Few rugby league players are more notorious than John Elias. The fearsome-looking forward not only intimidated his opponents on the field for first grade clubs like Canterbury, Wests and Balmain, he also led a double life off the pitch as a career criminal.
After serving an eighteen-month sentence in Long Bay Goal at the age of sixteen, in his life away from football he became a part of the seamy Sydney underworld, working as a standover man and enforcer, and orchestrating illegal bookmaking rings.
Loved by his friends and feared by his enemies, John Elias life story is one of the most colourful in Australian sport, as he careered between league at the highest level, and long years in jail for crimes as various as gun and drug dealing and the shooting of a hated rival.
Sin Bin is John's incredible story. You'll never look at John Elias, or Rugby League, the same way again.Sin Bin is John's incredible story. You'll never look at John Elias, or Rugby League, the same way again.
John Elias was a preacher in Wales in the first half of the 19th century, as part of the Welsh Methodist revival. His preaching was noted as being exceptionally powerful, "as if talking fire down from heaven". On one occasion it is said he preached to a crowd of 10,000 people.
He was a strict High-Calvinist who believed in the literal truth of the Bible. At one stage he argued strongly for the controversial doctrine of Elected Salvation, meaning that salvation was pre-ordained for a select few. He came to be known as The Methodist Pope because of his forthright views.
Despite his wide interests, he was a religious conservative who opposed all forms of political Radicalism as well as the assertion, popular at the time amongst Nonconformists in Wales, that "the voice of the people was the voice of God".
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