When you think of the greatest rugby league stars of all time, the likes of Wally Lewis, Johnathan Thurston and Mal Meninga come to mind.
The referee equivalent was Bill Harrigan.
FOX LEAGUE, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every game of every round in the 2025 NRL Telstra Premiership, LIVE with no ad-breaks during play. New to Kayo? Get your first month for just $1. Limited-time offer.
Harrigan officiated 393 first grade matches, 21 State Origins, 25 Tests and 10 grand finals. From his Origin send-off of Gorden Tallis, to being told by late Immortal Bob Fulton that he hoped he’d get run over by a cement truck, ‘Hollywood’ has been a part of some of the NRL’s most memorable moments.
He was one of the first referees to be inducted into the NRL Hall of Fame.
“Being inducted into the rugby league hall of fame, it’s probably the icing on the cake. I had a really good career. Did everything that I wanted to do in the game, very satisfying. Very humbling,” Harrigan said on Fox League’s Face to Face.
Harrigan quickly became accustomed to pressure. While becoming one of the youngest referees in first grade at just 28 years old, he also was working as police office in a tactical response group, where he had to deal with life and death situations.
“It was dangerous, it came about because there was a lot of riots. Probably the biggest dicey moments was the Bathurst bike races,” he said, referring to riots through the early-to-mid 1980s when the country NSW city hosted the Australian motorcycle Grand Prix.
“There was a guy in front of us throwing stuff. He was peeing into a bottle and throwing that at us and we were just getting smashed with bricks, rocks, Molotov cocktails. We kept getting smashed for hours and hours. They pulled the toilet block down with all the vessel blocks.
“I got knocked out.
“We were that short-staffed as soon as I came around, I had to get straight back up and out on the line. It was very scary.”
READ MORE
Mid-season report card: Ricky’s A+ masterclass as powerhouse rivals turn D-graders
Billy’s ‘unthinkable’ Ponga problem threatens bombshell switch after DCE axing — Crawls
‘Killing us!!!’: What really happened after wife’s Ricky sledge almost ended star’s Raiders career
Danger was also a too-common threat on the field.
After a 17-year-long refereeing career in Australia, Harrigan from NRL duties in 2003 and went to Papua New Guinea. He officiated five straight grand finals in PNG, where footy isn’t just a hobby – it’s a way of life.
“Some of their grand finals were classic and the way they played footy up there and the way they’re passionate about it. And then you’ve got shots being fired in the middle of a game, tear gas being fired. It’s an unbelievable atmosphere to be up there,” he recalled.
“They’re some of the best experiences I’ve ever had, and one of them was Mount Hagen Chimbu versus Mount Hagen. It’s the local derby and I’m up there refereeing it, and the ball went out to the winger in Mount Hagen. They’re down 30-28. He catches the ball off a forward pass. I’ve gone and as I’m going ‘forward pass’, he dives over and scores in the corner and then the hooter goes. There’s four and a half thousand people cheering and carrying on and I thought, ‘I am in a lot of trouble here’, because violence up there was a problem.
“They jump the fence and come running onto the field. And I thought I’m dead because I’ve just ruled out a forward pass and cost Mount Hagen the game in Hagen against their arch-rivals Chimbu.
“These guys hit me in the legs and I started belting them and I’m waiting for the security and the cops to help me. But there was just too many of them. I’m going down but I’m not going down without a fight, so I’m belting them.
“Next minute, these two blokes who got me legs lifted me up and I’m on their shoulders and they were cheering me and they started going, ‘Billy! Billy! Billy!’, which I thought was, ‘Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!’ I’ve gone from thinking I’m dead, absolutely dead, to a rock star to this day.
“The hairs on the back of my neck still stand up. It was an experience, and I get emotional because it was that good, It just brings back tears, it was a beauty.”
PNG made Australia look almost sedate, yet working as a policeman and referee made for an intense lifestyle.
“George Piggins was the Souths coach, and I remember he got interviewed and he says, ‘There’s two people in this life that I hate and it’s coppers and referees’. And you two were both.
“I think most clubs said, ‘Bill hated us’, and you know, they’re right. I hated them all, and that was the best way to do it.”
Known in his pomp for letting the game flow, Harrigan likens refereeing to conducting an orchestra: “You’re in the middle and you’re controlling just as a conductor controls the orchestra.
“If they’re playing well, you can virtually just stand there and not wait. So if I went out there and the players respected me and they just said OK, if we work with Bill, he’ll stick the whistle in his pocket.
“The coaches also know don’t give this guy any lip because he will send you packing for 10 minutes or he’ll have us 10 meters down the park just like that and I did that pretty much in the first couple of years. I’ve actually had a player in the bin every game and it was because I wouldn’t cop anything.
“I was privy to a lot of sledging that was going on, packing down scrums, play the balls. There’s a lot of sledging and nobody else could hear it. Sometimes I get a few words, choice words said me and I’d bark back with a few choice words, so it was tit for tat.”
There was one sledge that Harrigan would not tolerate: cheat.
“That was the one word you couldn’t say to me, period.
“I couldn’t cop the unacceptable comments and if we go to the ‘cheat’ comment, I think seven or eight players ended up off. They were the eight players that called me a cheat.
“They question your integrity, and you can only give away integrity by being biased or by cheating, that is something I’m not.”
Tallis made the mistake of using the forbidden word in State of Origin I, 2000, in Sydney — and duly became the first player in Origin history to be sent off.
“Gorden Tallis used the word cheat with a couple of other expletives, but he was jumping up and down because he said there was a knock on down in the field of play, that’s all. I just kept saying ‘Play on, we’re playing on. There was no knock-on play on’,“ Harrigan recalled.
“We kept going then he turned around, he said, ‘Mate, you are a worse referee than Steven Clark’, and I went, ‘You’re going to go to the bin for that’.
“We kept going down and then Ryan Girdler scores in the corner and I’m looking for him and he’s coming over and he’s giving me a gob full. I thought, I’m going to bend this bloke. I’m just not going to cop this crap.
“I’ve copped it all the way down the field. I’m not copping it here and then he let go with it … he threw the word ‘cheat’ in, as soon as he threw the word ‘cheat’ in it was, ‘Now you’re gone, just go’. It didn’t matter how big the stage was.
“Straight after the game he came into the sheds and he said, ‘Mate, I shouldn’t have said what I said, I sincerely apologies’. I said, ‘Accepted, let’s leave it at that’”
“Just as he was leaving, he said ‘But there was still a knock on’.
“Unknown to anybody, we ended up meeting at my mum’s place over tea and scones, jam and cream, and we talked about our differences. The only people that knew this meeting was on was Wayne Bennett, Gorden Tallis, myself and my mum and dad. We resolved our differences over tea and scones.”
