Broncos CEO has brain tumor

The Courier Mail

Francis Whiting

August 24,2015

Broncos CEO Paul White, with wife Angela, and daughters Emily(right), Madeleine (rear), Molly (front) and Annabel (left). Photography David Kelly

BREATHE. Breathe in and out of all of your stories, the people gathered at your mother’s table, the kids kicking footies across dusty ovals, the inner-city alleyways and country lanes, your wife and your daughters, five Christmas baubles strung across the darkness.

Breathe in everything that has led you here, to this table, with the mask moulded like a hand across your face, as the radium begins its work, treating the tumour that shadows your brain.

In and out of all those stories, and all those players in your life, everyone on your team now.

PAUL WHITE, 49, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER of the Brisbane Broncos, would like the club’s fans to know he fights the good fight; to know that the seizure that shook him just before the third match of this year’s State of Origin – the one that saw Queensland pummel NSW into 52 points to 6 submission – occurred as he was having a “particularly vigorous discussion” with National Rugby League executives over the Broncos potentially playing Thursday night football.

Fans like their footy on Friday nights, and White, somewhere up on the 11th floor of a glass tower in Brisbane’s CBD on June 30, was on the phone to NRL headquarters, and also on, he says, “the front foot”.

“A few of us had gone to a solicitor’s office in the city to do some club business, but I was in another room, taking a series of calls about [the Broncos] playing a couple of Thursday nights,” White recalls at his home in Brisbane’s inner west.

“It was what you might call an animated chat,” he says, grinning, “and I’m up for it, you know, I’m enjoying it, to be honest, because you’re not there for tea and scones; I’m going into battle for the club, and then … ” White struggles to find the right words to describe the seizure, the way his whole body tightened, the way he thought he was most probably having a massive heart attack, the way the phone tumbled from his hand.

“Then I lost myself,” he finishes, simply.

Broncos chairman Dennis Watt found him in a “bit of bad way”. Tests later that day would show White had a low-grade, primary tumour on his brain, one that would require radium, chemotherapy, and another kind of battle altogether – one that he is also certainly up for. As Watt notes: “Paul possesses a particularly strong determination [“stubborn bastard”, White’s wife, Angela, later translates] – when the ambulance arrived, he refused to get into a wheelchair or stretcher. He said, ‘No way mate, I’m walking out of here’, and so he did, down the elevator and across Eagle Street to the ambulance, hanging on to my arm for support.”

Watt was happy to give it. Because from the Broncos chairman to captain Justin Hodges, who drives White to some of his radium treatments, to hooker Andrew McCullough who goes “walking with Whitey” one morning a week, to the players, friends and colleagues who send texts and leave dinners on the doorstep of the family home, there’s a snaking queue of people wanting to bring something to the table for the man who welcomes everyone to his own.

Ask McCullough, and Broncos halfback Ben Hunt, who met White in June 2011, not long after his arrival at the club, not long after both were charged with public nuisance after a somewhat exuberant night in Brisbane’s CBD.

Both then 21, and shaking in their footy boots, they expected to be bawled out by their new boss; instead, he asked them to dinner.

“They turn up at my house,” White recalls. “They both look a million bucks, smell great too, and I said, ‘You probably won’t need to look so flash where we’re going’.” White took them to a homeless shelter in the inner city to help out at dinner time.

“I said to them, this is not just turning sausages and handing out hot Milo, although there’s a bit of that. I would like you to find out who these people are, and why they are here.

Because everyone’s got a story, and everyone’s got a value, and there’s so much to be learnt just by listening to people.”

One night a week for six weeks, the two young men worked at the shelter, sometimes accompanied by their CEO.

Then he invited them to the home he shares with Angela and daughters Emily, Madeleine, Molly and Annabel. This time, McCullough and Hunt were served the meal, but not before grace had been said, everyone holding hands across the table, the young players finding themselves holding their CEO’s. “They probably weren’t expecting that,” White says, smiling.

Hodges, too, has held hands with his CEO over the odd roast dinner at the White house, in what has become a sought-after invitation. “You just go over there, you meet with Ang – who’s not too shabby a cook, by the way – [and] it’s just really nice to be there with his family,” Hodges says.

“It doesn’t matter who happens to be there on that night, and it can be a real mixture, but everyone who sits around that table is equal. That’s the gift of Paul White, I think.”

