‘He’s handled it’: Wayne Bennett’s journey from super coach to clickbait – and back

Wayne Bennett sits at his dining room table in his house on his farm near Warwick in south-east Queensland wearing Peter Alexander pyjamas – a light blue T-shirt with a small dachshund on the chest matched with long, striped shorts – that hang loosely from his long-limbed frame. On this morning he’s only a month past his 72nd birthday, but he looks fit enough to bench-press the John Deere tractor parked in the adjacent shed. Most footballers pile on the kilograms in retirement: Bennett weighs 88 kilograms, about four kilograms below the weight at which he played rugby league during the 1960s and ’70s.

“Why do you keep looking at your tape recorder?” Bennett asks.

For the past four hours, we’ve been chatting without a break about almost every aspect of his life and ­career: his troubled childhood in regional Queensland after his father, Jim, walked out on the family when Bennett was 12; his early years in the Queensland Police Force, struggling through death knocks but ­revelling in locking up protesters; his playing career, which included matches for Queensland and Australia; his enduring passion for making young men better, and for coaching, which yielded seven National Rugby League premierships, six of them with his beloved Brisbane Broncos, one with St George Illawarra, and more than 900 first-grade matches; the pressure ­raising two disabled children can have on a family; and the numerous successes, failures and fallouts that have made him arguably the greatest coach in Australian sport – and, unquestionably, its greatest survivor.

To the uninitiated, Bennett can be cold and stubborn, giving little away whenever he speaks publicly. NRL officials had to beef up its media protocols two decades ago when he refused to talk to the press after matches. When he did front, he tossed up one- or two-word answers. Even in the ­dressing-room or on the training field, which has been his workplace for half a century, he’s economical with his words, simplifying his message. Sometimes, at ­half-time, he mightn’t say anything at all.

Bennett’s frostiness is often misinterpreted as ­arrogance. He’s regularly likened to Clint Eastwood, standing on the front porch in Gran Torino, scowling at the world as it passes him by. The truth, though, is that Bennett has struggled with crippling shyness his entire life. “I’m not insecure, okay?” he insists. “I have my ­battles with insecurity, but I’m introverted. If only you knew the fights I have every day with myself to say something. I know I’ve got to say it, but I just don’t want to do it.” Even now? “Even now.”

“People are scared of him, but that persona, that he’s an arsehole, it’s not true!”

Bob Bennett, brother

I tell him I’m not buying it. In private moments, Bennett can be chatty, even gossipy, about the never-boring world of rugby league. His dry sense of humour is legendary among past and present players. In his spare time, he zips all over the country to speak in front of hundreds, sometimes thousands, for charity events or blue-chip corporations for his usual appearance fee of $10,000. But none of it, Bennett says, comes easily: “If I go to a function, I’m thinking, ‘What the f--- am I doing here? What is it today, idiot? What are you doing here? There’s 150 people in the room. What are you going to say?’ All this shit goes through my head. I don’t want to be the centrepiece.”

Bennett’s younger brother, Bob, says the media turned him into the sourpuss he often seems to be. “It’s a routine!” roars Bob, who followed Bennett into the police force and went on to become a detective. “People are scared of him, but that persona, that he’s an arsehole, it’s not true! The media, which isn’t that smart, didn’t pick him to be an introvert. So they write stories about Wayne Bennett being arrogant. The media made Wayne what he is.”

Not on this day, though. For once, Bennett has ­something to say with the tape recorder sitting on the table between us. That’s why I keep looking at it: to see if the batteries have run out. I hadn’t banked on him speaking for so long, so openly, on any topic.

Yet there’s one matter Bennett doesn’t want to ­discuss. When I ask if I can interview his wife, Trish, from whom he separated in 2016 after starting a relationship with another woman, he falls silent. “No,” he says softly, lowering his head into his hands. When he eventually looks up, there are tears in his eyes. “She’s a special person.”

Wayne Bennett agreed to be interviewed after I phoned him in late 2021 to tell him I was ­writing a biography about him. “How can you write a book about someone without their permission?” he asked.

When I told him I didn’t need it but assured him it would be fair and balanced but raw and honest, I was met with one of his signature pregnant pauses. That’s the oldest move in the Bennett playbook: don’t say a word until the journalist feels the need to fill the uncomfortable silence. “Well, if you’re going to write it, I want you to write it properly,” he finally said. “I’ll help you with whatever you need.” Then, after another long pause: “I’m excited by it.”

