John Sattler probably got sick of talking about it a long, long time ago.
You'd never know it though. He always found the time for every punter who wanted to know about the day he played a grand final with a broken jaw.
His career was so much bigger than that one afternoon or that one act of courage. Sattler was a leader of great renown for club, district, state and country.
His list of achievements is lengthy and prestigious, with Test and interstate appearances to go with his four premierships at South Sydney.
However, it always came back to the jaw: how he broke it and what he did next.
It was grand final day, 1970. Souths were playing Manly and things were getting heated, as they tended to in the old "softening-up period" of the time, where the ref put the whistle away and let the players hook into each other with hurricane fury.
The match was three minutes old when John Bucknall cracked Sattler with a right hand.
It was the remaining 77 minutes of the game that will ensure Sattler's name will live as long as rugby league is played.
Sattler later said he wouldn't wish a broken jaw on his worst enemy. He wouldn't even wish it on Bucknall himself, who he later came to forgive.
The Rabbitohs man refused to submit to the pain. He told his teammates to hold him up, so Manly wouldn't see him as a weakness.
When those same teammates tried to protect him from himself by cutting him out of the play, he ordered them to stop.
He jammed his broken lower jaw into his mouthguard to hold it up.
Sattler said afterward that there was no pain. When he tackled or made a tackle, the guard would drop out again so he'd push it back in.
The rest of the Rabbitohs took their revenge, first on Bucknall as they targeted him with such ferocity that he left the field before half-time, then on Manly when they won 23-12 to capture the club's 19th premiership.
His teammates chaired Sattler off the field, his jaw hanging in the breeze. He was bloody and bruised but not beaten. You might win the game, but you'd never beat John Sattler.
Sattler gave a winning speech, accepted the J.J Giltinan Shield and only then did the pain come flooding back. It cost him a spot on the Kangaroo Tour but won him a place in league history forever.
He never dined out on his famous day. He always downplayed it and always said he was just doing his job, but that sells him short.
He was a player of commitment, focus and sheer will and the game in his day was one of intimidation and fear, punishment and pain, but he refused to submit to those two forces.
Going off the field in a grand final was something he did not believe a captain should do, so he would not do it.
Other players have had their own moments of glory born from incredible toughness on the game's biggest stage: Shaun Kenny-Dowall played with a fractured jaw when the Roosters won in 2013 and Shane Webcke had a broken arm when the Broncos triumphed in 2000.
Most-famously, Sam Burgess busted his cheekbone with the first run of the grand final in 2014 but played on to lead the Rabbitohs to their first premiership in 43 years.
Each of these men found incredible reserves of toughness, and each of them was compared to Sattler. He's the benchmark from which all courage is measured.
South Sydney will play Manly again this weekend, the first match for the club since Sattler's passing on Monday.
It's a different world to the game Sattler knew and dominated all those years ago.
It's still tough, just in a different way and there will be plenty of hard, brave men who wear the colours when the two teams collide.
None of them are like John Sattler though. That's not a shot, it's just a fact.
There's nobody like him now. Players don't have to worry about getting punched in back-play, there's no more softening-up period. It's a whole new world.
It's not right to say they don't make them like him any more because they only made one like him in the first place.
Therein lies why he meant so much, to South Sydney and to everybody else.
Sattler's moment of immortality came half a century ago, but what he did at the SCG that afternoon is still the go-to example of the inhuman toughness of the hardest men who play this hardest of games.
So much of his era has been forgotten through the years, obscured by the times and memories that came later and are so much fresher and more vivid.
But not of Sattler, and not ever. Most younger fans might not be able to name another player from the 1970s but they all know about Sattler and they all know about the jaw.
If we only live as long as the last person who knows our name, you can be certain John Sattler will live forever.
