Ray Warren was the feeling of rugby league as much as its voice. He called the game for so long and felt the game so deeply that it came to speak through him. That warm rumble that ran through Warren’s larynx as he rode the play – a trickle of adrenaline that could build to a torrent in seconds – made fans feel the crunch of tackles, the exhilaration of line-breaks, the desolation of defeat, and the pure joy of tries scored and sports battles won.
After 55 years of broadcasting, 45 grand finals and 99 State of Origins, the “voice of rugby league” has hit the mute button on his career, a week shy of this year’s Origin 1. It’s a characteristically humble call by Warren not to chase a 100th call simply for posterity. Even after five decades, Warren suffered acute anxiety before every broadcast, fearing he would make a mistake in the call and not realise, thereby damaging a legacy hard won and rightly revered. Right to the end he has put the game and its supporters first. But the quiet he leaves behind is deafening.
Of course the game will go on and other commentators will call it as they see it. But no one rode the play like Ray Warren and no one saw the game and its combatants like he did. Colleague Brad Fittler reckons he never heard Warren criticise a player and marvelled at how he always stayed objective rather than subjective. That’s why players are hurting too. Tens of thousands grew up with his voice in their ears, dreaming that one day the great Ray Warren would call their name too. When it came to rugby league, he was the voice of record.
Of course he lent those larynx to other sports too - racing in all its forms, and swimming too. The latter brought out his patriotism and a love for athletic achievement almost paternal. In calling three Olympics, that love came through most vividly when he called Susie O’Neill. “The red line is coming at her. Hang on Susie! Hang on Susie! Five to go. You’re gonna do it, Susie! Yes! Yes! Yes! She’s done it! A dream has been realised!”
That’s why he’ll be so missed. Warren was invested in athletes and their pursuit of dreams. Maybe because he’d invested a lifetime into his own dream to be a sports commentator.
That epiphany came listening to a radio race caller’s dulcet tones reverberate through the Warrens’ weatherboard shack in Junee on Saturdays. The six-year-old Warren rattled his money box and gave the coin that came out to his father to lay a bet with the local SP bookmaker. As Ray rode a broomstick, the voice on the radio built from a low burble to a blast to call his horse home in the 1949 AJC Derby: a 20-1 maiden named Playboy.
Young Ray had heard his calling: to be a caller. So began an origin story Bradman-esque in its beauty. For just as the young Don pinged a golf ball against a corrugated water tank with a cricket stump for hours on end, Warren upended a tin of marbles and called their progress as their colours ran across the rough floorboards of the family home he shared with six older siblings. Every day for a decade he did it, and the voice grew with the emotion and impact.
It is fitting Warren’s home town of Junee takes its name from the Wiradjuri for “talk to me”. But he left home for an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner at 17 to chase the dream. While he waited for his break, Warren became a policeman. He was dux of his squad, with top marks in law, but he hated the sight of blood, hated breaking bad news and hated locking up SP bookmakers to whom he frequently owed money (Warren didn’t abide by the adage you can’t bet and broadcast and while small-time, he was prolific). After causing a four-car pileup on his first day as a traffic cop, Warren took a gig with a country radio network to call bush footy.
Warren was so determined to make commentary his career that he drove a wheezy Valiant thousands of miles across the NSW plains to attend mid-week training, matching faces of players to names, so that when he set up his card table on the sideline on game day, he was ready. Being a policeman had honed Warren’s photographic memory and when he turned it to racing silks, it was a revelation. Half a century on, he can still recall the owner’s colours of long-dead champions like Tulloch and Kingston Town. The more he called, the better he got and the easier it became. In a long career he never called the wrong horse past the post.
In the late 1970s, the big time beckoned him in at last. By then he was at the top of his game and could call two flies crawling up a wall like it was a Wimbledon final. But at the height of his craft, an old demon caught up with him. Not the punt or the drink, but a fear of flying. Plagued by dreams of falling and always scared of heights, Warren refused to get on the plane for the 1984 Olympics and fulfil his duties as head presenter and expert of 32 sports.
The network sacked him shortly afterwards. Suddenly Warren was riding the outer rail again. “But just because someone takes away the bike, it doesn’t mean you stop pedalling,” he would say later, “particularly when you’ve got a wife, kids and a mortgage.” So he went back to the country, and kept punching, calling greyhounds, pacers, trots, anything that paid. Sometimes he drove nine hours to call eight races for a $200 pay packet but he did it, anything to put the binoculars in the bracket. “I love it so much I’d do it for nothing,” was his refrain. Kerry Packer heard him say it once and barked: “Gimme back my money then!”
Packer brought him back from exile to Channel Nine and there he stayed. He conquered that fear of flying, although only on big planes and always on flights after midday so he could have a drink, all so he could revel in the deeds of Benji Marshall and Billy Slater and their ilk, bringing fans into the game on the swell of his voice while ushering in new generations of commentators, analysts, technologies and wave after wave of young men who ran with a pigskin in their arms and dreamed of that voice calling their actions into the history books.
In the end, for all the millions of words he’d given us, all the glorious moments he’d called and all the catchphrases he created – “shimmy-shimmy-whoosh”, “that’s not a try, it’s a miracle!” – Ray Warren signed off by thanking us, the fans “for allowing me to share a little time in your living rooms”. As usual it was the right thing to say at the right time.
