Rugby League Pranks

The beauty I have had out of playing Rugby League is that I have made so many good friends and had so many great laughs over time. You always have your very funny characters that you just enjoy being around, they just lighten the mood at training and make it so much more entertaining. There is always someone you take the piss out of more then anyone else and funnily enough, even when you have a re-union many years later, that same person, will still have the mickey taken out of them - normally they are wingers:).

Not only are there funny people but there are always players playing pranks on one another, some small ones and some at a much larger scale. Now I have been very lucky to have been a part of a couple of good pranks and they were both performed at Castleford and both involved the same individual. That individual was Welsh International and Cronulla raised Mark Lennon.

Now Lenno is a great mate of mine and a top class bloke but he was a serial pest and a serial liar (I mean that in the nicest way Lenno). Lenno had this angelic face that all mothers love and believed could do no wrong. Mark lived with his cohort and now Bradford Captain Andy Lynch. Lynchy and Lenno (has a dodgy ring to it doesn’t it)at the time were only young blokes and lived together just out of Castleford.

Now when I say Lenno had an angelic face, he did because I believed,  for a number of months that he was telling the truth, when I asked him if he had anything to do with all the pranks that had been going on around the place. The pranks included messing with our furniture in our room in Lanzarote, wheels being taken off cars and various other pranks to do with automobiles. In fact one time the two pranksters, jacked up Dale Fritz's car and took his tyre off but in doing so damaged the panel work because they put the jack in the wrong spot.

Once it was realized that Lenno and Lynchy were lying through their teeth a couple of plans were hatched to get payback on these scoundrels. The first one involved Aaron Raper, who was injured at the time, stealing Lynchy's house keys and getting them copied while he trained. We then found out when both lads wouldn’t be home and I Aaron Raper, Michael Eager and Dale Fritz went around to Lynchy's house and took everything from downstairs to upstairs and vice versa, as well as turning it upside down, just for good measure. We then went our separate ways and waited for pay dirt to happen. I received a phone call off Lenno explaining what had happened and he asked if I had anything to do with it. In most my most innocent voice I said "of course I didn’t I had been with the family all day". It worked because they didn’t find out until a couple of years later that I had anything to do with it.

The second prank was a much larger scale and an all time classic. This prank also involved his flat mate Lynchy as well but for a different reason, which I will explain later on. Lenno drove and old bomby car, as most of us did to get to training and it just so happens Mick Eagar and Fritzy had found the same car over at the wreckers across the road from the Castleford ground. We all went over and inspected the car and it was exactly the same as Lenno's bar the different colored seats. We spoke to the owner of the wrecking yard and explained what we wanted to do and with much laughter he agreed with great plan we had.

We pooled our money together and for a few hundred quid we purchased the car and had it crushed. The second part of plan involved Mick Eagar getting Lenno's keys after the last game and stealing his car. This was able to be done when Lenno's counterpart Lynchy, rolled over and joined our team (so much for loyalty). Lynchy got the keys for Mick and he did the rest and took the car to a safe house ( I just added that bit because its sounds so good)

So Mad Monday rolls around and everyone is at the Tiger Bar at about 9am, enjoying a few drinks, when Lenno arrives asking who has got his car. Of course we all plead our innocence and say we know nothing about it. Lenno was pretty good about as he was thinking his car would be returned later and it was just a gee up. Just before 11am, I am supposedly called into see the CEO Richard Wright for something, this is done so that everyone knows I am going into see him, for theatrical purposes. I come back about 10 minutes later and address the players and hold up a set of keys that the police had just supposedly handed in to Richard. I hand them to Lenno and then tell him that his car has been found but there is a problem and he needs to come outside to have a look at it.

The timing was perfect for this prank because just as we get outside, in rolls the truck with a squashed car on the back of it that looks like Lenno's.  A picture is worth a thousand words and I wish I had of taken a picture because the expression on Lenno's face was priceless. His bottom lip dropped and started to quiver and he eyes started to tear up as he saw his beloved car, flat as a tack. The players were showing a lot of sympathy for Mark by rolling around on the floor laughing their guts out. If Lenno had of looked closely he would seen the seats were a different color to his but I guess when you have so many tears in your eyes from crying it would be easy to miss it.

It was the best prank I have seen and it was worked to perfection and I have never in all my time seen so many grown men laughing so hard. We didn’t let on to Lenno for a few good hours that it was all a prank. His reaction was that he knew all along.

Now the moral to this story is "young blokes don’t play pranks on older players because they will get you back ten fold". As Lenno and Lynchy found out the hard way. When myself, Rapes, Monkey and Fritzy get together for a drink this prank normally pops up in conversation as it will no doubt do again on Mark's wedding night later in the year.

