Matt Williams: A tragic end to a life of substantial sporting achievement

Eight days ago, a good man sat in his Brisbane home, glaring into the abyss and contemplating eternity.

The first 49 years of Paul Green’s life had been full of extraordinary sporting achievements. As an Australian Rugby League halfback, Green had a long and distinguished career in club, State of Origin and international level rugby league.

At only 167cm (5ft 5ins) and 80kgs he was, as the French say, “Le petit general.” Green was a player of such high quality that in 1995 he won the Australian Rugby Leagues award for their best and fairest player.

He then became one of the few players of excellence to successfully transition across that giant bridge from being a quality player to becoming a championship-winning head coach.

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The North Queensland Cowboys are a National Rugby League (NRL) team based in the tropical city of Townsville. This is Rugby League heartland. Hemmed on to the coast by the immensity of the Great Barrier Reef, the North Queensland Cowboys were to become Green’s “magnum opus”.

After Green was appointed as their head coach in 2014 he began to transform the Cowboys from perennial underachievers into national premiers, winning the club’s first NRL Premiership trophy in 2015. The joyous celebrations in the deep north rightly hailed Green’s brilliant achievements.

Green again proved his quality as a leader by returning the Cowboys to another Grand Final in 2017. Although defeated it remains a powerful achievement.

Ptolemy was a lifelong companion of Alexander the Great. After Alexander’s death, he became the Pharaoh of Egypt. On reflection of his life, he famously said, “Like Alexander, all men reach and fall”.

Sporting dynasties do not last and the Cowboys began to slide. I watched Paul Green’s hair turn frosty as he fought with all his being to lead a club and a group of men he obviously loved, out of a decline and back towards success.

But Ptolemy’s observation proved true. Sadly the world always blames the coach. In mid-season 2020 Paul Green stepped down from his position with his beloved Cowboys.

Apart from elected political leaders, coaches are the only profession where their employment status is played out as a public blood sport.

Despite the personal chaos, few coaches somehow pick themselves up from the floor, dust themselves down, put aside all their misgivings, look the world straight in the eye and attempt to coach again.

Resilience is in there, but so too is the unhealthy compulsive obsession to compete, mixed with that most disloyal of companions, ego. The coach’s drive to prove themselves and gain redemption is both noble and powerful, but it can also be self destructive.

State of Origin in Australian Rugby League is an amazingly unique beast. When the blue of New South Wales hits the maroon of Queensland, life on the east coast of Australia stops.

Inexplicably, a game between two Australian provincial rugby league teams creates unimaginable amounts of rivalry, passion, entertainment and money. Rugby league’s pinnacle is also a physical phenomenon and one of Australia’s most cherished sporting events.

When Paul Green was appointed as the Queensland State of Origin Head Coach for 2021, the heart of the great Queensland team, that had dominated New South Wales for more than a decade was evaporating. A core group of all-time great Queensland players had just retired. A long hard road of rebuilding awaited the new boss. It was a daunting task in an impatient world.

Queensland lost the 2021 three-game series but improved across the matches to win the last game 20-18. Regardless, attention was focused on the two heavy defeats at the start of the campaign. Green stepped down after just one series.

Last Friday as I was driving in my car, I turned on the radio to hear the unthinkable. In his Brisbane home Paul Green had taken his own life.

All I could do was to slap my open palm onto the steering wheel and uselessly repeat to a deaf world, “No. No. No. No.”

Despite all the bigotry that sits on both sides of the rugby codes, my experience is that there is very little between rugby union and rugby league. Growing up in a Sydney winter meant Saturday was rugby and Sunday was rugby league.

The shared heritage of the two codes has far more in common than the nonsense taught at kitchen tables about long dead class wars that divided the game more than a century ago. In both codes, coaches have become a disposable commodity.

Paul Broughton is one of rugby league’s most intelligent elder statesmen and a former coach of my club, the Balmain Tigers. Over the weekend as the news of Green’s death shocked us all, the wise 91-year-old Broughton reflected on his own journey. He wrote, “There is nothing on this Earth that prepares you for the day when you wake for the first time in your life without the game.”

After more than half a century of skin in the game of rugby as a player and coach, I have lived through that morning myself. It was an exceptionally hollow experience. The real trouble was that the next morning the hole was even deeper.

When you have had a clear mission across many years of your life and that mission is suddenly gone, it can create a hazardous and perilous time.

Why Paul Green chose to act as he did is an unanswered question that has shattered the hearts of his family, former team-mates, players and the entire community to which he devoted his professional life.

Mental health is now a subject that is openly spoken about across all sections of our society. Yet men continue to take their lives in numbers that are truly shocking.

At its essence, this story is not about rugby or league. It is not about coaches or athletes. It is about people.

The tragedy is best summed up by the seven-times winning NRL Premiership coaching legend Wayne Bennett. He was also Paul Green’s coaching mentor, having given Green his first NRL coaching contract as a specialist skills coach when Bennett led the Brisbane Broncos in 2005.

The day after Green’s death, Bennett wrote on the front page of Brisbane’s Courier Mail newspaper, “Let us know if you’re in that dark place. When you open up and talk about your problems, you’ll realise that you’re loved and cared for.

“Men don’t want to burden us with their problems. We don’t want to be seen as weak. But men are vulnerable and it’s okay to show it. You have to let us know so we can try to help. Because this [Green’s death] helps nobody, this hurts us all.”

– Samaritans’ free helpline is at 116123, or you can email jo@samaritans.ie or jo@samaritans.org; Pieta’s free helpline is at 1800-247247, or text help to 51444