Here is a story that hit my e-mail inbox sent by somebody from somewhere. The publisher is AAP NewsWire. The publication is AAP Australian Sport. The author is John Coomber, Senior Sports Writer. I confess I do not know the places or the people of whom he writes. But the story is interesting and there is in it my favorite sting-in-the-scopion’s-tail: for who is to say that sport is less “dangerous” than mining? Here is the story as written by John Coomber:

Andrew Johns might never have been such a great rugby league player if his father hadn’t taken him down a coal mine when he was 15.

It scared “Joey” half to death and changed his life forever.

Johns and his elder brother Matthew grew up in Cessnock in the days when the Hunter Valley town earned its living from what came out of the ground rather than the grape vines that now grow on top of it.

Their father Gary worked down the mines, as had his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, whose family emigrated from a coal-mining village in Wales.

For Matthew and Andrew Johns, two sports-mad boys who neglected their school books, there seemed to be only one career option.

“They lived in a mining community. All my mates were miners, all the blokes I played football with, they were all miners,” Gary Johns recalled.

“It was just expected that the sons more or less followed the fathers into the mine.”

But Gary Johns had other ideas. He thought his sons needed to see for themselves what awaited them.

He got special permission from the mine manager to take them to work with him at the Newstan mine at Fassifern near Lake Macquarie.

The day he took Matthew there was a major cave-in.

“If you haven’t experienced it you can’t explain it to anybody. The noise, the dust flies everywhere and you can’t see anything for five or 10 minutes. It’s really black.

“He said after that: `I think I’ve convinced myself to try harder at school.’”

Some time later Johns took his younger son to see where he worked.

“The day I took Andrew we got to the opening of the mine, and we went down in the dolly car.

“We went down a kilometre and he got to the tunnel mouth and he saw the darkness and tried to jump out, and I’ve wrestled him back in.

“He was frightened before we even started, Andrew.”

Johns said the impact of the visits was profound for both his sons.

“I think it had a huge effect on them. They probably had it in the back of their mind that they would be miners, but when they experienced it, they didn’t want to do it.”

Around the same time, both boys were toying with the idea of a career in football and Johns believes the jolt of reality he gave them inspired them to train harder to succeed on the field.

One of the main reasons he wanted to keep his sons out of the mine was to shield them from the danger and injuries that blight the lives of so many underground miners.

“You don’t see many blokes work to retirement age in the coal industry - the legacy of the injuries that they get - the legs, the back, the neck, the deafness forces them off,” he said.

Johns himself was laid off eight years ago at the age of 47 when his body gave out.

Among the many injuries that shortened his work-life was a back condition that required surgery and leaves him with a bad limp to this day.

His neck was also damaged in a rock fall that knocked him unconscious.

The irony is that both his sons were forced out of their football careers prematurely by spinal injuries, but Gary and Gayle Johns, who have lived in the same house in Cessnock throughout their 36-year marriage, have the satisfaction of knowing that their sons have made the most of their talents.

The discipline of hard work instilled in them by their parents - and those mine visits - have much to do with their success.

Johns said the sight of his boys kicking a football and practising their skills for hours on end in the sports ground near their house became something of a town joke.

The locals used to shrug their shoulders and say “That’s just Matty Johns and his brother, they’re out there every day.”

Johns, who captained the Cessnock Goannas rugby league team and had a hand in coaching his boys, said they always had talent but stood out because they were prepared to work at it.

“There were some boys who were better players than them, but they never wanted to achieve and they never trained as hard as our boys did.

“They both put in phenomenal numbers of hours at the sports ground, just honing their kicking, running and whatever.”

According to Steve Crawley, the Nine Network’s director of sport, the discipline carries over into their television careers.

He said Matthew Johns arrives for every game with sheafs of hand-written notes.

“He doesn’t just turn up and watch the footy and talk about it. He’s done a lot of research and a lot of thinking about it.

“His work ethic, I haven’t seen anything like it in television,” Crawley said.

He believes Andrew has the makings of a superb analyst and commentator if he decides he wants to concentrate on it.

“I don’t think people understand how much he thinks about the game and the changes that he’s made to the game through his thought processes.

“I think that he can change commentary if it’s what he really wants to do. If he feels comfortable, and he’s got the right sort of space around him to be able to just read the game and tell us what’s going on before it happens.

“I think he can take us to a new level as far as the reading of the game goes.”

Crawley said Andrew needed coaching with his on-camera work, where he was like a shy country kid to begin with, looking at his feet and not knowing what to do with his hands.

But he has a real interest in television and its technical side, and he would be only too happy if Johns decided to concentrate on a career in television.

Gary Johns is proud of his sons, and what they have made of themselves, and can’t help thinking what might have been if he hadn’t taken them to the mine to show them what their lives could have been.

He and his wife got a shock when Andrew phoned them earlier this week to break the news of his retirement.

“We’re very disappointed for him but very relieved, too. We used to say to ourselves `God it’ll be nice when he retires’.

Johns said he and his wife had worried about Andrew’s constant injuries, and he is grateful that the seriousness of his neck injury was picked up when it was.

“He was so lucky. It was only going to take a bad jolt and he’d have been in a wheelchair.”