CELEBRITY SWINGER: Dan Stains

FOR A rugby league prop whose goal in life was once to be the hardest hitting defender in the competition, Dan Stains is very much a spiritual man and a deep thinker.

The son of a battling dairy farmer in East Cooyar, near Toowoomba, Stains overcame obstacles to fashion a remarkable career in rugby league, captaining Cronulla, playing State of Origin for the Maroons, and representing Australia at international level.

But through it all, and into his post-football career, Stains has been conducting an ongoing search for inner peace, self-belief and a genuine purpose in life.

Now, after a coaching career that never really got off the ground and two failed marriages, he says he’s found it – a happiness based on loving all of life, especially himself, and being in the present, appreciating the time he has right now.

And he says golf has played a key role in discovering the inner peace he had sought for so many years.

Dan Stains was a standout performer for the Cronulla Sharks, playing 135 games in the top grade.

“Golf has given me a purpose,” he said after a Sunday morning round at Maroochy River, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, where Stains has lived for most of the past two decades.

He took up the game only five years ago and now, having just turned 61, plays off a handicap of 14.

“I love playing with mates, trying to get better, and it gives me something to do,” he said. “I had a few lessons, watched YouTube videos and picked up tips as I went along.

“At my age the bottom line is that I’m not going to get much better. I just love my Wednesday round, having fun, and competing for a few bucks. It brings you into the present moment.”

Stains has always been wary of what would follow each step of his amazing life; what would he do after his playing days; after his coaching career; after his marriages broke up? He even wrote a book about it. 

‘What Now’ is written for people going through times of change, reflects on Stains’ search for the most powerful transformational force available, and chronicles a football career that began with barefoot matches on a field full of holes at Stains’ tiny local Darling Downs primary school.

His dad died when he was just four. After battling to make it profitable, his mother sold the farm and moved the family to Toowoomba, where she resumed her career as a teacher. Further tragedy followed when Stains’ sister Madeline died in a road accident.

Through it all, he found comfort in rugby league. He made the Toowoomba and Queensland Under 12 teams, was selected for the Queensland Under 18 side, and represented Valleys in the Toowoomba A grade competition from the age of 18.

Stains then moved to Brothers in the Brisbane competition, lured by the fact Ross Strudwick was the coach. 

From his teenage years Stains had always yearned to coach. His ambition was to learn from the best coaches he could find, then take all of that knowledge back to Toowoomba, where he would coach the Valley Roosters.

The best coach of the time was Jack Gibson, and when the opportunity came to join Gibson’s squad at Cronulla, Stains snapped it up. “I’d crawl over broken glass to come and play for you,” he told Gibson when the phone call came.

Always a Maroon. Dan Stains with his Queensland Origin-inspired golf buggy.

Stains went on to play 135 games over seven seasons for the Sharks, usually as a front-row forward, second-rower or hooker. He captained both Cronulla and the Balmain Tigers, where he played 35 games in 1995-96, and had a year with Halifax in the 1989-90 UK season.

Stains was chosen for the first of his four Origin games in 1989 and was part of the Kangaroos tour of New Zealand that same year.

After his playing days were over, he coached the Balmain Reserves team for two seasons before being appointed coach of the London Broncos in Britain’s Super League. 

After beginning with 10 straights wins, Stains’ Broncos went into a steep decline, lost the Challenge Cup final, performed dismally the following season, and Stains paid the price by being sacked.

He returned to Australia, settled on the Sunshine Coast and bought a mechanical repair business, an occupation he thought suitable for a former apprentice fitter and turner. The company did very well.

A decade later he sold the business, jetted to Europe with his second wife Jen, trekked the 800km El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage through France and Spain, then detoured to China, where he was a physical education teacher in Shanghai, and coach to China’s fledgling women’s rugby union team.

He returned to the Sunshine Coast and opened a physical fitness centre where one of his clients, Ross Forbes, talked him into taking up golf.

Stains now plays two or three times a week, navigating his maroon golf buggy bearing his signature ‘FOG 59’ livery – signifying his membership of the Former Origin Greats brotherhood – around Maroochy River’s network of concrete paths.

That leaves him ample time to pursue his latest project – writing a second book, this one titled ‘Getting High’. He says writing is just as much a passion for him now as rugby league was in the past.