Eels star Chris Sandow carries Cherbourg tradition LATEST IN LINE: Cherbourg product Chris Sandow. ON THE journey out of his childhood home eight years ago that would eventually lead to tonight's battle with the Brisbane Broncos at Parramatta Stadium, Chris Sandow passed a series of signposts defining his past and shaping his future. Three hours northwest of Brisbane, on the outskirts of the threadbare, knocked-about township of Cherbourg, is a forest of white crosses at the local cemetery where some of the greatest names in Australian sport are buried, including the enigmatic Jerry Jerome, first of Australia's champion indigenous boxers. Nearby are the local paddocks where on the red earth Eddie Gilbert, a local farm worker who needed permission from white authorities to marry his sweetheart, perfected bowling so fast that he once knocked the bat clean out of Don Bradman's hands. There's the Cherbourg State School where Sandow and Willie and Esi Tonga learned reading, writing, 'rithmetic and rugby league. And on the road that would lead him out of Cherbourg to the NRL, Sandow crossed the Big Shot Fisher Bridge named after Cathy Freeman's grandfather, the Wally Lewis of his people who was denied the chance to further his football career because of racist laws in the 1930s. Cherbourg is an Aboriginal settlement of about 2000, where despite economic and social disadvantages, juvenile crime and an epidemic of petrol-sniffing, the locals have been punching above their weight in the sporting field since Jerry Jerome won the Australian middleweight title at the old Olympic Stadium in Brisbane's Albert St in 1912, the first indigenous national sporting champion. Twenty years later, Eddie Gilbert produced the fastest spell of bowling Don Bradman ever faced while playing for Queensland against NSW at a new arena called the Gabba. "Eddie Gilbert and all the other great sports people from Cherbourg were inspirations to us growing up as kids," Sandow told The Courier-Mail yesterday. It's only a small community but because of all those champions of the past every kid who plays sport there wants to prove themselves. To be the best. That was what I was like as a kid. You didn't have much money but you had to make the most of whatever talent you had. We always wanted to be the best player in Cherbourg and growing up you had to prove yourself every time you got the football in your hands. Sandow, 24, left Cherbourg eight years ago for a start at Marsden High in Brisbane before stints at the Titans and Rabbitohs led him to the No.7 jersey at Parramatta. But he says Cherbourg will always be his home and he has sought refuge there in the times his rollercoaster career has come off the rails. "It's been hard coming from a little place in the bush to the city," he says. I've got my teammates but I've always missed my family and every chance I get I go home to be with them. Sandow says the remarkable sporting success of the little Aboriginal community, established in 1904 as the equivalent of a remote detention centre, comes down to tradition. "I think it's been passed down in our genes from generation to generation," he says. There have been great footy players and cricketers and boxers from here for 100 years and their descendants have grown up in Cherbourg with that sporting ability. Preston Campbell, Sandow's mentor at the Titans who has travelled to Aboriginal communities inspiring them to strive for the same success he and Sandow have enjoyed, said role models were crucial. "Chris has had to go through a lot of changes in his life and the environment of playing in the NRL is very different to living in a tiny bush town," Campbell says. The kids from Cherbourg have had to make the most of what little facilities they have and there is an abundance of football skill there. Chris had the drive to make the most of his gifts.