The rise, fall and remaking of the greatest rookie in NRL history

Source : ABC NEWS

It’s not that Tim Smith doesn’t think about it. Anyone would think about it, from time to time. It just doesn’t get to him anymore.

The 2005 Dally M Rookie of the Year, the ultimate rookie of the year, the greatest rookie rugby league has ever seen and perhaps will ever see, turned 40 years old in 2025.

It’s a big birthday for anyone, but has a special resonance for Smith because of the 40 try assists he put together during that debut season with Parramatta, an NRL record that will likely never be broken.

His childhood hero, Andrew Johns, never had 40. His contemporaries in that 2005 season, Johnathan Thurston and Benji Marshall, never had 40. All the play-making legends who have come since never got 40. That’s Tim Smith’s number, and Tim Smith’s alone.

These days, Smith lives in Victoria with his wife Renee and their two children, Slayter and Blair. It’s home for him now, even if he misses the warm weather on the Gold Coast.

He has a good job working on high-rise cranes in Melbourne. His kids are teenagers and they’re mad for Aussie Rules, so he does a little bit of coaching at the local club — even though he’s not always sure of what he’s doing out there — so he can spend more time with them.

“They get me down there to try and teach some tackling, I try and get away from them and kick the footy around,” Smith says.

“So not too much has changed.”

He is living a good life. He’s content and he’s happy. He doesn’t drink, and hasn’t for years now. He doesn’t sit on the cranes and stare at the horizon, lost in memory and filled with regret. 

There is too much living to do now for him to be stuck in the past.

He does not lament what he once had or what he might have got; he’s just grateful for what there is now.

It took a good while, and plenty of self-inflicted hardship, for Smith to get to that place. But he made it in the end and that’s bigger than any NRL record ever could be and brighter than a rookie-of-the-year medal.

“At some stages it was like, ‘far out, I have made such a meal of this, things could have been so different.’ But that wasn’t my journey,” Smith says.

“If I sit here and dwell on that … well, I can’t, it is what it is, and I had to live through that. The biggest gift I have after all that carnage and destruction I did is being of use to someone else, to help them even if it’s in a small way.

“If it helps someone, anyone, then I’ve done my job.”

A rookie season from heaven 

It was 2002 and Tim Smith was 17 years old and waiting for his dreams to come true, which meant he was waiting for Parramatta to get him.

There were plenty of clubs keen on Smith, but the Eels always had the inside track. Throughout his time growing up on the Gold Coast and playing with the Runaway Bay Seagulls as a boy, he was blue and gold to the core.

It was at a state carnival in Toowoomba where it finally happened. He and legendary talent scout and former international Noel “Crusher” Cleal circled each other for what felt like the whole day but once they got to talking the deal was done quickly.

Fast-forward three years and Smith was ready for his chance at the big time. 

The Eels, as they so often did in the post-Peter Sterling years, needed a halfback and Smith was chosen to be their man for season 2005.

At 20, he was the youngest player on a team filled with experience. 

Parramatta hadn’t made the play-offs since losing the 2001 grand final but under Brian Smith they were never far away from being there or thereabouts.

The core of the side had been together long enough to have a fair bit of chest hair and had been through enough hard times to be hungry. The likes of Nathan Hindmarsh, Nathan Cayless and Daniel Wagon especially had been through a lot and formed the basis of the forward pack.

But there was also a bumper recruitment drive, with big-money plays delivering Glenn Morrison, Timana Tahu, PJ Marsh and Mark Riddell to the club. 

They had a lot of talent, and a lot of seasoned professionals, and were ready for another run at it.

It could not have been an easy side to walk into, especially given the fate that had befallen every Parramatta halfback in the post-Sterling years, but Smith, with the confidence that only exists in the youngest and most gifted, refused to be overawed.

“It all happened really quickly. I was really lucky, there was a lot of established players, especially in the forwards,” he says.

“It was so exciting, I was a young bloke and the world was my oyster. There was no expectation from the coaching staff, they just told me to go play.

“I was a bit of a maverick. Later on I slowed down, but at the start it was just play whatever I saw and I had that license from the coaches.

“I was lucky that Brian Smith and the players around me had that faith in me. They let me play the only way I knew how. I don’t know how to explain a lot of it, it was just there and it happened.”

His debut came in round one against Wests Tigers, going head-to-head with Scott Prince, the Queensland Origin halfback from the year before. 

Smith set up three tries, two with short balls and one with a grubber, in a handy Parramatta win.

He remembers the team dinner afterwards more sharply than the game itself, because it was all so new and exciting to him that none of it felt real.

