‘It was a brutal task’: How Gordon Bray picked 15 Wallabies ‘Immortals’ from 125 years of rugby history

For many, one of the best parts of listening to Gordon Bray was when the “Voice of Rugby” would garnish his commentary with a quirky fact or second mention.

Like the day jobs of then-amateur New Zealand rugby players: “The Taranaki pig farmer” Dave Loveridge, “the Manawatu meatworker” Mark Shaw and “the Maori Mormon” Stephen Pokere.

“My favourite one was Hika Reid, the unemployed nightclub bouncer,” Bray says.

The one-liners were created via a network of New Zealand contacts and magazine subscriptions. Across a 55-year broadcasting career for the ABC and commercial networks, no commentator would even come close to Bray for fastidious research and thirst for accuracy.

But when it came to Hika Reid, well, let’s just say no one checked too hard if he’d picked up any gigs in the week before a Bledisloe Cup match.

“Ah, well that was probably too good a line,” Bray laughs. “That was a rare case of don’t let the facts get in the way of a story.”

Rugby commentator Gordon Bray in his Sydney home.

Pick a moment from the last five decades in Australian rugby and it will invariably come with a soundtrack of Bray’s clipped commentary. Since he called his first Wallabies Test for the ABC in 1976, having paid his own way to France, Gordon has called “over 350 Wallabies Tests” and over 400 worldwide Tests in total.

Little wonder then that when a publisher was looking for someone to put together a list of 15 Australian rugby “Immortals”, and fill a book with their stories, they rang Bray. The Immortals of Australian Rugby Union is released on June 19.

“It was a brutal task to get it down to 15,” Bray says. “It compresses the highs of Australian rugby history over the last 125 years, and I have been lucky enough to call pretty much all the milestone victories since 1980, over the last 40-odd years.”

Bray’s Immortals are a who’s who of Australian rugby; selected on the criteria of being a World XV standard player, who had longevity, contributed to the Wallabies being world champions, or the equivalent of the era. Post-rugby contribution to the game was also a factor.

“Like the rugby league Immortals, they must be individuals who changed the way the game was played and left indelible memories for those lucky enough to have witnessed their exploits,” Bray writes.

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Quibbling around such lists is usually more about who is absent than who is included, and Bray mitigates by also listing another 17 honourable mentions and an all-time Wallabies team, too.

Cyril Towers, the 1930s Wallabies captain and father of running rugby, is the first chosen by Bray for “Immortality”, and Trevor Allan, Ken Catchpole and John Thornett are also on the list. The remainder ended up being players Bray called himself, and familiar names like Campese, Ella, Eales, Lynagh, Horan and Gregan are pulled from world-beating Wallabies teams and eras.

One of Bray’s more unpredictable picks, perhaps, is dreadlocked flanker George Smith.

“Well, his record speaks for itself,” Bray explains. “He is our latest inductee in the World Rugby Hall of Fame, and in fact I think 11 of my Immortals are in it.

“The interesting thing as well is that 11 of the 15 are backs, so the forwards will be screaming. The backs can’t do their stuff without the hard yakka of the forwards.

George Smith in action against France in Melbourne in 2002.

“But I will say that nine of the 13 rugby league Immortals are backs as well. The backs are the glory boys aren’t they? And the forwards don’t get enough recognition, so I suppose if that’s the charge, I am guilty.”

Given such a task, most people would have had to spend months in the state library, combing through biographies and newspaper clippings. But Bray simply had to walk into his spare room, aka the analogue internet.

“I have an extensive collection of books, and I have newspaper clippings going back over 40 years, which upsets my wife because we have to find space for them,” Bray says. “From 1980 on, I would probably fill three to four scrapbooks a year. And even more in a World Cup year.”

The importance of research was drilled into Bray from his early days as a trainee ABC cadet, in a 1969 cohort that also included Bob Carr and Triple J founder Marius Webb.

Bray, who used to sneak into Wests Magpies games with his Homebush High schoolmate John Coates, was a lover of rugby and league but he was deployed to cut his teeth in Tasmania, calling Aussie rules and a wide array of almost everything.

“We covered a different sport every week: powerboats, hot-air ballooning, rowing, sailing, horse racing, trots, lawn bowls, you name it,” Bray says. “You learnt to do your homework.”

Bray took over from Norman May as the ABC’s lead rugby caller in 1980, and quickly became synonymous with the game. When television rights left the ABC and bounced around TV networks, executives would sign the rights deal and then immediately sign Bray as well.

It takes a while for Bray to rattle off even a brief summary of his favourite moments: the young Wallabies beating the All Blacks in 1980, Mark Ella’s feats on the 1984 Grand Slam tour, the 1991 and 1999 World Cups, the 2000s golden era, and that “heartbreaker” kick from Jonny Wilkinson in 2003. People forget, too, Bray was caller on the world feed for Japan’s upset of South Africa in 2015.

Bray acknowledges rugby’s current struggles, however, and says many of his vintage have lost their once-strong connection to the game. His book, which has a chapter on the life on each of the Immortals, will help them bathe in some golden nostalgia, and with fascinating backstory nuggets like Towers doing speed training with Jesse Owens in 1936.

But Bray says he wrote in a way he hopes can capture the imagination of young people, who he says are the key to returning Australian rugby to its heydays.

“It was an enormous responsibility. It is not the definitive list, it is only my thoughts, but I absolutely stand by every person as being a true immortal of Australian rugby,” he says. “And I am happy to argue with anyone who wants to pick fault with it.”

A word of warning, though. Do your research first.

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