By NORMAN TASKER

In most walks of life, and certainly among Sydney’s Shute Shield Rugby clubs, great men tend to define great eras. Gordon men certainly have been reflecting on that truism lately following the passing of two important club characters in Arthur Summons and John Fordham.

Their impact on Gordon came decades apart, and in very different ways. Summons (pictured seated far right in the front row) was a champion player who helped Gordon to two premierships in his six seasons with the club.

He was one of eight Wallabies in the 1956 premiership team, and by the time he left to become an icon of Rugby League, he had played 10 Tests for Australia.

Fordham managed teams through the late 1970s and early 1980s, where his talent for organisation, innovation and imagination – talents that won him wide renown later on as a manager of leading sports people and media personalities – helped lift the club to one of its most productive eras. More of Fordham later.

Gordon have decided to honour both men at the 7TWO TV match-of-the-day at Chatswood this week, when a resurgent club takes on Warringah. A brief ceremony will be held to reflect on their contribution to the club, and the Gordon team will wear black armbands as a mark of respect.

History being the fickle the thing it is, Summons’ time at Gordon has been largely swallowed by the impact he later had on Rugby League.

He played in three grand finals for Western Suburbs, played nine league Tests, captained Australia and was captain-coach of the 1963-64 Kangaroos. This was perhaps the best league team ever gathered, with names like Gasnier, Langlands and Raper at its heart.

And for Summons, of course, a certain immortality came with John O’Gready’s famous photo taken after the 1963 grand final, where the Norm Provan-Arthur Summons embrace became the basis of the NRL’s premiership trophy, now the Provan-Summons Trophy.

Yet Arthur played more games for Gordon than he did anywhere else, and spent more years with the club than he did in top grade league. He played more Rugby Tests than league Tests, and he made no bones about the fact that the years he spent at Gordon were the most treasured of his entire career.

Summons was a fly-half whose talents were of another era; he was small of stature, nimble and fleet of foot. In a time when forwards hunted as a pack and were largely out of the way, and backs were lithe, fast and evasive, Summons was the artful dodger, jinking this way and that to make break after break.

It was a time when such skills were gold, before there were forwards strewn all over the field to suffocate the pace of a game, and before backs were built like body-builders.

One of the more telling performances of his career came on the 1957-58 tour of the British Isles, when Australia came up against Ireland at Lansdowne Road.

His opposite number that day was Jackie Kyle, decades later voted the greatest player Ireland had produced – no mean feat when you consider the likes of Willie John McBride, who made five Lions tours, Mike Gibson and Bryan O’Driscoll were in the frame as well.

Summons bested Kyle that day, scoring a brilliant try, and half a century on was still talking about it as one of the more memorable moments of his career. Australia could not win a Test on that tour, although the scores were always close. Summons lamented the loss of his Gordon centre Jim Phipps early on with a broken leg as critical to the tour outcome.

“I made a lot of breaks on that tour, but support was never as good as it should have been,” he recalled to me years later. “Jimmy would have known exactly what I was doing and would have been there. We had that sort of combination at Gordon. It would have made an enormous difference.”

The era of the 1950s was a great time for Gordon. They had first won the premiership in 1949 under the leadership of Trevor Allan and the uncompromising coaching of his father ‘Slab’, then went on to win again in 1952, 1956 and 1958.

In 1979 all of those teams gathered again, together with the premiership team of 1976 and the then current first grade team of 1979, to honour the 30-year anniversary of their first premiership, which brings us back to John Fordham.

John was always coming up with exotic ideas to make things special, and the premiership dinner of 1979 was one of the best of them. Nick Shehadie, Randwick’s captain through many of those years, was the guest speaker, ‘Bomber’ Miles led the singing as he had back in the day, and they were all there, the champions of Gordon past.

Fordham came on board as manager of the Gordon seconds in 1976, when I was appointed coach, and we spent five years together as manager and coach of Gordon teams, the last three of them in first grade. We also worked together with NSW Under 21 teams, and Fordham’s imaginative efficiency was a key to some great times.

He was working as a promotions manager with Qantas when we started, but it was not long before he went out on his own, building a stellar career in talent management.

He certainly knew how to inspire people. One of his early tricks with our reserve grade side was to concoct a story that an American billionaire had by chance been to Chatswood and had seen the team play, was captivated by it and wanted to buy it as the centrepiece of a professional troupe in the States.

He produced at our pre-training team talk on the Tuesday night a letter from the supposed magnate he had dubbed Chuck Knox III, which outlined in some detail an elaborate plan for Rugby in the States. He had everyone absolutely convinced.

It was often like that. Every training night, we seemed to take to the field laughing, and it forged a spirit that carried the team to 17 straight victories and a five tries to nil grand final win.

Even now, that spirit lives in a twice a year “Fordo’s lunch”, that he started a couple of decades back as a re-union, initially for Gordon players of that era but lately (Covid depending) of any era, that draws about 50 people and much of the same sort of laughter that was in play in the 1970s.

Summons and Fordham both knew the value of a sometimes indefinable spirit that has existed at Gordon, and has been at the centre of the good years. The character they embodied lives on in a club that is enjoying a significant resurgence in difficult times.

NORMAN TASKER is a much decorated sports writer and author who wrote rugby and cricket for the Sydney Sun before moving to ACP Magazines where he edited Rugby League Week as well as Inside Edge and helped launch Inside Rugby magazine. He nows lives on the Central Coast of NSW.