From that moment, for the next two years, I wondered if Bennett was manipulating me like he has countless players, officials and, particularly, reporters. The best coaches are Machiavellian by nature, doing whatever they can to squeeze out a win, sign a player, keep their job or find a new one. But Bennett is the master of bending the narrative: about himself, about his team, about any issue he likes. “He’s a manipulator,” agrees Justice Martin Burns, a Queensland Supreme Court judge and one of Bennett’s closest confidants. “But he wouldn’t be trying to manipulate you.”

Bennett is an intriguing subject, not only because of his success and his longevity, but also because of how a complicated life shaped him into the coach that he’s become.

Some treat coaching as if it’s a science, filling the heads of their players with intricate game plans and complicated instructions. Bennett identified early that the most effective way to unlock a player was to earn his trust by getting to know him as a person. If anything, he’s a cranky version of Ted Lasso, the character from the eponymous Apple TV series about a hokey American coach who takes over an English Premier League team. But Bennett was doing Ted Lasso long before Ted Lasso, knowing precisely when a player needed a ­cuddle, a reassuring word – or a kick up the arse.

“He’s very special at that,” offers Allan Langer, the champion Brisbane Broncos playmaker who played under Bennett from 1988 to 2002. “He gets to know players: who they are, where they’re from. He’ll lean on them when they’re playing cards, whatever it is, just to get to know them individually in his own way. He gets them to want to play for him and each other.“

When Bennett was coaching South Sydney in 2021, he gritted his teeth as Penrith humiliated his side 56-12 in a match in Dubbo. “Go have a shower,” Bennett told the players afterwards. “See you on Monday.” When the players trudged into Redfern that Monday morning, they expected some harsh words, then even ­harsher treatment on the training paddock. Instead, they found an almost-deranged version of their coach. Bennett had his hat turned backwards, sunglasses on and pants pulled up high. Suddenly, Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman started blaring from the boombox.

“Boys, if you want to go upstairs and watch that shit you dished up at the weekend, you can do it,” he said. “But I’m not f---ing doing it. We’ve got an opportunity to turn this around against Parramatta. Now go out there and f---ing show me what you can do!” His players started screaming their support, hugged the coach, and the horrific loss was forgotten. Souths went on a run of victories to reach the grand final that year.

Most coaches assume the role of father figure to their players but, for Bennett, the paternal instinct runs deeper because he’s giving them something he never had. His father, Jim, was a drinker, smoker and gambler, more concerned with having a good time in the pubs of Allora, a speck of a town two hours south-west of Brisbane, than raising two boys and two girls. As Jim had the time of his life, Bennett’s mother, Patsy, struggled to keep the family together, juggling jobs cleaning and cooking counter meals at pubs during the day.

His father, a drinker, smoker and gambler, abandoned the family when Wayne was 12.

As the eldest of four, Bennett led by example. When Jim abandoned the family in 1962, the then 12-year-old Wayne vowed to his mother that he’d never be the same man. Indeed, he’s abstained from alcohol ­throughout his life. Despite this, Bennett’s never stopped ­generations of players he’s coached from ­having a good time. Often, especially after significant victories, he’ll be at the bar with them, sipping water. “He gets drunk on the atmosphere,” Langer says. “He wants to know the stories from your night out. As long as you’re doing your job and on time, he doesn’t have a problem.

“I still love going to lunch with him. You can take the piss out of him, and he takes it the right way. He doesn’t get offended. I just think it’s wonderful how he’s handled that.”

This instinctive ability to understand what his ­players need and bend himself to accommodate them has made Bennett an outrageous success, up there with the likes of AFL’s Ron Barassi and Kevin Sheedy, basketball’s Lindsay Gaze and hockey’s Ric Charlesworth. After winning the Brisbane Rugby League premiership with Souths Magpies in 1985, Bennett joined the NSW Rugby League premiership (now known as the NRL) and coached the Broncos to six titles between 1992 and 2006. He signed with St George Illawarra and won a premiership in 2010, much to the relief of their long-suffering supporters. Then there’s the myriad State of Origin matches and series won while coaching Queensland, and internationals claimed while coaching Australia, which he did twice with indifferent success during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

His career, though, only flourished because of the support of the woman standing by his side. Wayne Bennett met Trish Veivers while playing for Souths Magpies in the early 1970s after they were introduced by Trish’s brother, Greg, a teammate of Bennett’s. They were married in 1974 and three years later their son, Justin, was born.

