Tapping the Unconcious — Anti-Rugby-League?

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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Commentary and Contributions

Making Hard Decisions — Anti-Rugby-League?

Part 42 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.

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Early in 2001 the Board approved Mark Levy’s recommendation that Royce Simmons be re-signed for a further two years. The decision ultimately led to his departure in a way that, to Cowan, was both regrettable and unnecessary.

Royce Simmons was an icon in Penrith. He had come from the country as a young player and had shown enormous commitment to the club for close to twenty years. He was – justifiably – looked upon as one of the heroes of the Panthers’ 1991 Grand Final win. He was extremely popular with sponsors and supporters.

Levy approached the board in early 2001, saying that Simmons believed that some high-profile players would not sign new contracts until they knew Simmons’ contract had been extended. Cowan remembers there was mixed reaction from the Board. Significantly, the five directors who so often voted together were themselves divided on the issue.

Cowan believed the mechanisms that had previously allowed for detailed discussion and analysis were no longer operating in the same way, making the situation even more difficult. Most importantly, it had to be handled carefully. Because of Simmons’ popularity, if word leaked that the board was reluctant to extend his contract, a strong backlash was likely.

He had been quite successful as a coach, which increased the pressure. Although the club had been badly damaged by the Super League wars, Simmons had taken the team to the finals in 1997 and again in 2000. In 2000, the club had also broken records for attendance and sponsorship.

Taking all this into account, the Board agreed with Levy’s proposal and signed the two year contract. Cowan says the 2001 season was a disaster.

The team was not just losing; it was barely competitive in many games. It finished the season in last place. In Royce’s defence, he had been at the club for a very long time compared with the usual coaching careers. A rigid salary cap had prevented the club from adding any new players to the team. However, we still had a good solid base from the previous year, and we had faced the new season with high hopes.

But it does not work that way in rugby league. Having no new blood served to dampen the morale and enthusiasm of the coach, the staff, and the team. The continual losses hit Royce particularly hard. They sapped his confidence, which didn’t help the situation. By the middle of the season, it was obvious that we were in trouble.

In my own mind I was trying to work out how we could overcome the problem at the end of the year. Royce had a two-year contract, and the decision-making processes of the club were basically in the hands of five directors.

By the second half of the season, Cowan had reached the view that the only way to restore spirit to the team was to replace the coach and several members of the football staff.

He could see no value in making drastic changes halfway through the season. It was his plan to spend the remainder of the season collecting as much information as possible, and to work with some trusted staff to try to analyse the problems and come up with solutions.

Had things been different, part of the process would have been consultations with the Board, but he says that by this time, breaches of confidentiality were a fact of life at that level. The last thing the coach and team needed was to have their problems publicly debated in newspapers, and on television and radio. Cowan adds that it often seemed that Ron Mulock and the Western Weekender knew things before he did.

Around the same time, and unbeknown to the rest of the Board, Dennis Coffey and John Bateman were meeting privately with some senior Panthers players. They later said that players had expressed dissatisfaction with the coach during those meetings.

To Cowan, the meetings presented a serious governance problem. He believed concerns of that significance should have been brought back to the full Board and management rather than pursued independently by individual directors. This was particularly difficult for him to reconcile with Bateman’s frequently expressed concerns about corporate governance.

It was also extremely naïve to think that the meetings would remain secret.¹

Soon there was a blaze of publicity. Instead of being handled with discretion and objectivity, Simmons’ future became an emotional public issue that further undermined his position.There were divisions among sponsors and fans. The players, already suffering because of the bad season, were caught in the crossfire.

Cowan says he backed away from making a recommendation but suggested that they consider moving back to the old system, where the responsibility for hiring and firing rested with management.

Greg Evans was vehemently opposed to handing back this power. I was equally obstinate, believing that it was the only way to fix the problem without causing more conflict in the community.

Finally, the Board agreed that Cowan should handle the matter, effectively returning responsibility for the coaching decision to management. Royce Simmons was sacked as coach, to be followed soon after by most of the coaching staff.

As a result, Greg Evans resigned from the Board, to be reinstated about six months later.

Substantial changes followed within the rugby league operation. John Lang was appointed coach, and two seasons later Penrith won its second premiership.

Cowan reflects on the problem:

The phenomenon of coaches reaching a year of failure is not unusual. It is not because a good coach suddenly becomes a bad coach. Had Royce Simmons left Panthers one year earlier, he would have left on a very high note. He gave much to the club over many years. As a coach he was virtually a workaholic and would probably have cheerfully donated his right arm in return for a successful Panthers team. The way he left was sad and did not do justice to his service with the club. What is even more sad is that it could have been avoided.

Recognition should also be accorded to many others from that era, including Mark Levy and all of Royce’s coaching and support staff. Unfortunately, timing in these matters is all-important – a club full of heroes at the end of 2000 and most of them sacked by the end of 2001.

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Max Cowan recalls speaking to some players about what was happening. “Some were furious that other players were, as they saw it, putting the skids under Royce; others were despondent at the prospect of continuing with him as coach. It seemed clear to me that Bateman and Coffey had unwittingly undermined the coach and added to the instability of the team. ↩︎

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Commentary and Contributions

A Return to Two CEOs?

Part 41 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.

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Cowan’s ‘hands on’ approach to rugby league saw him step into the role of rugby league CEO a number of times. He was involved in some monumental rugby league decisions in the club’s history, including engaging some very successful coaches.

Strangely though, he says his passion about rugby league resulted in him sometimes being less tolerant of people than he should have been. This brought him into conflict with people,

I should have been able to handle the rugby league issues better than I did. The number of people who think I was anti-rugby-league is an indication that I was not communicating well. There is plenty of evidence to show that I was passionate about having a successful team. But I resented seeing waste arising from irresponsible decisions.

I could also never cope with people who kept prattling on about the Club not putting enough money into rugby league to make it successful. To my way of thinking they were just ratbags who did not have the common sense to see that if we put unlimited money into rugby league it would only last a few years and then there would be none. To me all this was obvious. The most important thing was good management of the resources that we had, rather than having to spend our way out of trouble because of poor management. It frustrated me that some people just couldn’t see it, and there were probably many times I showed how I felt — which is not the way to win friends and influence…

But when people suggested initiatives that presented a chance to build success, I was never opposed to spending the money. On one occasion I had a call from rugby league commentator Frank Hyde, suggesting we consider getting players from South Africa. His rationale seemed very logical, and the idea looked promising. The Board agreed to my recommendation to try it, despite the expense.