“It was a blur, I was just out there and playing and it felt like I was back at the Seagulls because I was playing the way I’d always played,” he says.

“Afterwards it sunk in, that’s when it really felt like it was all happening.”

For the first two months of the season the Eels went along, winning some games and losing some and Smith was doing well. John Morris, a fine utility man, had settled in at five-eighth and the two complimented each other nicely.

In round nine, the Eels hosted the Cowboys at Parramatta Stadium. 

The Eels were without Tahu, Riddell and Eric Grothe Jr, three of their best attacking players, and it was Sunday afternoon. 

Sunday afternoons were always Smith’s favourite time. 

That was when the light shone out of him.

With Johnathan Thurston calling the shots for North Queensland midway through what would become his first Dally M season, the visitors were expected to walk it in, and when Matt Sing scored after 75 seconds of play there was no reason to expect any different. 

Then Smith caught fire. He set up five tries in a 50-12 rout and after that everything changed. 

The Eels won their next five and Smith was at the heart of it all. With a ball in his hand he could do anything you could imagine and plenty of things you couldn’t.

The year 2005 is just long enough ago that vision of it can be hard to find on the internet. 

Some of it has made it through, but it’s pixelated and blurry. 

There is no highlight reel of Smith readily available, like there is for Thurston or Marshall. To remember exactly how it was, and how Smith was, you had to be there. 

To hear about it now sounds like a story that’s grown with the telling but it really was like nothing else. 

There were cut-out passes that seemed to go a mile, no-look short balls that sent support runners into acres of fresh air, chip kicks that landed like they were guided by radar and banana kicks that cut so violently they cracked like whips, and other kicks they had to invent names for.

Smith would kick early in tackle counts just about anywhere on the field, he could throw short balls without looking and dance around defenders with his tongue sticking out — not to be a lair, just because that’s how he did it. 

Whatever he saw he would go after, whatever he thought he could do he would try and everything worked, everything stuck, everything happened exactly the way he wanted, how he envisioned it, again and again and again.

The Eels rose up the ladder, the try-assist count kept ticking over and the blue and gold hype train began rolling. The club’s last title in 1986 was just far enough away to be a serious drought and the fans came out in force for the glory days coming again.

That day against the Cowboys was the last time the seats looked empty. 

The faithful came from all around, with renewed belief in the revival, filling Parra Stadium to bursting to see a glimpse of the new prince as Smith used what he’d always had, to give himself what he’d always wanted.

“Parra hadn’t won a premiership in a while and all these comparisons were happening and I got caught up in it all a bit,” Smith says.

“But imagine being a young bloke, running around at halfback for the team you went for as a kid, you’re going good, the team is going unbelievable, there was a lot going on.

The accolades started to come faster than Smith could believe. Even now, so much of that year is a blur for him. Every week he would ride his skateboard to training and get ready for another thriller.

There was the night he went head-to-head with Andrew Johns in a highly-touted affair and sledged the life out of his idol. 

Johns responded by directing all of Knights biggest forwards at Smith and while the Eels went down in a rare defeat, Smith set up two tries and lost no admirers.

Another time, they put 50 on defending premiers Canterbury, handing their old rivals their heaviest defeat in 70 years. 

They put 40 on St George Illawarra, who were touted as their biggest competition for the premiership. Late in the season they played Canberra and trailed 10-6 at half-time before scoring 42 points in 40 minutes in the second half.

All they knew was extravagant wins, where points came as easy as breathing.

In their last game of the regular season they took on the Broncos, who were top-four bound, with a chance to wrap up the minor premiership. Smith set up another four tries in another Parramatta win.

It was like something out of the fantasies we have as children when we’re kicking a football around the backyard — coming from nowhere to lead your favourite team to glory, taking on the superstars you grew up worshipping and looking good doing it, with the blessing of the legends who see so much of themselves in you.

That literally happened to Smith during an appearance on The Footy Show in July, when Sterling himself physically handed over a Parramatta jersey with a number seven on the back. 

It was like something out of a dream, only not even our dreams were that perfect.

It was also too much. 

Smith knows that now, and it would never happen like that today. 

But at the time he was loving it and given it was everything he’d ever wanted, how could he not?

“That first year when everyone was coming out and saying such nice things, I just kept thinking how good it all was,” Smith says.

“I probably felt a bit uncomfortable with it, but Peter Sterling handing over the jersey he made so famous? That’s a dream.”

