During Souths’ early years it was “the pride of the league”. From the inaugural season until the 1970s the Rabbitohs won 20 premierships, making them the most successful side in the history of Australian rugby league.
But South Sydney has faced many challenges along the way. Mark Courtney, author of Moving the Goalposts and the Book of Feuds, says despite these struggles the Rabbitohs have been continually resilient as a club. “In between those golden eras there were times when the club was really poor and struggling and had to fight back from that,” he says.
Stories of South Sydney’s resilience are littered throughout the club’s history. There was the “miracle” season of 1955 when the Rabbitohs started at the bottom of the ladder only to come from behind in 11 consecutive matches to eventually win the premiership in the dying minutes of the game. There was the match during that season when Clive Churchill played the whole game with a broken arm and kicked the winning field goal from the sideline with it strapped up. There was the famous 1970 grand final when Rabbitohs captain John Sattler had his jaw broken by a Manly player at the beginning of the match, but played on for the entire game to lead Souths to victory.
And, of course, there was the fight to overturn the club’s exclusion from the league in 1999. Following the union brokered between Rupert Murdoch’s Super League and the Australian Rugby League (ARL) in the late ’90s, it was announced that only 14 sides would participate in the National Rugby League (NRL), and Souths would not be one of them.
But once again the Rabbitohs would not lie down. On a hot Sunday in October 1999 around 40,000 people protested against Souths’ exclusion from the competition. “There was this enormous groundswell of South Sydney supporters and then also a whole mess of other supporters from other clubs who realised what was happening was a bad thing,” Mark Courtney says.
“I think because South Sydney Football Club was an integral part of so many people’s lives, it was just something they weren’t prepared to let go of. These were people whose families had supported Souths for three, four, five generations and people felt that somehow their family history was being trashed and it cut extremely deeply,” he says.
So the club, led by Sydney lawyer Nicholas Pappas, took the battle to the courts. Mark Courtney believes everything turned on the day the club lost its second court case. “I think that was the day the NRL thought the fight was over, and in fact by the end of that day the South Sydney supporter base was even more galvanised than before.
“The South Sydney Board came out and said we’re going to appeal and we’re going to march again, and everyone went crazy.I’ll never forget that night. There were scenes of joy and we’d just lost a multi-million dollar court case with almost no chance of an appeal, because we didn’t have any money, and yet that night it was all on again.We’d moved on to the next game if you like, which was an appeal for the following year and there was going to be another march, which had 80,000 people, more than the first one, and the NRL must have just sat there and thought, ‘What the hell is wrong with these people? They’re never going to go away’.That night was the first time that I knew that we would win because I knew that we would never stop, we would never give up,” he says.
After the appeal the Rabbitohs were finally readmitted into the NRL in 2002.
Alana Valentine, creator of the acclaimed stage play Run Rabbit Run, says she was inspired by the never-say-die attitude of the Souths supporters she interviewed as part of her research for the play, which centred around the club’s battle to be included in the NRL. “I met people who really made me believe that the impossible was possible – not because they said it, but because they did it, they really did fight an impossible battle and win. I think that life hands us a lot of reasons to stop believing in impossible faith – but the Rabbitohs give us a reason to think that as individuals we may be powerless, but as part of a community, no matter what the outcome, we need to shoot for the stars.”
Now Souths have done just that. They have emerged from the position of virtual wooden spooners after being re-admitted to the league, to positions near the top of the ladder over the last few seasons. This year the club’s hopes of breaking their 43-year premiership drought seemed stronger than ever, and the dream was finally realised in the 2014 grand final on October 5.
So it seems the fighting spirit upon which the South Sydney Rabbitohs was built remains as strong as ever today. And Mark Courtney agrees: “They’ve had a fighting spirit forever in the history of the club. There’s just something about Souths – the supporters are so passionate, and they have such a massive, deep love for what they believe the club embodies and stands for, which is this resilience and passion and fighting spirit and success against the odds over 100 years, and that’s what it’s all about.”
