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February 2014 marked 160 years since the first press report concerning sport at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
A single sentence appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald describing a cricket match between the Garrison Club and the Royal Victoria Club on Thursday, February 16, 1854; "This match came off on Thursday, on the ground at the back of the Victoria Barracks, and excited unusual interest," the report said.
Since then, journalists, broadcasters, photographers and media professionals of all kinds have made regular prilgrimages to the hallowed grounds regardless of the season, weather and event. More sporting history has been made on the grounds of the SCG, Allianz Stadium and the Sydney Sports Ground before it, than any other precinct in Australia.
The constant companions of the stars who took wickets, lifted premiership trophies, or kicked goals have been the men and women of the media.
The Media Hall of Honour pays tribute to their efforts past, present and future.

Richie Benaud led the Australian cricket team in 28 of his 63 Test appearances.
He did not lose a series as captain and was the first man to complete the 2000 runs/200 wickets double in Test cricket.
From 1956 until his retirement as a player at the end of the 1963–64 season, Benaud combined sport with life as a journalist for&nbsp;The&nbsp;Sun&nbsp;and the&nbsp;News of the World,&nbsp;learning the art of reportage during his time as a police roundsman.&nbsp;
Benaud began his broadcasting career on BBC Radio in 1960, moving to BBC Television three years later.
Through his work in England and commentary for commercial TV in Australia, his voice was familiar to Australian viewers when he joined Channel Nine for the first summer of World Series Cricket in 1977–78. The commentary team he anchored became synonymous with televised cricket in Australia.
At the same time, Benaud never stopped writing — for newspapers, magazines and as the author of 10 best-selling books.&nbsp;

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Ernest Harold ‘Tiger’ Black was a 20-year-old hooker in St George’s reserve-grade&nbsp;rugby league side that won the club’s first premiership in 1938.
Injury ended his playing days soon after and he accepted an administrative role with the Saints before setting off on a radio career that continued into the 1970's.
Black began his commentary career at 2UW, moved to 2UE and established himself as a highly respected and popular figure at 2KY with his ‘It’s nice to meet nice people’ catchcry becoming a familiar term of the day.
Black was a fixture on the sidelines at league matches in Sydney, followed tours by the Australian team to England, France and New Zealand, called boxing with the same enthusiasm he gave football and hosted a regular Saturday morning sports show.
His forte was understatement.
An advertisement in EE Christensen’s&nbsp;Rugby League Yearbook&nbsp;described him simply as ‘Australia’s greatest league commentator’ and he was awarded the British Empire Medal in 1979, for services to sport and the community.
Black died in 1983 while his beloved St George were beating Easts in a semi-final playoff at the SCG.&nbsp;

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Described by his rival, Alan Clarkson of&nbsp;The&nbsp;Sydney Morning Herald, as ‘undoubtedly the finest all-round sporting journalist of my time’, Ernie Christensen started at the&nbsp;Labor Daily&nbsp;at age 18 in 1936.
Two years later he was covering the British Empire Games at the Sydney Cricket Ground. He worked briefly at the&nbsp;Daily Mirror, served during the Second World War and joined&nbsp;The Sun&nbsp;in 1945, where he established himself as rugby league’s No.1 reporter.&nbsp;
Christensen edited the Sydney premiership’s program,&nbsp;Rugby League News, for two decades and the&nbsp;Official Rugby League Yearbook&nbsp;from 1947 to 1978.
He was the inaugural president of the Australian Sportswriters’ Association and a president of the Rugby League Writers’ Association. He covered seven Commonwealth Games and also served as a judge at the Johnny Famechon–Fighting Harada world title fight in Tokyo in 1970, when the Australian originally assigned the task encountered visa problems.
He died suddenly in 1980, soon after he returned from the Moscow Olympic Games, his seventh Olympics as a reporter.&nbsp;

