Balmain legend and Kangaroo captain Keith Barnes was ideally placed to watch the glittering unfolding of Reg Gasnier’s rugby league career.
The best position was in 1959 playing fullback for Australia and watching 19-year-old, fresh-faced Gasnier on the first of his three Kangaroo tours.
Applauding Gasnier’s brilliance as a Test teammate was far preferable to playing fullback for Balmain against the most sophisticated and stylish attacking player rugby league has known.
“You just never knew what was coming next. He was just a magnificent footballer,” Barnes said.
“He had everything, a body swerve, speed and acceleration. He could stand you up or run around you.
“There was no better sight in rugby league than when he threw his head back and left them standing.”
The brilliant centre died on Sunday, a day before his 75th birthday, in a southern Sydney nursing home after a long illness.
His Test and St George team-mate Graeme Langlands said that when he arrived at Saints in 1963 Gasnier was already a star.
“My first memory is always of walking in and heading toward the sideline and seeing this bloke racing up the field, head back, ball under his arm,” Langlands said.
“I didn’t have to ask: `Who’s that?
“I remember once watching him in a game beat half a dozen players to score a try. He just kept going past them.”
Although he would make two more Kangaroo tours and captain-coach the final one in 1967-68 in compiling his 39 appearances for Australia, it was the 1959 side that established Gasnier as an international phenomenon.
It confirmed the enormous potential he showed in jumping from reserve grade to the Test team in the home series against New Zealand just months earlier.
The slush of England’s playing fields proved as accommodating to his skills and footwork as the rock hard Australian surfaces.
“He was a great player. Along with Eric Ashton (English captain) the best centre I’ve ever seen,” says David Bolton, the former Lions half-back who played against in three Test series before settling in Australia.
“He was very fast and very deceptive. You never knew what he would do next. He’d be running straight and then veer left or right.
“He was a big part of the Ashes staying in Australia.”
Barnes was behind Gasnier when he played his first Test on the 1959 tour, scoring three tries.
Among his triumphs was a third Test try he engineered with a feint, a step and the acceleration of a Ferrari to put away winger Brian Carlson.
“I have never had a centre set me up so beautifully for a try,” Carlson said.
Highly-rated Australian forward Arthur Clues, who settled in Leeds, said it the greatest Test try he had ever seen.
Australia won the 1959 series 2-1 and have not lost the Ashes since in England.
In club football, Gasnier won six premierships before a leg injury forced his retirement at just 28 during the club’s record run of 11 grand final wins between 1956-66.
He played 125 games in the famous red V, scoring 127 tries.
Bob Fulton, like Gasnier one of the original four Immortals, said Gasnier was an idol and he regretted that they never had a chance to play together.
Fitting genius into its appropriate time frame is not always a hazardous puzzle.
“Gasnier would be just as devastating nowadays in the modern game as he was when he played,” said Barnes emphatically.