It was the 1969 grand final, Maitland versus Lakes, and Lakes winger Jim Porter had received the ball and run straight at his opposing winger, Maitland's Merv Wright, the greatest front-on tackler I've ever seen.
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Merv picked up Porter and dropped him on his head.
Merv's preferred tackling style is no longer met with much approval by the League, but anything went in those days.
The next time he got the ball Porter tried it again, running at Merv, only harder and faster this time. Merv picked him up and speared him again; and then repeated the process on Porter's next optimistic attempt.
The fourth time Porter ran at him Merv picked him up, carried him over the sideline, paused for a minute and then... buried him anyway.
Jim Porter must have learnt some sort of lesson - he went on to play for Easts and Parramatta, and was selected for the Australian World Cup side - but he later said, "I did a lot in my career, but I've never lived down that day against Merv Wright."
I thought about that story this week while talking to rugby international David Campese who was in town for the Australian Rugby Foundation lunch and dropped into the cafe a couple of times.
"One of the problems we're having in both codes," Campese told me, "is that teams are buying bodies rather than players. We've got plenty of big strong blokes running into other big strong blokes, but there seems to be not much thought being given to running around them."
Campese also commented on the bloated nature of the organisations associated with the teams these days. On playing test Rugby with Alan Jones as coach Campese said: "Jones had an assistant, I think, and that was it. Now you've got a cast of thousands - physios, attacking coaches, defensive coaches... more assistants than players."
I agree with him, and don't think it is at all controversial to suggest that we are in no way getting better quality football out of it. The problem goes to the very top. You find yourself wondering, "who are these people, and why are they occupying these roles?"
Peter Beattie appears to be going from blunder to blunder as chairman of the ARLC. His cobbled together no-fault standing down policy has been challenged in the courts already, with Beattie being criticised by the court itself for falsely publicly suggesting that a yet to be enacted policy was already in place.
Beattie is supposed to be a lawyer. In an interview with Phil Gould last year Beattie was shown to be unaware that Cronulla are known as the Sharks. The question was posed as a multiple choice...
Is this really the best man for the job?
Todd Greenberg, seemingly already anticipating some type of revenue dropping fallout over this off-season poor player behaviour stuff, indicated this week there is a very real possibility of downward movement in player payments and a reduction in the salary cap.
He was quoted as saying: 'We've got clauses in our collective bargaining agreement that if the game suffers financially, at an aggregated number, then everyone feels the pain and that includes the players.'
I wonder if the 'everyone' he refers to includes the CEOs? Somehow I doubt it.
Do these administrators have any genuine feel for the actual game itself? When I keep hearing weird suggestions of new systems for referees rewarding 'attractive play' (how???) and 10-team semi-finals I'd have to think, no, they don't.
Why go to such trouble to fix a game that wasn't broken?
In fact, I consider it a testament to the greatness of the game that it continues to weather all this stuff.
Many other sports are, it appears to me, being compromised by these top-heavy dysfunctional administrations.
David Gallop, having been very much less than impressive at the helm of the Rugby League, can now be found in charge of the Australian Football Federation where he recently oversaw the mysterious sacking of the successful Matildas coach in the immediate lead-up to a World Cup.
It gets worse. In the cricket world, in the aftermath of the ball tampering scandal, we saw a mass exodus of high level administrators who were apparently responsible for the 'win-at-all-costs culture' of the team which lead to the cheating.
The 'culture' of a cricket team? I don't know what this means, have never seen anything approaching a coherent explanation for it and would think that one of these fairly well paid fleeing administrators should be able to explain it to me.
As we all know, sport now is business; big business. The strange thing is though, that big business, which you'd expect to be good at this stuff, seems to be so thoroughly mismanaging so many aspects of our sports.
There is apparently a certain incompatibility occurring which needs to be ironed out.
As Jack Gibson once importantly observed, "A club's number one priority is to have its front office in order". Jack's one-liner should perhaps be extended to apply to the 'front offices' of these entire sporting bodies.