OLD AND YOUNG BULLS COMBINE

RUNNING on to the rugby field for the first time with his son Stephen was a memory Nerang second grader Chris Williams will never forget.

The father and son, members of the Yuin Nation on the NSW south coast, debuted together for the Bulls last year.

Over the course of 12 months the Williams have grown together to become a central part of their team’s undefeated start in second grade.

Stephen, 19, is Nerang’s flyhalf and a junior Cyclones representative who fell in love with the code after leaving the Burleigh Bears in rugby league to play with mates at Bond Pirates.

Chris, 40, is his adoring dad, best friend and the team’s hooker, who came out of sporting retirement to take the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play alongside his eldest child in a sport that had captured their hearts.

“As Indigenous people we’re more well-known to play rugby league,” the elder Williams said.

“If you look at the NRL at the moment you see Josh Addo-Carr, Latrell Mitchell, and growing up in a small Indigenous community we all aspired to be someone like that.

“Unfortunately in rugby union Indigenous people don’t have that same profile on TV and unfortunately in Gold Coast rugby I don’t know if there are many players who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

“As a father and son who do, it makes it pretty special.”

Their journey towards the Game They Play In Heaven began in 2014, when a group of Stephen’s mates invited him to join them at Bond Pirates for an all-conquering season that ended with the Brisbane junior premiership.

“I left to have a go at something different and fell in love with it,” Williams said.

“There was just so much more options. I’d never made a rep team in rugby league and after two years in rugby I’d made the Cyclones.”

Chris signed on to help coach his son’s team and was soon bitten by the rugby bug as well.

It was while the pair were supporting a friend of Chris’s at Nerang in 2020 that the idea to take the field together became a reality.

“Stephen was at an unfortunate age where as young men they gain employment or girlfriends or study so sport gets put on the backburner,” Williams said.

“If you look around now they don’t have a competition for under-18s and or under-19s on the Gold Coast so for him to play rugby it meant stepping up into seniors, which was an opportunity that fell into my hands.

“As a father and son we were joking around about when we went out to Nerang and I said, ‘what do you think?’. We went to training and signed up that week.”