I’ll never forget the first time the Bears caused me pain. It was a wet, Autumnal day in May 1994. I was eight, Norths were first. Newcastle, and Andrew Johns, then 19, beat us at home. I trudged in the rain with my Mum, Dad, and four uncles, back to the pub – Percy’s – across Miller Street. The loss was evidently too much for me, and I began to cry.
Norths were formidable in the 1990s, regularly bettering storied opponents like Canberra, Manly and Brisbane, upon whom the folklore of ‘90s rugby league has been built. But they never won that premiership, they strategically blundered with Super League, and they fizzled into insolvency, enduring the humiliation of what former president David Hill described as “the sacrilegious merger with Manly before the expulsion of the Bears by the Forces of Darkness”.
