He was a part-time bouncer and accomplished amateur boxer who morphed into rugby league’s original super-coach.

A quintessential Jack of all trades who grew to be the only man to guide two different clubs to successive grand final triumphs.

But hands up if you knew that Jack Gibson, after leading the Roosters to back-to-back premierships in 1974-75, orchestrated Parramatta’s historic and hoodoo-busting title-winning hat-trick from 1981 to 1983 in a school bus.

That’s right, a school bus.

Revered as the greatest innovator rugby league has ever known, Gibson rarely courted convention.

Captained by five-times premiership winner Steve Edge and featuring too many all-time greats to list, Parramatta’s triple grand final hero Brett Kenny has recalled how Gibson educated his then-homeless Eels from literally behind the wheel.

“After Cumberland Oval got burnt down after the ’81 grand final, we used to train at Granville Park and there wasn’t a lot of room there,” Kenny told AAP.

“So actually Jack bought an old bus and that’s where the first-grade side used to have their team meetings – in the bus.

“We’d all get on there and take a seat and Jack would sit in the driver’s seat.

“He’d have Ron Massey there and Jack would have one of those big sketch books and he’d write everything down; everything about every individual player and what they did in the game – what mistakes they made, if any, and then give you a rating out of 10.”

As far as coaches go, Gibson was as close to a 10 out of 10 as they come.

He was so respected that Kenny initially feared him.

“I gotta admit I was a bit overawed when Jack first arrived at the club,” the champion five-eighth said.

Kenny remains the only player to bag try-scoring doubles in three consecutive grand finals.

“When he arrived, I was only 20 and had only been there 12 months, but I’d seen him and heard stories and he always used to wear that big coat and I often wondered ‘what the hell has he got under that coat?’ Kenny said.

“You used to think he knew people in the underworld or whatever, gangsters …”

But Kenny quickly learned that under that big coat lay a big heart, a legendary dry sense of humour and an unrivalled ability to think outside the box.

An NFL lover, Gibson was the first coach to introduce offside touch football to training, the first to give rugby league “The Wall”, “The Wedge” and “Sneaky Pete” – a move Peter Sterling despised because he’d usually end up flattened after accepting a sly short ball from Bob O’Reilly.

And always the first to stretch the boundaries in search of success.

“Jack would look at the rules and go ‘well, there’s nothing illegal about that’,” Kenny said.

“So then of course when we did it, everyone would start blowing up and saying ‘that’s illegal’.

“But it wasn’t.”

Gibson was a thinking coach who made his players thinking footballers with his famous one-liners.

And that’s all Parramatta’s star-studded class of the 80s – which included Eric Grothe, Mick Cronin, Steve “Zip Zip Man” Ella, Kenny, Sterling, Ray Price, Edge and O’Reilly – needed.

“Sterlo mentioned at training once that he wasn’t happy with his kicking game,” Kenny recalled.

“He said: ‘I’ve been able to get the ball away. I can kick it clear. That’s not a problem.

“But I can’t find the ground. I’m always kicking it to the fullback or wingers’.

“And Jack said, ‘Mate, I’ll give you a tip; kick to the seagulls.

“We are out at Granville Park in the Parramatta area thinking what the hell is he talking about. We’re looking around and of course there’s no seagulls.

“So it wasn’t til we played at the Sydney Cricket Ground probably a week or two later and we were in the dressing room and watching the reserve-grade game and we looked down and you could see all these seagulls on a certain part of the ground.

“It was almost like we all saw it at the same time and thought ‘shit yeah, where there’s seagulls there’s no players’.”

But one particular Gibson line will resonate with Kenny forever and it came when the Eels clung to a 7-6 half-time lead over Newtown in the 1981 grand final.

Parramatta were playing poorly and Kenny expected a rocket from the coach.

“Instead Jack just gave us a couple of pointers,” Kenny said.

“Then he said: ‘That’s all I’ve got to say but I’ll leave you with this: you’ve got 40 minutes to do something about this game and you’ve got the rest of your life to think of the result’ – and walked out.”

Forty minutes later and the Eels were savouring their maiden premiership.

It was the first of three straight, a feat not achieved since.

Kenny doesn’t believe the Eels could have done it without Gibson calling the shots in his unique way, and allowing his players to use their natural abilities.

“We just needed Jack to add the final touch, the polish to the team,” said the “Boy Kenny”, as Gibson used to call him.

“I always described him as a cryptic coach because he would never give you a straight answer.

“His answer was to kick it to the seagulls so then we’d have to think about that and I believe that’s why we became better footballers.

“He just wanted us to think about the game, think about situations in the game and what we could do and how we could get around that.

“He truly was a super-coach.”