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John Corbett Davis was one of Australia’s first great sportswriters.
He worked on the renowned Sydney sporting paper&nbsp;The Referee&nbsp;from the inaugural edition in 1886 (when he was 18) to the last in 1939. He was editor from 1912 to 1939, a role he also filled during the 1920s at two other Sydney weeklies,&nbsp;The Arrow&nbsp;and the&nbsp;Sunday Times.
Davis wrote for&nbsp;The Referee&nbsp;using the pen names of ‘Not Out’ (cricket), and ‘The Cynic’ (football).
As a journalist and administrator, he was hugely influential in the evolution of cricket, rugby union and rugby league in Sydney.
He was a strong supporter of the concept of a ‘Board of Control’ to run Australian cricket, which put him at odds with some of the game’s leading players from the pre-War years, including MA Noble and Victor Trumper although these champions, like his legion of readers, never lost respect for him.
Davis died in 1941 and his remarkably extensive sporting memorabilia collection is archived with the State Library of NSW.&nbsp;

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Jack Fingleton opened the batting for NSW and Australia during the 1930s before achieving further fame after the Second World War as a journalist and author.
He started in newspapers at age 15 as a copyboy with the&nbsp;Daily Guardian,&nbsp;and was a full-time working reporter with the&nbsp;Daily Telegraph Pictorial&nbsp;and&nbsp;The Sun&nbsp;as he pursued his cricket career.&nbsp;
Fingleton appeared in three Tests during the bodyline series and was a regular in the Australian team from 1935 to 1938, at one point scoring five centuries in six Tests.
After three months as press secretary for former Prime Minister Billy Hughes, Fingleton joined the Canberra press gallery in 1944 and remained a member of the gallery until 1978. He also covered cricket series in Australia and England as a widely read reporter, columnist and radio commentator.
He crafted 10 books — including his classic on bodyline,&nbsp;Cricket Crisis&nbsp;(1946) — in a style that prompted Sir Robert Menzies to judge him ‘the best of cricket writers’.&nbsp;

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Ian Heads joined the Sydney&nbsp;Daily Telegraph&nbsp;as a copy boy in early 1961 and on his move to the sports department as a cadet journalist began covering rugby league, and swimming in 1964.
He was the chief league writer for the&nbsp;Daily Telegraph&nbsp;and&nbsp;Sunday Telegraph&nbsp;for 12 seasons from 1969, leaving newspapers to become managing editor of&nbsp;Rugby League Week&nbsp;in 1981.&nbsp;
From 1988 he analysed league and other sports for a variety of newspapers and magazines on a freelance basis.
At the same time, Heads became a prolific author, writing or co-writing more than 40 titles, including major histories and books with champions from a wide range of sports including cricket and the football codes to the Olympics and Paralympics.
A superb mentor for many aspiring journalists, Heads ran the Australian Olympic Committee office in the Main Press Centre at the Atlanta, Sydney and Beijing Olympics, and was a long-time president of the Australian Sportswriters’ Association.&nbsp;

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Frank Hyde was a first-grade footballer with Balmain, Newtown and North Sydney.
He won a premiership with the Tigers in 1939 and was Norths’ captain-coach when they lost the 1943 Grand Final to Newtown at the SCG.
He became a sports broadcaster at Radio 2SM in 1953, quickly gaining plaudits for his boxing commentary. He covered the Melbourne Olympics and, most famously, dominated Sydney rugby league’s airwaves for 33 years.&nbsp;
A much-loved figure, his signature line when describing a kick for goal was, ‘It’s high enough, it’s long enough … it’s straight between the posts.’
Hyde was a columnist with a number of newspapers and magazines, including the&nbsp;Sydney Morning Herald&nbsp;and&nbsp;Sun-Herald, the&nbsp;Catholic Weekly,&nbsp;Rugby League Week&nbsp;and the&nbsp;Bulletin.
Hyde was also a long-time panelist on Channel Nine’s&nbsp;World of Sport, a referee, coach, raconteur, recording artist (his&nbsp;Danny Boy&nbsp;was a top-10 single in Sydney in 1973) and tour guide.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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Alan McGilvray was an all-rounder good enough to play 20 first-class cricket matches between 1933 and 1937 and led NSW in 13 of these games.
McGilvray’s earliest radio reports were match summaries in 1934 and he was one of the pioneers involved in the ABC’s synthetic coverage of the 1938 Ashes Tests, when he and colleagues in a Sydney studio interpreted ball-by-ball cables from the UK and then called the play complete with artificial sound effects.&nbsp;
After the War, McGilvray was at the ground alongside former Test players Victor Richardson, Jack Fingleton and Arthur Gilligan describing the 1946–47 Ashes series with future notable co-commentators including Johnnie Moyes and Lindsay Hassett.
A staunch advocate for fair play, McGilvray hardly missed a Test in Australia, covered Ashes tours from 1948 to 1985 and followed Australian teams to South Africa, the West Indies and New Zealand and became ‘the voice’ of the Australian summer.
His final Test commentary stint in Australia occurred at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1984–85, after which he received a heartfelt standing ovation.

