Passionate spectator steps on to the pitch

December 19, 2008


John Huxley talks rugby with a WAG from way back, Sally Loane.
It was as a 17-year-old, while pursuing an early interest in boys by working as an usher at Ballymore stadium in Brisbane, that Sally Loane developed a lasting passion for rugby union and met her first husband: a future Wallaby skipper, Mark Loane.
Of course, the game they allegedly play in heaven was very different then, recalls Loane, 52, who moved into corporate affairs with Coca-Cola Amatil five years ago, after two decades in the rough and tumble world of print, radio and TV media.
For one thing, players were amateurs. Really. "One day Mark was named player of the match," she recalls. "The prize was a new colour TV set. We were just married and living in a tiny flat, with a black and white set, from Radio Rentals, with a rabbit-ears aerial. I went, 'Fantastic!' But Mark said, 'We can't accept it.' So back to the shop it went."
For another, wives and girlfriends - WAGs, in current parlance - were neither seen nor heard, especially on tours. "There was an edict put round by one Wallaby coach that any player whose wife was spotted in the same town would be dropped from the team.
"They didn't want the boys distracted from what they were doing," she says, adding with a boys-will-be-boys smile, "in any shape or form."
It may be some measure of how the game - and to a lesser extent, perhaps, the boys - has changed that Loane recently became the first woman in 134 years to sit on the board of NSW Rugby Union. It is a role - part public face, part new perspective - to which she brings not just a less blokey eye to the game, but expertise, experience and the blood-and-guts passion of the average fan.
Like most supporters, she has her favourite players: Phil Waugh and Stirling Mortlock - "delightful, courageous, brave blokes, who take no prisoners, who put their bodies on the line every time they play".
And her favourite matches, among them Australia's last-ditch defeat by England in the final of the 2003 World Cup in Sydney. "It was an amazing game. Tremendous atmosphere," says Loane, recalling how she watched the final dramatic minutes of the game alongside the dual rugby union/league international Michael O'Connor.
"It was so tense. I know at one point I realised my knuckles were white and I was gripping his arm so tight, my nails were digging into him."

Though Australia lost, the mood among both sets of fans was one of elation. "It was the pinnacle of the game."
Like most supporters, Loane has never been able to control her excitement, to spread the word - most publicly during her five-year stint as host of the ABC 702 morning show, where she spotted unexpected media talent in players such as Brendan Cannon. Not all listeners appreciated the rah-rah-rahing. Some even suggested it was as much a social indicator as a sporting affiliation, hinting at a privileged North Shore upbringing.
It is an odd theory given that Loane grew up on a sheep property in Tenterfield, in northern NSW, attended school and university in Brisbane, and lives south of the Harbour Bridge.
Loane, who plays down any drama about being the first woman to enter a man's world, remains unabashed and unapologetic about introducing rugby to listeners. As she says, the promotion of other pet codes by male broadcasters goes unremarked.
The truth, as a former colleague on the Herald, just one of several newspapers for which she worked with distinction, says is that, "One way or another Sally's been married to the game for most of her life."
Her father played rugby; so, too, did her brother. Almost 40 years on, she recalls standing on the touchline of Brisbane Boys' College oval, watching John, a towering second-rower, play.
"I loved the atmosphere; loved the sight of boys running around." Her eyes light up. "Running into each other." No, she was never tempted to play herself, and confesses she takes little exercise beyond "walking and rushing around".
She and her present husband, Rob, share a long-standing love of the game. Their 16-year-old son, Lachlan, "a big, enthusiastic back", plays for The Scots College, and their 14-year-old daughter, Isabella, is, like her mother, a knowledgeable spectator.
Together, they have always watched and supported, by way of fund-raisers such as sausage sizzles, a variety of teams, at several levels: Scots, Lindfield, Eastern Suburbs and Sydney University, the Waratahs and the Wallabies.
"For the Waratahs we always sit, surrounded by friends, in the same four seats: row 35, I think it is, opposite the boxes." That's how rugby should be enjoyed, she says: among family and friends, male and female, of all ages.
She tactfully declines to draw unflattering comparisons with Australia's other "great" football codes, suggesting allegiances probably depend very much on the tribe into which one is born. But she acknowledges that rugby faces a fight for the sporting/entertainment dollar, especially in sports-fickle Sydney, where even Waratah fans waver in their commitment, should the team lose the winning habit or the game itself become boring.
Loane admits that, having studied and worked in Brisbane and married a Queenslander, she will always retain a soft spot for the Reds north of the border.
"But I'm a New South Welshman; I was born into the tribe," she insists, playing with the lucky blue sapphire she wears round her neck.
Even before she joined the Waratahs board she was, as one of the team's slogans reads, happily "Tah'd for life".
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