Maverick Shea the hardest of them all
PETER JACKSON
THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW
NEWPORT heralded the season with a birthday bash on a lavish scale, filling a dining room the size of a rugby pitch in celebration of 150 years and a global galaxy of some 300 internationals.
The Black-and-Amber roll of honour is like no other in the club game, a list featuring rugby’s first Victorian superstar (Arthur ‘Monkey’ Gould), an Olympic silver medal sprinter (Ken Jones) and the boy wonder who gave England a fearful run-around on debut (Keith Jarrett). Gould, whose nickname sprang from his penchant for swinging from the branches of trees, did so much to popularise the game that the Welsh Rugby Union presented him with the title deeds of a house paid for by donations from adoring fans.
The RFU took such a decidedly dim view of the property deal that they cancelled the annual fixture rather than expose England’s finest Corinthians to a team tainted by a dastardly professional. More than half a century later, at the 1948 Olympiad, Jones avoided a similar fate because he ran for the love of it and nothing more.
An overnight sensation between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning in late winter 1967, Jarrett was barely 21 when he took the yellow brick road to Rugby League. His name, along with those of Monkey and Jones The Speed, were spoken of in revered tones among some 700 guests on a night awash with Newport nostalgia.
That all three were local lads made it better still. A fourth born and bred in ‘The Port’, could have been added to the list but the vast majority of the multitude would never have heard of Jerry Shea, born and bred in the docklands of Pill.
He ought to be remembered because what he did can never be done again and what he did went far beyond being the first player to go ‘through the card,’ scoring a try, conversion, penalty and drop goal in a Test match, against England in January 1920, the first after The Great War. Wales won 19-5.
Unlike Gould from an earlier generation, Shea, right, was a bona fide professional, a boxer who earned a living from one sport while playing another as a true-blue amateur. As a middleweight, his career spanned eight years and almost 70 fights. The most famous one took place slap bang in the middle of the Five Nations.
His place secured after cleaning up against England in Swansea, Shea reappeared against Scotland at Inverleith in what might have been the most one-sided non-international match of all time. The SRU, those perennial paragons of amateur virtue, smelt a rat once Shea had picked England off. They declared him a professional and threatened to withdraw the Scotland team, an action which sounded like the first big noise of the Roaring Twenties well before the advent of all those flappers in London doing the Charleston.
The laws relating to professionalism, archaic even way back then, meant that anyone being paid to play another sport would still be deemed an amateur in Rugby Union unless, of course, that sport was Rugby League.
The SRU relented at the eleventh hour, Scotland turned up, so, too, Shea. Wales lost but that’s only half the story. Back in Newport, Shea went straight into training for his biggest fight, in Mountain Ash against Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis who seemed to be in a hurry to get back to London.
The former world welterweight champion knocked the Wales centre out in the first round. Shea also failed to beat another count, a fortnight later for the Five Nations title decider against Ireland in Cardiff.
Wales won it without their middleweight contender. Whether they did so for medical reasons over the lingering effects of ‘The Kid’ having put Shea on his backside or for purely playing reasons, nobody knows.
An intriguing clue pointing towards the latter comes from Howard Evans, the noted rugby historian. His uncle, ‘Wick’ Powell of Cardiff, played in the 1920 match against England when he had the distinction of being the only other Welsh scorer besides Shea with a try made by the Newport centre.
“Jerry Shea was a maverick, a kind of Gavin Henson of the time,” says Howard. “What my uncle said about those times left me with the impression that the Welsh selectors didn’t like Shea that much. Jerry was his own man.”
Shea must have come rapidly to the conclusion that he had enough fighting to do in the ring without finding more on the rugby field in respect of regaining his lost position. A man clearly aware of his value, he negotiated a move to Rugby League strictly on his own terms.
Wigan offered Shea £700 (approximately £30,000 by today’s values) and wanted his services badly enough to agree to the player’s proposal that he would sign on one condition; that he would travel north only for matches. Their approval allowed Shea to stay at home and keep his job, thought to have been in Newport docks.
He spent two seasons at Wigan, long enough to help them win the 1922 League championship play-off final against Oldham. His arrival among a large Welsh contingent coincided with that of an out-ofwork apprentice boilermaker from Cardiff, Jim Sullivan.When he had done proving himself arguably the mightiest of all converts from Union, Sullivan considered all the tough men he had played with and against and concluded that Shea was the hardest of them all.
Banned from Rugby Union for life, like every other League player, he kept on boxing into his early 30’s, his 52 wins including one over the British and Empire champion Frank Moody from Pontypridd.
Jerry Shea died suddenly in his native Newport on June 30, 1947 at the age of 54.