FROM THE ARCHIVES
Looking Further Afield — Penrith’s South African Recruitment Mission
In 1972, a four-man Panthers delegation travelled to South Africa looking for players who might strengthen the struggling first-grade team. The venture became a rather more unusual recruitment story than that simple description suggests.
Read the original account

Another time Alan Clarkson told me of a terrific English player who would probably come to Australia if invited. His name was Bill Ashurst. I reached an agreement with Bill, and we agreed to pay a very large transfer fee to his club. When another club tried to get under our guard, we sent two directors to England to make sure we clinched the deal. The two directors rang from England saying that we could also get the English captain, Mick Stephenson, if we were willing to pay another large transfer fee. We paid record money for those players, and I supported it all the way. The success of those two choices is part of Panthers’ folklore.¹

The fact is that I cannot recall one occasion when a request for money to fund a well-thought-out rugby league initiative was refused by the board or opposed by me. In addition to that, the criticism that I would not give rugby league enough money shows an ignorance of the procedure. The football club would present a budget to the board of the licensed club at the beginning of each season. On most occasions it was approved. But sometimes – and particularly in the Cartwright era – we would be confronted with a huge deficit at the end of the season, and that’s when I would go off my brain.

After ‘one board, one CEO’ became reality in 1984, Cowan led or participated in most of the important plans and decisions for coaching the Panthers.

The change was followed by a much more deliberate approach to football development. Among the initiatives was the Five-by-Five Plan, which set the ambitious goal of having five locally developed players representing Australia within five years. Within six years of the structural change, Penrith reached its first Grand Final; a year later, the Panthers won their first premiership.²

Those decisions also included included the eventual decision to replace Royce Simmons and the contract Cowan negotiated with John Lang, who would take the club to its second premiership. At this time Cowan had once again taken over responsibility for rugby league after a major restructure that saw most of the club’s rugby football staff depart, including rugby league CEO Mark Levy.

Although there had been a number of dramatic rugby league upheavals over the years, Cowan says that, until the Simmons episode, major changes had generally been made with minimal adverse publicity. He attributed much of that to the club’s participative approach to decision-making.

It all seemed to operate quite smoothly, and a lot of that could be attributed to our participative style of management. Any changes were thoroughly discussed and explored before they were made. For example, the final meeting with Ron Willey was preceded by a meeting of the rugby league chief executive and about six other managers. Their brief was to help me analyse the problem, and decide what should be done about it, and how adverse publicity could be avoided. The Board Executive was also brought in before any action was taken.

Similarly, the decision to join Super League followed months of analysis and discussion involving key staff and the Board.

Cowan strongly rejected claims that he ran the Club as a dictatorship.

He maintained that the five directors who later complained about his management had themselves participated for years in the Club’s consultative decision-making processes. His involvement in the departure of some high-profile rugby league personalities nevertheless provided further ammunition for his critics.

Around 1999, the Board began to become more directly involved in the management of rugby league — a development Cowan regarded as a backward step.

It started with a very simple request from the board that Simmons and Levy should attend the start of every second meeting to deliver a football report.

The Simmons/Levy visits soon moved beyond their rugby league reports. What had begun as a straightforward reporting arrangement gradually altered the decision-making structure. In Cowan’s view, it was a step back towards the arrangement of the Charlie Gibson years: one Board dealing directly with separate executives responsible for the registered club and rugby league.

It was a subtle shift away from the model of discussion and analysis that had operated for about fifteen years, towards more direct decision-making structure by the Board.

Cowan cites an example:

At one meeting, Simmons proposed a payment of $100,000 to a player who was exempted from the salary cap. It took all of one minute for the Board to agree, despite a couple of strong dissenters. Previously, something like this would have been analysed carefully by a team. Only then would it have been referred to the board. It was a very poor decision, and fortunately – because of other reasons – it did not happen.

A decision by the Board early in 2001 had massive repercussions.

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More details on the Ashurst and Stephenson signings can be found in Beyond the Book: Looking Abroad — Bringing Stephenson and Ashurst To Penrith. ↩︎
For more details on this see Beyond the Book — The 1983 Strategic Reset and its companiion post The 1983 Strategic Reset — Did it Work? ↩︎

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Commentary and Contributions

Anti-Football — Joke or Paradox

Part 40 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.

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People who worked with Cowan, or dealt with him through rugby league administration over the years, saw the anti-rugby league tag very differently.

Greg Mitchell, rugby league general manager at Parramatta,¹ was a contemporary of Cowan during the NSWRL days. They attended many meetings together.

If there was some issue facing the game at the time, Roger always had a paper to present to provide a new perspective. He was certainly always current and relevant in terms of rugby league issues.

David Gallop says the fact that Cowan was on the Board of Super League is evidence of his reputation as a leader among football club CEOs.

I’ve always found him to be a deep thinker about rugby league and how to improve the game. For instance, his role in the judiciary concept and the amount of written material that he put together in relation to that – shows that he was very interested in the future of rugby league.

Roger Cowan was the original architect of the judiciary system introduced by Super League in 1997 and subsequently adopted by the NRL. In a 2003 paper, academics Ian Dobinson and David Thorpe described the system as a “benchmark or exemplar for how sports … should deal with on-field violence”.

Cowan says the way the rugby league judiciary worked had long been a problem in his mind.

Even back in the early seventies, when I was on the NSWRL executive committee, there was always controversy about the way the judiciary worked. Often there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the decisions, and some teams appeared to be getting more favourable treatment than others. One night I decided to suggest an improvement to the system.

Bill Buckley was the chairman at the time. I waited till general business, then stood up and said,

“I want to make a suggestion about the judiciary system”.

Buckley said,

“Sit down, Mr Cowan, you’re not here to talk about judiciary”.

“But I just want to suggest an improvement.”

“Sit down, Mr Cowan or leave the meeting. You are out of order”.

That was it. He was going to throw me out of the meeting rather than listen to a suggestion. The culture of rugby league was always pretty closed in its early days. There was that inner circle, and they were fixed in their ways. It was very much a closed environment for ideas. It was an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of atmosphere. “We’ve been doing it this way since nineteen hundred and nothing …”.’ It took around twenty years for it to change.

At a Super League meeting one night, we started talking about judiciary, and I said, “I’ve always had a passion for judiciary, I’d like to write a paper on it.” They said, “Terrific! Go ahead, do it”. It was such an open and participative environment. Everyone worked together in a great spirit of cooperation to get things done.

I wrote a proposal, and we worked on it as a team. There were a number of modifications, and it came into operation in time for the commencement of the Super League competition. When the NRL competition started there was great debate about which system to use for judiciary – the Super League or the ARL system. They agreed to use the Super League system, but to my horror and frustration they started to use it incorrectly. It was going back to being more like the ARL system. Fortunately, someone must have seen what a mess they were making of it and made the necessary changes.

Cowan says his original system was refined by the input of others on the Super League planning group, and since then there have been some minor modifications but the basic principles remain the same. Thorpe and Dobinson agree that the previous NSWRL judiciary procedure was viewed as arbitrary and inconsistent. Their research also found that it ‘was not written down anywhere and varied from chairman to chairman’.

