The ‘Roosters family’ guy with the NRL’s most confusing banner
Most rugby league fans won’t know Wayne Leong’s name but they’ve seen him on television, along with the banner he’s held up at Sydney Roosters games for more than a decade.
Its relevance to the foundation club prompts frequent confusion, but its prevalence exemplifies the lengths fans like Leong will go to support their team.
“We all look after each other … it’s a Roosters family,” Leong told this masthead on Thursday.
The banner he’s often seen holding depicts Family Guy Peter Griffin’s hypersexual neighbour Quagmire, wearing the tricolours, bearing his catchphrase “giggity giggity”. Many question why.
“It’s been there for years, never understood it,” one person commented on a recent post questioning the banner’s relation to the team.
“He has been there all season to be fair. I admire the commitment of the man,” another said, prompting the original poster to repeat: “what has Family Guy got to do with Easts?”
The answer, of course, is nothing really at all.
“Whenever [Quagmire] thinks he’s going to get lucky he goes ‘giggity giggity’ … it’s ‘hopefully we’re going to be lucky’, sort of optimism,” Leong said.
The original banner was made by another Roosters fan named Julie. Leong became its custodian after she moved to Melbourne. A modernised banner has emerged in recent seasons, the old iteration becoming “more tape than cloth” by the end.
Leong has been a fixture of Roosters games far longer than this season. He’s been a ticketed member for more than three decades, signing up as a “Freddie disciple” when Brad Fittler joined the team. But he’s followed the team since the 1970s.
“I was a little kid playing football in Taree and they were the team to follow, I sort of ‘picked and sticked’,” he said.
Leong said he has only missed one game this season, in Perth, to attend a wedding. The handful of other games he’s missed since 2014 were due to recovering from surgeries.
He didn’t follow the Roosters to Las Vegas in 2024, but he’s travelled to England for World Club Challenge games against Super League clubs Wigan and St Helens.
And he’ll be at Accor Stadium when the Roosters take on the Newcastle Knights in Sunday’s grand final.
Perhaps due to the ubiquity of the Quagmire banner, Roosters fans have adopted another depicting the show’s villain-esque infant Stewie declaring “Victory Is Ours”.
“He stays locked up until we win,” Leong said.
“Although this weekend, hopefully an exception will be made if the NRLW girls win, then he will come out … and then I’ll tape him up again for the second game.”
If nothing else, the banner, its reliable presence in the chook pen, and its somewhat esoteric nature show the lengths fans will go to support their team, even when that dedication takes a form that, to outsiders, might make little sense.
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