Interesting read.
Every good redemption story has a rock bottom. For Ivan Cleary, it came staring out the glass of the coaches box at Panthers Stadium last May: "F---, I'm responsible for this?" he asked himself watching his team play.
For Panthers chairman Dave O'Neill, it came in the form of chief executive Brian Fletcher using private security guards to protect them from their own fans as they left their own stadium to walk to the nearby car park.
"I didn't kill anybody," O'Neill remembers thinking at the time. "I'm not a mass murderer. You walk around town and hear little old ladies say, 'He's the guy destroying our club'."
Even the local police were concerned.
"I got a call saying, 'We're following a lot of the social media and there have been quite a few death threats pointed at you directly'," O'Neill recalls.
There were times Nathan Cleary wished he never signed that million dollar deal. "I wanted to sign a new contract on half the money just so the pressure wasn't there," he says.
His mother, Bec, watched from afar as the drama ripped away at the happiness of her family. "There were days I just thought, 'Oh my gosh, is this worth it? Should Ivan have just stayed at the Tigers?'"
It wasn't that long ago the Clearys were the feel-good story of rugby league. However, the unblemished reputation of the honourable coach took a battering upon his acrimonious exit from Wests Tigers, and with it went some of the shine of his superstar prodigy.
"My son became the villain because of me," an emotional Ivan admits.
"He shouldn't have been feeling that way because the drama and the scrutiny that was surrounding us, that was because of me. Because of the way the Tigers thing went, I got cast as the villain, which is fair enough, but people threw Nathan in with me.
"Whenever a coach does that you need support big time and he was enormous support the first couple of years. He's taught me the most, daylight second, in terms of rugby league and my coaching. Most of it, the framework, comes from Gus in terms of footy. But there comes a point in time where you have to let the rest takeover, and that's what happened."
A broken shed
The night Ivan refers to as rock bottom, the same night Penrith bosses were ushered out of Penrith Stadium by security, was a 30-10 Friday night loss to the Warriors that saw them slump to their sixth defeat on the trot and drop to the bottom of the ladder.
"I remember walking into the sheds that night and Ivan came up to me and said, 'I apologise for that performance'," O'Neill recalls.
"I told him, 'You don't need to apologise for anything, we'll be right'. When I said that, I had no idea how we would be right, I just had to show I wasn't down. But I looked around the shed and mate, the shed was broken. The players were just broken."
None more than Nathan. "I felt like I had anxiety going into games," he says. "It didn't even feel fun because I was just so worried about the outcome and what people would say."
The pain and pressure of the scrutiny the once adored Cleary family found themselves in as a result of Penrith's failures pushed Ivan to the brink of throwing in the towel.
"Yeah, he did," Bec says of her husband's thoughts about quitting.
"I definitely had to have some encouraging words at times, telling him, 'You've got this, it's going to be OK'. He wouldn't have been human if he didn't feel like that at some stage. He'd lost his confidence.
"Going from one club to another, and he was meant to be bringing this team into the top four, but it just wasn't happening. Penrith made a big call bringing Ivan back and they were amazing with the support and that helped Ivan knowing they would stick by him. Now they're reaping the rewards."
The reward so far is the club's third minor premiership on the back of a record 15-game winning streak. But the ultimate prize awaits.
"I've been chasing it for 30 years," Ivan says of his quest for premiership glory as a player and coach.
"It almost feels like it's a dream. I'm still chasing it. It's not hard to think about what you want when you wake up each day, I tell you that much."
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Michael Chammas
Michael Chammas is a sports reporter with The Sydney Morning Herald
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