The NRL system was also adopted by the Australian Football League at the beginning of the 2005 season. In an article in a sports law journal, The Commentator, Andrew Stops, a partner in Piper Alderman’s Dispute Resolution Group, Melbourne, made the following comment:

The tribunal system is a great credit to the AFL. It is transparent, predictable and flexible enough to deal with a wide variety of incidents that can and do occur in our national game.

Beyond the Book: Roger’s original judiciary papers survive, providing an unusual opportunity to follow the way he approached the problem — from defining the desired outcomes to designing the system and later defending its principles. Read: Don’t Fix the Decision. Fix the System.

At the time he was interviewed for the book, David Costello was CEO of ClubsNSW, having previously held the same role with the Leagues Club Association. He had a long association with Roger Cowan. He laughs at the suggestion that Cowan was “not a rugby league man”.

I don’t believe that myth. Roger is an absolute supporter of rugby league, I’ve seen it personally, in the support that he extends to junior rugby league and so many other areas.

I think more than anything else, he’s encouraged better professionalism on the football club side of things – as opposed to the leagues clubs side. I don’t believe that Roger ever had anything but absolute regard for rugby league, and the need to promote it and propagate it. But he was also very mindful of the costs associated with supporting a professional rugby league team. He would have liked the football club to be able to fully fund rugby league at some stage, given the pressures that we’re now seeing with government taxation levels.

So, to suggest that he’s not passionate about it – that’s a joke.

Roy Masters says Roger Cowan’s ‘anti-rugby league’ tag is paradoxical.

There were many times that he had to pull himself away from rugby league, because people were saying he was too hands-on. He played rugby league. He’s always been fascinated by the game and quite a few times he was involved at the administration level.

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Greg Mitchell left Parramatta Eels in 2005 and joined the NSW Rugby League Western Academy. ↩︎

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Commentary and Contributions

The Not-Enough-Money-For-Football Myth

Part 39 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.

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The perception that Roger Cowan was against rugby league was built up through the seventies, as he battled to bring the registered club and the football club under one administration.

Barry Hubbard was on the executive of the registered club through those years.

There was the football committee and our board, and there was very little liaison between them. The football committee called the board the “kings in their castles”. Roger was always up against it because everybody knew he was determined to get hold of football. He once told the board executive, “We should cut the head off rugby league”.

It was a remark that would come back to haunt Cowan. He did not remember the particular occasion, but acknowledged that, when particularly frustrated by the divided administration, it was quite possible he had said something like it.

I used to say that if we were not careful, rugby league would send us broke.

They [the football committee] would give us a budget, and when it came time to pay the bills at the end of the year, the amount would be double. To them there was no limit – they would just spend, didn’t care where it was coming from.

The other thing that I always said – and I’ve never backed away from it – is that the number one priority is to make the registered club successful. Rugby league has to run second. If you reverse the priorities you end up with nothing, not even a team. Western Suburbs came close, and Norths failed to take their place in the fourteen team competition. The Newtown club – with all its traditions – died completely.

Expressed that way, Cowan’s priorities could easily be interpreted as placing rugby league at the margins. His argument was almost the reverse. If the registered club was to provide continuing support for football, its own financial strength had to come first. In his view, weakening the source of the funding would ultimately weaken rugby league itself.

The vote taken in July 1999 was not a vote on whether to merge, but on whether to sign and send the letter to the NRL.

In 1983, Newtown¹, one of the original rugby league clubs, with a debt of $1 million and no money to pay its players, was forced to fold. In a similar financial position, Western Suburbs — also one of the rugby league’s foundation clubs — was only saved by legal action. It struggled for many years before amalgamating with Balmain in the late 90s.

Cowan’s own memories of the days when the Penrith club was unable to pay its players had steeled his convictions.

The dispute always made me think of the fable of the goose that laid the eggs of gold. If the goose is treated badly there are no more eggs.

Yet the belief that not enough money was put into rugby league is a big part of the anti-rugby league tag. Merv Cartwright took what he needed for football, because he believed he could, but he was not the only person who saw things that way. In their evidence at the Inquiry, both Greg Evans and Dennis Coffey said that Cowan was not as supportive of football as they would have liked. Both spoke of their passion for football and their love of the team.

There was, however, an important distinction between Cowan’s influence as chief executive and the authority of the Board. Cowan could advise and recommend, but decisions about the level of financial support provided to football ultimately rested with the directors.

That raises a question not explored in evidence presented to the Inquiry. If directors believed football required greater financial support, they had the capacity to propose it and, if they commanded a majority on the Board, to approve it.

When Ian Temby suggested to Coffey that he ‘reckoned the leagues club was mostly there to support the football club and the football team’, Coffey agreed. He said that it would not surprise him if management was prepared to collude in a reverse takeover by amalgamating with clubs that would take control of rugby league out of Penrith’s hands.

Roy Masters does not agree that Roger Cowan could have secured more premierships by providing more money.

Rugby league premierships are extremely hard to win. Look at Cronulla.² They came in the same year as Penrith, and they’re still waiting for their first one.

Putting more money in does not necessarily help. Penrith put more money in in 98, when Royce Simmons was coach, and didn’t win. They didn’t in 2003, with John Lang, and that year they won. There are many elements to winning a premiership.

Being the type of person that he [Cowan] is, he probably took the view that if you build a tremendously successful licensed club, you are always going to have a cash cow that can support a football club.

Dennis Fitzgerald, who was the long-time CEO of the Parramatta Eels, has faced the same problems with funding;

If you put all the money into the game – and so many clubs have done that – their leagues clubs either have to close or they run into all sorts of financial problems. Newtown is a classic example.

Roger is a rugby league person, but at the end of the day, he is a visionary, a business person who realised that unless you’ve got something funding rugby league, you won’t have anything. He had a massive junior league to fund, as well as an NRL team – as we all have. You need a good profitable facility to generate the dollars to keep everything else running.

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Only tw years earlier, Newtown had played Parramatta in the 1981 Grand Final, leading 7-6 at half-time before losing 20-11. Few watching that game could have imagined that Newtown had only two season leftc in the first-grade competition. ↩︎
Masters was speaking well before Cronulla won its first premiership in 2016. ↩︎

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Commentary and Contributions

The Foundations of Myth

Part 38 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.

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In the aftermath of Mulock’s advertisement¹, a mythology built around a distorted version of events began to take hold in Penrith. It was strongest perhaps among readers of the Western Weekender, but by word of mouth it spread widely. People came to believe that four of the nine Panthers directors had voted for a merger with Parramatta, even though no such vote had been taken.

One of the four was Barry Walsh who says:

I made it clear from the start that there was no way I would ever vote for a merger with Parramatta. But we had to investigate it. We were in trouble; we could have lost our team completely. We had a duty as directors to look at the position and investigate the options and the opportunities.

In 2002, the five directors who had opposed signing the letter placed another full-page ad in the Weekender. Again, it referred to the merger, and the ‘vote’ on it. In part it reads:

On 31 July 1999 a special board meeting was held at Roger Cowan’s request at which he tabled a written submission by the Penrith and Parramatta clubs to the NRL requesting the NRL’s approval for a joint venture of the two clubs for participation in the NRL competition from 2000.