IT STARTED AT HIS OWN TABLE, BORN, WHITE says, of his mother and father’s belief that the greatest respect you can afford another human being is to invite them into your home. And so it was at Denis and Marie White’s place in the western Queensland town of Charleville

during the ’60s, then in Toowoomba, Rockhampton, Brisbane, and back to Charleville and Rocky, as the family travelled wherever Denis White’s peripatetic career in the Commonwealth Bank took them.

Amid the irregular rhythm of their childhood, the kids – Gerard, Paul, Meagan, Bernadette and Helen – knew there were three constants: they were wholly loved, they were expected to pull their weight – sweeping

the floor, doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, washing the car – and their friends were always welcome. Particularly, White says, friends (and sometimes strangers) who were hungry for a feed, with Marie White’s brownies a particular hot-ticket item.

Packing up, settling down, moving on – the beat that began beneath White’s feet as a young boy would continue to propel him as a young man. Finishing high school at Rockhampton’s Emmaus College in 1983, he travelled to Brisbane, and the Queensland Police Academy in the outer south-western suburb of Oxley. His beat took him from a cadet in 1984 to senior sergeant in 2003, stopping at stations in Fortitude Valley, Woodridge, Emerald, Rockhampton, Moranbah, Middlemount and Mount Isa along the way.

Policing, in particular country policing, he says, is where he learnt the skills he now uses so effectively at the Broncos (during White’s five-year tenure, the club has experienced record revenues, membership and sponsorships, and a record low for off-field player shenanigans, something White describes as “the pleasure of going to bed on a Saturday night without worrying about what anyone’s up to”).

Policing was a vocation, he says, that taught him how to talk to anybody, how to listen, and how to remain calm in the eye of a storm. It taught him compassion, how to knock on a parents’ door when you’re the only copper in town and two of the 13-year-old boys you also happen

to coach in footy are dead, killed in a car accident on their way to training, three others from the team severely injured.

That was in Middlemount, in 2000, the accident ripping the heart out of the Bowen Basin bush town, affecting everyone.

“I struggled with what happened,” White says quietly. “Still do sometimes, to be honest. I struggled for the boys who died, for the ones who lived through it, for the woman who was behind the wheel driving them to footy and, of course, for the boys’ families. I was these kids’ coach, but I was also their copper and so I had to do all the official duties that come with that as well – the reports, the post-mortems. That was where I probably most saw the value of listening, of not trying to fill silences with platitudes or fixes, just sitting quietly with people, having a cup of tea.”

Policing taught him how to turn a town, or a football club, into a community, learning how to get amongst it, shake things up a little, join in, go out on a limb … walking into the Middlemount Hotel on a Friday night and doing the rounds, systematically taking car keys off the young blokes who might be tempted to turn them in the ignition later – “I’ll have those, Davo”; “Hand ’em over, Marty”.

“I’d walk up to the pub, say ‘give me your keys and come get them off me in the morning’, because the only night that’s going to go to shit is Friday night.

“The only night that your phone beside your bed is going to ring at 3am is Friday night, and if it does ring, it’s never good news. So I always thought it was better to take the preventative route; just walk through the pub, see who’s there, who’s making a goose out of themselves, and take their keys.”

Or take them home to their parents. “Sometimes if a young kid was out getting pissed and causing trouble, I’d take him home to his parents and say, ‘Have him at my house for some gym training in his sandshoes at 8am’.” White grins. “They hated it.”

It usually did the trick, though, and while White concedes that some of his methods then, and now, have a distinctly maverick streak to them, he believed then, and does now, that there are much better ways of earning respect than “throwing the book at people” or ruling by fear.

Like taking your players to a homeless shelter, taking keys off a young bloke rather than waiting in your car down the street to book him … like footy.

RUGBY LEAGUE IS – ANGELA WHITE, NÉE BUSBY aside – the great love of Paul White’s life. He began as a centre in the mighty Charleville Midgets, played in every town his family moved to, and at representative level.

He was signed to Brisbane Souths in 1985, made the Queensland Country team in 1988, and played for Hunslet in Leeds in the English League’s Second Division in 1990/91.

He played for and coached premiership-winning teams while policing in Emerald, Rockhampton and Moranbah, and one of the reasons he applied to become a cadet at the Queensland Police Academy in 1984 was because another bloke calledWayne Bennett was already there.

It was Bennett, the present Broncos coach who is credited with the team’s return to form, who signed White to Souths, and it is the usually reticent Bennett who veers perilously close to effusiveness when talking about the man who became his club’s CEO. “There was no-one happier than I was when Paul got the job at the Broncos,” he says. “Because I knew he would get the job done. I’ve known him since the [police] academy.

“Back then he was this kid with this real openness about him, this beautiful smile on his face who tried so hard at everything he did, and still does. He was a pretty handy player too; he had the footwork and the speed, and he never, ever backed down. Off the field he is a very honest, very kind person, someone who, if he can help someone, he will, simple as that. I went back to Moranbah with him a couple of years ago, and he was practically mobbed in the street. That’s because he’s a decent person.”

And a tough one. White came to the Broncos following a stint in the mining industry. After he left the police to join Xstrata in Mount Isa in 2003, he then spent seven more years as regional manager of the Anglo-American mining group, based in Brisbane. Mining executives in the Isa had noticed the local copper who did things a bit differently, the way he created a sense of community. But not everyone at the Broncos was convinced that this ex-copper, ex-mining suit, had what it took to do the

job, right up until the moment, Bennett says, that White walked through the club’s doors. “I think people were surprised, because he had to lead from the front foot from the get-go, and make some really difficult decisions.”

He is almost certainly talking about the sacking of Ivan Henjak – the first Broncos coach to be booted in the club’s history – soon after White’s arrival. Two years later, White had to deliver the same blow to his close friend and coach, Anthony Griffin, to make way for Bennett’s

prodigal return to the club he coached through its glory years, from 1988 to 2008.

For his part, White simply says: “If you chase the job of a CEO, if you’re going to put your hand up for it, then you’d better embrace all the responsibilities that come with it. If all you’re chasing is popularity, drive an ice-cream truck.”

But back to the other love of his life, back to 1981, and 15-year-old Angela Busby, crying in the back seat of a car she’s not meant to be in, on the way to a party she’s not meant to go to.

Her mother has reluctantly let her accompany her older sister to a friend’s house, on the condition that under no circumstances Angela leaves that house, or gets in a car. Now the Rockhampton schoolgirl is doing both, her sister having left the house to go to a party, leaving the younger one no choice but to go with her.

“I cried all the way there, all the way into the party, until I met Paul there, and then I stopped crying,” Angela recalls. Too young to date, the couple eventually got together at Schoolies, ’80s Rockhampton-style.

Think the coastal town of Emu Park, Passion Pop and a “pretty decent pash” under the stars, White says, much to his now-wife’s embarrassment (“Oh, Paul!” she exclaims).

They married on November 28, 1989. Ang has since been his rock, pulling up stumps wherever White’s job took them, and making a home in each town for their growing family – Emily, now 24, Madeleine, 22, Molly, 19, and Annabel, 17.

Surrounded by men at the Broncos training facilities, White is “outnumbered” by women at home, his daughters screaming with laughter as they recall some of their father’s oft-repeated mantras: “Life is not a rehearsal”; “your body is like a car, you need to put the right fuel in”; “no matter what hand you’re dealt, make the best play with it”; and “if you respect yourself, others will respect you”.

Then they bring out the “oh my gods”, recalling their father’s daggy dad moments. “Oh my god,” Molly says. “What about when he dances?”

“What about when he sings [’70s pop song Bad, Bad] Leroy Brown?”

What about when he told them he had a brain tumour, and that he was, is, and intends to stay positive – and that he would like his girls to remember another of his mantras: No matter what life throws at you, no matter how tough it gets, there is always, always, someone doing it tougher.

“So he said, ‘no sad faces’,” Madeleine recalls. “ ‘I want you all to be strong with me. Don’t bring me down, help me to get up’ – so we are.”

White thinks about his girls when the medicos put the radium mask on his face, the one he finds so claustrophobic, using his breath to settle his nerves. He thinks about Ang, and his daughters – like Christmas baubles, he reckons – and all the roads he’s travelled and the people he’s met along the way. He thinks about them during this round of treatment (six weeks of radium and oral chemotherapy, due to end in a week or so), and he’ll think about them through the next round, too – a short break, then six months of a much stronger dose of chemotherapy.

He’ll also think, because he is continuing to work part-time at the club, about the business of the Broncos, how to keep members and shareholders happy, keep building its growing sense of community.

And, as Ang discovered recently, he’ll be thinking about his 50th birthday party in January next year, the one she only discovered he was planning when two blokes turned up to talk about building the dancefloor over the pool. “Typical,” she says, smiling.

There will be dancing at the party, there will very possibly be a rendition of Leroy Brown from the birthday boy, and there will be lots of food and lots of wine, everyone gathered at the table.