Ray Warren’s mic drop sees rugby league lose its voice

Second, it reminded all concerned that rugby league – particularly Origin – sounded better when Warren was calling it, much like cricket sounded better when Richie Benaud was holding the microphone.

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It was a point his Nine colleague, Phil Gould, made in the epilogue of Warren’s best-selling autobiography The Voice.

“Ray Warren is the voice of the game,” Gould wrote. “There will never be another.”

As far as Warren is concerned, his career started when he was six years old and he accidentally knocked over a jar of marbles and started calling them as if they were racehorses as they danced along the verandah.

Carbine! Playboy! Tulloch!

He became a policeman in the ACT but soon got his start in broadcasting at 2LF in Young alongside a young Ken Sutcliffe before cracking the big time as the No.3 race caller at 2GB behind his hero, Ken Howard, and Johnny Tapp.

The voice of rugby league, Ray Warren, after being inducted into the NRL Hall of Fame in 2019.Credit:Getty

He started calling rugby league on radio, then television for the Ten Network before he was dumped after refusing to cover the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984 because of his fear of flying.

Nine resurrected him when Kerry Packer bought the rights to rugby league in the early 1990s and he never looked back, his velvet voice as welcome as a cup of hot chocolate or smooth cognac when sitting in front of the TV on a chilly Friday night.

Warren ascribed to the theory of “light and shade”; hard, serious commentary mixed with colourful verbiage that set the scene for the viewer, that took us right there into the stadium.

He applied it to 99 Origins, 45 grand finals, three Melbourne Cups, swimming at the London Olympic Games and more horse races than he’d care to remember.

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He was always driven by nervous energy, but in recent years had been worried about making a mistake and “making a fool of myself”. He had seen his heroes hold on too long and was determined not to make the same error.

Warren walked out of the commentary box after last year’s NRL grand final knowing it was his last call.

That it took him six months to make it official shows how much he loved his code, his colleagues and especially his craft.

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