AS THINGS tend to at the Bulldogs, it started with a crisis. An end-of-season atrocity no less, albeit in the days when such incidents were occasions more for chuckling than buckling up in the back of a police car.
Hugh Hazard's 34-year career with the club that was then known as the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs began in a swimming pool in Singapore. It was there that Peter "Bullfrog" Moore, the now dearly departed Bulldogs patriarch, smashed his head open - painting the pool red before anyone else could do the same to the town.
"Some time later, he walked into my practice at Belmore and said, 'Can you fix this?'," Hazard recalled this week.
Moore pointed to the wound on his head, which had become infected and formed an abscess. You see, the Bulldogs had, so the story goes, effected a patch-up job that would have left even the best under-the-carpet exponents of the time - and there were many in rugby league - shaking their heads.
George Peponis, the Bulldogs hooker in his first or second year of medicine, borrowed a needle from the front desk of the hotel, took some cotton out of a curtain and promptly stitched the boss up. "That's the story I'm told, anyway," Hazard said. "So after he came in and I fixed him up, he said, 'Do you want the job?'. We shook hands, and I've been there ever since."
Peponis is now the chairman of the club, and a little more adept at stitching patients, while the late Bullfrog's son, Kevin, will be coach next year. But Hazard won't be the club doctor.
At 66, Hazard will be retiring his own needle at season's end, which, for the Bulldogs, will be tomorrow. While outgoing coach Steve Folkes has rightly commanded testimonials and tributes for his contribution to the club over 30 years, Hazard has slipped quietly out behind him. Which is probably how he likes it.
But Hazard has been at the club for longer and witnessed as many premierships (six in that time) as Folkes. In fact, he claims to be something of a lucky charm - before he arrived, the Bulldogs had not won a title since the date of his birth, in 1942.
This season, of course, has been slightly different. In fact, through all the crises the club has endured - Coffs Harbour, salary cap breaches, player walkouts and the like - he says this year has been the toughest. Medically, it even beats the year more than a dozen players came down with glandular fever.
There have been injuries on a scale never seen before at the club, the likelihood of a wooden spoon and, of course, Sonny Bill Williams's sudden, controversial departure. "This year … we've never been that far down [the table] while I've been here," Hazard said. "It's been a very tough year for everyone."
Hazard has watched all the dramas unfold through those tiny rimless glasses. On the salary cap scandal of 2002: "We were going to win the premiership, but to lose all those points …" he says, his voice trailing away like those title chances that year. "It was hard to cope with."
And Coffs: "It was a very tough season … It was a terrible time for the club."
He has seen some of the best and the bravest. The toughest? Greg Brentnall, Geoff Robinson, Terry Lamb, Bill Noonan, and in the modern era, Corey Hughes. The worst injuries Hazard has treated? Ross Conlon's dislocated hip, and when Turvey Mortimer nearly bit his tongue off - "he never shut up, even with only half a tongue."
And so, with more letters after his name now than that fateful day when Bullfrog barged through his office door, another club legend departs. Not for the money of French rugby or because the club is heading in a different direction. Simply because wife Ann wants him at home on weekends.
"She's pretty keen to do something before we get too old and dotty," Hazard said.
He will still act as a consultant for the club, and will continue on various medical bodies. Everything else "depends on what the good lady puts in the schedule".
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