The game that never was
Jack Clancy was born in 1934 and grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton. He founded the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Media Studies course and retired from that institution as Associate Professor of Communications. He’s been called the ultimate Coodabeen Champion — the bloke who played league football without actually playing league football. But he’s there in the record books: J.Clancy, Fitzroy, 1 game. It’s the briefest but most talked about aspect of a long and notable football career spent mainly in the VAFA — as player, coach, selector, administrator and long-time supporter. He was named in the University Reds’ team of the century. Jack also played cricket until well into his fifties — in the Victorian Junior Cricket Association (now the Victorian Turf Cricket Association), with the Parkville People’s XI and in Melbourne’s traditional Meanjin v Overland and Writers v Artists matches. He wrote this essay for The Greatest Game by Ross Fitzgerald and Ken Spillman (eds., 1988).
The first approach was from Footscray. A letter with the impressive red, white and blue letterhead at the top, and at the bottom the signature of the great Charlie Sutton.
It was immensely flattering, but Footscray was on the wrong side of town for me, geographically that is, and anyway I didn’t really believe it. I’d only just started to develop the habit of getting a kick with the local church side, and for someone who had only begun playing competition football at the age of nineteen and a half, dreams of League glory seemed a long way from reality.
I’d always been obsessed by football and cricket. There were no other sports, no other activities even worth thinking about. They were the reality; except that they existed in a world of unreality, of daydream.
I did all those things that kids did in pre-television, pre-rock days. There was the paper footy (newspaper rolled up tightly to a catchable size and bound with a tough bootlace), the sock footy (an old sock stuffed with other old socks and bound with garter elastic), sometimes the rare joy of a real footy—which, unlike those two primitive imitations, had the enormous advantage of bouncing, so that if you didn’t grab the mark in the endless duels of kick-to-kick, you could run and chase it, and pick up a kick when more skilled playmates couldn’t be bothered.
But childhood footy was also a solitary pastime. If you had no one to play with, you created a game in your own imagination, kicking the footy (imitation or real) up in the air far enough away to force yourself to run for it, often to fall sprawling—at the cost of dirty or cut knees and elbows and grubbied clothes, which won you no credit from a harassed mother of nine.
An important part of this solitary performance was the structure of the world of the real ‘big league’ you superimposed on it. As you ran, you gave a running commentary, using the jargon picked up from radio broadcasters like Mel Morris. It is still possible to hear kids do this, for it has the great advantage of allowing you to live in a fantasy world and a reality world at the same time.
There were other versions of fantasy. There were ‘pickup’ matches with teams of anything from four to five to twelve a side, where each player would take the identity of a hero from the real world, such identities carefully bestowed according to the status of the individual in the group, and his ability as a player. The cricket versions were more elaborate. The solitary performance consisted of throwing a ball against the wall and then batting to it, with specific points in the backyard having specific scoring value; team versions could be any variation on this. The common factor was the fantasy element, with Australian and England test teams set down rigorously in batting order. Sir Don would have been surprised at the number of low scores he was credited with, and parents expressed puzzled irritation that the work on these meticulously kept scoresheets was always of finer quality than the hastily done homework that followed them.
Fantasy recedes as we age, and stern reality is supposed to preoccupy us. In my case, the fantasies of religion were receding by the age of nineteen and a half and being replaced with important matters such as books and Beethoven and films. And a delayed adolescence meant that I now found myself, greatly to my own and everyone else’s surprise, to be almost six feet three inches tall. I’d always been too small and too slow to even fantasise about being in the school side. Reality was too close to allow thoughts of participating in a formidable team that included at least six members later to play League football.
So a season in the local church team was an introduction to the excitements, joys and disappointments of competition football. Regular training on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the furniture van converted to football bus for away games, the steady learning of the skills of ruckwork, the banalities and clichés of the coach’s speech, similar to a hundred such speeches delivered by a hundred coaches at the same hour early on Saturday afternoon, the happy cameraderie of after-game beer drinking where conventions of mutual flattery and consolation cast a rosy glow on the afternoon’s proceedings, the recovery Catholic Hour session at the club rooms after Sunday Mass, where the often hungover heroes of Saturday had special status among the young ladies of the parish; all these were part of the innocent ockerism of those fifties days, which doesn’t meet the standards of today’s changed values. Even the frequent impromptu singing sessions late on Saturday nights (‘We were rough and ready guys, but, oh, how we could harmonise... ’) were joyful male celebrations among a group of twenty-five, almost everyone a bachelor, and with ages ranging from seventeen to thirty-four. It was only the following year that I found that ‘wedding bells were breaking up that old gang of mine’ and reality remorselessly imposed itself on nostalgic fantasy.
But, by then, after losing the Grand Final by five points, I had made a decision to move up. It was only during the inevitable ritual of the drowning of the sorrows on that Grand Final night that one of my teammates broke to me the story of the coach’s instruction about me. The coach, in most respects neither a brilliant tactician nor an outstanding psychologist, had observed that I started very slowly ‘as if he’s daydreaming’ and that my daydreaming trance had been broken early in one game by an opponent’s smartly delivered whack on the left earhole. He decided that if the opposition couldn’t supply this salutary summons to reality, my team must do so. One player was therefore deputed to join in a ruck duel and make me, rather than the ball, his object. The player so deputed was the one now telling me the story; he was apologetic, even troubled, as he said, ‘I didn’t whack you too hard, and you’ve got to admit it worked.’
Now in my last year as a student, I would try the amateurs. Melbourne University had two clubs in the top grade, University Blacks and University Blues, and new players were allocated according to the needs of the two teams. After some fierce argument, I was later informed, I was allocated to the Blacks, since I had apparently impressed the trainers during practice games, and I looked forward to the first game against Old Melburnians. I knew nothing about them except that they were all old boys of Melbourne Grammar School. I therefore felt quite justified in an attitude of total hostility towards them, despite the contradictory fact that, of the Blacks side, of which I was a part, at least half were former public school boys. Before selection on Thursday night, and throughout Friday and even into Saturday morning, my head was filled with anticipatory fantasies of great and glorious deeds. I would be the best ruckman on the ground, take soaring marks, and kick several goals.
Reality was somewhat different. I found it hard to get a touch, let alone a kick, and learned more in that one afternoon about the noble art of ruckwork than I had picked up in all the previous season.
The teacher was a bald veteran with years of experience who anticipated and overcame my every effort, and who also had the good grace to tell me after the game that I had a lot of potential, but a lot of learning to do. The difference in standard was a shock. I realised that very few players from my previous team would have survived at this level, and that I had some work to do if I were to stay alive in it. If I think about what motivated me at that time, I realise that every young player’s dream of becoming a VFL star had nothing to do with it. The fun, the challenge, the feeling of physical well-being and developing athletic skill, the friendship—mateship if you like—all these were part of it. Most of all—and I suspect this is part of every athletic endeavour—there was the double bonus to be gained from a good performance. Part of this was the sense of satisfaction that comes from the self, derived from pushing oneself hard and succeeding, and this is particularly strong in a game as physically exhilarating as Australian football. The other element of the reward was praise—from one’s fellow-players, from supporters, even perhaps from umpires and, very rarely, from a loving but sceptical father.
Two intensely enjoyable years with the Blacks brought developing skills and confidence, even some minor honours, and, at the age of twenty-two, another invitation, this time from Fitzroy. The pangs of departure were, if anything, stronger than before, but the extraordinary prospect of League football was irresistible.
In 1957 VFL players were subjected to only a fraction of the training regimen demanded today. A couple of months sufficed for pre-season preparation, although there were a number of players who had done their own fitness work before that, so that their practice match form would be ahead of their competitors, and they would win a spot in that all-important first game. Still, the training presented a different dimension from anything I’d ever encountered. The coach was Bill Stephen, a fine player, admired and respected as a man, and one of the last playing coaches in the League. On the night when ‘real’ training began—which was, for me, when the footballs were brought out—he began his address to the sixty or so veterans and hopefuls by holding a brand new football in the air. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a football,’ and then exhorted us to do as he had done. ‘Handle it every day, pass it from left hand to right, go to bed with it, wake up with it. Let it be the first thing you handle in the morning.’ The occasional sniggers from the experienced or the insensitive died away in the solemnity of the occasion.
And it was at this point, I believe, that my sense of reality clashed with the world I was now in the middle of. All this seemed obsessive, slightly absurd; the rational mind started to have its doubts. The element of competitiveness was now something to come to terms with. It had a depth and fierceness that shouldn’t have been a surprise, but for someone going on twenty-three, young in football knowledge, and aware only that the game was essentially enjoyment and fun, it was a new reality.
Two incidents during the practice match period brought it home to me. One was a flare-up between two established players, Brian Pert and Vin Williams, during one intra-club match; punches were willingly exchanged in front of the grandstand before teammates and trainers separated them. They were competing for a wing position, with two other keen competitors, Ian Aston and Leo Smythe going just as hard on the other side of the ground.
Even more enlightening was a revelation by the great Alan Gale—barely an inch over six feet tall, but possibly the best ruckman in the League at the time. Over a post-match drink, Butch claimed that he regarded me, and anyone around six feet three or over, as a threat to his position. The very idea was as much a shock as seeing two teammates exchange punches in a practice match. It should have taught me something about the realities of football at the top competitive level.
For all that, my form in the practice games, all intra-club, was good enough to win some encouraging forecasts in the club and in the press, although in the second last of those games, it was helped in an unusual way. I’d had barely a touch by late in the first quarter, and the umpire (Harry Beitzel, I seem to recall, and bless him if it was) asked as I trotted back to the centre after a goal was scored, ‘How’s it going, son?’
