personal history in terms of a couple of years you spent somewhere, and that forever influences your view of a person. You also make observations as you go down the track. And I can’t deny the fact that he, selflessly, with massive amounts of hard work, has built a vast empire.
Roger’s model introduced a revolutionary coaching plan It was a good model, but it was too far ahead of its time in terms of the politics that existed at the club in those times.
It didn’t matter what you tried to do with those people. If you came up with something new — like trying to develop match plans or produce videos — or had any kind of scientific training, you were completely alien. You belonged to a culture they didn’t like, and couldn’t accept. Yet look at the game now, it’s all scientific, all research and video analysis.
The politics during those days of two boards was treacherous … and it was very destructive and soul destroying. Merv Cartwright wasn’t on the committee at the time, but he was still a powerful force behind the scenes.
My experience at Penrith steeled me for the future.
In 1974, the year that Roy Masters came to Penrith, Mike Stephenson and Bill Ashurst also came — from England, to play with the team. Under the direction of Roy Masters, the team made the final of the new mid-week competition, the Amco Cup. They finished in ninth position in the first-grade competition, and had come close to making the semi-finals.
Although the team had its best yet success under Masters, he opted to remove himself from the politics and coach the Under 23 side the following year.
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From early in the 70s, Roger Cowan maintained an absolute commitment to the belief that rugby league would never succeed at Penrith while it was a separate entity. Cowan passionately believed that the secret of success was to integrate rugby league, uniting all the expertise within the management structure.
It took more than ten years to achieve that goal. Yet the struggle came with an unforeseen downside — the move to integrate had a negative impact on some relationships and reputations.
Cowan says there had been consistent failure under the two-committee system, and serious conflict.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had taken the easy path and simply kept out of rugby league. I am not sure that it would have been possible to do that and also protect the interests of the licensed club. In so many ways, the two are interdependent. But if I had found a way to do it, there is no chance whatsoever that the police would have walked through that door in 1985.
I know some very successful CEOs of large clubs who have kept right out of Rugby League. I think they were smarter than me. If Rugby League had been managed openly, honestly and effectively in the first few years there would have been no need for me to ever get involved. But I was never about to lead a team working for the success of the Registered Club and have it all blown away by irresponsible management of football.
As the club moved into the seventies, the licensed club continued its growth. But on the football side of things, the club was struggling
The results told the story.
The team’s best performance throughout the seventies was equal seventh in the 12-team competition, in 1971. It was second-last twice and had collected its first wooden spoon in 1973.
Something had to be done to improve performance and Cowan formed a small strategic sub-committee to focus on new strategies. The group included Cowan, Tom Wilson – who would become the club’s director of coaching the following year, Dave Podmore, a local businessman and Frank Ley, a schoolteacher who was also heavily involved in school rugby league. Podmore, Wilson and Ley were on the football committee.
The group devised a whole new concept of coaching.
The plan was to appoint a panel of coaches. The head coach would lead a team of specialist coaches – one for backs, one for forwards, and one skilled in tactics and strategy. The panel would oversee all three grades of football, and each would train the players in their specialty.
This was a new concept for Australian sport and structurally very different. There were similar systems used at the time in American football. Balmain coach Jack Gibson1 had also spoken in support of such a coaching system, although he never actually used it. It is now in common use in all football codes.
The system was introduced in time for the 1974 season.
Roy Masters, who would become a prominent Sydney sports journalist2, was part of that 1974 coaching panel. Barry Harris – a former state representative – was to be the forwards coach, and Wilson, already established as a coach, would oversee the backs. The fourth member of the team was Jack Clare. Clare was popular in the world of rugby league and seen as a ‘nice bloke’. He had been chairman of selectors with the Balmain club but had no experience coaching at grade level. He had coached high school teams and had only ever played five first grade matches.
Cowan and the strategy team wanted Masters as head coach. He had coached a number of successful school teams, notably the Australian schoolboys’ team that returned unbeaten from a tour of England in 1973.
