A Bomber or bust
It’s a Sunday morning in June and the Mosman under-10s are heading for another win in what looks like being a golden season. As the boys march to their seventh straight victory, there’s not a beanie or a windbreaker in sight. In fact, the sun beats down on Middle Head Oval, arguably the prettiest football ground in this or any other hemisphere. In the distance, the waves break on Washaway Beach, the yachts bob gently where the First Fleet sailed through the heads just over two centuries ago, and the Manly ferry carries tourists and daytrippers back and forth across the harbour.
Three hours later, my 10-year-old son and I are sitting in the front row of the SCG’s Churchill Stand as the Swans resolutely inflict St Kilda’s first defeat of the 2004 season. It’s almost summery now. With beer in one hand and a pie in the other, I turn to my host, another ‘Mexican’ – the locals’ charming term for anyone south of their border – who’s also marvelling at the ambiance of it all. “It doesn’t get any better than this,” he ventures as Barry Hall boots another goal. But perhaps it does. The beautifully coiffed and coutured blonde three seats up decides she’s not coping with the heat and whips off her top to the astonishment and delight of most males within a 50-metre radius. Yep, football in Sydney is different.
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The game wasn’t played or watched this way when I was a kid growing up in the 1960s in the Melbourne housing commission suburb of Broadmeadows. Back then, it was quagmire grounds and leaden skies on Saturday mornings and cold pies and splintering wooden seats at Windy Hill on Saturday afternoons. And, of course, we loved it.
To this day, I find myself reflecting on matches won and lost on Broadmeadows’ Anderson Reserve and harking back to those Windy Hill afternoons. They’d begin with Dad piling us into the family Vauxhall – registration OR 496 – grabbing his ‘secret’ parking spot west of the rail line, walking my older brother and me to the Napier Street entrance of Essendon’s home ground where he’d say goodbye for the three or four hours it would take for the second half of the reserves and the main game to play out.
For the most part, that drive and walk from the car would pretty much be the sum total of parent-child interaction. Dad would head into the social club for a day’s drinking and banter, while the two of us would head upstairs to follow the exploits of our heroes. We never missed a home game and the Bombers won most weeks. It was the ’60s – a decade that delivered two premierships and what should have been a third (in 1968) if not for a dodgy Jeff Crouch decision that denied Alan Noonan a free kick which almost certainly would have turned a three-point Carlton win into a three-point Essendon win.
Today, as a middle-aged man, one of my proudest possessions is the autograph book I took into the Essendon rooms one Saturday afternoon. It was 1965 and we were on our way to our 12th premiership. My father, who’d used committee connections to get us in, introduced me all round: this is Mr Birt, this is Mr Epis, this is Mr Clarke, this is Mr Fraser. Wide-eyed and speechless, I’d proffer my book and they’d duly sign. Then came the great man. This, my dad said, this – even then I knew the emphasis was important – is Mr Coleman.
My hero in those days was Jack Clarke, Essendon centreman, sometime skipper and later coach. I was so devoted to his exploits that whenever he was injured, I would send him a get well card – and he’d write back. One Saturday afternoon at Windy Hill, he was felled by a Carlton back pocket right in front of me. I remember being convulsed with anger at this outrage. If we could pinpoint the moment we began losing our innocence, I suspect this would be mine. Evil had triumphed over good that day.
In any event, 30 years later I got to meet Clarke again. It was at the opening of Essendon’s Hall of Fame in 1996 and he’d been inducted right off the bat, as was only fitting given his extraordinary career. I wasn’t a wide-eyed boy then; I occupied a senior position at a Melbourne broadsheet that bestows a certain gravitas on all those who sail upon her. Spying the still sprightly former premiership skipper in a corner after his induction, I sought him out. “Um, