Western Australia has produced some champion ruckmen over the years, with the names of Farmer, Clarke, McIntosh, Moss, Michael, Slater, Boucher, Foley and many others always under consideration when discussions take place about an all time greatest WA team, but there are many good judges who would have a player who stood just six foot tall and played only a hundred and eight league games in their side.

Les McClements was a star in WA between 1941 and 1950, winning the Tigers fairest and best awards in 1946, 1948, and 1950, was club leading goalkicker in 1946, 1949, and 1950, and was runner up for the Sandover Medal in 1946 and 1947.

But it was at Interstate level that McClements shone brightest.

Debuting for Western Australia in the first State clash following World War Two, he led the first ruck, alongside Dave Ingraham and Vic French against South Australia in a game WA won by twelve points. Invariably among the best in his sixteen appearances for WA, he absolutely dominated in the 1947 Carnival in Hobart, sharing the Tassie Medal,giving a lion hearted display in a victory over Victoria, and winning acclaim universally as the best player in the land.

Western Australia provided the first ruck, with Merv McIntosh and Jack Sheedy joining McClements, when that year’s All Australian side was announced.

It was a lack of coaching opportunities in WA that was the catalyst for Les McClements to move to Tasmania, where he had been offered the job at Clarence.

His entry onto the football stage in the Apple Isle was spectacular.

On his first training night at the Tasmanian club, McClements was booting long drop punts through the goals in bare feet, and would target a goalpost from the same distance, with a seventy per cent accuracy ratio.

He once kicked fifteen goals from seventeen shots for a Tasmanian Football League side.

McClements played for Tasmania at the 1953 Adelaide Carnival, and won two Clarence fairest and best awards. He was selected in the club’s Team of the Century in 2002.

Les’s sporting feats were later emulated by niece Lyn McClements, who won a gold medal in the one hundred metre butterfly swimming event in Mexico at the 1968 Olympic Games. It was Les who convinced her to continue in the sport, after she had decided to quit in 1967. She went on to claim a silver medal in the 4 x 100 metre relay at the same venue.

Les McClements tragically left us in 1973, at the age of fifty one, a victim of leukemia. His name is perpetuated at Claremont by the past players association with the awarding of the Les McClements Memorial Trophy to the player they consider to be the club’s best each season, and he is without doubt an all time star of Australian Rules football nation-wide.