Col (rtd) Ian MacKay, WO2 (rtd) Barry 'Butch' Baker and LtCol Adam Boyd
By LtCol Adam Boyd.
Services Rugby lost one of its best on January 13, 2010 when Barry ‘Butch’ Baker passed away after a tenacious battle with cancer.
Well before today’s players were old enough to don a rugby jumper, a bunch of ordinary guys selected to represent the Australian Services Rugby Union (ASRU) in 1972 pulled off a not-so-ordinary feat that’s still got us talking 38 years later. Ssgt Barry ‘Butch’ Baker, a sapper who had served in Vietnam, captained that ASRU team. It was his sixth ASRU tour and it was to be his crowning glory on the rugby field. If you flick through the 1972 ASRU tour journal you’ll see the pride on Butch’s face as he clutches the trophy after their final and most celebrated victory on that tour.
Across many decades, the best rugby players in the Defence Force have fought countless pitched battles against the toughest rugby opponents in Australia and overseas. In 1968, ASRU’s performance against the All Blacks was viewed as NZ’s best contest that year outside of their test matches against the Wallabies. Butch played in that ASRU match, along side some bloke by the name of Bob Fulton. As if that wasn’t enough, Butch swapped his ASRU jumper for his Victorian jumper and faced the All Blacks again during that same tour. In recent times, the proud achievements of the 1994 ASRU team during their UK tour come to mind, as do the representative accomplishments of ASRU players like Jim Williams, Murray Harley, Angus Baker, and Kate Porter to name a few. But for me, the success of Butch’s ASRU team on that wet Ballymore rugby pitch in August 1972, where they rallied to topple Qld, the best provincial rugby team in Australia at the time, stands above all else. 27 – 25 was the final score that day and it signalled the triumphant conclusion to an undefeated tour which saw ASRU victorious against the country’s best representative teams from Qld, NSW and ACT, as well as Australian Universities. That feat has not been repeated again by ASRU.
Through Col (rtd) Ian Mackay, the 1972 ASRU coach and former ASRU captain, I had the privilege to meet Butch and his family a month before he passed away and tell him that the decades had not tarnished ASRU’s proud memory of his achievements as a player and leader. It was a small but very important gesture.