In the first week of the finals the Eels hosted eighth-placed Manly on another golden Sunday afternoon. Just days after being named the rookie of the year ahead of no less than Greg Inglis, Smith created two early tries for his 39th and 40th assists of the season to set a new NRL record.

The Eels were up by 40 and ended up winning by 20, but the way they played it felt like 2000, and it was the kind of day you could live in forever.

The grand final was a win away, so close they could taste it, all it would take was a victory over that same Cowboys side they had put 50 on just a few months before and they would be in the big one, with Smith the ringmaster of a blue and gold circus where each act was more death-defying than the last.

Smith was the shining star, but this team had plenty else to it. 

They had scored the most points of any side in the competition, even more than Wests Tigers, who were the first team through to the decider, while also conceding the fewest.

To a man they seemed ready, the way the great teams always are when their time comes, with everything they’d done leading them to the moment they found themselves in right now.

The pressure of such times can be crushing and had brought down many a Brian Smith Eels side in years past. 

But this time they had the boy wonder, the chosen one, and those things couldn’t touch him. 

He would feel it all one day, but not now.

“That first year it didn’t matter, the expectations and all that, nothing like that mattered. I wasn’t thinking too much about anything, it was the following year where I started to take on too much and it all caught up with me,” Smith says.

“But I wouldn’t change 2005 for the world. Everything except that last game was perfect.”

The dream gets heavy 

They laugh about it now and that’s a good thing. Even the worst losses shouldn’t haunt forever. It’s been long enough that it’s alright and they can laugh about it the way old footballers do.

It’s a wonder the Eels didn’t score early against the Cowboys in that 2005 preliminary final. 

They had a lot of ball, much of it down North Queensland’s end, but the passes weren’t hitting the mark like they had all season.

The crowd of 45,000 at Stadium Australia started to get a little tight. This was not what they’d become accustomed to, the brilliance was taking longer than usual.

The previews on the match focused heavily on Thurston and Smith, labelling it as the first of what would no doubt be many meetings between the two in the years to come. 

Thurston had made his Queensland Origin debut earlier that year and Smith’s charge towards that honour was tipped to begin here.

After feeling each other out, it was Smith that fired the first shot with a cross-field kick for Grothe. It was instinctual and sharp, and it happened so fast he barely had time to think about it, which was the kind of play he made all year.

Grothe was unmarked and got a hand to it, but couldn’t drag it in. 

When he and Smith talk about it now, Grothe swears the kick was a bit long. Smith swears just as loudly that it was perfect.

“Guru and I laugh about it — if we catch it and we score, who knows? But we had a lot of ball but just couldn’t score and they had Johnathan Thurston and Matt Bowen, once they got a sniff it was just over,” Smith says.

“They took things over and it’s a bit of a sour taste, but it is what it is. We couldn’t finish it off.”

On the back of Thurston, who grew in stature as the game went on, and Bowen, who was in the form of his glittering career, the Cowboys pulled off a 29-0 rout that rates as one of the biggest preliminary finals upsets of the NRL era.

Watching it back today, the Eels didn’t seem to know what was happening even as it was happening. It was a brutal end to such a brilliant season.

But they would be back, right? They had to be. Smith was so young and the young have so much time on their side. Everything could still happen and even if nobody knew what the future could hold it was certain that Smith held the future. 

The world could still be his, if it wasn’t already.

But it was never like 2005 again. That very next season is when it started for Smith, when the pressure he evaded as easily as he did defenders began to weigh him down as everything caught up to him at once.

The football came a bit harder and the beers came way too easily. He was fined by the club twice for his drinking and dropped after turning up to training once under the influence.

“That first year was such a whack to my whole life, such a dream run, and then ’06 I started to drift outside the things I should be doing,” Smith says.

“I took advantage of a lot of things and got in the papers a lot for acting up on the drink.

“Then I snapped my collarbone and missed a lot of footy and I didn’t handle that well at all.

“There was a bit too much outside noise and it was always going to take a toll on any 21-year-old. I’ve learnt now that I was struggling and I didn’t know how to deal with it.

“Thank God things have changed.”

The Eels couldn’t repeat their form of the year before. Brian Smith, at the time the longest serving coach in the club’s history, stood down mid-season and was replaced by Jason Taylor.

The side snuck into the finals in eighth after being inconsistent for much of the season and Smith blamed himself, wearing it heavily as he started to get lost inside his own head.

Michael Hagan arrived as the side’s new coach at the end of the year and took a special interest in helping Smith. 

That’s part of why he isn’t bitter today, because through those hard times when he was his own worst enemy there was always support, even if he didn’t always know how to accept it.