It notes that the document had been signed by the Parramatta CEO.

The vote taken in July 1999 was not a vote on whether to merge, but on whether to sign and send the letter to the NRL.

The assertion was that the document was a submission for a joint venture between the two clubs — a description that did not accurately reflect what the letter said. The letter sought the NRL’s approval for Penrith and Parramatta to continue discussions about a possible joint venture, while expressly stating that neither club was under any obligation to proceed.

The ad did not mention that the letter clearly spelled out that there was no obligation to merge.

The ad was run as part of the Five’s campaign for the October 2002 election for the Board of Directors². Cowan says it followed their controversial “Board Wars” front page headline in the newspaper a week earlier.

For Cowan, the advertisement was more than simply an inaccurate account of what had occurred. He saw it as part of a deliberate attempt to portray him and the other three directors as being prepared to sacrifice Penrith’s independence:

By this time, I had seen plenty of behaviour from these directors that should have prepared me for this, but it still surprised me a bit. Here in print was the evidence that they were prepared to stretch the facts in order to take over the Board of the Club³. If the ticket they ran at that election had been successful, the Board would have contained the so-called Footy Five, and two other affiliates of Greg Evans.

Ron Mulock ran his own separate ad at the time of that election. What surprised me most was that a well-known local solicitor, a prominent local newspaper owner and businessman, and a high-profile Labor politician – who was also the club patron – would put their name to ads that were obviously designed to mislead the Club’s members and the public. The participation of the other three did not surprise me.

Particularly damaging were some misleading statements in the Footy Five ad.

Readers would be left with the impression that I had signed away the club and that they had saved it. Also untrue was that four directors had voted to merge with Parramatta.

The belief that Roger Cowan signed a document to merge, and that without the actions of these five people and Ron Mulock, there would be a team called the Parramatta Panthers in the competition – remains with many in the Penrith community to this day. A number of long-time Panthers supporters interviewed for this book were definitely under this belief.

Roger Cowan says that the merger saga solidified the anti-football perceptions that he believes started many years earlier.

In the mid-1960s, Penrith won a place in the first division competition, but Cowan was continually frustrated by the football committee’s inability to stay within budget. The tensions between the two administrations eventually contributed to the removal of district club secretary Merv Cartwright⁴.

As a player I had been quite friendly with Merv and supported him.

Once we were both in administrative positions, we came into conflict. We did not work well together as secretary and treasurer.

He was on the registered club committee when I offered to manage the Club on the three-month trial. He spoke against it. The committee accepted the offer and Cartwright was furious.

After the meeting I went down to help behind the bar and he followed me, abusing me all the way.

“What a hide I had to take on such a role without previous club management experience”, he said. “What would a schoolteacher know about running a club?”

When promotion to first division was raised, I supported it totally. The bad blood that existed between Cartwright and me was never a factor. I was excited by the prospect.

Penrith 1st Grade circa 1959 — Cartwright and Cowan are teammates. (photo courtesy of David Ellks)
Back row: Gordon Roberts (2nd from left), Don Ellks (centre), Merv Cartwright (4th from right), Noel ‘Doc’ East (far right).
Middle row: Roger Cowan (far left), Leo Trevena (centre)
If you can help identify any others please contact admin@pantherspassionpolitics.com

Cowan had realised that promotion to the top level would be made much more difficult while it was struggling financially. He and some of his team were working seven days a week to turn the registered club around.

The rugby league competition was very different in the 60s. It was Sydney-based, most players were employed in other jobs, and it did not require the kind of money it does today to participate. A small club could aspire to do it – provided it was run efficiently. But Penrith was by far the smallest, by every measure — licensed club turnover, profitability, membership, football operations, financial resources and assets. Even Newtown was larger. St George, Norths, Easts, Balmain were all giants in comparison. Cowan realised it was going to be difficult to compete with them in rugby league without significant financial gains.

Up until that time I doubt if anyone could have said that I was anything other than a committed rugby league supporter for Penrith. However, reputations are often built on rumour rather than fact, and I had made a ferocious enemy.

Cartwright was well known in the district and had built his own reputation as a rugby league man through and through. Considering our conflict, it is unlikely that he would have been singing my praises around the junior league and other league circles.

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This refers to the advertisment run in the Western Weekender in 1999. You can read it in full in A Campaign of Letters, a PDF archive of public dispute of late 1999.
↩︎
By this time the Penrith Panthers had already competed in three NRL seasons — the prospect of being excluded no longer existed, there was no danger, no prospect, no thought of mergers.
↩︎
The five directors signing this ad would contend their aim was to protect the Penrith club.
↩︎
The treasurer at the time, Ron Partridge, also lost his position. See Beyond the Book — Removing the Football Club and Treasurer ↩︎

← Part 37 · All Parts · Part 39 →

Commentary and Contributions

The Myth of the Footy Five

Part 37 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 11: A Strange Response to a Lifeline

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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Few Board decisions carried greater significance than the one made late in July 1999. Panthers’ place in the national competition may have depended upon it. It was life or death in rugby league, says Cowan

Panthers losing its place in the NRL competition would have been a disaster, yet here we have a board refusing to talk about it, and refusing to sign something that would have given the club more time.

Sometimes I would have daydreams about the Footy Five attitude¹. I imagined them deciding to dive into a pool from the high tower. They would climb to the top, look down and discover that all the water had drained out of the pool. This was new information. But they had already made a decision, and why would they change it just because of new information? So they had dived anyway. As they plummeted downwards, they were studying a book entitled Corporate Governance. It was open at the chapter about considering all the available information and making decisions in the best interests of the organisation.

There was only one downside to signing that letter. Extending the deadline would have allowed the media to continue its speculations, and this, in turn, would have continued to foster divisions in community attitude.

If it had been signed, it is certain that the subject would have been raised again in Penrith Council, perhaps with some questions to Bateman and aspiring councillor Evans, who had previously served and was known to many on council.²

If it had been signed, there would have been no Footy Five campaign, no full-page ads from Ron Mulock attacking Cowan and the other four directors. And there would never have been what Cowan regarded as the biggest myth of all — that the Footy Five and Mulock had saved the Panthers.

There would never have been a ‘Board Wars’ story on the front-page of the Western Weekender. And the Footy Five may never have lost their seats on the Board.

Panthers Board, management, and staff – including the Five themselves – would have avoided much pain.

It is also likely that Panthers would have been spared the enormous costs – in money, time, spirit and lost business – of the Temby inquiry. The NSW government might have been spared a useless exercise which cost it millions of dollars, and the respect of the club industry.

It never occurred to Cowan that there could have been any misunderstanding about the non-binding nature of the document.

