"Break Even Bill"

When I first worked with Bill Mordey, more than half a century ago, I wasn’t a smoker, I was an almost complete novice with alcohol, and I abhorred compulsive gambling. I also liked to get a decent eight hours sleep a night. Given Bill, in those days, smoked 70 a day and stayed out all night drinking and gambling, it might have seemed odd that we became such close friends. It helped that we covered the same sports, summer and winter, tennis in the former and rugby league in the latter and boxing year round. And we were part of the same stable, Bill with the Sydney evening the Daily Mirror and me with the morning national daily The Australian. That meant we were in each other’s company a lot, constantly at our typewriters in and out of the office. Yet I was surely the Jekyll to his Hyde, and I’m convinced Bill sometimes tired of the company of other Hydes. One ‘colleague’ set his measly heart firmly upon becoming a Mordey clone, and hung to Bill’s coat-tails day and night. It didn’t work. He was no more than a pale imitation. Those who worked with Bill and knew him as a Real McCoy journalist knew this self-proclaimed ‘protégé’ was no more than an imposter, a licking lackey who lacked all of Bill’s news gathering skills. For one thing, such was the flunkey's urge to be noticed, he was one of those despised newsroom pains - an office shouter. Bill Mordey never shouted, even in a bar. Others shouted him, for the benefit of his company.

Bill Mordey with Peter Muszkat, right.

Bill was the archetypical Australian sports journalist-raconteur. Being in his company was a guaranteed hour or four of enormous entertainment – and often enlightenment too. One of my favourites was his story about how Bill and the Australian Associated Press’s Peter Muszkat were the only two Sydney rugby league writers to fly to New Zealand with the Australian team in 1969, when I was rugby league writer for The New Zealand Herald. Bill was representing the evening newspaper, Murdoch’s Daily Mirror, which was then in intense competition with the Fairfax’s  Sun, but the Sun hadn’t sent anyone on the tour. Peter, like me, wasn’t capable of going drink for drink with Bill, and after checking into the Station Hotel in Auckland, Peter went to his room and flaked out. Bill, meanwhile, was checking through his list of story ideas – he’d placed them in order of what he deemed to be their news worthiness. After typing and filing four stories, Bill took pity on a comatose Peter and decided to file his fifth yarn to AAP on Peter’s behalf. The next morning Bill rang his sports editor, Peter Miller, to check that his stories had got through and were satisfactory. “Yes,” said Miller, “but I like the story the Sun has on its back page.” “The Sun?” said Bill in astonishment, “but they haven’t got anyone here. What’s the story about?” When told it was the one he’d filed to AAP, Bill felt like strangling the still sleeping Muszkat. “I must be the only silly bastard who ever managed to scoop himself,” Bill moaned.

Of Bill’s three deadly sins, tobacco was the only one that later got me in its grip, and held me there for 44 years. It was after I’d sailed out of Sydney and landed up one miserably cold and wet Sunday night in a place called Thurles in County Tipperary, when two of us in a freezing hotel room thought the only other living person in town was a church bell-ringer, that the cigarettes took hold of me. If there had been a phone in the room I’d have possibly called Bill and announced my seemingly inevitable lapse, it being early Monday morning Sydney time and me knowing what Bill’s routine would be, at his desk on Holt Street thumping away at his Remington International, pale green, the colour of Bill’s Monday morning gills. His Sundays would have started with a visit to support the Bloodstains team in the Anderson Cup rugby league competition at Neutral Bay. Then there’d be the famous Mordey bar trek, across the Eastern Suburbs and beyond, where he’d pick up his stories for the next day’s Daily Mirror. He’d have a pocketful by 6am on Monday, along with a mighty hangover. The man lived on fags, bourbon and Coke, coffee and occasionally melted cheese on toast.

Bill play pub pool with his son Craig.

William George Mordey was born in the Sydney suburb of Campsie in 1936. In 1943 his father, London-born George de Swynhoe Mordey, died, aged 41. Bill, a lone child of the marriage, was raised by his mother, Constance Maude (née Dell), who went by the name 'Maudie' Mordey. She worked as a seamstress, doing piecemeal work at home to keep Bill clothed and fed. “She used to sit for hours sewing those bloody pyjama sets together,” Bill recalled. “You used to have to turn the collar and you’d put the collar and a steel thing and put a needle in it to get the points. And I’d have to sit there for hours doing these bloody collars while she was putting it all together.”

