hour. Bang, bang, bang straight over. He hardly ever missed." Simms has said: "Of course anyone can do it in training but it's harder when people are charging at you and the crowd is booing. Often I'd have to kick from weird angles under all sorts of pressure. Against Wests once I remember Mick Alchin coming around from the scrumbase to flatten me just as I took a shot. He hit me so hard that I went up in the air and came down flat on my back. But I was watching the ball go between the posts. I must have timed the kick just right." Of the field goal rule change, he has said: "I never really believed the league changed the rule because of me ... . But over the years so many people told me I was the cause that there must be something to it." Awards and honours In 2001 he was named in the Indigenous Team of the Century at the Eric Simms Challenge - A Tribute to Indigenous Rugby League, Redfern Oval, June 2001. The team was chosen by a panel chaired by then Senator Aden Ridgeway, a former South Sydney junior league player and then deputy leader of the Australian Democrats in the Australian Senate; other panel members were Ian Heads (rugby league journalist and historian), Frank Hyde, Roy Masters and David Middleton (a rugby league historian). The Eric Simms Challenge was described by the Rabbitohs' marketing manager as "a salute to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island players, past and present" and was a match between the NRL Rabbitohs team and a representative Aboriginal team, the Murdi Paaki Warriors, a development side from western New South Wales ("from the Queensland border, across to Burren Junction in the east, to Gulargambone in the south-east, through to Bourke, Cobar, Ivanhoe and down to the Victorian border"). Life after league In 1977, Simms returned to the family home, Chifley Sydney where he started work on the wharves, an industry in which he has worked for more than 30 years. He worked at Port Botany where the demands of shift work put an end to his coaching days and his rugby league career. By 1997, he was a foreman for P&O on the White Bay wharves at Port Sydney. In September 2008 he was living in a southern Sydney suburb and working at the Rozelle wharves.