‘I’d hate to see the ugly ones!’: Tina Turner’s love affair with rugby league

“Me and Cliffy Lyons.”

When Turner arrived at the studio, she pulled Quayle aside.

“If these are good-looking ones, I’d hate to see the ugly ones!” she laughed, before hugging Miller and Lyons, who was so nervous to be in the presence of the rock goddess he could barely speak.

And so rugby league’s unlikely love affair with one of the world’s greatest recording artists of all time began. In time, she became the voice, the face and enormous spiky hair of the game. For many fans, she still is.

As Quayle recalled on Thursday: “I’d gone from the game’s best-looking footballers to two of the least. But they were wonderful. And so was she. She never changed from that moment, through all the commercials she did for us. She wasn’t programmed. She was invested in our game.”

Quayle led the tributes to Turner following her death in Kusnacht near Zurich, Switzerland, following a long illness. She was 83.

Her association with rugby league attracted a new audience to the game in the late 1980s and early 1990s as part of the ARL’s push to entice more women to watch.

The league had engaged Jim Walpole, the advertising genius at Hertz Walpole, who had approached various artists to record Turner’s 1986 song What You Get Is What You See, but it just didn’t sound right coming from the mouths of others.

Then fate played its part in securing Turner.

Quayle’s assistant was Micki Braithwaite, who was married to Daryl Braithwaite, the lead singer of rock band Sherbet, who had been managed by Roger Davies, the Australian agent who also represented Turner.

“Myself and Paul McKay from Hertz Walpole met with Roger and he wasn’t interested,” he recalled. “He said, ‘No, it’s just not right for Tina’. A couple of days later he called and said, ‘You’ve got one day and it