The Professional: Jack Gibson 1929-2008

As a leader of men, Jack Gibson relied on two key attributes: simplicity and innovation. The first came naturally. The second arose from a life-changing trip to the U.S. almost 40 years ago. In his physical prime, Gibson, who died May 9 in Sydney after a long struggle with dementia, was a good player, rugged and brave. But that’s not how he’ll be remembered. He is recognized as the finest coach in the history of rugby league in Australia. Winner of five premierships between 1974 and 1983, he was last month named Coach of the Century by a panel of experts that chose a greatest-ever Australian team to mark rugby league’s centenary year. Said Wayne Bennett, the closest thing to a Gibson successor: “So much of everything a coach has today is because of him.”

In late 1969, when the world was a much bigger, less connected place and his rival coaches were enjoying their summer holidays, Gibson took the extraordinary step of attending a National Football League conference in Hawaii. He’d felt an affinity with the U.S., having grown up believing that his father’s uncle, Hugh Cooper Gibson, was Secretary of State to President Woodrow Wilson. (Much later, he learned that his great-uncle had been merely a senior official in the State Department at that time.)

In Honolulu, the Australian interloper met Chuck Knox, who was in charge of the Los Angeles Rams, and became friends for life with then San Francisco 49ers head coach Dick Nolan. “I went because I was looking to learn something,” Gibson said years later. “Their game is the same as ours. They’re looking for the same type of individual”: huge, fast, tough.

Gibson brought back ideas that forever changed rugby league, which at the time was played and coached, even at the highest level, by amateurs. He made strength training compulsory for his players, and introduced video analysis and a preoccupation with statistics into the Australian game. Among these stats was the “tackle count” — a record of each player’s contribution in defense. “I might have read it in Sports Illustrated,” Gibson said, “where in the American game it takes more talent, experience and a tougher individual to be a defensive player than a runner.” Gibson even started to sound like an American, drawling about “offense” rather than “attack,” the rugby league term, and “releases” rather than “offloads.”

Big Jack raised the profile of the coach by demanding he receive the same salary as his highest-paid player, and by insisting on the American tradition that the coach — who lives and dies on results — should select his own staff and teams. Former coaching colleague Roy Masters called him the Australian Vince Lombardi.

As a callow reporter, I dealt with Gibson when, in the shadows of his career in 1990, he was in the midst of a typically intense State of Origin campaign as the coach of New South Wales. He was clearly under stress: his reputation was on the line (Queensland had trounced N.S.W. under Gibson the previous year) and there was a whisper that, among the players, he was seen as a little out of touch. At team training one morning, while Gibson “fed the chooks,” as he called speaking to journalists, I botched the phrasing of a question and he lasered me with a look of contempt. A week or so later, I called him at his home to address a delicate matter of team selection, dreading his reaction to hearing my name. But for the next 15 minutes he was a model of courtesy and patience, calling me “Danny” five or six times and signing off with a gentle, “All the best, kid.” In both instances, it occurred to me later, Gibson was trying to teach me something: don’t open your mouth until you know what you want to say. And, when you fall down, get back up — people will respect you for it.

Many who played under Gibson were shattered by his passing. “Jack — he loved his players, he cared about his players,” said Peter Sterling, who won three premierships under the master at the Sydney club Parramatta. It was to Sterling that Gibson offered perhaps his most famous piece of advice, at once simple, esoteric and delightfully clever. The coach told the halfback, who’d been kicking poorly, to “kick it to the seagulls” — in other words, to a part of the field that is free of opposition players, to the point where the gulls of a coastal city feel safe settling there. Initially baffled, Sterling would later relate the story as evidence of Gibson’s genius. Jack Gibson was much more than a product of his American influence. But in the shaping of Australia’s greatest football coach, nothing beats his summer of ’69.