“There were a lot of people who were trying to help me but as I know now, you can’t help someone who can’t be helped,” Smith says.

“Michael Hagan was a big one, when he came to Parra I was really going through it and he wanted to help. So did Jason Taylor, Brian Smith was the same when he was there.

“I was lucky, because I met so many good people in that rugby league world. If I see them today I say hello and thank you, and maybe apologise for the way I was. All they were doing was trying to help me.”

Smith has a reputation as a one-season wonder but his 2007 campaign disabuses that notion. 

The Eels finished fifth and made it to the preliminary final, where they went down swinging against a Melbourne side who only lost three games all year en route to the premiership.

Smith finished the campaign with 29 try assists — plenty of years that’ll be enough to lead the league — and while there wasn’t the raw brilliance of two years before, he mostly played smarter and with a greater control. 

That’s not that there wasn’t some of the raw, uncut stuff. There was a special day in the final round of the season against Brisbane, at Parramatta Stadium on another Sunday afternoon, where the Eels put on 68 points and, like 2005, it felt like Smith could do whatever he wanted.

An assist from that game is one of the few Smith highlights that’s easy to track down. It’s blurry and glitchy and has been tucked away in a corner of YouTube reserved only for rugby league’s biggest sickos. 

It’s a message in a bottle that’s been bobbing around in the sea of the internet for almost two decades but there’s no mistaking it as he launches a ball so long that Krisnan Inu can literally walk over the line from 10m out. 

It’s only a taste of what Smith was, what he could see and what he could do, but it’s like tasting a drop of a hot sauce made with Carolina reaper. Don’t rub your eyes after this one. 

That season wasn’t like 2005, it was not another perfect year. Smith was a popular target any time the Eels lost as the pundits demanded the football of his rookie year. 

He struggled with injuries at times, dislocating his shoulder three times in four weeks towards the end of the year, including during a win over the Warriors in the first week of the finals.

There was enough good stuff for it to look like a new start. But the end at Parramatta was coming for Smith, faster than he could have believed.

Officially, he was diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder in 2006. He doesn’t go into whether he’s living with either condition now, or if it was the right word for what he was going through then, but he is sure of two things — that he was drinking too much and it made everything worse.

“But now I know, being off the drink, that there’s things I need to deal with.

“I have to work through them, and that’s what I’m doing. It’s a lot easier when you’re not drinking a lot of alcohol.”

He was spotted drunk in public several times over the 2007-08 off-season, to the point the Eels banned him from training and playing indefinitely. 

He avoided the sack by agreeing to refrain from drinking until the end of the season and stuck to it for about two weeks before he was spotted at a pub. That’s when he went to rehab to try to get a handle on it all before returning to the Eels. 

The season started and, for one of the first times in his life, footy wasn’t the same. He played three games, two of them losses, and felt lost. 

After a loss to Gold Coast in April he rang his mother and told her a hard truth — that he couldn’t do this anymore. That he needed help.

He faced a press conference and revealed his bipolar disorder to the rugby league world, announcing he would be taking temporary absence from football.

Some of the commentary from the time is brutal in a way that reveals how far the game has come when it comes to mental health, but there was some support from influential places including Andrew Johns, who had worked with Smith as a halves coach at Parramatta and himself was diagnosed with bipolar disorder years before.

“It took me 10 years to do what Tim Smith did yesterday,” Johns said at the time in The Daily Telegraph.

“It was incredibly brave of him but it was also 100 per cent the right thing to do.”

Smith went to a rehabilitation facility on the Gold Coast and never played for the Eels again. That luminous promise of 2005, frozen in time forever, never came back in blue and gold.

The end and the beginning 

There was still more footy to play because Smith still loved it, deep down. 

About six months later he signed with Wigan in Super League and stayed there for a season and a half.

There was an off-season where he trained with Brisbane, and a year and a bit with Cronulla under Ricky Stuart. Smith tries not to have regrets, but he wishes he could have done better for Stuart, who he said was as good to him as a coach could be.

He went back to England and had some years with Salford and Wakefield, the latter of which he counts as one of the happiest times of his career, when at last he found a place free of the expectations that had chased him for years.

Sometimes, the old football came back, glimpses of the player he’d once been that promised the possibility of a return. Smith found a bit of a home with Trinity especially, helping steer them through a rollicking late-season run in 2012 that resulted in a rare play-off berth.

It was three years later that it all finished up when Smith was let go by the club after crashing a car. His final game came a week before in a 46-6 belting by Widnes in front of 3,500 diehards, about as far away from those golden Sunday afternoons at Parramatta Stadium as any place in rugby league can be.

