How Shane Perry worked as a mortgage broker, played without a contract and helped Brisbane to an NRL premiership

Right now, there are only three of them. If Brisbane wins on Sunday, then Adam Reynolds will join the club, but until then, it's just a trio.

Two of them are impossible to miss. Allan Langer is the Broncos' favourite son and still one of the princes of the city, almost 25 years after his retirement, and Kevin Walters isn't far behind.

But the third man who has won a premiership as a Broncos halfback is different. Langer and Walters still turn heads on the streets of Brisbane, but Shane Perry, not so much.

That is alright with him. Perry lived a real life well before he fed the scrums for the Broncos in their last grand final win, which happened 19 years ago this week against the same opponents they will face on Sunday, the Melbourne Storm. He is just grateful any of it happened at all.

But sometimes a diehard will twig that they have come across the most unlikely premiership hero in Broncos history and that is still a thrill for Perry.

"It happens occasionally. The tried and true Broncos supporters, they remember and they pull me up," Perry said.

"It's always a good feeling. It's a special group to be a part of, and to think they haven't won one in 19 years, it just shows how hard it is to get there and win one."

The long wait for a dream

Perry's beginnings in the NRL were humble. After claiming player of the year honours in the Queensland Cup for 1998 with Logan Scorpions, he signed with Western Suburbs in Sydney.

He made his NRL debut the following season as part of a Magpies team that struggled mightily in the club's final year as a standalone entity. They were high on spirit but low on results, winning just three games and conceding a record 944 points.

"Tommy (Raudonikis) got me down there, and it'd been my dream to play in the NRL so I couldn't pass up that opportunity," Perry said.

"It was a tough year, I was living out the back of Minto, and it was a big change from Queensland and a real eye-opener.

"But don't get me wrong, Tommy was a great coach and I learned a lot from that experience — even though there were a lot of tough times."

From there, Perry had a stint with Canterbury before returning to Brisbane.

Once back home, he established himself as one of the best players in the Queensland Cup, winning back-to-back premierships with Redcliffe.

It was good footy, and Perry had a good job working in the finance industry. For plenty of players, one go at the big time would have been enough.

But he never let go of his first-grade aspirations even as the years mounted and his time in the NRL got further and further away.

"It came into my mind (that I missed my chance), but I never really gave up on making it back," Perry said.

"As long as I was playing footy, I had that dream and I never lost it. But as time goes by and you get older, you start to question yourself — it would have been easy to give up, but I kept that belief.

"I had such great support from my wife Angela; she always allowed me to chase those dreams and she was a big part of me not giving it up."

Halfback troubles in Brisbane

Perry waited and waited for a chance that was no guarantee ever to arrive, while, in a post-Allan Langer world following his abrupt departure in 1999, the Broncos suffered the kind of halfback trouble that only comes when a club is trying to replace one of their true greats.

Walters was the first into the breach and he did a fine job, steering the club to the 2000 premiership before retiring.

After that, unless they could return to the past, halfback was a spot the Broncos just couldn't seem to fill.

They recalled Walters from retirement for a few games in 2001 and enjoyed one last ride with Langer when he came back for a final season in 2002.

But after that, times got hard. Shaun Berrigan and Casey McGuire got shoe-horned in there, even though they were better at other positions.

Brett Seymour, Shane Walker and Berrick Barnes were all given chances, but none seemed to take, and halfback proved to be a problem the Broncos could not quite solve despite their undoubted quality across the rest of the squad.

That quality included Darren Lockyer leading the way after moving from fullback to five-eighth, plus a backline containing Justin Hodges, Brent Tate and Karmichael Hunt, while the forward pack was led by the likes of Shane Webcke, Petero Civoniceva and Brad Thorn.

Halfback was the missing piece and, for once, it seemed like one of the few problems the Broncos couldn't solve through star power alone. In a team that seemed superhuman, they ended up turning to a regular guy.

A couple of weeks after his 29th birthday, Perry scored a two-week training window with the Broncos after the 2005 season, after Redcliffe linked up with Brisbane as an affiliate club.

"At the end of the two weeks, I went up to Wayne (Bennett) and asked if I could stay on, and he said yes, so I just kept lobbing up to their sessions," Perry said.

"They couldn't get rid of me. I started a trial game at the beginning of 2006 and that got me selected for Round 1, and it all went from there."

Even for a Broncos team, Perry found himself surrounded by stars. Of the club's 32 players that season, 20 played either Origin or Test football at some stage of their careers.

Perry, by contrast, didn't even have a contract that year and was one of the last top-line players to juggle a job outside of football.

"I was a mortgage broker at the time, so I'd do the field session in the morning, then go to work, then come back and lift weights at the afternoon or at night," Perry said.

"If I didn't play, I wouldn't get paid, so I did everything I could to get out there. I ruptured my PCL in Round 9 and was supposed to miss six weeks, but I came back after two.

"I had another arthroscope later in the year and the physios kept trying to rule me out, but I kept telling Wayne I'd be right and he was happy with that."

All told, Perry played 16 games through the regular season, and as the finals loomed, he emerged as Bennett's preferred option at halfback.