Despite all the encouragement I had given the management team trying to have open minds and think creatively, and my own understanding of the powerful impact paradigms can have, it never entered my mind that anyone could fail to understand. I tried so hard to explain it. The document itself seemed so plain.

In September 1999, Ron Mulock sought to publish a full-page advertisement in two local newspapers. It supported his position on the merger situation and was highly critical of Cowan. The Penrith Press declined to run the ad, saying they considered it defamatory. The Western Weekender ran it.

The ad described a document that had ‘fallen off the back of a truck’ to come into his hands. It was a copy of the letter to NRL chairman Malcolm Noad, signed by Denis Fitzgerald – and with a space for Roger Cowan’s signature. The Mulock ad quotes from the document:

‘This submission creates no obligation on our clubs to conclude the joint venture’.

The ad also noted the document to be confidential.

Editor’s Note: Following the Board’s July 1999 decision, the merger issue unexpectedly returned to public debate — the full-page advertisment mentioned here was not what sparked the return, three weeks earlier a press release lit the fire. The Historical Context article — Resurrecting the Merger Debate — examines the exchange of letters and public statements between Roger Cowan and Ron Mulock and links to the Digital Archive containing the original documents.

So, how did this confidential document get from the Panthers boardroom into his hands?

Greg Evans told the Inquiry there had been a split in the Board between those who didn’t want to merge at any cost, and those that were willing to accept the merger. Ian Temby asked if ‘the former group would have rather seen the Panthers cease to compete in the top competition than merge?’

Evans answers: ‘I can’t speak for them, but I probably would have.’

Yet the theme that resounds through Evans’ evidence is his passion for rugby league. This, he claims, first prompted him to stand for the board, and to lobby board members when vacancies became available. Yet his evidence appears difficult to reconcile with that passion. He told the Inquiry he would probably have preferred Panthers to leave the competition rather than merge to ensure top grade games continues to be played by a Panthers team at Penrith Stadium.

Mulock’s attack in the Weekender initiated the myth of the Footy Five, as Cowan explains:

He divided the Board into two groups and labelled one group the Footy Five. He was claiming the high ground for them, saying it was they who would save the club. He denigrated the three directors who had voted in favour of signing the non-binding letter.

So the very concept of a Footy Five, from the first day it was invented, was a total misconception. I call it Mulock’s myth.

As for his other claims, there was no split on the Board about retaining our identity in rugby league. Chairman Barry Walsh has said many times, there was no vote on a merger. The only vote was about signing a non-binding letter.

What did Evans have in mind when he told the inquiry that there were some directors willing to accept a merger? Did he really believe something for which there is no evidence anywhere, or was he just having difficulty in breaking out of his paradigms?

A myth that Cowan had signed the letter grew in the wake of Mulock’s attack, linked to claims he wanted a merger and that Cowan was anti-rugby-league.

Roy Masters disagrees.

I saw that letter, and it was signed by one person, and it was not Roger Cowan. I don’t know how hard he pushed it, but he didn’t push it so far that he signed that document.

The claims by Mick Kelly and others that Ron Mulock and/or the Footy Five had saved the Panthers from extinction are not borne out by the events of the time. The dogmatic stance taken by the Five could easily have spelled the end for the Panthers team.

North Sydney’s misfortunes during 1999 ultimately played a decisive role in saving Penrith. Norths’ stadium on the Central Coast was supposed to open for the 1999 season, but it rained in Gosford almost non-stop for months. The club had vacated its home ground at North Sydney oval, so all its home games had to be played as away games. What should have been a bumper season became a financial disaster for them.

It had been a well-kept secret that North Sydney had financial problems. Towards the end of the 1999 Season, they announced they were going into receivership, and thus had no chance of competing in the NRL on their own. The club formed a joint venture with Manly, and Penrith moved into 14^th position. That day, for the first time, Penrith became assured of its place. For some months Cowan had been aware that Norths’ misfortune was helping to close the gap for Penrith. It was a tight tussle on the criteria ladder.

Cowan remained apprehensive right up until the final decision that ensured Panthers’ place in the fourteen-team competition. Three possibilities worried him. Firstly, Norths could – and probably would – finish in front of Penrith on the criteria score. Secondly, even if Penrith was only slightly ahead, grants of $20 million by two governments — given the political push to have a team at Gosford – might have somehow been included in the formula to push the advantage back to Norths. Finally, if Norths merged with Souths it would create an entirely new entity to take the 14^th spot.

Each of those possibilities would have been the end of Panthers.

Cowan finally breathed a sigh of relief when Norths chose Manly as its partner. Manly had long been assured of a place, and Norths’ place became vacant for Penrith.

Panthers had survived — but only because events entirely outside the club’s control had unexpectedly changed the criteria race.

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Editorial note: Footy Five is used here — and elsewhere — as retrospective shorthand. The name became associated with these five directors during the later Board conflict and election, rather than during the events being described here. See Beyond the Book — The Footy Five: A Name That Rewrote the Story.
↩︎
This paragraph refers to John Bateman and Greg Evans two of the Panthers Board who were included, by Ron Mulock, in a group he called the Footy Five. ↩︎

← Part 36 · All Parts · Part 38 →

Commentary and Contributions

A Lifeline Rejected

Part 36 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 11: A Strange Response to a Lifeline

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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Panthers was running out of time.

With only days remaining before the deadline for NRL amalgamations, the club appeared destined to miss the cut for the new fourteen-team competition. Then, unexpectedly, a possible lifeline arrived.

It required nothing more than the signing of a non-binding letter.

The Board rejected it.

Through the first half of 1999, Penrith continued to sit at number fifteen in the NRL criteria. The deadline for amalgamations was midnight on 31 July.¹

Commentators had labelled a merger between Parramatta and Penrith was a ‘done deal’. Community concern was mounting. Two Panthers directors with ambitions in local politics, John Bateman and Greg Evans, were sitting between a rock and a hard place.²

Late in July, Cowan received a call from rugby league headquarters concerning the deadline.

Penrith was still highly regarded in the Super League circles,³ and they were trying to do anything possible to assist us. It was obvious to everyone that we were in dire trouble. We sat solidly at number fifteen, and that didn’t look like changing. Nobody knew what was happening at Norths.

The call suggested that we could at least maintain a fallback position if we were prepared to sign a letter saying that we were still considering a merger with Parramatta and requesting more time. The letter would very clearly state that it was not to be taken as any commitment to a merger. It would be a non-binding document, aimed solely at keeping our options alive.

In his evidence to the Inquiry, John Bateman spoke of the events of July 1999. He said that when Cowan presented this offer to the board on 31 July, the Board resolved not to sign the letter. Bateman also spoke of his frustration concerning a paper that Cowan presented to the Board on 20 July, with the latest information on joint ventures.

Bateman said:

In the previous September we had resolved to stand alone. That was our view, and then Roger tabled this paper giving us more information and basically telling us that we were in a risky position standing alone.