Tom Wilson remembers that some of the group travelled to Tamworth to meet with Masters, who was teaching high school there at the time.
We spoke to Roy for 40 minutes on the sideline of a training session. We watched the session, and Masters didn’t say a thing to the team the whole time. They went through 43 moves – and dropped the ball once. What an efficient team!
Roy had developed a completely different way of doing things. It was a real management concept. We convinced him to leave Tamworth and come to Penrith to head up the new coaching panel.
But it would not prove that easy! Wilson continues,
When they got back and started to work on the new strategy, the old brigade came out fighting, “What would some schoolteachers and a couple of businessmen know about football?” The committee was prepared to go along with the new coaching concept but personality clashes within the committee caused a poor decision that derailed the strategy. The decision was later corrected by Cowan in quite extraordinary circumstances, but the strategy did not recover.
Masters says there were problems from the start.
The pervading culture on the football committee at that time was anti-intellectual. If you were a schoolteacher, you were gone from the start. There was one particular person on the board who really had it in for me. He was very vocal and wielded a lot of power.
There was something like 16 men on that committee, and most of them were the same.
It was never going to work. Frank Ley – who was a teacher – signed me. Roger, the club secretary, had also been a teacher, and here was I, another one. They just would not accept me. And it was all down to the prejudices of this unbelievably insidious committee.
It was even worse than that, says Cowan.
Frank Ley was unpopular with the committee, and he was seen by the committee as the driving force behind the appointment of Roy Masters, so the vote to appoint Jack Clare as the head coach was really a vote against Frank Ley. Personal prejudices easily won the battle over logical argument.
Headline SMH Herald 11 October 1973 – click image to read the article
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Jack Gibson did not coach Balmain. In 1973 he coached Newtown and in 1974, he was in his second stint as coach of Eastern Suburbs. ↩︎
Roy Masters later became a prominent journalist and columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald and is now based in Melbourne. ↩︎
The Panthers scoreboard became one of the most distinctive features of Penrith Stadium — or any rugby league ground at the time. Its origins can be traced to the club’s early think-tank culture.
In the early days of Penrith Rugby League Club, Roger Cowan used think-tanks to encourage participation and generate ideas for the club’s development.
According to Kevin McGrath, the unique scoreboard installed at Penrith Park in 1979-80 had its origins in one of those sessions.
An idea for creating a Luna Park style feature for the club entry was eventually re-imagined as a football scoreboard. The concept was developed further by the architects Dick-Smith Leffler & Gill, who drafted the concept.
Early concept drawing of the Panther Scoreboard. Image from Les Street
Finally, that original idea was brought to life at the southern end of Penrith Park as an innovative scoreboard.
The scoreboard displayed the score of the Panthers game, as well as progress scores from other matches being played on the day. A score by the home team triggered a response from the structure — flashing eyes and a Panther’s roar marking the moment.
Over time, modifications were made as the structure aged and operational demands changed.
The original scoreboard on the left showing scores for 3 grades plus other games. Photo: unknown source. The later version on the right showed only 1 game and the clock — this photo (circa 2012) from the blog: James Smith Reckons
The iconic scoreboard had its operational flaws, as it aged there were many breakdowns and failures and eventually could not deliver what was required at a modern sporting stadium … but still it was loved by Panthers fans and visitors alike.
In 2013 it met a fate unbefitting of a trusted, if unreliable, friend:
This Facebook post is dated 4 March 2014, the photo (source unknown) was taken in 2013.
In 2013, the scoreboard was removed.
At the time, it was suggested that the structure had been carefully dismantled and placed into storage, with the possibility of future restoration. Other accounts indicated that it had instead been destroyed during the removal process.
Regardless of the circumstances, its disappearance marked the end of one of the most recognisable symbols of the Panthers experience.
Panthers, Passion & Politics - The Roger Cowan Years 