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Norman May’s broadcasting career began at the Sydney Metropolitan Surf Championships at Dee Why in 1957.
At different times over the next five decades, on television and radio, he enthusiastically covered just about every sport imaginable, including cricket, rugby union, rugby league, swimming, surf lifesaving, sailing, football and rowing.
He enthusiastically described 13 Commonwealth Games (1962–2006) and 12 Olympics (1964–2008), and was the perennial host of the&nbsp;ABC Sportsman of the Year.&nbsp;
Although May’s Olympic experience was prodigious and who can forget the ''Gold! Gold! Gold!''&nbsp;call in the men’s medley relay at the 1980 Moscow Olympics - for many sports fans the strongest memories are of him calling rugby matches for the ABC at the SCG and Sydney Sports Ground alongside Cyril Towers or Trevor Allan, and cricket Tests and Sheffield Shield games with experts such as Jim Burke, Keith Miller, Frank Tyson and Bob Simpson.
In 2000, he was awarded the Olympic Order by Juan Antonio Samaranch for services to the Olympic Movement in Australia.&nbsp;

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Johnnie Moyes played Sheffield Shield cricket for South Australia as a teenager before the Great War.
He was chosen to go to South Africa with the Australian team in 1914–15 but the War meant the tour did not take place and Moyes enlisted in the AIF earning the Military Cross in France after being seriously wounded.
Moyes played twice for Victoria in 1920 before moving to Sydney, to forge a remarkable career in the media.&nbsp;He was initially a correspondent for&nbsp;the&nbsp;Sporting Globe, then a reporter and news editor with the&nbsp;Daily Telegraph, the&nbsp;Daily Guardian,&nbsp;The Sun&nbsp;and&nbsp;Sporting Life.
After the Second World War he became a revered broadcaster with the ABC and author of 13 of the best books ever written on Australian cricket, including accounts of visits by overseas teams to Australia that are classics of tour reportage.
Moyes’ excited yet measured commentary of three dramatic finishes during the epic Australia-West Indies series of 1960–61, including the Tied Test, are now part of cricket folklore.

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John O’Gready’s often masterly coverage of major sporting events in Sydney established him as the best known of all the great photographers to have worked at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
Remembered today as the man who took the epic photograph of captains Norm Provan (St George) and Arthur Summons (Western Suburbs) in the seconds after the 1963 rugby league grand final, O’Gready ‘patrolled the sidelines’ during 29 grand finals and countless cricket, league and rugby union Tests.&nbsp;
He joined the&nbsp;Sydney Morning Herald&nbsp;photographic team in 1957 and over the next three decades built an enviable reputation through his reportage of major news and sport for the&nbsp;Herald,&nbsp;The Sun&nbsp;and the&nbsp;Sun-Herald.
O'Gready's photograph of Provan and Summons, two mud-clad warriors, one short, one tall — captured in a sporting embrace as a shaft of sunlight cut through the gloom — won the British Press Sport Picture of the Year Award and is now famously cast in bronze as the National Rugby League’s premiership trophy.
The equipment available meant he had one chance to capture the shot and he did not know the outcome until afterwards in the dark room.

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Sir Donald Bradman described Bill ‘Tiger’ O’Reilly as "the greatest bowler that I ever faced or saw".
In an era often dominated by batsmen, O’Reilly took 144 wickets at 22.59 in 27 Tests, bowling leg-breaks, top-spinners and wrong ’uns at near medium pace in a style Johnnie Moyes described as "intense, purposeful, hostile, relentless".
Working as a school teacher, O’Reilly was based in the NSW bush for three years from 1928, which meant he did not make his Test debut until 1932.&nbsp;
A knee injury forced his retirement in 1946 and almost immediately he was working in the press box at the commencement of the ’46–47 Ashes series for&nbsp;The Sydney Morning Herald&nbsp;and&nbsp;The Age.
O'Reilly occupied his position in the media to great effect for every subsequent Test in Australia until the Bicentenary Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground in early 1988. He also covered the 1948, 1953 and 1956 Ashes series in England.
Tiger O'Reilly's daily pieces were studded with insight and he was never guilty of poor grammar or lazy prose. His policy, he once explained, was to rely entirely on his long experience and to write ‘exactly what I thought in the most forthright manner possible’.&nbsp;

