Corey Parker: Brutal training helped make the Broncos great and the idea of NRL limiting contact is garbage

They were full contact drills. They were brutal. Tatey copped a shot at the wrong split second and ended up with a mouthful of blood.

Wayne loved those sessions and if he thought we weren’t going hard enough, he’d stop the drill and we’d go again.

It was done every week. No exceptions.

Contact training started in January of pre-season. With no games then, you could only compete against each other, so training would be merciless.

We used to have Chris Haseman, who fought in the UFC during the bad old days, as our wrestling coach. We wrestled two or three times a week in pre-season and they were some of the worst sessions I’ve ever done. The PCYC at Suncorp Stadium, before it was redone, was an absolute hotbox.

Chris had a favourite drill: Sharkbait. You were in the middle of a circle and had to fight three or four guys in a row, all coming in fresh. By the last, you’re out on your feet. Gassed. Vomiting. And that last bloke has no mercy. He still wants to rip your head off. It was always a case of, who’s the big dog here? Men like Shane Webcke never yielded. There was nowhere to hide.

I’ve seen guys close to tears. I’ve seen guys split. I’ve seen guys in a bad way physically and I’ve been one of them. But when you’re sitting there afterwards, you’re looking at your teammates thinking, We’re going all right here. We’re doing hard things to get to where we need to be.

I used to love seeing players get cut at training. That sounds twisted but seeing a player bleeding after a collision told me that he was having a red-hot crack. That I could rely on him to do the same come game time.

Honestly – this is what it takes to compete for NRL premierships. You’ve got to be willing to do what other teams won’t. To go harder and longer than any other side so that when the big moments come, you’re ready.

So the idea that the NRL may impose time limits on contact training, be it pre-season or in between games … absolute garbage. Are we serious? Rugby league is built on contact. Concussion protocols? Sure. We are now fully aware of how important those are. But limiting contact? Get real.

The moment they start limiting contact training, we’ll have a different game. It won’t be the rugby league we all love.

We saw some injuries emerge over the weekend in pre-season: a facial fracture for Joey Manu at the Roosters, a broken jaw for Parramatta’s Bryce Cartwright. That simply tells me that those sides are training to the intensity that is required to contend. It tells me that the Roosters and Eels – three-time premiers in the past decade and grand finalists last season, respectively – are having a red-hot crack. I’ve got no doubt that the likes of Penrith and Melbourne are doing exactly the same.

Can you do heavy contact every day? No. Do players do it every day? No. It’s done as needed – but if you’re serious about being a good team, it needs to be done, no questions.

You need to prepare your body to turn up for 27 rounds in peak condition, or you’ll be chewed up and spat out. Setting up your year in pre-season is crucial. You can’t win the comp in pre-season but you can certainly lose it.

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Some of the old Broncos training sessions would get so heated that you’d come to blows with teammates. I did a number of times. The intensity and the collisions were similar to what you’d have in a semi-final.

But as tough as Wayne’s combat sessions were physically, it was more a mental thing. Right – on Wednesday we’re going to absolutely bash the shit out of each other and what we get out of that, we’re going to take into the game.

It’s hard to quantify what that does to a group. The confidence and the belief that it instilled was incredible.

Training in general back then was more consistently opposed; first-choice players running against the reggies. When I came in as an 18-year-old kid, the Broncos pack was full of hard men: Gorden Tallis as captain, Shane Webcke, Petero Civoniceva, Andrew Gee, Brad Thorn and Tonie Carroll. They didn’t want anyone to take a backwards step. They never would.

Countless times in training, play rolled on and I was in the background still wrestling with Webby. We were trying to rip each other’s heads off. Him the old bull, me the young bull. Him trying to show me what’s what, me trying to show him that I won’t take any of his shit.

Gordie was the scariest. He was the captain, for starters, but Gordie was just wired differently.

Where Webby was non-stop effort at training, Gordie would float in and out of intensity. That’s also how he played. But if Gordie turned up to training one day and wanted to teach you a lesson … seriously, it was on. I was lucky never to cop one of those days.

It was the same with games. I was right next to Gordie the day he punched the shit out of Ben Ross at Penrith. I was in around the tackle, next moment Gordie is belting him and I was like, Holy shit … what did Ben Ross do?! From my eyes, he didn’t do a thing. It was just Gordie snapping, deciding that it was time for a lesson. It’s no wonder that he was so intimidating for opposition sides.

And at the Broncos, if he picked you out at training one day and wanted to see what you were about, there was no backing down. You had to have a red-hot crack back at him. That was the only way to earn his respect.

These days, it’d probably be called bullying, the way that older players pushed the young guys back then. But I thought of it as them trying to see what sort of player they were going to go out and play with every weekend. I basically turned into the same person as I became a senior player, doing those same things to Jarrod Wallace and Josh McGuire that I’d picked up from my training battles with Webby and Gee-Gee. It was not about being a bully, but about instilling grit and building mutual respect.

I think back to some Queensland State of Origin camps, too, where you were surrounded by great players. At times we trained at an intensity where strength and conditioning coaches wanted to pull the pin, saying that we were going too hard. We kept going, balls to the wall, because we knew that come Wednesday night, we’d be ready.

Both in pre-season and between games, the consistently strong NRL teams train for longer periods at higher intensity. That’s what differentiates them from weaker sides, the ones that go up and down. We always hear how intense Melbourne’s training is and the results speak for themselves. We never hear about how hard the Titans are training. Those are the teams that can play 60 good minutes per game, not 80 like the Storm.

Go and ask Cameron Smith or Cooper Cronk, guys who’ve one numerous competitions, how they did it. They weren’t handed it. It’s done in the off-season, with a level of training that others aren’t willing to do.

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There’s been the argument that a heavy contact load will shorten careers. I’d argue that it lengthens them. You learn to be resilient. Your body is battle-hardened.

I never, never went to physio as a young player. Wayne used to have to walk past the physio room to go to his office and I thought, If he catches me in here, he’s going to think I’m injured and not pick me on the weekend.

So I learnt to train with niggles. I learnt to train under duress. It instilled this hardness in me that, come game day, you’ve dealt with it all before. A niggle here and there? No worries. Keep going.

The first thing that the modern player does on Monday morning now? They’ll go to the physio. Oh, I’ve got a bit of a tight calf, can you give it a rub? Oh, I’ve got a sore shoulder. It’s done a complete 180.

Physio used to serve some purpose without being a big thing. Now, there’s two or three full-time physios at all clubs. There’s players that go to physio for a chin wag.

It’s garbage, some of it. It really is.

Young guys who haven’t played a lot of NRL, especially these days, don’t know what battle-hardened resilience is all about. You don’t normally understand first grade until you’ve got about 100 games under your belt.

The first couple of seasons are a blur; How good is life? But after 100 games, it starts to look a bit different. You realise that ingrained toughness is the only way to consistent success in the NRL.

That starts with pre-season and a strong pre-season needs sustained sessions of intense contact training. It just does.