By Andrew Webster
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It was close to midnight on Monday, 24 March 2014, when Wayne Bennett sat on the back seat of the Knights bus and wept in Willie Mason’s arms. “It was like watching your dad cry,” Mason recalls.
The bus was parked outside the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, where, inside its intensive care unit, Knights backrower Alex McKinnon had been placed in an induced coma. Earlier that night, in the dying seconds of the first half against the Storm at AAMI Park, he ran the ball at the defensive line as he’d done countless times before, but the tackle went terribly wrong. Storm prop Jordan McLean had McKinnon by the legs but, as he drove forward, the tackle collapsed under the weight of brothers Jesse and Kenny Bromwich, breaking his neck.
Alex McKinnon and Wayne Bennettat a press conference for the Rise forAlex Round in 2014. Credit: Kate Geraghty
After the match, which Melbourne won 28-20, Bennett asked for the team bus to go directly to the hospital. Bennett wanted to see McKinnon – he wanted his entire side to see him – but only the coach was allowed in. “When I came out, I was heartbroken,” Bennett says.
That’s when he made his way towards the back seat of the team bus. The back seat has long been a sanctuary for Bennett. That’s where the larrikins sit. That’s where the laughs come from. But when he found Mason on this night, and the enormity of what had just happened sank in, they cried in each other’s arms.
When the other players noticed that Bennett was crying, it triggered tears in them too. “Wayne’s the Don, the Godfather, the King,” Mason says. “If he’s rattled, we’re rattled.”
Bennett was rattled, but he was only prepared to give his players a brief look at his vulnerability. “It’s the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to me outside of my own family,” he says. “But I had to pull myself together because those players needed me.”
About 4am, after the players had gone to bed, Bennett was in his hotel room, processing what had just happened. “I thought, ‘You’re a cold-hearted bastard, you should be more upset than you are’,” he says. “Twenty-four hours later I realised I was in that place because I had to be in that place. I couldn’t let them see me being weak.”
There’s a difference between weakness and vulnerability, and Bennett had shown the latter to McKinnon that Monday night when their paths briefly crossed in the AAMI Park tunnel at halftime. They didn’t utter a word. They didn’t have to.
Knights players huddle as medical staff attend to Alex McKinnon at AAMI Park on March 24, 2014.Credit: Getty
“He looked at me, I looked at him, and we just went f—,” McKinnon recalls about their reaction to his injury. “Then he moved on with the job at hand. When he’s soft, you can feel him. When he shows that empathy, you can really feel it. Because he’s such a hard man, and doesn’t show emotion, you can really feel it when he softens. This will sound weird, but Wayne was the one person I wanted to see. Because I felt like I’d let him down. He flew down a few days after the surgery and he just sat with me for an hour. It was very peaceful. I loved it. It was so nice.”
In all his years of coaching, Bennett had never been confronted with a situation like this. When specialists confirmed the tackle had left McKinnon a quadriplegic, Bennett discussed with his players the idea of pulling out of their next match against Cronulla. “It was the only time in my life that I didn’t want to coach,” he recalls. But they played, and the Knights won 30-0.
Wayne Bennett attempts to focus his troops after the emotion of Rise for Alex Round in Newcastle.Credit: Getty
Over the next few months, though, Bennett had to coach a team, be there for McKinnon, and handle his own emotions as the wider rugby league community rallied around McKinnon and the club. The Knights won just two of their next ten matches as the coach did all he could to keep them together. The Rise for Alex Round was held at Hunter Stadium in July and it was emotional for all involved. McKinnon came out into the middle of the ground and the 26,000-strong crowd chanted his name. Alex! Alex! Alex!
Emotion’s a strange beast for a football team. With just the right amount, a team can achieve amazing things. Too much and players can lose focus. As Bennett made his way to the coach’s box that afternoon, he knew his side couldn’t win. “We all went on the field with him – I have no idea why the f— I let that happen,” he says. “I suppose it was out of respect to him. But I should’ve realised. How can you have your teammate in the middle of the field, then you have to play footy? I still can’t believe I let that happen. It impacted on our team, our performance.”
In the years since the events of Monday, 24 March 2014, McKinnon has managed to let much of his anger around that tackle go: towards the Storm and Jordan McLean, who received a seven-match ban from the NRL judiciary. Bennett has not.
