Australian Football

Coodabeen Champions, eh? The irony is, they are.

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The news became public on Saturday but I've known for a fortnight. A group of us received a message from Champs telling us that the end was nigh. And so I've had a couple of weeks to gather some thoughts before pulling my reflections together into a few (hopefully) coherent paragraphs.

Champs is, of course, Greg Champion; and the news is that after 43 magnificent seasons, the final siren has sounded for the Coodabeen Champions, a bunch of blokes whose musings and banter have been a weekend staple for footy fans in Melbourne and around the country for four decades.

The Coodabeens will be eulogised heavily in the coming days, and rightly so. Without wanting to simply repeat the well-deserved accolades that have already begun to flow for them, I'd like to a share a few thoughts on what the Coodabeen Champions have meant – and given – to me over those past 43 years.

I can't recall the exact moment I became aware of these boys who added a new dimension to the great game of footy, but I know it came in their very early days. I became an avid RRR fan in 1981, a year in which I was awakened to music that would not necessarily get airplay on 3XY or even on the 'new kid on the block', EON FM (later to become Triple M).

Just as 3RRR's music shows taught me that there was more than one approach to appreciating music, the same was true of sport.

In 1981 I was in Form 5, or Year 11, depending on your age. My own age at the time was 16. Music was making a big impression on me, as were my high school peers. I was a footy nerd. I devoured stats and I took wins and losses to heart. Footy was a serious business.

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But sometimes I would go to games where 'wags' in the crowd would engage in a bit of banter or yell out a funny comment. I began to appreciate that humour could play an important part in footy culture, no matter how passionate you were about your team. In fact I began to learn that humour helped to deal with not just sporting heartbreaks, but those in life overall as well. My witty mates at the footy, along with the Coodabeen Champions on the radio each weekend, played a big part in my developing understanding of this.

As the Coodabeen Champions settled in to radio life, their repertoire expanded. While Greg Champion used songs to express his thoughts on the game, the other panel members provided commentary on footy by bouncing witty observations off each other.

The ability to broaden the scope of these thoughts came with the introduction of footy talk-back, and the characters which were developed as callers to Tony Leonard first, and in later years 'Torch' McGee.

Many of these characters – Digger, Peter from Peterborough, Danny from Droop Street and the like – were grounded in stereotypes, but as we know, stereotypes are born of truth. Between them, the Coodabeens developed these characters ingeniously and many of them came to represent us, the footy fans, their calls summing up our own thoughts on our teams' performances with poignancy and hilariously.

Greg Champion did the same via 'Guru Bob' and through his thousands of songs. Many of these were parodies, of course, brilliantly rendered by Champs with the help of listener ideas and contributions.

But to know Champs only by those parodies is to do him a great injustice. Let's not forget his own many fine compositions, and not just the best-known ones such as 'That's The Thing About Football'.

The one that sticks out for me is 'The Day the Goal Ump Went the Screamer' from the brilliantly named 'Double White Album'. This is a song that takes a bizarre occurrence in a match – a goal umpire who spontaneously abandons his duties as the ball sails towards him and rises above the pack of players in the goal square to take a speccy.

It's a ludicrous storyline, which fits the Coodabeens narrative well. But it's also the story of all of us on the other side of the footy oval fence – occasionally fantasising about what might be – "Imagine if that was me out there, starring!"

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We've all had that dream, and that dream is also at the heart of who the Coodabeen Champions are. Indeed, their very name derives from that unfulfilled dream.

How were the Coodabeens able to so brilliantly fuse footy tragedy and comedy? Perhaps its no coincidence that core of the original team was made up of supporters of clubs long starved of success. Simon Whelan a Saints fan, Ian Cover a Cats diehard, Tony Leonard a Footscray tragic. Later Billy Baxter (another long-suffering Cat), Torch McGee (a Swans disciple and former player himself) and Demons' fan Andy Bellairs were able to draw on their own footy suffering to create more brilliantly-crafted tragicomedy for the show. (Like all the great acts, the Coodabeens lineup changed several times over the years.)

'Richo' (Jeff Richardson) was an exception. When the show began his beloved Tigers were reigning premiers. But, for better or worse, he came to know what his Coodabeens teammates were being subjected to over the next 37 years.

Over those decades I've been an avid Coodabeens' fan. And in recent years I've had the privilege to appear as the guest on the show (discussing The Footy Jumper Book, co-written by Tim Rath and me), and become a very small part of Champs's parody songwriting team. Both of these were dreams come true.

Now the Coodas have taken their last talk-back call – at least on the radio. The good news is that they plan to continue doing the odd live show. I eagerly await thoseCoodabeen Champions? They have been all along. Thanks to each every one of them for helping me understand that footy can be funny and poignant at once. Footy season weekends will never quite be the same. 

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