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In 1925, 20-year-old Ray Robinson, a junior reporter with the Melbourne&nbsp;Herald, contacted the English magazine&nbsp;The&nbsp;Cricketer&nbsp;to complain about their scant coverage of Australian cricket.
The editor invited him to contribute, beginning an association that lasted more than 50 years. Robinson became the cricket writer for the&nbsp;Star&nbsp;in 1933 and worked for the Australian Press Association in England during the 1934 Ashes series, his first of many tours.&nbsp;
In Sydney from 1939, Robinson was a sub-editor at&nbsp;The&nbsp;Telegraph&nbsp;and then a reporter and sub-editor for a number of Fairfax newspapers, including&nbsp;The Sydney Morning Herald&nbsp;and&nbsp;The Sun. He was also the Australian cricket correspondent for the London&nbsp;Daily Telegraph&nbsp;and had articles appear in papers and magazines around the world.
Robinson’s acclaimed first book,&nbsp;Between Wickets&nbsp;(1946) sold more than 50,000 copies. His later titles, especially&nbsp;On Top Down Under&nbsp;(1975), characterised by meticulous research and apt phrases, entrenched his status as one of cricket’s finest authors.

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Jim Shepherd was the first sporting director for Channel Ten in Sydney, responsible for shows involving many sports — including cricket, the football codes and boxing — between 1965 and 1970.
His passion was motor racing, especially the speedway, which he called at the Sydney Sports Ground and Sydney Showground for many years. Shepherd’s first ‘break’ in journalism came while he was a student at Sydney Boys High, when he had articles published by&nbsp;Australian Motor Sports&nbsp;magazine.&nbsp;
Shepherd began as a copyboy with&nbsp;The&nbsp;Sun&nbsp;in Sydney in 1950, quickly gained a cadetship and within a year was a sports reporter at the&nbsp;Daily Telegraph. He edited several national magazines before switching to radio, and then television.
After Shepherd left Channel Ten to establish a publishing business, he built a reputation as one of Australia’s best sport historians, writing and compiling a number of major reference works.&nbsp;

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Born and raised in Junee, Ray Warren’s earliest commentary experience was ‘calling’ marbles he’d rolled down a slope near the family home.
His first official broadcasting job was a Barmedman–West Wyalong rugby league game for Radio 2LF Young in 1966. Within three years he was in Sydney as 2GB’s No.3 racecaller behind Ken Howard and Johnny Tapp.
In 1971, Warren filled in as a league commentator, a precursor to getting the 2GB job full-time at the start of the following season.
Warren's first television experience came in 1974, describing midweek Amco Cup games for Channel Ten. He covered numerous sports for Ten, including Melbourne Cups, swimming and tennis, and called NSWRL premiership matches from 1983 to 1986.
He joined Channel Nine’s State of Origin commentary team in 1989 and seven months later was in Auckland calling Commonwealth Games swimming with Norman May. He was still calling swimming 22 years later at the London Olympics.
When Nine obtained the exclusive rugby league TV rights in 1992, Warren again became the game’s highest profile play-by-play commentator, a position he held without challenge for the next 20 years and more.

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For more than 50 years Gordon Bray has been Australia’s voice of rugby. He represented NSW Combined High Schools as a scrum-half but after leaving school, concentrated on his broadcasting career. His first experience as a TV rugby commentator came in 1972: France versus Tasmania in Hobart, where he was working with the ABC as a trainee.&nbsp;
Four years later, Bray called his first Test (for ABC Radio): France versus Australia from Bordeaux. He had funded the trip to Europe himself. In 1980, he became ABC-TV’s first-choice rugby commentator – taking over from Norman May – and quickly developed a reputation for his precise, passionate calls and his deep, sometimes quirky knowledge. Bray has now called more than 400 Tests, for the ABC and then commercial TV, including matches at every Rugby World Cup (1987–2019). He is also a qualified rugby referee. Beyond rugby, he has called at eight Olympic Games and 25 different sports at international level.

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Herbert H Fishwick was born in England in 1882 and came to Sydney in his youth. He joined the Sydney Mail in 1910, and began working for The Sydney Morning Herald as well in 1925, when the Herald started employing their own photographers.&nbsp;
Assigned to cover the cricket at the SCG immediately after the Great War, Fishwick was frustrated with the small lenses available; his action photos had to be enlarged to such a degree that they lost much of their clarity. He had a special &nbsp;40-inch telephoto lens made for his Graflex camera, especially for taking cricket photographs, and the results caused a sensation when his work from the 1920–21 Ashes series was seen in England.
Sports photography was transformed. Fishwick’s most famous photograph – of Wally Hammond cover driving at the SCG in 1928–29, with keeper Bert Oldfield crouched behind him – is regarded by some as cricket’s finest photograph. Sadly, the glass plate did not survive, meaning the image we see today is not as sharp as the original.&nbsp;

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Tom Goodman was born in Parramatta in 1902 and started in newspapers during the Great War as a 13-year-old copyboy at the Evening News. He remained there for 15 years, until the paper’s demise in 1931. Soon after, prior to the Bodyline series, he joined the Sydney Morning Herald, where he would cover Sydney’s two major team sports – cricket and rugby league – until his retirement in 1967.&nbsp;
He doubled as the Australian correspondent for Wisden for many years. Goodman was a revered figure to generations of Sydney sports journalists. The man who would take over from him as the Herald’s league writer, Alan Clarkson, would say in 2002: ‘There has never been a finer sporting journalist than Tom Goodman, a man who loved all sport and particularly those he covered with such distinction.’ In 1981, Goodman was among those commissioned by Rugby League Week to choose the first four Immortals. During World War II, Goodman first served with the Australian Imperial Force and then became a war correspondent for the Herald in South East Asia. &nbsp;

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Les Murray coined the phrase ‘the World Game’ to describe his beloved sport. Few men have played a more prominent role in enhancing the profile of football in Australia.&nbsp;
He was born in Hungary in 1945, and came to Australia with his family in 1957. He began his journalism career in 1972, training with the ABC for four years before working for two years on Fleet Street in London. Murray began his television sports career as a football commentator with Channel 10 in 1977, worked briefly with Channel 7 in Canberra before joining SBS when it was launched in 1980.
Soon, he was presenting and producing SBS football programs, and for the next three decades and more was heavily involved in all the major events covered by SBS Sport, including football World Cups, European Championships, Australian internationals and club competitions, and World Youth Championships. He was appointed Head of Sport at SBS in 1996, a role he retained until 2006, and he remained with the station as a commentator and analyst until 2014.&nbsp;

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As a taxi driver, Ray Hadley turned a chance meeting with a radio station executive into one of the most successful broadcasting careers in Australia. Hadley is the pre-eminent play-by-play caller of the National Rugby League era and continues the sport’s tradition of broadcasting excellence established by fellow Media Hall of Honour members Frank Hyde, Tiger Black and Ray Warren.&nbsp;
Hadley has won more than 32 Australian Commercial Radio Awards, dominated his mornings talkback slot, weekends with the Continuous Call Team and even won every ratings survey when he and his crew weren’t allowed inside grounds during the 2000 and 2001 NRL seasons. He has called five Olympic Games, five decades of State of Origin matches, the last NSW Rugby League grand final at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1987, as well as the first premiership deciders at the Sydney Football Stadium and Stadium Australia.
Hadley was recognised in the 2002 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for his significant contribution to fundraising for many charities and his services to sport as a broadcaster and in 2017 joined the Australian Radio Hall of Fame.

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Rebecca Wilson was born in Brisbane in 1961, into a newspaper family. Her grandfather was a newsagent, her father and brother journalists – a tradition continued by her eldest son. When offered a cadetship with the Brisbane Courier-Mail, she left university to join the newsroom.&nbsp;
After four years, Wilson moved to Channel 10 Brisbane, where she worked on rugby league, and covered major events such as the Brisbane Commonwealth Games and the Seoul Olympics. She moved to the ABC as a sports reporter before managing News Limited’s 2000 Olympics Division and 2003 Rugby World Cup coverage. She wrote a regular column for the Daily Telegraph and partnered with Phil Rothfield to establish the Sunday Telegraph’s feared weekly column Bec and Buzz. She was a TV regular on The Fat, The Footy Show, Offsiders and Sunrise, and worked at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics for Channel Seven, and the 2010 Commonwealth Games and 2012 Olympics for Foxtel. &nbsp;
Wilson died in October 2016 and is remembered as a pioneering female sports writer. ‘Rebecca showed that it was OK to have an opinion,’ wrote journalist Jacquelin Magnay. ‘You might not have agreed with it, but you certainly read it.’&nbsp;