Bennett was at training when he received the phone call that would change his life: Justin, who was only a few months old, had been rushed to hospital after ­suffering a seizure. “That’s when the brain damage occurred,” Bennett recalls. “He kept having seizures for the next four years.“

The seizures abated, but the Bennetts’ lives were changed forever. As a toddler, Justin tested negative to Dravet syndrome, a rare and lifelong form of epilepsy that begins in the first year of life and causes severe seizures. But in 2019, after more research and more tests, it was eventually revealed that he had the gene. The couple were told there was a 1-in-300,000 chance of a baby being born with this condition.

The Bennetts’ second child, Beth, was born a year after Justin without complication but in 1981, their third, Katherine, was born with arthrogryposis, a complex congenital condition that relates to thin, weak and atrophied joints and muscles. The doctors told them the odds: 1 in 5000. “It was a shock ­because she was very twisted,” Trish has said. “We’d never heard of the condition ... She had club feet. Her feet were sitting on her tummy. Her arms were extended because she couldn’t bend her elbows.”

While Justin and Katherine have required full-time care since they were born, the Bennetts got on with life, with Wayne coaching and Trish making things work at home. “She is his North Star,” says Beth, now 44 and a mother of four. “She still is. Without her, none of this happens.”

Bennett might be one of the most recognisable faces in Australian sport, but public life never sat easily with Trish. When she finally agreed to meet me at a Brisbane restaurant in early 2022 for my book, she was genial but guarded. “I’m not very good at this,” she said. At what? “At being interviewed.”

As Bennett’s star ascended during the 1990s, there was keen interest in his family’s story, but the media remained respectful. The first public reference to his children occurred in 1998, when Bennett was named Queensland Father of the Year. “Life hasn’t been easy for them in one way or another, but they’ve overcome it,” he said in his acceptance speech. “My greatest achievement will be to keep my family together for the rest of my life. If I have done that then I’ve been successful.”

The following year, he opened up to the ABC’s Australian Story about his troubled upbringing and life raising two disabled children. A Man For All Seasons remains one of the long-running program’s most ­popular episodes and opinion about the often gruff and misunderstood Bennett softened after it aired. “It’s still one of our most famous stories,” the episode’s ­producer, Vanessa Gorman, says. “After that program, Wayne reached saint-like proportions. People were really moved and amazed by the strength of character in ­pulling his family along with him.”

Yet there was one dynamic not explored. His family came to realise they were sharing their husband and father with the players he coached. “You started to ­realise you were coming second,” says Beth. Trish puts it this way: “He does care about them, the players. It’s a 24-7 job for him. It always has been. And if there’s been a drama, I’m right here. ‘Go and sort the drama out.’ If a boy was in trouble, I’d say to him, ‘You go.’ And there’s been a few boys who have needed him.”

Trouble can come in various forms and Bennett has seen many of them: police arrests, problems with ­gambling and drugs or problems at home. In 2016, when Bennett was coaching the Broncos, journeyman forward James Gavet suffered a season-ending knee injury and there were real concerns for his welfare. Bennett dropped around to his apartment unannounced and started cleaning and putting his clothes away without saying a word. “There’s been countless young men over the years,” Bennett says.

Nevertheless, he’s rarely made a move throughout his career without consulting his wife. The only time he didn’t was in 2012 when he signed with the Newcastle Knights, taking the millions on offer from young ­mining magnate Nathan Tinkler, who’d bought the club licence the previous year. “I didn’t think he should go to Newcastle,” Trish says. “People don’t always tell him what he needs to hear. Sometimes, he doesn’t see the real picture.”

You can narrow the moment Wayne Bennett lost his saint-like status to one day: Sunday, September 18, 2016, when Queensland’s Sunday Mail broke the story about his affair with Dale Cage, whom he’d met in Newcastle two years earlier while Trish was in Brisbane, caring for Justin and Katherine. The story had all the elements of a tabloid scandal: a revered 66-year-old sporting icon, a former Father of the Year no less, leaves his wife and three children, two of whom are disabled, for a woman 22 years younger than him.

