Jim Sharman, the name's got a real ring to it, by Roy Masters - 5th June 2004
(Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald)

Jim Sharman is a showman by name and by nature, writes Roy Masters.

'I'm the oldest living premiership footballer," proudly pronounces Jim Sharman, aged 91, Western Suburbs fullback in their 1934 trophy-winning team, sounding like a man who doesn't intend surrendering his record any time soon.

In March, the Magpies awarded him life membership, 64 years after he last played for the club.

Life membership is bestowed after 10 years' service and Jim played from 1934-40, although he was captain in his final year, but what the heck, if a bloke makes it to 91, what's a miserable three years?

He never misses a Wests reunion and clearly overlooks the fact the club's modern reincarnation is a joint venture with Balmain and named Tigers.

"I've got my eyes on the young Magpies," he said of the team that plays the Storm in Melbourne tonight.

"They're coming good."

Jim is the only child of Jim Sharman I, the man who started tent boxing in Australia in 1911, challenging the locals at agricultural shows from Cairns all the way to Mt Gambier.

Young Jim lived with his grandmother in a Narrandera boarding house before accepting an offer from a wealthy Ashfield publican to play for Wests.

The residential rule applied and he was required to front the formidable NSWRL secretary, Harold Mathews.

Mathews: "State your full name."

Answer: "James Michael Sharman."

Mathews: "Where do you live?"

Answer: "I don't know."

Mathews: "Where does your father live?"

Answer: "He doesn't live anywhere."

Mathews: "And your mother?"

Answer: "She lives with my father."

Insofar as Jimmy's parents lived in a caravan, his answers were entirely truthful.

Jimmy snr, steeped in lower gymnasia, had earlier tried to push his son to higher education, boarding him for two years at St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill but, according to Jim: "I was a f.....g log of wood in class."

He succeeded only in playing fullback for the college, proudly pointing to a giant photograph of the 1931 team where he sits at the feet of the masterful coach, Brother Henry.

"Greatest coach who ever lived," Jim says, leaving no room for debate.

In 1946, Jim joined his father on the boxing troupe and travelled Australia until government medical regulations banned tent boxing in 1971.

"It's the longest a footballer has ever been on holidays," he says of his quarter century following the shows, expressing it with such conviction it didn't seem wise raising the matter of today's talented 17-year-old footballers, who can still be on vacation 17 years later.

Jim inherited the family business in 1955, attending 60 shows a year, banging a big drum, challenging likely lads in the crowd to "take a glove", parading a troupe of skinny young Aboriginals clad in dressing gowns, each with the whack of a horseshoe in their gloves.

Jim turned a blind eye to kids who snuck under the tent but it was hard to get his money off him, the bell always seeming to ring when one of his troupe was in trouble.

"We had a permit for 60 years and not one complaint in four states," he says.

Asked to name boxers who got their start at the shows, he says: "There were so many, you couldn't print them all in The Sydney Morning Herald. We got George Bracken at 16 and Jack Hassen, both of them from Charters Towers."

Conversations with boxers who knew the Sharmans can be exercises in canonisation. Because some of the eulogies are expressed by men who fought for them, the testimony carries unique conviction in a sport where exploitation is a cheerful tradition.

"Dad was a hard taskmaster," Jim says.

"He was crooked on fighters who drank grog. I had to sneak away to have a beer."

Good father-son boxing stories are rare - the relationships of Joe and Marvis Frazier, Bill and Buster Douglas, Bob and Tony Tucker are tales of recklessness and over-caution and the jury is still out on Tony and Anthony Mundine.

A great father often must feel he is the maker, not the made.

But nearly 30 years after his father died, aged 79, on November 18, 1965, Jim says: "I'm a fortunate son. My old man was a great old bloke."

Jim's wife, Christina, died on Melbourne Cup night last year after 65 years of marriage. Their only child is also named Jim, another theatrical entrepreneur who directed commercial blockbusters such as Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Show, as well as Mozart's Don Giovanni and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

The third Jim has also set one of these records the Sharmans accumulate.

"He's the only bloke to turn down a Churchill scholarship. He was in Japan and came back to Australia produce Hair."

After a near century of promoting shows from tent boxing to opera, it's amazing that the Sharman name should be so close to the words "showman" and "shaman", the itinerant spiritual healers so common in South America.

Almost to validate this, he points to a framed certificate from the Royal Agricultural Society of NSW, given to him last year for his contribution to the Easter Show: "I'm the only legend in show business."

Other framed mementos decorate his Randwick unit, such as autographed photos of Jack Dempsey and Rocky Marciano and his scrapbooks are full of memories like wrestler Big Chief Little Wolf and sideshow freaks such as Zimmy the legless man, Little Mae West and Little Ubangi, a pygmy.

Asked to identify a grainy old black-and-white photo of two very small boxers either side of his father, he says: "Just midget boxers who used to fight in the tent."

The ring in those days was an amusing subsidiary, a playground in which the Sharmans exercised their already fully developed roguishness.

Pertinacious and peppery, Jim blames political correctness for bringing all those good times to an end.

Yet look at the heavyweight division of boxing today with Mike Tyson, a man who long ago made his sport a lurid show business, biting into ears, as if his chronic inability to exist in normal society has been all the entertainment value we need from the sport.

It was a thought best left unexpressed.

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