From a corporate governance perspective, directors are expected to receive and consider information that may materially affect the organisation. Why, then, would the presentation of updated information about such an important issue become a source of frustration? A CEO who withheld such vital information would be guilty of poor corporate governance.⁴

On 31 July Cowan called a special meeting to advise the Board that there had been an offer that would overcome the need to comply with the 31 July deadline. Panthers would simply need to sign a non-binding letter addressed to NRL Chairman, Malcolm Noad. Cowan suggested to the Board that there was nothing to lose by signing it.

Bateman was not the only one who was angered by the presentation of the non-binding letter. The ex-wife of Greg Evans remembers how very stressed her husband was before leaving for that 31 July meeting.

Why these two directors reacted angrily to a non-binding proposal that would keep the Club’s options open remains a deep mystery. Cowan developed an interesting theory about it, which seems to be borne out by some seemingly unrelated events of the 1990s.

He came to believe that the concern could not have had anything to do with merging because it was a non-binding letter and the Footy Five had the numbers to prevent any merger any time they liked. He started to wonder if the problem was just the publicity.⁵

Greg Evans shed some unexpected light on the events of July 1999. He was adamant that none of the Five had believed that the document was actually non-binding.

I really believed that signing that letter was signing to merge with Parramatta. So did the others.

I believe if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then that’s what it is. It might have said non-binding, but once we signed it, we were going to merge. The NRL were putting enormous pressure on everyone, standing over teams, trying to force amalgamations. It was very bad PR for teams to die completely, so it was in their interest to push.

There was debate and discussion that night, but when the letter was discussed by the entire board, the fact that it was non-binding did not come into the discussion. Every member of that board believed it was an agreement to amalgamate.

Another of the Five, Geoff James, agreed with Evans, saying his view was ‘dead right’.

More about Greg Evans: See Major Player — Greg Evans

It might seem difficult for some readers to believe that anyone could misread such a letter. It was a simple one-page document. There it is on the opposite page! Leo Armstrong, Barry Walsh, Keith Rhind and Terry Heidtmann had no doubt that it really was a non-binding agreement.

The committee had representation from local councils, and from local community organizations and businesses, as well as people from Panthers management and Board. The purpose of the committee was to devise strategies that would convince the league decision makers that they could not drop Penrith.

The other three members of the Footy Five group were asked in writing if they agreed with Greg Evans’ view. Dennis Coffey did not respond.

Craig Terry says he had a different perspective on the incident. The document said non-binding, he recalls.

But my view was that signing that document would signal that we were prepared to reopen the issue

It was an important document, and we had no legal advice to say what it actually meant. It did say ‘non-binding’, but what it said was not the main issue. We had made policy determinations that said ‘no’.

Later John Bateman wrote that whilst the document was non-binding, he felt that signing it would bring about a merger. Cowan says it would be easy to jump to conclusion about Evans and James when they claimed that the document was a binding agreement, but he believes it is possible they actually believed what they were saying.

If Evans and James genuinely believed the document committed Panthers to a merger, then an obvious question follows. How could intelligent and experienced people read a document that repeatedly described itself as “non-binding” and nevertheless conclude it required a merger?

The contradiction is difficult to ignore. The letter before the Board imposed no immediate legal obligation and expressly preserved Panthers’ ability to make future decisions. Yet some directors clearly believed it represented something much more significant.

Before considering one possible explanation for this apparent contradiction, it is worth pausing to appreciate just how differently the same document was being interpreted.

Cowan suggests an explanation comes from the author Joel Barker whose book The Business of Paradigms, explains that people interpret information through mental frameworks — beliefs and patterns of thinking. These mental frameworks, or paradigms, cause people to fail to see evidence that goes against their beliefs.

Barker says that even experienced scientists sometimes fail to see clear evidence, although it might be right before their eyes, if it is in conflict with what they expected to see, or what they believed.⁶

According to Cowan if directors came to that special meeting with the firm belief that they were being asked to vote on merging with Parramatta they could have been “trapped by their own paradigms”.

My argument that it was non-binding and that we had nothing to lose would have fallen on deaf ears.

From the Footy Five point of view, a decision not to sign may have had certain advantages, no matter what different reasons each of them had for not signing. Perhaps it was just plain old-fashioned good luck — make a silly mistake and it comes back to reward you.

Had they analysed the situation and concluded there was nothing to lose except some unwanted media speculation, it would have been difficult to justify not signing it. As directors they had a duty to do what was best for the business, and what rational argument could there be against keeping all the options open for as long as possible?

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Only the top 14 ranked teams were to be included, amalgamated entities were guaranteed a spot – so this deadline had great relevance for Penrith.
↩︎
Roger Cowan believed the political ambitions of both John Bateman and Greg Evans may have influenced the way they approached issues surrounding the merger debate. His reasoning is explored further in the accompanying Removed Section — Political Ambition.
↩︎
Although Roger refers to “Super League circles”, he is really referring to senior figures associated with News Limited and the Super League organisation.
↩︎
The Australian Institute of Company Directors identifies keeping directors informed of matters that may materially affect the organisation as one of the CEO’s fundamental governance responsibilities.
↩︎
Roger Cowan eventually developed an alternative explanation for why this apparently harmless document generated such strong opposition. It is explored in the accompanying Removed Section — Political Ambition.
↩︎
“Paradigms” was a subject often covered in training sessions at Panthers thoughout the 1990s. One of the videos consistently used is available on YouTube was Joel Barker’s Discovering the Future: The Business of Paradigms. It runs for about 40 minutes and shows how easy it is for thinking patterns to create perceptions that don’t match the evidence. ↩︎

← Part 35 · All Parts · Part 37 →

Commentary and Contributions

The Cost of a Good Story

Part 35 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 10: A Narrow Escape from Football Oblivion

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

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The information night on 7^th September 1998 was intended to provide clarity. Instead it intensified the debate. Media coverage and public reaction quickly hardened positions and narrowed the club’s options even further.

A front-page account of the meeting in The Western Weekender opens with a blatantly false statement:

In a historic announcement, the Panthers board of directors told the rugby league world that the mighty Penrith Panthers were to compete in the National Rugby League competition as an elite and single identity.

The article quotes Cowan as saying that ‘the stand-alone option was always the preference of senior management and the Board’.

Inside the paper in a double page spread, Mick Kelly lets rhetoric run riot. He quotes Mulock, the club patron — and its saviour, according to Kelly — as saying that Cowan and Levy’s efforts ‘have been skewed towards a merger with Parramatta’.

Editor’s Note: The way the meeting was subsequently presented in the local media is examined further in Following the Merger Debate, which reproduces the principal newspaper coverage from the period together with historical commentary.

Looking back, Cowan still found the events of that period difficult to understand. Why was Mulock so attached to arguments that were not reflecting the truth? Either he was being misinformed or his passion for Panthers was clouding his judgement.

After the public meeting and the subsequent newspaper coverage, feeling in the community was galvanised.

