Newcastle boot camp: How the Knights learned to fight
By Nick Walshaw
WARRANT Officer Scott Bredden isn't joking when he lists his teeth as a deadly weapon.
"Because should your finger get caught anywhere near my mouth in training, men," he bellows, almost by way of introduction, "you won't be getting it back."
And so Knights back-rower Steve Simpson is making no sudden moves as he hauls himself out of bed just after 1am.
Scrambling into his training gear while Bredden - all shaved head, chiselled frame and starched army fatigues - stands in the doorway pounding his Maglite around the insides of a metal garbage tin.
"Carn, men, get your arses up," he screams as bodies stumble from tiny dorms into the din. "I want all of you outside . . . now !"
And so they move.
Jogging even though the past 39 hours have been a chaotic whirl of rope burn, barbed wire, dark tunnels . . . "C'mon Simmo, move" . . . beep tests, tyre flips, water troughs . . . "Where's Jarrod Mullen? I wanna see Mullen" . . . tower climbs, burpees, sunburn and asphalt sprints.
Already Bredden has woken these Knights twice tonight. A third still to come as part of this sleep-deprivation routine usually reserved for Special Forces Commandos.
"And there was only one guy who looked ready to erupt," Bredden says later from his office on Singleton Army Base. "One of the Polynesian boys. For a split second I thought it was gonna get real ugly."
But it didn't. Why? Because something special happened over three days this week as the Knights sweated through a boot camp far removed from the measured approach for which coach Brian Smith is so famous.
This was a camp more about belief than biceps. Faith rather than fitness. About stretching minds and creating winners. Take Chris Houston, for example. The back-rower who fired so many rounds during a simulated weapons exercise, he melted the machinegun barrel.
It was Junior Sau conquering his fear of heights. Or Marvin Karawana pushing through the beep test until he spewed.
And then there was Mullen, the playmaker who told Bredden, "Wake me one more time and I'm gonna cry" as he dragged his backside to bed around midnight on day two.
Well, by sunrise Mullen had been woken twice more. Lifted logs, run hills and pushed a tractor tyre 3km.
Yet when his team was offered water near the finish, he shouted "Brush it, boys . . . let's win this". And they did.
But on a camp so secretive not even coach Brian Smith knew the program, it was appropriate an unknown Knight should epitomise it.
Young Cessnock prop Joel Edwards. A Toyota Cup kid who, despite repeated attempts, just couldn't get himself up a dangling rope on the commando course. So eventually Edwards returned to where the structure was tied off to the ground - then began climbing from there in an effort that would scar him for days.
And maybe it was embarrassment driving him upwards inch by inch. Or that every Knight had stopped to cheer. Maybe it was just the red hair . . . but Edwards made it.
And the ballsy bloodnut was still going well past midnight too. Pushing until Bredden finally shouted: "That's it men, done. You won't see me now until 0900." And he was right. Because it was another instructor who returned just before five.
Banging on doors, blowing a whistle and screaming for someone to point out "where that f . . . en Jarrod Mullen is sleeping".
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