Cheers
Vowlesy

Life After Footy

I read with interest in the GC Bulletin this week that former Rugby Union International Tim Horan struggled with the transition from player to retirement. This got me thinking to when I finished playing professionally and how hard it was to adapt back into normal life so to speak.

Now when I first started playing grade football, I worked during the day and trained at night, a lot of times doing ten hour days as an apprentice cabinetmaker and then going to training for a couple of hours. Most times by the time I came home and cooked dinner etc it was 9.30pm and time to get to bed and continue the cycle at 5am the next morning.

I finished my apprenticeship, so as I had something to fall back on but in all reality I was never going to continue on in that trade. The day I finished my apprenticeship, I quit and never did it again except for some stuff around the house. Luckily for me, my football career took off and it was a rather long one at that and the game also turned professional, which meant no working.

When I finished in the UK and came back to Australia to live, I wasn’t too worried about work because I was going to buy a business of some sort. I looked at a number of different ones from juice runs, Subway franchises, to a news agency but nothing seemed right. I was also training fulltime with the Brisbane Broncos for a few months to try and have one last crack in the NRL, which meant commuting to Brisbane most days for training from the Gold Coast. I ended up playing the season with the Broncos feeder club the Toowoomba Clydesdales.

It was when that season finished that I really struggled, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or for that matter, could do. I had no qualifications bar my trade and I wasn’t confident enough to try and pursue that again. As time went on, my confidence dwindled, until I was in a pretty dark place that I certainly didn’t like being in. I felt like a failure and my marriage suffered as a result too and I continuously doubted myself. I was having some pretty ordinary thoughts and looking back the worst thing I did was keeping it all to me. I wanted to tell people but felt too embarrassed to do so as I felt like it was my fault and that I was the only person it was happening too. I wanted to tell a close mate but being a man decided against it, the closest I came to telling someone was Danny Orr a team mate and close friend from Castleford. I told him of a few things but not how low I was feeling. My Mum and Dad knew that I was pretty down but they had no idea just how far down I really was. (till now)

There were a few factors that basically put me back on track and got me out of a dark hole, that I now know many footballers fall into come retirement time. The first one was that I have always been a pretty positive person, who has kept plugging away when others may give up, secondly was my love for my kids. I would see my kids smile, or give me a hug and it dug me out so many times. The last factor was a mate who I played footy with, Ben Ikin. I mentioned to him one day that I desperately needed work. A week or so later, he asked me to come in and interview for a job running the packaging side of his Dad's removalist business. Now I had no business experience at all and was running empty on confidence, so I didn’t hold great hopes for getting the job.

Ben rang me a few days later to say I had the job, now to say I was excited was an understatement. I was double fist pumping, doing the double heal click like the Toyota ad and generally jumping up and down (Funnily enough another mate, Dave Bouveng had fixed me up with a job at Carlton United breweries the same day).  It was amazing how much I changed as a person overnight, once I felt self believe again. I had a smile on my face, I walked tall again, something I hadn’t done for a couple of months.

Since this time I have talked to a large number of former team mates and many have also faced the demons alone without telling anyone. It’s hard to explain why we go through it, as it’s not missing the lime light or anything like that. Maybe it’s the familiarity of being with the boys and talking crap at training and actually being a strict regime. Men will often bag women because they tell each other all their problems that they are having in their life but it’s actually something that men can learn from. As men we tend not to say anything as it may be seen as a sign of weakness and there lies the problem. We let it build up and up inside us rather then sharing it with someone who might be able to help.

I have grown so much from what I went through and have never been back to that hole and nor will I ever again. The advice I offer all footballers is be prepared for retirement. Do some courses so that you can get a job when you finish your career and also network with your sponsors because they are business people who can help you later in life.

It’s important the clubs police this and don’t just get the kids doing personal trainer courses because there are a thousand of them in Australia now. The scary part about today’s players is, many will go through their whole career and will not have worked a day in their life.

Some more advice for players is, if you only get offered $200k a year instead of the $250k you wanted, just sign!! Try and get a job that pays that much in the workforce believes me its hard. In saying that for what Rugby League players put their bodies through they are very much underpaid compared to other sports.

Last but not least, for the players that play up and get into trouble, send them out concreting, or working on a property for a couple of weeks and I am sure they will then appreciate what a bloody good job they have.

This one was a bit heavier, so I apologies’ for that but just wanted people to know what goes on in a footballers life at times, its not all glamour and glitz.

Cheers
Vowlesy