At the next board meeting, a resolution was passed that the club ‘cease all joint negotiations and stand-alone’. The Board also resolved to form a committee to promote the stand-alone position.

In Cowan’s eyes, this was a totally blinkered attitude. If there was to be a committee, its focus should have been to make sure Panthers was represented in the competition. Forming a committee with the sole purpose of supporting and propagating this one idea was ridiculous. It did not acknowledge the great danger that Panthers could be dropped from the competition.

The feeling at the time echoed the sentiments expressed by John Bateman in a Western Weekender front page story of 24 July:

Panthers brings too many aces to the table to be considered a weak link in the NRL competition.

He used the ‘largest junior league in the world’ as a reason why the club was safe from relegation, but, as we know, the junior league component was never a factor. Roger Cowan explained the NRL’s rationale for this.

The size of the junior league at any club is an asset to the entire league, whether it is centred around the Penrith club, or Parramatta, or any other club. If it is divided amongst a whole lot of other clubs, it evens out the distribution of junior talent. In other words, it would have been an advantage to the other clubs chosen for the competition for Penrith not to have ownership of its junior league. All that young talent would have been there for the taking.

We tried, very early in the process of setting criteria, to have junior league strengths given some recognition. There was no support for that proposition. Most clubs have believed that Penrith and Parramatta had an unfair advantage by having such large areas of juniors. They would hardly support something they saw as unfair being given an advantage under the criteria.’

Bateman and the other directors admit to being bombarded with information and reports from management during this period, so it is difficult to understand him making comments indicating the NRL would not dare discard the Panthers. Cowan says it was very frustrating to read this kind of statement, especially from someone like Bateman, who had been given all the facts.

Once the ‘Stand Alone’ Committee was formed,¹ Cowan says he was absolutely appalled to hear Bateman, Mulock and other leading citizens of Penrith parroting the South Sydney line — that the NRL ‘would never drop us’.

Souths were using the same strategy – make lots of noise, build emotion, get the people marching in the streets – and it failed them miserably. Souths had far more emotion and tradition on their side than Penrith, being one of the foundation clubs in 1908 and having an outstandingly successful record. They also had the support of some very high profile people, yet they were dropped. Even though they were eventually reinstated, the loss of a year’s competition was damaging. Ultimately the courts supported the NRL’s right to drop them from the competition. Souths is only there because News Limited softened its stance, just for Souths. Without that, Souths would have been gone forever.

But in 1998, the powers that be at Souths had chosen to ignore the determination of News Limited to have a fourteen-team competition. Panthers was doing the same. News Limited had already conceded its original position of 12 teams, and agreed on 14, but Cowan could see that they would not go to 16.

Despite his reservations, Cowan agreed to join the committee. Ron Mulock was also on it, as were Leo Armstrong and Terry Heidtmann. Former Panthers operations manager Tony Lackey attended the meetings, which he says were held every second Friday. ‘They were always bad, there was lots of conflict. It got very uncomfortable.’²

Cowan found the situation very difficult. To him, it was a counterproductive exercise.

At every meeting he [Mulock] was repeating word for word things that I had said in the boardroom a week earlier. Worse, he was using things I had said in those board meetings out of context.

In the committee meetings I continued to push the fact that the agreement between NRL and ARL was written in stone. We would not be in the competition unless we could take our place in that fourteen under the criteria. There was never any doubt of that in my mind.

David Gallop confirms that the NRL was serious about its selection procedure.

There’s no doubt that the criteria process was a genuine exercise. And even though Souths was readmitted, the High Court ultimately found that we had behaved legally in eliminating them in the first place.

And Penrith were down the bottom, if you like, in terms of the way they were running under the criteria, so there’s no doubt they were in trouble. They were facing a serious threat of being excluded from the 14-team competition.

By now, independent voices from very different perspectives were reaching much the same conclusion: Penrith had been in genuine danger of exclusion.

Journalist Roy Masters believes Penrith went perilously close to being eliminated. He adds that the Board’s stand-alone resolution had effectively closed any doors that might save the team.

In fact, if it hadn’t rained non-stop in Gosford in 1999, there would be no Penrith team today. My view is that Roger had an obligation as chief executive to put it to his board as an option, and he would have been culpable if he had not.

Soon after Super League and the ARL had agreed on the new 14 team competition, it became clear that thirteen teams were pretty much secure in their positions in the new competition. Through 1998, Penrith continued to monitor the statistics week by week, and nothing changed. They were still sitting at number sixteen. The two teams ahead of them were Adelaide and North Sydney.³

On 1 December 1998, News Limited and the NRL announced they were pulling their financial support for the Adelaide Rams. From Cowan’s perspective, the announcement brought both encouragement and disappointment. It moved Penrith into fifteenth position. But it also sent a message that decision would be made regardless of political noise. The South Australian premier and the CEO of News Limited in Adelaide appealed for Adelaide to stay in the competition. They were supported by leading businesspeople. It made no difference. In relation to the criteria, however, Penrith was still well behind North Sydney, as Cowan explains —

During the year leading up to the ARL/Super League merger, North Sydney had negotiated relocation to Gosford. Their ground and facilities at North Sydney were out of date. The demographics of their area had changed dramatically, greatly diminishing their supporter base. On top of this, the Central Coast of NSW is a very strong rugby league area and had been crying out for its own team for years.

I watched this strategy evolve with a sinking feeling. The relocation was a disaster for Penrith. The state and federal governments had combined to provide grants of $20 million to build a modern stadium at Gosford. Norths had made a brilliant move. Their claim to a place in the competition now seemed to be considerably strengthened. Panthers had no hope of leap- frogging them under those circumstances.

If we could have read the future, we could have all relaxed and there would have been no conflict. Our crystal ball was not that good, and I suspect that Norths’ crystal ball was not giving them much more at that stage.

The damage suffered by Norths weakened it position, and by the end of the year, Penrith might have been slightly ahead. However, the influence of the new ground at Gosford was an unknown factor. For Norths, it went deeper than points on the criteria. But as far as the world knew, in mid-1999, Norths was in an unassailable position.

By July that year, Panthers had no strategy in place other than to demand selection based on arguments that had already been discredited. The Footy Five, with their numbers on the Board, and supported publicly by Ron Mulock, had moved to gag all discussion. There was an orchestrated campaign to make sure that Panthers could not even discuss contingencies at board level. It is difficult to understand their actions. It can never be in a company’s best interests for a board to suppress discussion of a threat that could have enormous repercussions for the business.

Cowan feels angry looking back at that period and remembers how bad the outcome might have been.

Had Norths survived, both Souths and Penrith would have been eliminated. Penrith would have had no bargaining power, and we would have been forced into a takeover by Parramatta or a year fighting alongside Souths for reinstatement. Having two clubs fighting for re-instatement would have probably hardened the resolve of the NRL to let the courts decide. Otherwise, it would have been signalling that the whole strategy of using criteria to reduce the number of teams was just a farce. The court, which ruled for the NRL against Souths, would inevitably have ruled the same way with Penrith.