Bennett’s coaching is rooted in the man he’s become, the man he’s made himself to be. His principles and beliefs in football are identical to those by which he lives his life. When he left Trish for another woman, it didn’t knock him completely from his ­pedestal, but it certainly left him ­clinging to the edges.

Cage, now 51, was the long-time practice manager for the Knights’ doctor, Neil Halpin. In late 2013, she stopped taking appointments for players when the club stopped paying its bills as speculation mounted about Tinkler’s financial problems. Bennett stormed into the office to rectify the problem as Cage was walking out the door for lunch. Bennett joined her and was, according to Cage, “taken aback by my confidence”. Four days later, Halpin’s bill was paid. “From then on, we became best friends,” she says. “There was an instant connection.”

Their relationship became romantic early in 2014, Bennett’s final and troubled year at the Knights. In the early rounds of that season, Knights backrower Alex McKinnon broke his neck in a tackle against the Melbourne Storm and was left a quadriplegic, a terrible period for the game – and for Bennett who, for the first and only time in his life, didn’t want to be a coach because of the trauma McKinnon and his players had gone through. Bennett had been through many difficult situations with players suffering ­injuries but nothing as catastrophic as this. In the months that followed, Bennett struggled to keep the playing group together as Tinkler’s empire crumbled. The cash shortfall meant players weren’t paid on time and contractors weren’t paid at all. The NRL terminated Tinkler’s licence and Bennett announced soon after that he wouldn’t be coaching the Knights for another season.

During those troubled months, Bennett and Cage grew close, although nobody at the club suspected they were a couple. “We can spend days together and not do anything or see anything, and not get sick of each other,” Cage tells me. “Then when we’re apart, he’ll call me three or four times a day. From the time we’ve been together, he’s called me every morning and every night.” When I ask her how the man she knows differs from the man people understand him to be, she offers this: “He comes across as arrogant, but he’s definitely not that. He’s just shy – with very old-school values.”

Bennett did not want me to discuss this part of his story, mostly because his family – and Cage – aren’t accustomed to, or comfortable with, public scrutiny. The tone of the stories around the time of their outing was particularly harsh on Cage, describing her as a “secret blonde”, a “buxom blonde”, a “vivacious blonde”, “Benny’s blonde bombshell”, a “good sort”, “popular” and “fun”. “I was called a homewrecker,” she says. “I copped a lot of abuse online at the time, and it’s still happening.”

There was nothing to be gained in picking at the ­salacious details of his affair, but Bennett’s relationships later in life are just as relevant to his story as those at the beginning. So, too, are the reactions of those inside and outside the rugby league ecosystem, which widely condemned him.

For years, Bennett had moralised about people’s behaviour. Now, in the eyes of many – particularly those with an axe to grind – his unfaithfulness to Trish was seen as the ­lowest of acts. For many, a switch had been flicked: Wayne Bennett, coach and former Father of the Year, was now just a man with a dirty secret and that dirty secret was plastered all over the front of the Sunday rags. This wasn’t a fall from grace but a face-plant.

Few of Bennett’s former players had taken him on publicly like former Broncos captain Gorden Tallis, ­although it had mostly been on football matters. Soon after news of Bennett’s separation from Trish, Tallis had this to say to Fox Sports: “We used to give Wayne a bit of slack because of his family life, and to walk out on his family ... that was the armour that he’s lost now. Now he’s just a footy coach.

“Before, Wayne Bennett was super; he had this ‘life’ and everybody was in awe of ‘the life’, and I think that’s gone now. I mean, I’ve always had a shot at
him but to have so many other guys poke their head over the fence, scream and shout … He’s lost a bit of his aura.”

Until then, Bennett’s aura was on high-beam. In 2015, he returned to the Broncos after a discussion with News Corporation co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch. They’d shared a close relationship during the 1990s, when Murdoch was a young executive on the rise at Queensland Newspapers. When the media giant took majority ownership of the club in 1996, it became – as one News Corp executive tells me – a “vanity asset” for Murdoch.

“People picked a side and Wayne worked out quickly who his friends were, and who weren’t.”

Dale Cage, partner

Bennett guided the Broncos to a grand final in 2015, his first season back in charge, but the following season wasn’t so successful. Board members and staff from that time maintain he was distracted because of his ­relationship with Cage. The couple had ­become clickbait fodder. Stories regularly appeared about the house they’d bought and the restaurants where they dined. One story claimed they were on the verge of getting married; another speculated they were about to break up.

