Locker Room: From Coyne to Cooper, Dragons mourn passing of beloved club icon

“Which is why his smelling salts would blow the boys’ heads off,” champion St George-Illawarra forward Shaun Timmins said.

“I loved it. But there were plenty of others who didn’t.”

Trent Merrin, who drove his body into the opposition across 151 games for the Red V, felt his legs shake from apprehension and excitement every time Connelly reached into his shorts pocket.

“These weren’t your run-of-the-mill smelling salts, I’m sure Ray whipped these up in his garage,” Merrin said.

“These had ‘XXX’ on the jar.

“As soon as it hit the nostrils, you were alive. It was like a rebirth.

“I would sniff the things until I gagged and threw-up. It got me prepared for war.

“He had it all. He had this secret hot rub. It wasn’t Dencorub, it was another one of his concoctions. The players these days wouldn’t be handle it.”

If it’s the people who make footy clubs, the Dragons will never be the same, following the sad passing of Connelly, the club’s longest-serving gear steward, last Wednesday.

He was 78.

He spent almost half of his life serving the needs of the game’s greatest players.

Consider every player that has ever pulled on either the original St George or St George-Illawarra jersey since 1988 and Connelly has massaged, strapped or put an arm around the shoulder of every one of them.

True rugby league champions like Mark Coyne, Ricky Walford, Gorden Tallis, Paul McGregor, Ben Creagh, Mark Gasnier, Matt Cooper, Dean Young, Jason Nightingale, Ben Hornby and hundreds more.

For a club that is in a constant struggle to prove who they represent and what they stand for, no one wanted to protect the red-and-white jumper more in the past 37-years than Connelly.

The Dragons dressing room was his home.

So much so, he once turned a broom cupboard at Jubilee into a makeshift bedroom so that he and premiership-winning forwards, Neville Costigan and Jeremy Smith, could sneak some shut-eye in the morning after winning the 2010 grand final.

It was in late 1988 that former premiership-winning captain and ex-coach Craig Young found Connelly, who had been helping out locally with the Peakhurst Hawks, hanging back after training one day.

“I turned to him and said, ‘I need some staff Ray, tell me what you can do?’,” Young said.

“He said, ‘I can strap, I can rub, I can run water’. And so I said, ‘Fine you’ve got the job’.

“From that day, he never left.

“The dressing room wasn’t open until Ray was in it.”

Severely loyal to the Dragons, Connelly was emphatically trusted by every coach that ever held a clipboard for the proud club.

Wayne Bennett, David Waite, Brian Smith, Nathan Brown, they all have a story about the cigarette-smoking strapper with the tattooed forearm, hands like an old catcher’s mitt and whose two loves were fishing and the Saints.

Which is why he called his boat, Sea Dragon.

“I wouldn’t pick the team until I’d run my thoughts past Ray,” Young said.

“He would tell me, ‘Nope, this bloke needs another week before he’s fit’, or, ‘This bloke can’t defend’.

“He would watch every one of our lower grade games every weekend and even until his final few weeks he was asking for a pass to go and watch SG Ball and Jersey Flegg.”

Connelly was also a straight-shooter.

“If Ray liked you, he would look after you. If he didn’t like you, well, you would know it,” former Dragons captain Dean Young said.

“It became obvious which ones Ray didn’t like because they were usually the boys with the shit strapping tape.”

Asked why Connelly wouldn’t like a particular player, Young said: “Because in his eyes they were soft and they weren’t doing the jersey justice.

The Dragons media team chose an incredible image from the 2010 grand final to announce Connelly’s passing.

The photo is of Dean hugging and staring into the eyes of his trusted strapper.

“Would you believe, I had never seen that photo until the other day,’’ Dean said.

“That was me telling Ray how much this premiership is his, as it ours.

“Clubs don’t operate without people like Ray.’’

Timmins, the NSW State of Origin, Test and incredibly skilful centre or forward from the Steelers, met Connelly when St George and Illawarra merged in 1999.

Timmins recently had two knee replacements at the age of 49. The surgery reminded him of how crucial Connelly was to him before every game.

“I got real close to Ray, largely because he held me together with my busted knees,” Timmins said.

“Nearly every session he would be rubbing and strapping my knees. I give so much credit to people at footy clubs who give so much of themselves, and that was Ray.

“He would fill water bottles or sweep the dressing room. Nothing was ever a drama to him.

“I appreciate everything he did for me and so many other players.”

The Dragons have an opportunity to pay tribute to one of their most loyal servants during the current construction of their new High Performance Centre at Wollongong University.

The Ray Connelly Players Area, Training Field or Meeting Room each have sentiment of their own.

Such was his deep passion for the club, his family have asked for the club’s victory song, “When The Saints Go Marching In...” be sung as his coffin exits Our Lady of Fatima Church, Peakhurst, next Friday.

But if there’s one final message from Connelly that his loving wife Maureen and the entire St George-Illawarra club must latch onto, as their vocal fans twist themselves into knots over the club’s future and namely, the roster build ahead of the 2026 season, it’s a story from big Jason Stevens.

Look close enough at the photo of a 20-year-old Stevens being helped from the old Sydney Football Stadium after just the first tackle of the 1993 grand final against the Broncos with a dislocated finger and you’ll spot Connelly under a red Penfolds cap, holding the prop-forward’s arm.

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“I was in shock,” Stevens said.

“One minute you’re meeting Tina Turner, and then I’m driving Glenn Lazarus backwards in a tackle with Dave Barnhill, and the next minute you’re being helped off the field.

“The crowd was so loud, but even amid the pain, shock and deafening noise, I’ll never forget hearing Ray’s soothing words: ‘It will be okay, big fella. It will be okay.’”