Politics and sport are a heady mix. Throw in a mysterious, brutal death and it's the stuff of movies, except this is a real-life story.
This week marked the 50th anniversary of what's known as the Tutty case, one which forever changed the rights of professional athletes in Australia and is one of only a handful of such cases worldwide.
Dennis Tutty went all the way to the High Court of Australia in 1971 to challenge what was ultimately deemed rugby league's "unreasonable and unjustified" restraint of trade.
His victory meant that athletes were free to decide which club they wanted to play for and negotiate their terms freely.
What is not so widely known is that the man who encouraged Tutty to go to court was a solicitor named David McKenzie, a former athlete himself.
McKenzie represented Australia in fencing at three Olympic Games. He was on his way to becoming an influential member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) before he was found dead, at the age of 45, in Hawaii in 1981.
Tutty was off-contract in 1969 with the Balmain Tigers but was bound by the New South Wales Rugby League's (NSWRL) "retain list", effectively preventing him from moving to another club.
He refused to play but, to make ends meet financially, he got a job cleaning the Balmain gym and sauna.
The Australian fencing team — which was managed by McKenzie — happened to train at the gym. In a casual conversation Tutty explained why he was cleaning and not playing rugby league, despite being one of the game's top players.
"McKenzie advised him, 'I think it's likely that, if you challenge the rules, you'd probably win a case before the courts and that way you'd be free'," Melbourne Law School's Braham Dabscheck told The Ticket.
"It took about two years for the case to work its way through the courts, which put Dennis under a lot of pressure … he was essentially an unskilled labourer earning slightly above the minimum wage, which back then was about $42-44 dollars a week."
Funding a legal team — to work through the Supreme Court of New South Wales hearing and the NSWRL's appeal in the High Court of Australia that followed — took a professional and personal toll on Tutty.
He won the case, with costs awarded in his favour, but his rugby league career did not reach the same heights as it had before he launched his legal action.
"Australian sport … we could argue now, needs good administrators who are conscious of the needs of the athletes … and [who will work] out ways to protect their rights," Dabscheck said.
Tutty's fight changed rugby league
Tutty did not have the benefit of a players' association.
It would take another eight years before the formation of the Rugby League Players' Association (RLPA), which has since recognised its annual players' champion with the Dennis Tutty Award.
The RLPA would like to see Tutty admitted to the NRL Hall of Fame for the personal sacrifice that paved the way for today's professionals.
NSWRL chief executive David Trodden said the Tutty case was "massively influential".
"It changed all of the contracted rules about rugby league," he said.
"It unlocked proper remuneration for all professional rugby league players. It had a massive impact on the way rugby league was administered and the way players could earn a proper income from it.
"The Tutty case has been cited in more than 200 cases in all the Supreme Courts around the country.
"People like (former Australia men's cricket captain) Kim Hughes relied on it when he was arguing about being stood down over the South African boycott. Rugby union cases have cited it … football cases, netball cases, hockey cases.
"Even a couple of weeks ago, Brad Hazzard — the New South Wales Health Minister — was sued in the New South Wales Supreme Court about one of the [COVID-19] public health orders and one of the cases relied on in that Supreme Court action was Dennis Tutty's case. So it's influenced not only sport but [also] Australian society in all facets."
Rise of a 'young radical'
But back to McKenzie. In many ways, he was a man ahead of his time.
When McKenzie was appointed an IOC member in 1974, he quickly immersed himself in some of the most pressing issues being faced by the movement.
These included a resistance to shifting from its purely amateur status to include professional athletes, the political pressure being applied during the Cold War period, and how to welcome mainland China back into the Olympic fold without having to exclude Taiwan, which had been competing under the Chinese Taipei banner.
A "young radical" is how McKenzie described how some of his Olympic colleagues viewed him.
In a series of publicly available recordings by Neil Bennetts in the mid-1970s now held by the National Library of Australia (NLA), McKenzie said he made himself an expert on the rather dry subject of athlete eligibility.
He urged the IOC to take a more-lenient approach, based on his experience in Australian sport.
"I had adopted the view that, in the past, those persons who were interpreting the rules of amateurism in Australia were firstly interpreting it in a very, very fixed and inflexible way," McKenzie said.
"I think I started to introduce, very slowly — [and] against great opposition — a slightly more soft approach, not to the concept of amateurism but the way to which it is applied."
McKenzie was making a mark in other ways. He had the ear of the IOC president at the time, Lord Killanin. Correspondence between the two is stored at the NLA and at The Olympic Museum's historical archives in Lausanne, Switzerland.
At the height of the Cold War era — shortly after the heavily boycotted 1980 Moscow Olympics — Lord Killanin was officially replaced as president by Juan Antonio Samaranch, who almost immediately embarked on a period of significant change at the IOC.
Television and marketing rights exploded, filling the IOC's bank account in ways not previously seen.
While the money is still not directly shared with the athletes — who compete at the Games for free — the IOC argues its disbursement of funds to each of the 200-plus National Olympic Committees (NOC) filters down to benefit each country's Olympic athletes.
McKenzie's death
In August 1981, McKenzie was sent an urgent telegram requesting he leave Italy — where he was attending a meeting of NOCs — to head to the United States for a meeting with organisers of the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
One of the officials he was to meet was a former US secretary of the Treasury, William E Simon, who served under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
Simon was US Olympic Committee president from 1981 to 1984.
McKenzie never made it to the meeting. He was found dead in a bath house in Waikiki, Hawaii.
In his autobiography, A Time for Reflection — published posthumously in 2003 — Simon wrote about his suspicion of the nature of McKenzie's death, alleging foul play was involved.
"McKenzie never made it to our meeting in Colorado Springs," he wrote.
"While vacationing in Hawaii, David McKenzie was found dead at a sauna in Waikiki, an ice pick thrust in his throat.
"There were suspicions, never officially confirmed, that McKenzie was set up (by whom was never clear) … I was, and remain, curious about David McKenzie's death but, at the time, I was too busy planning the 1983 Pan American Games and the 1984 Olympic Games to spend much time on cloak-and-dagger theories."
Reports of the tragedy, at the time, were sparse and remain so.
The IOC's website records McKenzie's death differently.
"McKenzie served on the IOC until his death which occurred under unusual circumstances," the website's biography of McKenzie read.
"After attending the Olympic Congress in Baden-Baden he went to the ANOC (Association of National Olympic Committees) Meeting in Milano, Italy, and on his return home, he was killed during a stopover in Honolulu.
"His body was found facedown in a changing room of a local bathhouse with the cause of death ruled manual strangulation. His killer or killers were never found."
Olympic historian Harry Gordon stated in his book, Australia and the Olympic Games, "At 3:38am on 9 August [McKenzie's] body was found face-down on a bunk in a small changing room in a bathhouse, the Steam Works, at Waikiki, Honolulu."
Gordon wrote of an "inordinate amount of mystery compounded by secrecy" over McKenzie's death. There were rumours of foul play, the possible involvement of an intelligence agency, and a Honolulu murder investigation petered out.
A post-mortem declared the cause of death was asphyxia, with deep bruising around his throat. Later, a coroner's report concluded death by manual strangulation.
Despite being one of the most influential sporting administrators of the time, there were surprisingly few ripples when the man who made waves in life met his untimely death.
David McKenzie — Olympian, IOC member and family man — remains largely a mystery in the history of Australian sport.
The Ticket will release a series of podcasts on McKenzie in 2022, titled The Shadow Man.