Through all this, there were the thousands of members who had no idea of what was going on behind the scenes. I wonder how they would have felt when they suddenly found that they had no team playing in the top competition?

By the middle of 1999, the position appeared bleak. The contingency planning had ceased, discussions with Parramatta had ended, and the Board had committed itself to a stand-alone strategy. Having exhausted every practical option available to it, Panthers could do little more than wait for the NRL’s decision.

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Well before this Stand-Alone Committee was formed the Panthers Marketing Team had started work on boosting those categories in the Criteria where Panthers was struggling — home game attendances, gate revenues and sponsorship income. Concept had already been planned, budgeted and were already active. The Our City, Our Team campaign was financed secretly by Panthers as it needed to be a grass roots campaign demonstrating the support of the community for the Club — neither the Board nor the Stand Alone Committee were made aware of this.
↩︎
Other members of the committee were Tony Ferguson (who chaired the meetings), Phil Morehead (from Panthers advertising agency), Max Cowan (Panthers Marketing Team).
↩︎
See Beyond the Book — Survival Becomes a Numbers Game . ↩︎

← Part 34 · All Parts · Part 36 →

Commentary and Contributions

An Information Night — Weaponised

Part 34 of 70 — Original Chapter: Chapter 10: A Narrow Escape from Football Oblivion

This article forms part of the serialised republication of Panthers, Passion & Politics – The Roger Cowan Years.

Start · Reader’s Guide · All Parts

Two weeks later, Penrith Council joined the fight. A resolution was passed at a council meeting to send a letter to Panthers urging them to stand alone. Several councillors spoke in support of the motion, emphasising both the importance of the football team to Penrith’s identity and the economic value it brought to the city. One councillor suggested that the council ‘should let the NRL know where we are and urge Panthers to stand firm’.¹

Council’s stance created a whole new dynamic. Two Panthers directors had council links. One, John Bateman, was already on council and it was common knowledge that he had his eye on the mayoral seat for the following year. His ally, Greg Evans had been a councillor in the early 90s, and was campaigning to be re-elected in the next council election.

Throughout most of the Penrith community, the issue sparked passion and emotion, and massive amounts of rhetoric, but there seemed to be little understanding or acceptance of the reality of the situation.

Ron Mulock, a former deputy premier of NSW and Penrith mayor, had been the club patron since its early days. He passionately opposed even the thought of a merger with any other team. He is quoted many times as saying he ‘would rather die on his sword’, than merge.

Through the club’s early days, Cowan had enjoyed a friendly relationship with Mulock. They were joint architects of the project to establish Penrith’s Police Citizens Boys’ Club as a joint venture between the council and the club. It was the first boys’ club of its kind in Australia to be built without the need for public fund-raising.

Board chairman Barry Walsh had also been a longtime friend of Mulock. When the Parramatta merger became an issue, this all changed. Walsh speaks of a day when Mulock arrived at his house, very upset and behaving in a rude and aggressive manner. It was a side to his character that Walsh had not seen. It was also a shock to Walsh’s wife who had always been a staunch Mulock supporter.

Walsh tried to explain the situation to Mulock. He understood the patron’s concerns, and wanted to reassure him. He suggested that if he would attend a board meeting, he would see for himself that the directors had no intention whatsoever of approving a merger. Mulock refused the invitation.

The Board decided to hold a public meeting to inform the members – and the team’s fans and supporters exactly what was going on. Its purpose was not to seek a decision, but to explain the situation facing the club and answer questions from members and supporters.

Cowan was to address the meeting held on 7 September 1998, but was quite unprepared for what happened.

I was aware of the controversy out in the community. We had just come through the whole Super League saga and people were very emotional about any possibility of merging with another club. But there was so much misinformation flying around. The board had agreed that our members and supporters should be given a factual analysis of the situation.

I decided to test my address on about eight of our managers. I was going to speak from notes to make sure that the message would not change on the night, no matter what. I asked them to look for any possible bias in what I was saying. I wanted to present both sides of the problem. They needed to understand that it was essential to fully investigate the situation.

If we decided to remain as a stand alone club there was, at that time, a very strong chance we would have no team in the NRL competition. If we decided to merge with another club, there would be a different set of negative results. They needed to have the full story.

I made a few changes on the advice of the management team, but we were confident that the message was objective and honest.

Rather than reducing uncertainty, the meeting fundamentally changed the course of the debate.

Cowan has described the meeting as an ambush. He says he and the board executive were completely caught by surprise. After Cowan addressed the meeting, Ron Mulock took the podium. Cowan says it was a moment he will never forget.

He was shouting and ranting about lies and corruption and saying all sorts of crazy stuff, and it seemed to be mostly aimed at me. He attacked four members of the board, carrying on that they had 80 years experience between them. He was even adding up their ages. The tirade went on and on. He made the “rather die on my sword” comment, and told the meeting that the league would never drop Penrith from the competition. Souths used the same questionable rationale and were dropped from the competition a few months later.

This was a public forum, and Cowan says he could not believe Mulock’s extraordinary behavior.

Later, I wondered about the reasons for the personal attacks. He was speaking as if he had come prepared for a debate, and it sounded as if he believed that I would be advocating a merger, and that I would be supported by some directors. If this really was the case, he had been badly misled.

This was the most troubling aspect of the whole thing. The Board had voted unanimously against any merger, but he was acting as if he had been told something very different.

His behaviour on that night was just another piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

There was another strange aspect to this forum.

John Bateman, responding to written questions sent in late 2006, said that the decision by members at the 7 September meeting was the reason he had continued his ‘stand alone’ stance.²

But this was not a proper members’ meeting.

A meeting of members for the purpose of making decisions would have required notices being mailed to all members three weeks in advance. This was nothing more than an information forum. Non-members were allowed to attend. Less than 350 people attended. There was no vote taken.

At the meeting the Five took the opportunity to declare their determination to stand alone despite a few weeks earlier having agreed to look at all options.

The following night’s board meeting virtually ensured there would be no further discussion on the subject. The continuing rationale for such a closed stance was that the members had spoken and that was what the members wanted. The fact is that many thousands of members would not even have been aware the meeting was held. The Board had taken no measure of members’ views.
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The position adopted by the Council was very interesting. Since at least 1994, research had been regularly done and the exposure and value the Penrith Rugby League team brought to the local community was an integral part of that research. Yet until this point the Council had failed to acknowledge that value in any way. In fact, it often seemed that certain councillors and council officers resented the thought that it was Panthers bringing Penrith growing visibility.
↩︎
This belief was express in correspondence from John Bateman to Jennie Bentley dated 7th Januray 2007. On tis issue Bateman says:
… it was my view that the members “had spoken” on 7 September 1998 and I was happy to uphold their direction to
the board to “stand alone”. ↩︎

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