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From the age of 14, after hearing Alan McGilvray describing the 1964 Ashes series in England, Jim Maxwell wanted to be a cricket commentator. He gained a traineeship at the ABC in 1973, and since then has covered more than 300 Tests around the cricket-playing world.&nbsp;
The distinctive Maxwell voice has been Australian cricket’s ‘sound of summer’ on the radio for many years, just as McGilvray’s was before him. ‘I had the pleasure of sitting behind Alan and learning his technique,’ Maxwell said in 2007. ‘When McGilvray came on, that’s when you found out what was really happening.’ Maxwell has covered sports beyond cricket, most notably both rugby codes, hockey (at three Olympics) and golf.
During the 1980s, he and Reg Gasnier called league for ABC-TV, and was the chief commentator for the ABC’s coverage of Saturday afternoon club rugby. &nbsp;Maxwell has produced numerous ABC audio presentations, written a number of cricket books, and released his autobiography in 2016, writing: ‘Cricket has given me a passport to many places and my life is richer for the many friendships that have radiated from this captivating game.’

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In 1983, 2GB staged a competition to find a new sports journalist. The only woman to make the top eight was 27-year-old Debbie Spillane, who had rarely missed a rugby league match at the SCG from the late ’50s. Though she didn’t win, the station’s sports director, Richard Fisk, offered her some part-time on-air opportunities.&nbsp;
Six months later, Spillane became the ABC’s first full-time female sports broadcaster and at the start of the following league season she took on the role of sideline commentator and interviewer on ABC-TV’s Saturday league coverage. She also called Sheffield Shield cricket, the first woman to do so, and worked at the Los Angeles Olympics and Edinburgh Commonwealth Games. In 1987, she left the ABC, initially for commercial radio, and over the next 15 years she filled a wide variety of roles, including working for Channel 10 at the 1987 NSWRL Grand Final. She was also a regular on Andrew Denton’s sports comedy show Live &amp; Sweaty.&nbsp;
In 2007, she released a book, Where Do You Think You’re Goin’, Lady? The Adventures of a Sports-Mad Redhead.

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Looking back at World Series Cricket, executive producer David Hill said, ‘We had transformed the coverage of cricket... realising of course that without Kerry urging us on to think differently, and to be bold and audacious in the coverage, and always put the viewer first, we would never have achieved what we did’.&nbsp;
Kerry, of course, was Kerry Packer, who as head of Australian Consolidated Press (which owned Channel Nine) launched World Series Cricket in 1977 after the Australian Cricket Board refused his bid for exclusive TV rights. Packer and Nine’s many innovations transformed the way all major sport was covered for television. Negotiations with the NSW Government led to light towers being built at the SCG, and the first day/night game was played in Sydney on November 28, 1978, with Packer famously opening the gates. His marketing department came up with C’mon Aussie, C’mon.&nbsp;
Peace was declared in 1979 and Nine covered international cricket in Australia for the next 40 years. Packer obtained the rights to State of Origin rugby league in the ’80s and the NSW Rugby League premiership in the ’90s, bringing the same level of broadcast excellence to the winter game. &nbsp;

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Mike Gibson was an exceptional print journalist when he moved into morning radio in the early 1970s and then, later that decade, into television, most notably as the co-host (with Ian Chappell) of Channel Nine’s Wide World of Sports. Gibson was also the host of State of Origin rugby league coverage and Summer and Winter Olympics broadcasts, read the evening news sports bulletin, and then, from 1997 to 2013, was the face of 720 episodes of Foxtel’s The Back Page.&nbsp;
Nine Network CEO David Gyngell reckoned he ‘revolutionised the role of the sports anchor’. After Gibson beat John Laws in the radio ratings, the US magazine Billboard described him as ‘the outstanding radio broadcaster outside America’. But sport was Mike Gibson’s passion. He could have studied law at university but chose journalism at 18. Five years later, he left for the UK, returning in 1966 to succeed George Crawford as chief league writer for the Daily Telegraph. The paper’s owner, Sir Frank Packer, saw Gibson as an ‘Australian Red Smith’ and soon Gibson was writing a daily column.&nbsp;

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In 1907, the year the NSW Rugby League was formed. Claude Corbett (a son of the prominent Sydney sports writer WF Corbett Sr) was a member of the Eastern Suburbs rugby union backline that featured Dally Messenger. 
 