‘Can’t get a touch,’ I replied.
‘Well stand back from the centre at the next bounce,’ he said.
I did so, whereupon he bounced the footy, beautifully angling it so that it lobbed over the contending ruckmen’s heads and into my arms.
I turned, ran a few paces and thumped the ball forward for a clear goal. As I trotted back to the centre, he said, ‘Good effort, son! From here on, you’re on your own.’
It was a generous gesture, harmless in an intra-club match, and it set me on the road to a good performance in the game and probable selection in the first game of the season.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have been the most popular choice. I was still coming to terms with the quite different culture of the dressing rooms and the club, from communal baths, with their opportunities for broad sexual humour, to the presence of the press doting on the stars—Gale, Murray, Abrahams, Ongarello. There was the close-knit camaraderie of the youngsters up from Len Smith’s Under 19s and the political tensions that exist in any football club, complicated by vestiges of the absurd old Catholics versus Masons bitterness.
I had received my jumper, Number 38, after the final training list was announced, and the reality of League football was coming closer. Speculation about the composition of the first team continued throughout the week, with plenty of supporters and trainers assuring me that I would be in the eighteen to play mighty Melbourne, premiers for the last two years. As it turned out, selection in the first game was assured, so I was later told, until a new element appeared late on the scene in the person of one John ‘Mulga’ Shelton. Mulga was a country boy from Gippsland, tough as his nickname, and guaranteed, or so I heard, the first three games.
But I made the twenty, just. I was twentieth man, not interchange, for there was no such thing then. You had to hope for injuries. There was still the extraordinary thrill of seeing your name there in the paper on Friday morning underlined as one of the League’s new players. There was the immense excitement of Friday and Saturday morning, and the even greater excitement among my family. Such glorious possibilities had never really been considered; it was as sudden for them as for me.
It seemed like reality.
Then there was Saturday afternoon, and the game itself. Brunswick Street was packed, which meant perhaps 25,000 people, and the atmosphere, unfamiliar to me, of a League game was dizzying. The coach’s address didn’t reach me, although in my limited football experience so far I’d often been stirred by emotional appeals. I seem to remember the appeal to class from Bill Stephen, who painted Melbourne as the silvertails, Fitzroy as the honest working class battlers. As one of nine children whose father was still a labourer on the basic wage, but also as an honours graduate from Melbourne University, I probably found that appeal left me somewhere in between.
Did I run out with the eighteen? I don’t think so. I remember them charging down the race, while the two reserves, Graham Gotch and I, followed at a walk. We were in dressing gowns, for tracksuits, like interchange rules, hadn’t arrived in 1957. There was one injury, and Graham went on, and the game was close, and there was no chance for even that last minute call to action.
Then it was over, and we’d beaten mighty Melbourne—with, I have to say, a lot of help from ‘Mulga’, who played like a man inspired or demented. I don’t remember feeling particularly deprived or disappointed. We had won, and the world was in front of me, and of the club. One friendly trainer, at the rub-down on the following Tuesday, told me what I knew then. ‘Well, son, you haven’t quite played League football yet, but you’re going to. You can be sure of that.’
But I didn’t.
Six weeks in the seconds, most of them with a mention in the best six players, was almost reward enough. Played on the opposite ground to the seniors then, before a bare handful of spectators, it was still a learning experience, and the Big Time was never as close as it seemed.
I became aware, as naivety started to drop away, how fierce was the desire of my teammates. I got to know the levels of cynicism, desperation and idealism that were part of those earnest strivers.
Perhaps it was just at the time I was ready that the worst possibility became the reality. A knee injury against Collingwood (another reason for disliking them) came at the same time as a disastrous loss for the seniors. I would have been in next week. I could have been a contender.
There was the cartilage operation early the following year, a quick (for those days) return to football, some hopes that I might yet make it—then the end, with brutal abruptness, when the secretary came out to the training track, pulled me aside and said, ‘You’ll train Mondays and Wednesdays from now on.’
League football surely has a thousand stories like that. Some players make it; some don’t. Perhaps I never really believed it. But there it is in Fitzroy Football Club’s centenary history, ‘Clancy, John—1 game.’
The game that never was.
The postscript is the 200 games at various junior levels. I’d have played forever if I could have because I loved it. League football is great, but it isn’t everything.
Footy is.
Jack Clancy (13 July, 1934 - 23 March, 2014)
Footnotes
Australia's Game - Stories, Essays, Verse & Drama inspired by the Australian Game Of Football
(An updated and revised edition of The Greatest Game published in 1988.)
Edited by Ross Fitzgerald and Ken Spillman
Published by the Slattery Media Group, 2013.
Available at
http://www.slatterymedia.com/store/viewItem/australia-s-game-
RRP: $34.95
Excerpt used with permission
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