Cage felt judgment whenever she accompanied Bennett to a Broncos function or match. “That was the worst time of my life – the whole club was toxic,” she says. “He liked me to come to matches and functions; I wanted to stay at home and be a hermit. People picked a side and Wayne worked out quickly who his friends were, and who weren’t.”

Bennett felt it, too. Rumours swirled about him being distant from the playing group, ­although players from that time tell me they weren’t tired of the coach but the circus that surrounded his every move.

“There was one person who put himself in that place of being the judge and jury,” Bennett says. “That’s the only person I can think of. There were staff there who had been divorced. I wasn’t Robinson Crusoe. But there’s different rules for Wayne. There always has been. Wayne’s never been in that other place; he’s always been judged ­differently. That’s okay. He’s handled it.”

He doesn’t name the person, although his relationship with then Broncos chief executive Paul White had become strained. White rejects the suggestion. “I’m not the moral police,” he says. “I never made a moral
judgment. I’m not casting judgment on him at all. I thought I was a good support. He’s completely misinterpreted that.“

Bennett separated from Trish in 2016, but they aren’t divorced and she remains a strong influence in his life. They share the responsibility of looking after Justin, who is 46 but needs one of his parents to sleep with him every night in case he suffers a seizure. Katherine also requires full-time care but is an important staff member in the Broncos’ front office.

In late 2018, Trish told Bennett to leave the Broncos, and he did, signing with South Sydney, whom he guided to a grand final in 2021.

The main reason Bennett doesn’t like talking about his relationship with Cage is that he doesn’t want to inflict any further pain on his family. Katherine ­refused to be interviewed for my book, while Beth was emotional during our two hours together. “The longer he was away, the less weight our opinions held because he had so many people around him telling him how great he was,” Beth says. “There was a lot more trauma in Newcastle and a lot more going on off the field that needed managing, so he couldn’t just come home.”

Bennett’s marriage breakdown is only part of his story, but it’s a complicated chapter about a complicated man. “That’s the whole key to it,” he says. “Wayne Bennett was never supposed to do that, okay? We’re all entitled to make our own decisions, okay? If I made a ­decision that you think I shouldn’t have made, that’s not your business.”

Wayne Bennett turned 73 on January 1 but shows no sign of retiring to his farm any time soon. Make that “farms”: he owns five, which is indicative of his success considering the ­poverty in which he was raised.

This year, he coached the Redcliffe-based Dolphins in their first season in the NRL ­premiership. Pundits and fans alike dismissed their prospects before round one, believing the fledgling club would struggle to make it off the bottom of the ladder. Some reckoned they wouldn’t win a match after failing to land a ­big-name player during the off-season. Not even Bennett could perform a miracle with an apparently sub-standard roster.

Bennett thrives on proving critics wrong and he did, drawing on all his experience and knowledge to have the Dolphins perched near the top of the ladder for the first half of the season. When they beat the highly ­fancied Roosters in the first match, players openly wept on the field and in the dressing room. The Dolphins failed to reach the finals, but their successes, whether come-from-behind victories or narrow losses like the grudge match against the Broncos with Lachlan Murdoch in the stands, enhanced the Bennett legend. “I’m doing nothing different to what I’ve done my whole coaching career,” he said dismissively when I spoke to him late in the season.

Bennett’s methodology hasn’t changed, but he has. While I was researching his life and career, friends, family and former players regularly pointed to one of his favourite anecdotes when addressing a group of people, big or small.

The Two Wolves – an American Indian tale – provides a powerful message about the choices you make. It goes like this …

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It’s a terrible fight, and it’s between two wolves.

“One is evil: he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, ­inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.

“The other is good: he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee replied simply: “The one you feed.”

Two wolves are fighting inside Bennett, but they are neither good nor evil. One is a man, the other is a coach, and as the years go by, one wolf is winning with greater frequency. “I’ve worked all my life to feed the good wolf,” he says. “It’s the choice you’ve got.”

The Wolf You Feed by Andrew Webster (Pan Macmillan Australia, RRP $37) is out September 12.

In an exclusive offer for subscribers, order a copy of The Wolf You Feed from Big W for the discounted price of $20, plus postage. This offer is available until September 30. Click here for details.

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