Leeds Rhinos Foundation are supporting our partner organisation Black Health Initiative Leeds to promote the campaign ‘Cancer does not discriminate’ during Black History Month.
To raise awareness particularly of Prostate cancer within the Black Minority Ethnic communities of Leeds we will be releasing articles throughout October which celebrate the diversity of Leeds based rugby players from past to present.
Our third article taken from the 'Leeds Rugby League Football Club 100 Greats' by Phil Caplan & Peter Smith discusses a difficult, enigmatic and brilliant, Ellery Hanley, who was one of the finest players of his or any other generation, and also one of the most controversial.
Born in Leeds. He led a crop of highly-talented stars who revived Great Britain’s flagging international fortunes during the late 1980s and ‘90s. On the field, Hanley could do everything: make breaks, score tries, tackle and kick goals. He was an inspiring leader and a supreme athlete and when his playing days were over he became an instant hit as a coach, both at international and club level.
Hanley’s best days were behind him when he finally joined his home city club, but he still became the key figure in an all-star team which, thanks mainly to Wigan’s presence on the scene, never quite fulfilled its potential. Blessed with great vision and superb handling skills, Hanley had lost some of his pace by the time he joined Leeds in September 1991. But he remained a remarkable support player, an attribute which helped bring him an astonishing 106 tries in 104 games in blue and amber, including 41 in his final season, a new world record for a forward, his amazing upper body strength made him both a fierce tackler and almost unstoppable as a runner, and it was not unusual for Hanley to score a hat-trick and make forty tackles in the same game.
Hanley was very much his own man, supremely confident in his own ability and indifferent to other people’s opinions. His refusal to grant interviews, even after some of his and his country’s greatest triumphs, did massive harm to the image of the sport. Had anyone else taken a similar stance, a legacy of what he saw as unwarranted intrusion into his private life, they would almost certainly have been stripped of the Great Britain captaincy. Hanley was allowed to get away with it because he was simply too vital to his country’s cause. Hanley won 36 Great Britain caps, including one as substitute, appearing for his country as a winger, centre, stand-off and loose-forward. He was skipper for the sensational wins over Australia in 1988 at Sydney and 1990 at Wembley and coached the home nation to a stunning first Test triumph in 1994, though he was never a member of an Ashes winning side.
One of Leeds junior scene’s brightest prospects, Hanley signed professional forms for Bradford Northern in 1978, making his senior debut three years later. After scoring 55 tries in 1984/85, a record for a non-winger, he joined Wigan for a massive £150,000 fee in 1985, touching down 63 times in his debut campaign. Hanley was a dominant figure as Wigan became arguable Britain’s greatest ever club side, Hanley winning every honour in the game and skippering the cherry and whites to three successive Challenge Cup final triumphs. Hanley won the Lance Todd Trophy in 1989 for his display in the Challenge Cup final win over St Helens.
Hanley finally came home in September 1991, when he joined Leeds for a world record £250,000 fee, supposedly as the final piece in a trophy winning jigsaw. With Hanley teamed alongside Garry Schofield, Leeds boasted British rugby league’s two most charismatic figures, but the partnership was an uncomfortable one and the expected flood of silverware never materialised. At almost any other time Hanley would certainly have inspired Leeds to a hat-full of trophies, but even his influence could not quite bridge the gap between the Headingley men and his old club mates at Central Park and he failed to collect a single winner’s medal during his stint in blue and amber.
Leeds did reach Wembley for the first time in sixteen years, however, as a wonderful display from Hanley powered them to semi-final victory over St Helens at Central Park in 1994. That was probably the finest moment of Hanley’s four year career at Leeds, as he led a magnificent rear-guard action against wave after wave of Saints pressure, before finally cutting loose to seal a famous win with two magnificent late touchdowns. But even Hanley couldn’t inspire Leeds to end Wigan’s dominance of the trophy, nor the following year, when the two sides again met in the decider.
Hanley was a Leeds Millennium Legend, rugby league’s Men of Steel a record three times and gained an MBE for services to the sport. He eventually quit Headingley in 1995, for a stint in Australia which brought down the curtain on his illustrious playing career. He later returned to England to coach St Helens guiding them to the Super League title in his first season. But his reign was marred by frequent disagreements with the Saints board and he was sacked at the start if the following campaign. The prompted Hanley to switch codes, to great effect, joining the Bristol rugby union coaching staff before being promoted into the England set-up. He surprisingly returned to the code in the summer of 2004 as a coaching consultant to former Leeds team mate Gary Mercer at Castleford but left after seven weeks having roundly criticised the player’s lack of professionalism prior to their eventual relegation.