“Deep down, in my heart, I still haven’t forgiven the player,” he says of McLean. “I’ve got on with life, shut my mouth about it. But those things, when you’re a player, you know what you’re doing. Have I put someone in that position before as a player? Yes, I have. It was a time when we didn’t know as much as we do now, it was a time when you got away with that shit. But I think in modern society we’re more aware of what we’re doing when we put people in a dangerous position. Alex has been wonderful. He knew from that moment that he needed to be stronger than anyone else. A young man, 22 years of age, a life-changing moment, but he knows he has to be braver than all of us.”
Knights players line up with Alex McKinnon (left) before the Rise for Alex Round in 2014.Credit: Getty
When I tell McKinnon about Bennett crying in Mason’s arms on the back seat of the bus that evening, he isn’t surprised. “After I got injured, we started to chat as friends,” he says. “He wasn’t my coach anymore and he wouldn’t be again. He protects his vulnerability. He knows how powerful it is. He puts on masks for what needs to be done.”
McKinnon’s injury was a tragedy in a season when nothing went right for the Knights but the development that changed everything was Nathan Tinkler’s plummeting fortune and his inability to service the Knights.
For months, he had ducked and weaved the NRL and club members before the licence was finally revoked in May. When the NRL took control of the club on a caretaker basis, officials were perplexed when they couldn’t find any record of Bennett’s contract. They assumed he was being paid directly by Tinkler.
“When they went broke, we had to re-sign our contracts,” Bennett says. “That made me a free agent. I signed until the end of the year. Didn’t stay for the fourth. It was my decision. It was my choice because he’d gone broke.”
On 9 July, Bennett announced he was leaving at the end of the season.
Bennett was immediately linked to the Dragons, which wasn’t surprising because he’d been speaking to chief executive Peter Doust for weeks, although Bennett had been agitating for a return to Brisbane long before he quit the Knights. A Broncos source tells me he had reached out to Lachlan Murdoch at the end of 2013, despite having two years to run on his Knights deal.
Fans rally around Alex McKinnon following his horror injury.Credit: Getty
If anyone knows the value of keeping your options open, it’s Bennett. It came to a head on the weekend of 19-20 July – the same time as the Rise for Alex Round. As Bennett grappled with the emotion of that match, he also happened to be manoeuvring himself into this next job.
On Friday, 18 July, I wrote a column for The Sydney Morning Herald saying the “second coming of Saint Benny was almost complete”. The source was close to the board and adamant a deal was imminent. All that was needed was Bennett’s signature.
Doust confirms he met with Bennett in the Sydney office of leading player agent George Mimis, who negotiates the final details of Bennett’s contracts, that week. “Wayne does his own negotiations,” Doust says. “George does the detail. We went through what we were doing with staff and rosters.”
The next morning, Doust was preparing to meet his board to deliver the good news. He’d also told the club’s media department to prepare a statement announcing the development. That Saturday morning, Herald journalist Roy Masters heard whispers that Bennett was poised to sign with the Broncos. He phoned Doust to let him know.
“I think he’s done a deal with Brisbane,” Masters told Doust.
Doust was stunned and called Bennett in a panic.
“I’m not coming,” Bennett said.
The Wolf You Feed by Andrew Webster.
According to Bennett, he changed his mind after receiving a series of phone calls while driving along the M1 Motorway on his way to Kogarah to sign the Dragons contract. The first two were from Broncos players Sam Thaiday and Justin Hodges, both saying words to the effect: “Coach, you have to come back and save us.”
The next call was with [Brisbane chairman] Dennis Watt, who said the Broncos were offering him the job and that Watt had been authorised by Lachlan Murdoch himself to do so. Bennett stopped the car and called Murdoch to cement the deal.
On Monday, the Broncos announced Bennett’s return and Anthony Griffin’s exit at the end of the season.
“The $64,000 question is, why did Wayne talk to Lachlan at a late stage?” Doust asks. “Whether it was him calling Lachlan or Lachlan calling him, I’m not sure. I’ve never heard of Sam Thaiday being in the middle of it. Someone got to him. I was devastated again – we all were. He’s devastated us a couple of times. But it pales into insignificance when compared to what he did for us as a club.”
The Wolf You Feed by Andrew Webster (Pan Macmillan Australia, $37) is out September 12.
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