Monty Porter

Monty Porter

Personal information
Full name	Montague Stephen Porter
Born	(1935-04-27)27 April 1935 Peak Hill, New South Wales, Australia
Died	24 January 2011(2011-01-24) (aged 76)
Playing information
Position	Prop, Second-row
Club Years Team Pld T G FG P 1955 Western Suburbs 4 0 0 0 0 1958–65 St. George 113 13 0 0 39 1967 Cronulla-Sutherland 22 3 0 0 9 Total 139 16 0 0 48 Representative Years Team Pld T G FG P 1960 New South Wales 1 0 0 0 0
Source: [1]

Montague "Monty" Porter PSM (1934–2011) was an Australian premiership winning and state representative rugby league footballer who played in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a second rower with the St. George Dragons during their eleven-year premiership winning run from 1956 to 1966, playing in six winning grand final teams. He was the inaugural captain of the Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks in that club's foundation season of 1967. After football, he had a successful career as a Sports Administrator.

Career

Footballer

Born in Peak Hill, near

using a false name to circumvent the residential qualification rules of the time and spent the rest of the 1956 season in their top grade.

He moved to the St. George club in 1957 and was called into the first-grade team during the 1958 finals series at prop-forward, helping the side to their 3rd successive premiership. He cemented his spot from 1959, enjoying great success as a second rower.^[4] The club won the premiership every year he was at the club. In 1966 he signed for the newly formed Cronulla club and became their foundation captain in their inaugural year in 1967.

He made one representative appearance for

in 1960.

Administrator

He retired from playing in 1968 and became the Club Secretary of the Cronulla-Sutherland club until 1970. He remained actively involved with the club as chairman of selectors and under-23s coach until 1973.

He won a job managing the

found itself administering the Cronulla Sharks when the club ran into financial difficulties; Porter accepted a post as President of the club from 1984 to 1988.

In 1994 he came out of retirement to accept a caretaker role as acting general manager of the

Accolades

In his role as a sports administrator, Monty was awarded in the 1993 Queen's Birthday Honours List as a recipient of The Public Service Medal, which acknowledges outstanding service by employees of the Australian Government and/or state governments. During the Australian Rugby League's 2008 Centenary Year a college of the game's historians were asked to retrospectively give a Man-of-the-Match award for each of the 32

Sports author Larry Writer describes Porter's role in the elite Dragon's side as "a tradesman in a team of stars, a self-described 'plugger' who did his job each game with minimum fuss and maximum efficiency" whose primary job was to "tackle, tackle, tackle" and whose dependability was highly prized by his teammates. Writer suggests that such specialists hadn't come into vogue in the 1960s in Australian rugby league but by the 1970s at least one such second-rower was a critical for every successful side and players such as Steve Folkes and David Gillespie are examples of those whose playing and later coaching careers were forged entirely on their defensive capabilities with playing styles similar to Porter's.

Since 2008 the Cronulla club has awarded the Monty Porter Medal to its first grade Player of the Year.

Personal life

His marriage to his wife Nola Messiter was long-standing and they had three children. His son Michael made 154 first-grade appearances for the Cronulla club in an injury-affected career between 1984 and 1994. Monty Porter had suffered from Parkinson's disease for some years before his death. He died on 24 January 2011 aged 76.

References

Footnotes

External links

• Vale Monty Porter
• Retrospective Man-of-the-Match

Bibliography

• Writer, Larry (1995) Never Before, Never Again, Pan MacMillan, Sydney
• Whiticker, Alan; Hudson, Glen (2007). The Encyclopedia of Rugby League Players.
  ISBN 978-1-877082-93-1
  .