‘I tried to take my own life’: Inside the rise and demise of the Bulldogs
By Michael ChammasMARCH 4, 2022
Des Hasler’s arrival at Belmore a decade ago set the club on a path to two grand finals. The pursuit of success led to a spectacular fall for the once proud club, which is only now starting to get back on its feet. In the first of a two-part Herald investigation, the key figures at the club finally reveal the explosive truth about the rise and demise - and rise again - of the Bulldogs.
Ben Barba stepped off the team bus at Belmore as the poster boy of rugby league. It was a Friday night in February, 2013, and the Bulldogs had just returned from a trial match against the Raiders in Goulburn ahead of the new NRL season.
By the time he had finished partying with the Epic Bender Crew two days later, he was the NRL’s most wanted for all the wrong reasons.
Todd Greenberg’s phone rang in the early hours of Sunday morning. The mother of Barba’s children, Ainslie Currie, was in a panic after a heated disagreement with her recently estranged partner inside their Caringbah apartment.
What Barba and Currie did not tell the Bulldogs, which was also missing from the NRL investigation, was that he had already tried.
“I haven’t told too many people this, but that day I tried to take my own life,” Barba revealed.
“That’s when Ainslie ran in and tried to stop me from strangling myself. I owe my life to her for reacting like that.”
Publicly, it was the first time Barba had stepped so far out of line.
But behind closed doors, in the summer of 2012 following his Dally M triumph on his way to leading Canterbury to a grand final, he spiralled out of control.
There were mornings Barba would wake up and not recognise the people in the home he had passed out in.
“My partner would ring me and ask, ‘Where are you?’” Barba tells the Herald during the lunch break of his job as a scaffolder. “I wouldn’t even know.”
“The temptations outside of footy were out of this world. I wasn’t ready to deal with that. The women, the parties, the drugs, the alcohol; everyone wanted to be around Benny Barba.
“From being almost not wanted in 2011, then being the star of the show in 2012 … the fame got to me. I was just on such a high that the repercussions of what I was doing never even crossed my mind.”
In his first year in charge at the Bulldogs, Hasler transformed a player who, six months earlier, looked like he’d fail to overcome the “too small, can’t catch” tag he’d been stuck with.
Those who grew up in rugby league circles in Mackay in the ’90s witnessed Barba’s fear of authority from a young age.
“She said ‘Ben’s in trouble, he’s been out on an all-night bender and I’mJust like it did with his father Ken, whose whistling would reverberate around the local grounds on a Saturday morning grabbing the attention of young Ben, the authoritarian style of Hasler resonated with the fullback. worried he’s going to do something to himself’,” Greenberg recalled of the conversation with Currie.
“Benny was almost petrified of Des to the point where he was scared to let him down,” Greenberg said. “Ben had never trained that hard before in his life.”
And Hasler’s game plan, a revolutionary style played through a mobile, ball-playing forward pack, became the catalyst for one of the greatest individual seasons in rugby league history.
“That bloke, mate, I swear he was a genius,” Barba said. “He changed the game.”
“People were that worried about Benny, the people around him also had the best year of their careers,” Josh Reynolds added.
But just as quickly as the fullback united the team and the community, he ripped them apart.
There were signs - especially when it involved alcohol. There was the fight with teammate Jamal Idris in 2009.
In the pre-season of 2012, during a bonding trip to Kiama, Barba got into an argument with Josh Morris after players chipped him for prioritising the pokies over his teammates.
Prop James Graham, then in his second week at the club, then wrapped his arms around the pint-sized fullback, warning him of the consequences if he kept on provoking his teammates.
However, those incidents would soon pale into insignificance.
When Currie arrived at Belmore to meet Greenberg and Hasler the morning Barba tried to take his life, it became clear that there was more than a missing fullback to worry about.
According to sources with knowledge of the Tony Bannon report - the NRL-requested investigation which cleared Greenberg of negligence in his handling of the matter - the chief executive noticed a mark on Currie’s mouth after she walked into the room.
“I said, ’What’s happened here?” Greenberg recalled. “She said, ‘Nothing’s happened, don’t worry about me, I’m all good’.”
