Ken Elphick Not A Rugby Sort Of Bloke
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday November 26, 1996
That, then, concludes the strange and troubled saga of Ken Elphick's days as a rugby administrator.
When Elphick took over as executive director of the Sydney Rugby Union in the early 1980s, and shortly thereafter the NSW Rugby Union, it was immediately apparent to rugby players that this man was going to be different.
Whereas previous administrators had usually been older members of the "blazer brigade" - risen to their positions of rugby power through long and dutiful service to the game for the game's sake - Elphick was not that.
When he took over the SRU, he was only 27, younger than many of the players he administered. He had been a successful hurdler in his time, then sports promoter - giving him that era's version of "street cred".
In person Elphick always seemed friendly, if flamboyant. He was not a rugby sort of bloke, but nor was he without charm - it was just that it was charm without the cauliflower ears and broken noses attached to it that we trusted instinctively.
The change wasn't just that there was someone in "head office" wearing a wide flashy tie. Before him, there was no notion that representative rugby players had to produce a spectacle, and while it was nice if a large crowd turned up to our games, that was not the point of the exercise.
Elphick begged to differ. Rugby was "entertainment", he said, and it had to attract mainstream sports followers, not necessarily to rugby born.
So bring on the dancing girls, clear the way for the hoopla, and let's get it all on commercial television on Friday nights. And moving on from there, let's get right behind putting the representative rugby games on at the far more centrally located Concord Oval. It was in paying for the redevelopment of this oval that the court decided that Elphick had "systematically defraud(ed)" the NSWRU.
As part of his defence as to where all the money had gone - some $850,000 of it - Elphick claimed that a lot had gone in payments to 40 players at a time when rugby was amateur. Of money like that sloshing around, I remember absolutely nought, though there was no doubt Elphick seemed able to get us a much better class of tracksuit at the beginning of each new season, and we thanked him for it.
Basically, we more or less liked him. He wasn't a rugby sort of bloke, but it wasn't as if he was ripping us off or anything, was it? As we weren't getting any money in the first place, that simply wasn't the way we were thinking ...
© 1996 Sydney Morning Herald