I'm sure it was all about vitamins, shakes and organic food to make sure you were in tip-top shape before the 1971 grand final. Your preparation?
Today everyone has their little thing, get up for a bit of breakfast and whatever else. I know they don't do it now, but an hour or two later [after breakfast] we'd have a big steak back in the day.
Wait a second, a great big steak?
Yep, it was the same thing as always – a great big T-bone. It never affected us. Nowadays they tell you it's no good for you, but it was fine back then.
Subsidising this great big T-bone?
I just worked for General Motors Holden down at Pagewood. That was a very quick trip to training. We trained on the Tuesday, the Thursday and the Friday night. I don't know how many people worked there, but it was a massive staff and when you were leaving work and it was getting close to the weekend they would give you the old "good onya mate". A lot of the boys and girls that worked there viewed the football as something very important.
Clive Churchill, little master with a clipboard as well as a football?
Clive was a good coach and he was a joker a lot of the time. Sometimes he was serious, but when we were warming up he would be behind us cracking jokes about something. He had this thing when sometimes we'd be in an attacking move in the warm-up and he'd be standing back on the goal line and if it wasn't going right he'd run straight between two players, intercept the ball and kick it down the field and say "there you go, start again".
St George in 1971 weren't quite the best of the late 1950s and early 1960s, but they still had a very formidable outfit. Do not use
They had quite a good side – not the side they had when they went on their big long run – they were at the end of an era. A few young blokes came in for them and they all performed well because Chang [Graeme Langlands], Billy Smith and those fellas had them up and going. If we had been off our guard they would have beaten us that day.
Dirty on Ron Coote for fleeing The Burrow after the 1971 grand final?
Not at all. Easts offered him good money and he couldn't knock it back. Our club was at a stage where it was just about to hit rock bottom. I still talk with Bob McCarthy, Gary Stevens and Ronny. In fact, I only just went down to the storage room in my unit block and pulled out a big South Sydney frame a metre by three-quarters of a metre of the 1971 South Sydney jersey signed by Ronny and everybody. I haven't seen it for a while. George Piggins is on there too.
Forgive Sam Burgess too?
He's been a wonderful asset to the club. He's a wonderful player and a big loss to our game.
I'll give you a minute to address Big Sam and the 2014 South Sydney grand final side before Sunday. What do you say?
Not that anyone would get a chance to address them, which I completely agree with. Michael [Maguire] will say to them they've done all the hard work and their time has arrived. It's up to them as a team and individually to pull together and do their stuff. They've been training all year for this one day.
