16/05/2026
Our Local History Reg O’Keefe - the ‘Big Fella’.
*This article first appeared in Issue 35 of Glen Innes News.
With permission I quote from an article John Hamilton wrote about Reg O’Keefe in The Glen Innes Examiner 15 March 1990.
‘Reg O’Keefe strode over the league scene like a Colossus in a career which spanned 27 seasons and saw Reg pull on his boots for an incredible 578 A grade matches.
The stories of his heroic deeds on the football fields of the New England area number almost as many as the games he played.
Reg’s six feet frame carried almost 15 stone of great strength.
Perhaps the fact that he was at his peak during the height of the Great Depression when the folks of Glen Innes paid their two shillings admission to watch their local heroes go round and just for a moment managed to forget the terrible drudgery of their menial existence gave Reg and his team mates something of a larger than life reputation.
Reg O’Keefe delighted the fans of Glen Innes with one astonishing performance after another.
‘There were 22 paid players in the Glen Innes competition around that time. And the standard was pretty good. A lot of the paid boys were from the city, Sydney first graders who came to the bush because they could make more money up here than in the city.
At one stage Arthur Pivetta and I were the only two blokes in the rep side not getting paid.’
And Reg continued to play the game for the love of it, repeatedly turning down good offers to play in Sydney and other cities.
He claims this was the reason that he never reached the pinnacle of being selected to play for his country, an honour many said he richly deserved. O’Keeffe earned a reputation as a fearsome tackler and a fine runner with the ball, with pace the equal of anyone in the game.
Because of his isolation from the rest of his team Reg usually trained on his own in Deepwater and always trained in his hobnailed work boots.
During his career Reg represented NSW Country six times and lined up for Northern NSW against the English tourists in the 1936 and as a second rower in 1946…’