To do so, Perry leaned on the craft he had honed all those years in the Queensland Cup. A popular word for him at the time was "unfashionable," but that's not quite accurate.

Perry's play was conventional, straightforward halfback fare, the kind of game you learn simply by playing the position for a long time.

It was more meat and potatoes than a Michelin star, but sometimes the simple things taste best, and for a Broncos side hungry for success, it filled the belly.

He never overplayed his hand or went away from his strengths, and the simple approach worked as the Broncos found a stability in their mortgage broker that had been lacking in plenty more heralded halfback solutions.

"Being a bit more experienced helped me because Wayne gave me a simple job — get the forward pack around the field, and what an amazing pack they were, and just help us get to certain spots on the field," Perry said.

"Allow Locky to read the play, and when he wants it, give it to him. It worked well."

Perry makes it sound simple, and maybe it was, but that doesn't mean it was easy. If it were, anybody else could have done it on plenty of other Broncos teams, and, both then and now, nobody else has.

The only one of his kind

Brisbane endured a mixed season through much of 2006, including a five-match losing streak after the Origin period that almost put their finals hopes on the brink.

Three weeks out from the finals, they travelled down to Sydney to face Canterbury, who were counted as one of the premiership heavyweights.

"It was do or die, because there would've been plenty of pressure on us if we lost, but we beat them 30-0," Perry said.

"Big Petero, Thorny and Webby, they came together after the game and got us all together and said, 'we have something special here, but we need to make a sacrifice,' so most of us swore off the drink until after the grand final.

"I'm not sure about Hodgo and K (Hunt), they might have been the exceptions, but everyone else did. We had a big night that night, but it turned us around."

After finishing the season in third place and suffering an upset loss to St George Illawarra, the Broncos roared back to life with a 50-6 hammering of Newcastle in week two to set up a rematch with the Bulldogs in the preliminary final.

In what must strike Brisbane fans as a mighty omen, the Broncos turned around a 14-point half-time deficit to roar home and set up a grand final berth against Melbourne.

"It's an amazing week. The build-up, the feeling, it's hard to put into words how good the week is even before you get to the game," Perry said.

"I remember standing arm in arm with Petero before the game, listening to the anthem, every hair on my body standing up, and tears running down my face."

Perry had to wear a couple of shots in the lead-up to the game.

He was an easy target, given he was the only player from the Broncos 17 on the night who never scored a Test or Origin cap, and to this day, he's the only premiership halfback in the NRL era who never played rep football.

Webcke, who was playing his final game before retirement, went into bat for him.

"If players can't play with a bloke and feel confident in him, then he won't last in the side," Webcke told the Courier-Mail in the lead-up to the match.

"Shane Perry has survived for a lot of reasons, the main one being because he is wanted and accepted by the players.

"He knows how to talk to the big guys and push us around the paddock because he has that experience."

Webcke proved prophetic because in Brisbane's 15-8 shutdown of a Storm side featuring Billy Slater, Cameron Smith, Cooper Cronk and Greg Inglis, Perry did his job and did it well.

The Broncos were not a conventionally run side, given Berrigan attacked at hooker and defended at centre at the same time Hodges and Hunt swapped at fullback constantly, but Perry found a way to run them in a conventional way alongside Lockyer.

Watch a replay and Perry will stand out more than you think. He doesn't have the brilliant touches like Lockyer, but they never asked him to.

He especially grows into things late in the match as the Storm get desperate for an equaliser.

Perry's composure and experience, the product of all that footy he played in all those years spent waiting, comes through as his kicking game and terrier-like defence help choke the Victorians out of the match and send the retiring Webcke out a winner.

"There was about three or four minutes to go, and you could feel they'd run out of steam, and we were able to enjoy that atmosphere and soak it up for a couple of minutes," Perry said.

"Once that siren goes, knowing we'd done it, was amazing."

Perry played on for a few seasons after 2006, filling gaps in the halves and at hooker for Broncos sides that never quite hit the same heights again.

After a season in France in 2009, he finished off his career back in the Queensland Cup, this time with Norths Devils, playing until the wheels fell off.

Perry remains a stone-cold legend of that competition — with 218 games to his name, he is one of its most capped players and in 2015 he was named to its 20th anniversary team.

These days, he is still in the money game where he runs his own business alongside some partners as a financial planner and adviser.

In the years since his rise to a premiership, plenty of other halfbacks have tried and failed to join Brisbane's most exclusive club.

There is no shortage of talent on the list, from Peter Wallace, Scott Prince, Jack Bird and Anthony Milford, but each of them fell short.

Ben Hunt and Adam Reynolds both made it all the way to the season's biggest day, only to trip at the final hurdle, and now Reynolds has a second chance at gaining membership on Sunday.

Perry believes he will. Like any good Queenslander, he is backing the Broncos and he is confident about it.

"Melbourne are a great team and have been a great team for a long time but if Payne Haas has another big game, I don't think they'll be able to handle him," Perry said.

"Ben Hunt's line speed in defence last week was great and if he can lead that again, he can probably find a bit of redemption after the previous grand final.

"I think they get up in a close one."

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