League great Andrew Johns wanted boom Wests Tigers rookie Luke Brooks at Newcastle Knights
JOSH MASSOUD
The Sunday Telegraph
February 02, 2014 8:55AM
ANDREW Johns was intrigued. He'd just watched a 2012 schoolboys game featuring Holy Cross Ryde and was taken with the performance of their chief playmaker, Luke Brooks.
At full time Johns crossed the sideline at WIN Stadium for a quick word with the 17-year-old. During their brief exchange, the Knights legend joked: "How about coming to play in Newcastle?"
Before the starstruck Brooks could summon a reply, a veteran official from Wests Tigers intervened and set Johns straight: "There's no chance of that happening, mate. He's with us."
If only they knew. If only Johns and countless talent scouts from rival clubs who've dreamed of extracting the prodigious from Tigertown knew.
If only they knew that, even before he owned a football, Brooks was besotted with Tigers.
There were soft toy tigers, a tiger imprinted doona, even his first beach towel was covered with them. The obsession deepened when Brooks discovered rugby league through his mother, Michele, a lifelong Tigers fan who was raised across the bay from Leichhardt Oval.
Like generations of local kids beforehand, her middle son spent the winter afternoons of his early childhood on the venue's majestic grass hill, using a plastic bottle to emulate his heroes.
By the age of 10 he was old enough to appreciate their incredible skill, which unfolded before his own eyes at ANZ Stadium in October 2005, when Benji Marshall highlighted Wests Tigers' maiden premiership win with a flick pass for the ages.
Brooks tried to replicate the feat in junior games but could never quite make it work. For a strikingly talented kid, it was an all too rare taste of failure. Brooks also excelled at soccer to the point that opposing teams pleaded for him to be restricted to goalkeeping.
He set junior records in athletics, and made representative sides in cricket too, with his grandfather Clive Johnston a former NSW Sheffield Shield captain This idyll unfolded along the length of Victoria Rd, the main artery of Tigertown. Sporting fields in Gladesville, Ryde, and Leichhardt were his domain. Putney Primary School, where Michele is now assistant principal, was the scene of Brooks' first proper game of rugby league in 2001.
"I was in Year One and my older brother's team was short on numbers for a knockout game," Brooks recalls. "They tossed me on the wing and I remember scoring a try in the corner form a cut-out pass he threw to me."
According to his father, Jeff, that moment set Brooks on the path to becoming an NRL star. By his thirteenth birthday, all other pursuits had been abandoned in favour of rugby league and just a year later Brooks progressed to Balmain's junior representative system.
But there would be no magic carpet ride to the breathless acclaim of his NRL debut against St George Illawarra late last season. In the years leading up to that sparkling August day at the SCG, Brooks played precious little football as his lifelong passion for the game dimmed.
Between April 2010 and June 2012, Brooks managed just half a dozen matches. Two broken ankles, a golden staph infection and a broken thumb reduced him to a hapless spectator. The first ankle injury required a 15 month recovery, and, in just his second game back for Holy Cross, Brooks snapped the other one.
Jeff was on the sidelines that afternoon, and remembers his boy slamming the turf in disgust. Growing up, Brooks displayed remarkably little emotion or pain when hurt. He relished confrontations with bigger kids and junior coaches inevitably found themselves begging their star playmaker to leave the defensive grunt work to the forwards. Faced with such unusual distress, Jeff knew something was very wrong.
"I walked over to meet him on the sideline and there was a tear in his eye," Jeff said. "It's one of the only times I've seen him cry. He's such a tough, tough kid. He just said, 'Dad, I've broken the other one.'."
Brooks confesses the following nine months were the darkest of his short life thus far.
"When I returned I kept thinking that I would break my leg in every tackle, and I still get that a little bit to this day," he said. "Back then it was really hard and I got a bit over footy, to be honest. I was not really enjoying it, and I didn't think I was playing that well when I came back (in 2012)."
Trick shots and tries don't cut the mustard for Brooks. A sound defensive and kicking game are the keys for him to be personally satisfied after 80 minutes. Fine judges felt he did all that and much, much more prior to making his NRL debut, generating headlines and quotes that dared to compare him to Johns.
Although he handled the hype to slay the Dragons with a first-up display of remarkable quality, Brooks is far from comfortable with the attention as he prepares to the steer the Tigers attack on a permanent basis in 2014.
"I was very uncomfortable because I hadn't even played an NRL game and all these people were talking about me," he says. "After my debut it changed again. You see people look and recognise you and even say hello. I never expected that and I'm still not used to it. To be honest, I think I should still be doing that sort of stuff to the boys of playing with."
Should he perform as predicted, Brooks will have little choice but to adjust. As a level headed and polite teen, there's no reason why he won't. Just as there was no reason for him to even contemplate testing the open market when the Tigers offered a three-year extension midway through last season.
"He was not driven by money, not at all," Jeff reveals. "He said at the time, 'Dad, I don't really care what they offer, I just want to play for the Tigers'. He's always dreamed of playing for them, and there's a bit of destiny about it because he loved Tigers so much as a very young child."
If only they knew.
http://www.news.com.au/sport/nrl/le...ewcastle-knights/story-fndv39ms-1226815719561
