The smell of victory keeps Craig Bellamy in the coaches' box
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“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, declared in the film Apocalypse Now. It’s an anti-war film but also reflects the motivation of the career soldier, not dissimilar to what drives “lifer” coaches in rugby league, such as Wayne Bennett, Tim Sheens and Craig Bellamy.
Bellamy, who will re-sign for a 22nd consecutive season with the Storm, admits he is apprehensive about retirement.
“I’ve been speaking to a lot of blokes who have retired and they don’t know what to do with themselves,” the 63-year-old said.
Asked whether he was referring to another career coach, Des Hasler, whom his friends say is finding it difficult to adjust to life away from Brookvale, Bellamy said: “No, not football people. Just blokes who say, ‘You’re a long time retired’.”
The emptiness of life after football is magnified with Bellamy because he invests so much time, thought and energy into his work. Sure, the Storm have a future coaching director position awaiting him but it is a loosely defined role and may require him to sit above his successor, an arrangement which could bring discomfort.
Sure, retirement would allow more time with his grandchildren, whose pictures adorn the walls of his office in AAMI Stadium. Yet he realises that before long, all of them, led by Billie aged 7, will be walking out the front door with a soccer ball to join her mates, saying, “Bye, Pop”.
Craig Bellamy and (inset) Robert Duvall as Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Kilgore in the film Apocalypse Now.Credit: NRL Photos, Getty
It’s not that he fears “civvy street” but he thrives on routine: the order, structure, punctuality and discipline of running an elite NRL club can be addictive.
Football is one of the few places outside the military where the team is more important than the individual, although Bellamy is much in demand on the speaker’s circuit, addressing business corporations where CEOs like to talk of “my team”.
So he signed with the Storm for another tour, although, as he said, “Eight weeks ago, I was gone”. It’s the off-field issues that get to him. Like Kilgore, it’s the “greatcoats on, greatcoats off” contradictory and confusing orders from the top brass which frustrate him.
He recognised the problem with the ARL Commission’s six-again innovation before it was implemented: teams would deliberately breach on the early tackles when the attack was anchored near its posts. The result was a yawning gap between the top and bottom teams, and one-sided scorelines in 2020-21.
Eventually, the ARLC changed the rule to penalise teams on the first and second tackles for offside and ruck breaches, allowing the poorer teams to escape their territory. But Bellamy was also aware of the agenda in the introduction of the rule: to punish the so-called scourge of wrestling, of which the Storm was perceived to be chief culprit. But, to the frustration of a cabal of powerbrokers, the Storm won the 2020 premiership and lost the preliminary final in 2021 only after 18 months of stir-crazy lockdown in Queensland.
Stories accusing the Storm of grapple tackles appeared with such Groundhog Day regularity, Bellamy once quipped, “It must be semi-final time”. It must be particularly galling for Bellamy, a man so devoid of duplicity, that some of his fellow coaches would seed these stories in the media.
The negative stories diminished with the Storm’s collapse towards the end of last season, and the NRL has struck a commendable balance between attack and defence which is difficult for any team to exploit.
When he extended his contract about a decade ago, Bellamy said, “the emotional rope [with his players] is too hard to cut”.
Craig Bellamy has always had a strong bond with his players at the Storm.Credit: NRL Photos
It still is, with a new generation of players who call him “Bellsa”, rather than the earlier Bellyache, encouraging him to re-sign.
It helps to go around again after years of losing players he developed from raw 18-year-olds to internationals. Next year will be the first where the Storm begin a season without having lost a single player they desperately wanted to keep.
Honesty and hard work are the bedrock values of his NSW central-west hometown, Portland where his father died in a quarry accident.
At the time, his neighbour phoned him at work in Queanbeyan to warn him of “bad news”, suggesting he sit down.
“There’s no seat here, mate,” he replied, even being honest before the tragic news he suspected was coming.
Portland had an indelible effect on him, particularly for its working-class ethos of hard labour being a reward in itself.
He spent the day after the Broncos match with four of his hometown mates, a couple of whom had rarely left Portland.
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Their visit helped distract him after weeks of being, as he said, “confused” about the future. But, to quote one of his favourite expressions, “at the end of day”, he couldn’t see the end of the football day.
It’s the lure of the linament, the exhausted, euphoric warriors in the beer-soaked dressing room after a come-from-behind win. It’s not the smell of napalm but it is similarly intoxicating and redolent of the line which follows Kilgore’s most famous one: “The smell ... smelled like... victory.”
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