By STEVE MASCORD
I STILL think of the Leeds Park Plaza as a brand, spanking new hotel but the internet tells me I had my longest on-the-record encounter with Steve Folkes there 13 years ago.
When Canterbury held a season launch at Pyrmont at the start of the 1998 season – the one that brought the Australian game back together with 20 teams after the Super League War – I encountered new coach Folkes in the washroom.
“I don’t really want to deal with you blokes,” he said. “But I got to.”
It could have been interpreted as a shot across the bows of a 29-year-old Sydney Morning Herald hack but I just laughed. He was being honest, after all.
Folkes would have plenty of reasons to hold onto his personal preferences regarding the fourth estate over the coming years. If he wasn’t reading about his team being stripped of all 37 of its competition points for salary cap abuse in 2002, it was stories about alleged sexual impropriety by players in Coffs Harbour in 2004 … allegations that led to no charges.
Folkes, who we lost last month aged just 59, was almost military in his discipline and resolve as a player with Canterbury and Hull. He was a fitness fanatic before that was par for the course and a rugby league purist.
The pettiness around professional sport, it appeared from the outside, was not for him. You’d expect him to say at the beginning of a coaching career he cared not for interviews. It was an in-character declaration.
But despite being the epitome of the so-called “Family Club”, Folkes was not blindly loyal. Spend a bit of time around him and his moral compass was vividly apparent. Nothing – not coaching, not the spotlight, not even his beloved club – had indoctrinated him. He was unbroken. If there’s one word you would associate with Folkes, it was honour.
So despite the dunny declaration seven years previous, Folkes actually deigned to be interviewed in the foyer of the Park Plaza before the 2005 World Club Challenge at Elland Road. Why, I asked him, he had not lashed out in vindication at we jackyls of the press after the previous year’s grand final, a 16-14 win over Sydney Roosters.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about that,” Folkes replied
“Before the game I thought we would win, and to focus on anything but that win would take away from the satisfaction we got out of actually winning.
“I knew I would probably be asked something about that in the press conference after the game, but there was no reason … that just would have taken the gloss off it, it would have directed people’s attention away from the football … and put it onto something that doesn’t deserve comment, to be honest.
“I have my opinions and I’m happy to keep them to myself. [One’s] opinion is not going to change things nine times out of 10.”
Nevertheless, he went on to offer opinions: that the demands on players were too great, that agents had too much power, self-doubt over whether players could come to him a problem, concerns that Bulldogs fans had been unfairly maligned, that whinging coaches got too much airtime (including himself).
I knew Folkes mainly as a coach and then as a colleague on the ABC. I have plenty of other recollections and impressions. Yet I still thought it essential to trawl the internet to find the 2005 interview; not because of what I didn’t remember but because of what I did.
How many conversations from 13 years ago do you have that contain not one but two things which have stayed with you every day since?
At the end of the interview, I suggested the reticent Folkes should do one interview a year. “We’ll be back here this time next year, so …” I quoted him as responding.
“Put in something off the record I said at the end, you wouldn’t do that would you?” he gently chided the next night, after a WCC defeat.
What I remembered was my guilt. I’d taken a short cut, cheated, at the expense of someone who’d never done either.
The other resonant memory was a piece of advice from which we can all benefit and which I have been trying to follow ever since Steve Folkes imparted it back then.
“I seem to have this knack of putting [drama] to one side,” he offered.
“I put stuff out of my mind. If I don’t want to think about it, I don’t. It sounds funny but there’s obviously plenty of other things going on in your life and that’s what separates the professionals from the nearly professionals.”
Farewell from another saddened, grieving nearly-professional, Folkesy.
This story appeared in the March edition of Forty 20 Magazine.
