Graham Lowe shows his lion heart

BY STEVE KILGALLON

Surgeons operated on Graham Lowe again on Thursday, putting yet more stents into a heart already riddled with plastic tubes, and adding more pages to a bulging medical file that records a triple bypass, multiple deep vein thromboses, pulmonary embolisms and strokes.

By Thursday evening, Lowe had checked out of hospital (despite appeals for him to stay overnight).

On Friday, when we spoke, he still sounded exhausted.

Yesterday morning, when I arrived at his lifestyle block, he'd just climbed off his ride-on John Deere, having mowed his entire section.

Lowe does respect the medical profession. It was his doctor who decided he could have more children.

The same medic, cardiologist Warwick Jaffe, agreed he could take the chief executive's job at NRL club Manly, and still gave his blessing after Lowe collapsed on Monday, boarding pass and passport in hand, as he prepared to fly to Sydney to start work.

But Lowe has long since decided that his erratic health should have little say in how he conducts his life.

"Some would argue that at 63 years old, with the aggressive coronary disease that I have, you should be looking at other ways to live your life," he says.

"Most of my friends are trying all the new golf courses in Fiji and Singapore, and I've been learning new songs and dances with the kids, and now I've put my head back in the [NRL] cage."

Earlier this year, Lowe wrote a book called Me and My Little Blokes, a short, rather heartfelt volume which married practical parenting with an ode to his twin sons, six-year-olds Jack and Sam, and was particularly notable for having the phrase `Dad, wipe my bum!" across the back.

It's his boys, he believes, who have kept him young, and he agrees that he wouldn't have taken this job if they weren't around.

"It's one of the most fantastic things: they've given me a confidence that I had lost and I think they have returned me to me, if that makes sense."

Manly, one of league's most historic, and most troublesome, clubs, has interfered with Lowe's health before. A substantial chapter of his medical records was written during his three-year spell as their head coach, and it was the triple bypass that forced his retirement from the club in 1993.

"I can remember one instance going down to practice with 72 aluminium clips in my head after an operation," he laughs. "How ridiculous is that?"

Only a little less than giving his first team talk as Queensland coach before the third State of Origin game in 1991 from the intensive care unit at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney after suffering a DVT. The Queensland players gathered around a speakerphone in captain Wally Lewis's bedroom. He later took training from a bath-chair at the sideline, using a loudhailer.

He says that, back then, his life had no balance and his work was all-consuming. Will the new, improved Graham Lowe be the most relaxed chief executive in the NRL? "I think I will," he says. "I'm not going to let it eat me at all."

The Manly board is infamously riven between factions led by its chairman, Scott Penn, and major financial backer, Max Delmege, a rift that looms as Lowe's first real challenge when he starts work on January 11. Appointing him as chief executive last month was a rare unanimous decision, a measure of Lowe's lasting legacy (and of the influence still exerted by his strongest supporter, former chair Ken Arthurson).

The factions made another such call on Tuesday that his job was unaffected by his collapse.

Lowe was first approached about the job by board member Jack Elsegood – a junior player during his coaching reign – but it took a second call to make him consider it seriously.

"My CV could fit on the back of a postage stamp," he says. "I thought it pointless putting myself up against young guys with all the marketing and business degrees.

"But I put forward that I had spent 60 years getting ready for it."

He virtually concedes that this will be his last job, the only CEO role he would have pursued, and almost the only thing that would have induced him to leave his Dairy Flat home.

He's planning to be away for two years – perhaps more, if the club wants him to stay.

"When I realised I was in a bit of bother, one of the first things that flashed through my mind was, `I've stuffed my chances here,"' says Lowe of the moment he realised his heart had let him down again.

He was unloading his bags at the airport when he first felt unwell, but it was at the gate, as he handed over his boarding pass, that he collapsed.

"I felt very disorientated, and I didn't know what was happening until I was in the ambulance on the way to hospital."

Initially, he feared he would be compelled to undergo another heart bypass, but later it was decided he would merely have further stents put into his arteries.

"I've already got a lot, I don't know how many, but I've got heaps," he says cheerfully.

Not that Lowe was nonchalant.

His father died of a similar condition at just 41, and he is full of heartfelt admiration for the medical profession, saying: "They display on a daily basis what is probably missing in football: selflessness. And anyone who says they are not frightened is an idiot. I wasn't frightened, I was terrified for a while."

If Manly wants to thank anyone that its new chief executive is boarding the plane to Sydney on New Year's Eve, it's Dr Jaffe.

"He has turned my life around a few times now," says Lowe. "When I first had discussions about starting a family with [his wife] Karen, I needed confidence in the future, so I went to see him. I came home from his office and said to Karen, `Let's have a baby.'

"If he had said `Don't take this job', I wouldn't have. I told him about the stress and the trauma of the role, but he said, `Life the live you want to live.' That was enough for me."

- © Fairfax NZ News