It was around that same time that Thurston was beginning on the finals run that would end with North Queensland’s first premiership. Meanwhile, Marshall had returned to rugby league, beginning the final act of a career that seemed forever young as a wandering troubadour of a playmaker, beloved by all no matter where he went.

Those two did so much, and at one time Smith seemed like he could have had what they found. 

They are linked together forever because of 2005, a season which gave them all so much. 

Thurston won the Dally M, Marshall had the grand final flick pass and the premiership with the Tigers. 

And Smith has the 40.

He watched the other two go on to their heights and used to wonder why it couldn’t be him. But that’s another bad thought he’s learned to leave behind.

“Those hard times were a gift, because I can help people by sharing what happened to me and that’s what I try to do.

“That might be at work, or on the AFL field — even though I don’t know what I’m talking about out there — or wherever, but that’s what it’s about.

“I’d never tell anyone what to do. Everyone’s on their own journey. I can only share what I did, a lot of which wasn’t the right thing to do and maybe that can help someone.”

Winning the long game 

Smith had a career dotted with hardship and much of it was of his own making. But retirement was even more difficult.

Like a lot of former prodigies, football had been his whole world. Real life was about to start, and it was overwhelming.

“I had to go through a lot after footy, there was a lot of pain after retirement and going into a real job,” Smith says.

“Footy was everything I knew, and that change was hard. But it made me really look at some things.”

One of those things was his relationship with his wife. Renee had been by his side through nearly his entire career and all the ups and downs that came with it.

Her support had been steadfast, always, and Smith only realises now how much she had done for him and how hard she fought to save him from himself.

“I don’t think I could say enough to describe what she’s been like for me. What she’s had to go through with me and then come out the other side, there’s not much I can say,” Smith says.

“When it was tough she had to hold the fort and she did and all I do now is try to pay that back.

“For a very long time we had young kids and I probably wasn’t the husband or father I should have been, but what I can do now is be there.

“I’m such a lucky man to have such a strong woman in my corner because if I didn’t, who knows where my life could have gone. I’m blessed she stuck around.”

Today, Smith’s life is rich and full, with none of the cliches one might expect in a former footballer whose best season came when he was barely past his teen years. 

He’s worked hard to let go of any bitterness on how his career turned out and solved his relationship with booze by giving it up. 

He still watches as much rugby league as he can and is excited that the old way of playing halfback, which was his way of playing, is coming back after a time where everything was a bit too regimented.

And he loves Parramatta, always has, always will. Mitchell Moses, the club’s best halfback since Smith’s year and the first of the Eels playmakers to shake off the post-Sterling curse, is one of his favourites.

He thinks they’re on the right track as well, despite a tough start to the year, and that they’re on to a winner in new coach Jason Ryles.

“I just want to see Parra do well. They’ll always be my team,” he says.

“I spoke to Rylesy a few times when he was at Melbourne and I think he’s a ripper, they’re in great hands there even if it might take a bit of time.”

Smith doesn’t hear too much about the old days anymore but only because he’s in AFL country. If he’s back in Sydney or Brisbane someone will bring up 2005, otherwise it’s Sherrins all the way.

He used to do a little bit of coaching with Melbourne’s Jersey Flegg side but gave it up to spend more time with the family. 

Seeing his kids run around for Yarrambat Tigers is one of the best parts of his week.

A lot of former footballers who lived the best year of their lives early on and spend a lifetime trying to come to terms with it. 

In the worst cases, everything before it and everything after it is just everything else compared to their seasons in the light and they never get over the fact they aren’t who they used to be. 

The memory of their glory days can live forever but it fades around the edges as it gets further and further away because the older you get the more you forget what it was like to be young. 

They revel in who they were to avoid thinking about who they are.

Just like how a player can’t survive on one season alone, neither can a life. It has to be made anew and now, for Smith, it has. 

His football years were an enormous part of his life with all their joy and sorrow, but the rest of his days are too bright to be stuck in the past.

The greatest rookie season there ever was or will be, for all its glory and splendour, and the tumultuous years that followed for Smith really were just the beginning of a longer story that has found a happy ending stretching far into the future.

Smith has the try-assist record and the memories of the afternoon sun at Parramatta Stadium, but he’s also got his family and his hard-won wisdom and those are more important. 

They’ve led him to a better way to live and found him a better place to be.

“That’s how I live my life now. I just have to keep going, make the best of what I’ve got, try and help people,” he says.

“I’ve lived a good life so far and I still have so much more to go.”