The 1997 Newcastle Knights will take on Mt Everest for their mate
Paul Kent, The Daily Telegraph
October 6, 2017 7:26pm
THREE a.m. wake ups are never good and some are worse than others.
Trish Johns, the concerned wife, woke her husband Matthew at this god-forbidden time in the AM one morning several months ago because a five bell alarm was ringing in her head.
She had received a video from Paul Harragon and it was so urgent she needed to wake her husband immediately and make him watch.
“It was a video of what we’re going to go through,” Johns says.
Specifically, it was a video showing how many have died on the climb to Everest Base Camp.
It is a little known fact, for instance, how often yaks get irritated and throw people off cliffs. How they know it is an appropriate height for a fatality, the yaks, is one of the many mysteries of the mountain. Trial and error, maybe.
There are forty different ways to die on the climb.
Pulmonary oedema, high altitude cerebral oedema, acute mountain sickness.
Johns shut it down afterwards and had one simple thought.
Thanks, Chief. Try getting back to sleep after that
He is not alone in his worries.
Next Saturday, Johns and 28 others, almost all of them busted and beaten down, will fly to the Himalayas where they will befriend a yak and begin the climb to Everest Base Camp.
Most are former Newcastle Knights players, the majority from the 1997 grand final when the Knights beat Manly, and as such they will come from all around the world to come together once more.
In Yorkshire, Malcolm Reilly went to see his doctor to get a clearance.
Reilly’s knee blew out some time in the 1980s. The other, the bad one, blew out a decade or so before that.
He is 69 and after his doctor ran all the medicals a cardiologist came back with bad news.
“There’s no way I’ll let you go,” he said. “You’ve got a slight defect in your heart.”
Yet Reilly is a Yorkshireman to the last.
“I’ve got to go, Matthew,” he told Johns, “I have bought my poles.”
There is something about football people.
I think it was Trotsky, left centre for Russian Bears, who said it first when he said, “All happy footy clubs are alike, each unhappy footy club is unhappy in its on way.”
The bond in the winning teams is rare.
Johns walked for four hours on Friday. He will walk another four hours on Saturday
Danny Buderus is also out walking, more diligently than most.
And then there is Mark Hughes.
Hughes puts on his boots and walks through the bush, hours at a time. Some have taken to wearing face masks to cut down their oxygen intake and prepare for the high altitude of Everest.
All except the one ring-in, their Manly opponent that day, Steve Menzies.
Typical of Manly, Menzies has been taking himself to a high-altitude training centre at Brookvale.
Silvertails.
Hughes’s story is well known in rugby league.
He was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2013 and fights it daily. He set up the Mark Hughes Foundation to raise money for brain cancer research and earlier this year the NRL got behind his cause with Beanie For Brain Cancer round, raising $1.751 million.
It should surprise nobody but Hughes got tremendous help throughout the whole round of football, that got stretched to a week, by his captain Harragon.
When Hughes began to fatigue Harragon took over.
And when it all settled down and they got to talking about other ways to raise money, Harragon mentioned Everest. Could they do it?
Then came one of those happy occurrences. Evidence that sport is a community.
As each man trained towards conquering his Everest, in a totally separate part of the world Racing NSW stepped up its commitment to racing by announcing the world’s richest turf race, to be run next Saturday. They would call it The Everest.
An invitation race, 12 slots were offered and the Australian Turf Club called for nominations from owners to partner for their slot.
Australian Bloodstock’s Jamie Lovett, a Newcastle man, had brought Japanese horse Brave Smash to Australia and made a bid.
ATC chairman Laurie Macri liked the synergy of partnering with an international horse.
Then came the closer.
“We really liked the opportunity to work with Australian Bloodstock and an increasingly international profile,” Macri said.
“But when we saw Australian Bloodstock was partnering with the Mark Hughes Foundation, so it had a charitable endeavour, it was one of the things that sold me on the partnership.”
When they race for $10 million next Saturday the ATC and Australian Bloodstock will donate five per cent of any prizemoney won to the Mark Hughes Foundation.
“They’ve joined together and decided to support the Foundation and it’s just wonderful,” Hughes said.
Already Hughes has raised $350,000 and he called on anyone willing to contribute to go to their website and “put in five dollars, put in a thousand, to support us. It would be awesome”.
That Knights team from 1997 had a reunion some months back where some of the risks got laid out.
Somebody forgot to mention the yaks but a recommendation came for just one beer each day.
All the players just looked at each other.
When the meeting ended each of the players stood and told their teammates what they meant to them.
After all had spoken Johns stood to talk.
“I didn’t realise what professional sport was like until I left this team,” he said.
He told them what that meant.
“We were professional but we were a pub team,” he said. “We played together but we liked each other.
“We got on so well, no-one would substitute anyone for anyone else.”
It wasn’t until he left Newcastle that Johns realised the difference.
“Professional sport is having the ability to perform your best while tolerating your other teammates around you.
“We didn’t have that at the Knights. Even the weirdos like Doogs [Adam MacDougall], you loved them as if they were your brother.”
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