The report, which did not include an interview with Currie, claims that Greenberg thought it was domestic violence and that he encouraged her to go to the police to the point where she felt bullied and harassed.
After the Bulldogs doctor treated her for an injury that was allegedly inflicted while trying to stop Barba from taking his own life, the club organised for Currie to be driven to Bankstown Police Station to provide a statement.
However, at the 11th hour, after a third party informed her of the ramifications her intended actions may have on Barba’s contract and in turn the income for her family, Currie declined to participate.
“I was always accused of a cover-up,” Greenberg said. “But I stand by trying to provide support for Ainslie through the entire period. You have to remember the whole reason she rang me wasn’t because she felt in danger, it was because she was scared Ben was going to harm himself.”
Currie returned home to find Barba unconscious on the lounge. A few hours later she managed to convince him to head to Belmore to meet with the club.
Barba was shaking, unable to keep himself upright.
Hasler was no stranger to off-field incidents involving star players. He supported Brett Stewart when the Manly fullback was hit with sexual assault charges, of which he was later cleared, in 2010.
He believed that through the discipline and structure of the football department, he could help Barba and his family through the ordeal without sending him off to rehab.
“Someone had to take responsibility,” Hasler said of Barba, who had been chosen to launch the NRL season in a week’s time.
“It didn’t matter who it was, we had a responsibility to try and save a life. Not just Ben’s - it implicated his partner and their children. It’s easy in hindsight to say all this, but at the time I felt we as a club could help him as a human being. Someone had to intervene and help.”
“Someone had to initiate that and I thought we as a club could do that through what we had in the football department. Part of our role was to help rehabilitate him to help him make better decisions around what is right and wrong.”
Club bosses, however, ignored Hasler’s request and booked Barba into the South Pacific Private rehabilitation facility in Curl Curl the next day and called an urgent meeting with his teammates.
“Alcohol was all I knew in how to deal with problems,” Barba said.
“There was so much pressure. My relationship was breaking down. We’d split up for the first time. I was masking it and didn’t want to show any emotion.”
When he returned a month later, his teammates were furious. Perhaps more to the point, the wives and girlfriends of the players were furious.
They didn’t want their partners around him, nor did they want their partners playing at a club that wouldn’t sack him.
“What if this was Shane Pumipi?,” one player said in the team meeting with club bosses in reference to one of the club’s fringe first graders. “He’d be gone.”
The ones closest to him, like Frank Pritchard and Sam Kasiano, turned on Barba the most.
“I let them down and things weren’t the same any more,” Barba said.
“It didn’t feel like I was connected. Things were just different and it kept getting worse.”
Reynolds, who would often share a car with Barba to training, struggled to work out what was right and wrong.
“I find it hard to turn my back on people because I know what it feels like to go through shit alone,” Reynolds said.
“It was hard for me because I was so close to him before it all happened. I played 20’s with him. We hung out at the Bulldogs house together. But you could see that it was ripping the team apart.”
Currie turned up to matches oblivious to the elephant that only left the room upon Barba’s release to the Broncos the following year. For Canterbury it marked the dawn of a new era. For Barba, the demons remained.
“Sometimes I just sit back now and wish I never played rugby league.”
before Ben Barba started to implode, things had been looking bright for Canterbury. In 2011, CEO Todd Greenberg had pulled off a stunning coup, luring Manly’s premiership-winning coach Des Hasler to Belmore.
In accordance with the schedule he had been asked to adhere to, Greenberg arrived at the northern beaches home of prominent player agent George Mimis 30 minutes after Hasler entered the premises.
“He came early, I came late,” Greenberg recalled of the secret negotiations to lure Hasler to the Bulldogs in 2011. “Same thing happened at the end of the meeting. I left early, he left late.”
Hasler was paranoid. He believed his Sea Eagles were on the cusp of another premiership.
“Anything that stops us winning it, I’ll walk away and there’ll be no chance of it happening,” Hasler told Greenberg a month out from the finals. “You have a club that leaks like a sieve,” Mimis added.
The Bulldogs had just ended a 22-year reign of coaches with family ties to legendary administrator Peter ‘Bullfrog’ Moore, parting ways with his son, Kevin.
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