In his early teenage years Bill made it known he was keen to escape the needlework and become a newspaper reporter. He left St Patrick's School, Strathfield, in 1950 and the next year scored a cadetship on the Sydney Sun under its brusque turf editor Jack Charles, who considered Bill a “bodgie”. Being paid to go to racetracks to cover races was, said Bill, “like handing a grenade to a baby”. The pick of the sports writing jobs in Sydney in those days was to cover rugby league, and at the Sun Bill realised Ernie Christensen was there for the long haul. So he soon moved from Broadway to Holt Street, Surry Hills, to join the Daily Mirror and cover rugby league. His love of horse racing, however, never left him. He would pawn News Ltd typewriters to cover bets at the racetrack. “You could always get a quid for the typewriter,” he said. “You’d come back from the races and get off the train at Central and go straight down the road, put it [the typewriter] in and get a pound. And then you’d have to get it out again before the next race day.” Along the way Bill acquired a few nicknames, not all of them complimentary. The milder ones included “Bluegum”, after the tall, slim tree, “Tex”, “Maverick” and, in later life, “Break Even Bill”, first given to him by Daily Telegraph sportswriter Ray Chesterton. It always had to be assumed, not known, that when Bill said he'd "broken even" on a gamble, he'd finished up at least marginally in front. There are hundreds of anecdotes about Bill’s wild lifestyle, many of them created by Bill himself and, as might be expected, many of them don’t stack up. For instance, that his first bet was at age 13, backing Flight to win the Melbourne Cup. Flight never raced in a Melbourne Cup.

I last saw Bill on November 3, 1973, a year after I’d left Australia. It was at Wembley Stadium in London. Bill was covering a Kangaroos rugby league tour for the Murdoch organisation and I was still biding my time in Cork in Ireland. By the time I took up smoking I was in Dublin, living the life of Riley. I would call Bill occasionally, especially when I got nostalgic for Sydney – at least for its blue skies and sunny days. By the time I caught up with my old Bloodstains teammates on a flying visit to Sydney in 1979, Bill had moved on from daily newspaper work. Eventually, in 1984, he found perhaps his truest calling: he became a boxing promoter. He set up Bill Mordey’s Classic Promotions on Buckingham Street, Surry Hills, not far from the News Ltd building. Bill was to become the reincarnation of the legendary Hugh D. (“Huge Deal”) McIntosh, the Australian most famous for staging the Jack Johnson-Tommy Burns world heavyweight championship fight at Rushcutter’s Bay in Sydney on Boxing Day 1908. The title bout, in which Johnson became the first African-American world champion, was covered by Jack London.

Unlike his uncle Jimmy Dundee, a welterweight who fought 171 pro bouts between 1933-46, Bill was a writer, not a fighter. His own boxing career had comprised one amateur bout. His mother had given him a spare thrupence to go to the Burwood Police Boys Club to learn to fight, and his only bout was declared a draw when both boys were too tired to hit each other in round three. But Bill came to know the game, inside out. He was an inveterate gambler and he understood the odds like few others. So much so that Bill, like no other sports writer I’ve ever known, ended up a millionaire. There were many, many times between his start as a budding Aussie Don King and his retirement in clover that Bill was on the bones of his backside. But he ended up way out in front, even if only financially.

Bill first gambled and won handsomely by bankrolling Jeff Fenech, who won world titles in three weight divisions and fought a running battle with Ghanaian Azumah Nelson. Bill then really tested the patience of the fight gods by trying to resurrect the career of Hungarian-born British heavyweight Joe Bugner, marketing him as an honest “Aussie Joe”. Though he’d lasted, in total, what Sports Illustrated called 39 “respectable” rounds with Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Bugner had already been dismissed as the “Harmless Hercules”, the “Anxious Adonis” and the “Great White Dope”, and was described by British sports writer Hugh McIlvanney as being “built like a Greek statue but with fewer moves”. Bill took charge of couple of other Australian world champions, emerging as a puppet master in a rare golden era for boxing in this country. Bill’s most profitable investment was in Kostya Tszyu, a world amateur champion lured to Sydney from a town in the Ural Mountains, a Siberian of Koran, Mongol and Russian descent. Bill signed Tszyu for $100,000, a microwave and a goldfish, and turned him into a millionaire, with a dream for Tszyu to fight in Red Square. When the two split, Bill took Tszyu to court and won a $7 million settlement for breach of contract. Still, Bill and Tszyu, who held multiple light-welterweight world championships, remained on good terms. Bill staged 24 world title fights and was inducted into the Australian National Boxing Hall of Fame in 2007.

Bill’s heavy smoking, the drinking and the late nights took their inevitable toll. Bill gave up the stress of boxing promotion, moved to Singleton and then established a specialist high quality agistment farm and horse stud called Lurline Lodge on Dalswinton Road in Denman, appropriately just off the Golden Highway in the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales, 150 miles north of Sydney. After a battle with cancer over several months, he suffered an adverse reaction to chemotherapy treatment and died at Newcastle's Mater Hospital at 9.45pm on Friday, April 23, 2004. He was just 67.