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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are advised the following contains references to and images of people who have died.<\/p>\n
A tour to Tonga for a group of proud Indigenous young men has proven a key link in the inspiration chain for Indigenous All Stars and even paved the path for junior international representative tours.<\/p>\n
The 1990 Pacific Cup was the occasion for a watershed moment as an Australian Indigenous team wore the green-and-gold \u2018V\u2019 and adorned the ARL (Australian Rugby League) crest alongside the Aboriginal flag for the first time.<\/p>\n
The five-day carnival in Nuku\u2019alofa pitted what was effectively an Under 19 team of players invited from communities in New South Wales, Queensland and Northern Territory against men from Tonga, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Western Samoa, Tokelau and Niue, as well as a New Zealand Maori representative team.<\/p>\n
Leading them were three professionals \u2013 then Gold Coast Seagull Ron Gibbs, representative star Ricky Walford and South Sydney\u2019s Graham Lyons \u2013 who leapt at the chance to represent their culture.<\/p>\n
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Gibbs recalled the concept being an initiative of Steve \u2018Bear\u2019 Hall, and he especially savoured the honour.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was unbelievable for me, but it probably opened the eyes of those younger blokes that participated in something like that. She was pretty good,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey gave the best performance. Most of the were only little skinny blokes but they played their guts out.\u201d<\/p>\n
It became even more special when the squad came together for a four-day training camp at the Australian Institute of Sport.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me personally, it was an honour to even be invited, right from the start, to give some more young blokes an opportunity.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI got down there and they made me the captain and I went: \u2018Oh damn, captain? I got no brains on me whatsoever\u2019<\/p>\n
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\n\t\tRon Gibbs
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\u201cI only know the other way, and that\u2019s the way I captained, by leading by example \u2013 not necessarily getting them to play the way I wanted them to be or playing though like I did, but I wanted them to use their skills and their level.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo use talking about it, I\u2019m a man of action and that\u2019s why I got the nickname \u2018Rambo\u2019 and that\u2019s the only way I can do it. I always told the kids to be who you are and enjoy it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose kids took to me like a father figure. Some of them wouldn\u2019t have known who I was, they never gave me the opportunity to play Origin, they never gave me a chance to play for Australia, so for me, representing my people and Australia was one of the biggest parts of my football career and I was proud and honoured.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had to do a lot of things with that, meet the King of Tonga and doing the speaking for the crew being the leaders and giving the didgeridoo.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery team we played, we gave a didgeridoo from the Northern Territory and I have one of them at home.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I got home, we had one left and the officials gave it to me and I\u2019ve still got it at home, and my jumpers, I can put them on today.\u201d<\/p>\n
The other seasoned pro who hailed from western NSW was St George\u2019s Ricky Walford, who had earlier made his State of Origin debut for the Blues \u2013 but this was just as special.<\/p>\n
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\n Dragons legend Ricky Walford continues to inspire young Indigenous footballers.
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\u201cI think it was a great honour to represent not only Australia, but the Aboriginal people, on an international level, sanctioned by the Australian Rugby League, which was terrific. We had the Aboriginal flag on our sleeve and the ARL logo on our jumpers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a great experience for the young blokes, but in terms of the competition, we didn\u2019t fare as well as we thought we would.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of our blokes were giving away two or three stone (up to 20kg) man-for-man against some of the Samoa, Tonga, Cook Islands packs and they still gave as good as they got.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team was knocked out in the semi-finals by Western Samoa, going down 26-16, but Walford said the experience served as inspiration to a number of communities.<\/p>\n
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Graham Lyons lights up Endeavour Field<\/p>\n
The emerging players included Darrell Trindall, who has made his NSWRL first grade debut that year and kicked on to play 171 games in the top grade, while the likes of Cherbourg great Stafford Sandow and Randall Taylor \u2013 father of Ash Taylor \u2013 inspired more Indigenous talents to emerge.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously when you play for your country in any sport, the recognition you get, not only gives you the self-satisfaction of achieving that personally, but the broader community you live in, the inspiration you pass on to other kids and other families, but really, we just all tried to make our community better, living out bush back in the day,\u201d Walford said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the things go on and people say, \u2018Well, OK, if he can do it and he comes from here, living in the same environment as me, I can too\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose little things that happen to us go on to inspire kids who come through the system and hopefully Ronnie and I still do that with the communities we come from.\u201d<\/p>\n
Open age teams attended the tournament in 1992 and 1994 to withstand the physicality, with selection shared between Koori and Murri rugby league decision-makers \u2013 one of the many ventures that paved the way to the modern day All Stars and Pacific Championships.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are advised the following contains references to and images of people who have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":843659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":["post-843658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=843658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/843659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=843658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=843658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=843658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}