Corbett had been a champion schoolboy swimmer and was already a journalist, having joined the Evening News as a copyboy in 1899 when he was 14. After missing selection for the 1908–09 Wallabies and then suffering a knee injury, Corbett concentrated on sports journalism. 
 
In 1911, as the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent, he was the first Australian writer to accompany a Kangaroo side to Britain. He became the managing editor of the Sunday Times, The Referee and The Arrow, before becoming the sporting editor of the Sydney Sun in 1925. He would remain one of Australia’s leading league and cricket writers until his death, aged 59, in 1944. 
 
His work during the Bodyline series was superb and controversial. Corbett was a life member of the NSW Rugby League, the first journalist to be so honoured. During a life in sport he covered events far and wide including Melbourne Cups and interviewing heavyweight champion Gene Tunney.

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Rex Mossop was a dual international, playing five rugby union Tests (1949–1951) and 12 rugby league Tests (1958–1960), and was vice-captain of the 1959–60 Kangaroo touring team that narrowly failed to regain the Ashes. &nbsp;Mossop did a little TV commentary work during the 1962 Australia v Great Britain rugby league Test series in Australia, and two years later successfully applied for the sports director job at Channel Seven in Sydney. The only directive he received from management was ‘be yourself’, and he applied this for the next 26 years, becoming the No. 1 rugby league identity on Australian television.&nbsp;
Mossop was a superb commentator with Channel Seven, and the forthright producer and host of the long-running Sports Action and Sports World shows, before joining Network Ten in 1986 after Seven lost the broadcast rights. His Controversy Corner segment, featuring household names such as Ferris Ashton, Col Pearce, Alan Clarkson and Noel Kelly, and pass-the-ball competitions were staples for league fans. He also called league on radio and football matches for Seven, presented the evening sports bulletin and covered Olympic Games.

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David Morrow’s&nbsp;media career&nbsp;began in 1971, at 2KM in Kempsey, where he&nbsp;became&nbsp;the station’s sports commentator.&nbsp;‘I grew up wanting to be a broadcaster, from the time I was&nbsp;a&nbsp;young kid,’&nbsp;he&nbsp;recalled&nbsp;years later.&nbsp;‘It was in the blood and when the opportunity&nbsp;arose&nbsp;I took it.’&nbsp;&nbsp;
Morrow&nbsp;joined the ABC&nbsp;in 1980, and&nbsp;soon&nbsp;established&nbsp;himself as a true&nbsp;sporting&nbsp;all-rounder. He was part of&nbsp;eight&nbsp;Olympic&nbsp;and six Commonwealth Games broadcasting&nbsp;teams, often calling the athletics,&nbsp;and&nbsp;covered&nbsp;just about all&nbsp;of Sydney’s major&nbsp;sports — including cricket and rugby Tests, horse&nbsp;and harness&nbsp;racing,&nbsp;football&nbsp;and golf.&nbsp;&nbsp;
He&nbsp;is best known as a rugby league commentator, on radio and television&nbsp;—&nbsp;especially when he was in partnership with the&nbsp;great&nbsp;coach Warren Ryan on ABC Radio for 13 seasons&nbsp;— and became renowned for his&nbsp;rare ability to call a country grand final one weekend and the NRL grand&nbsp;final&nbsp;the next, each with the same passion and precision.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Morrow&nbsp;was awarded an OAM in 2005,&nbsp;for services to the community,&nbsp;sport&nbsp;and sports broadcasting. He&nbsp;left the ABC in 2014, to become an integral member of Nine Radio’s top-rating ‘Continuous Call’ rugby league commentary team.&nbsp;

MEDIA HALL OF HONOUR

HONOURING THE PAST, INSPIRING THE FUTURE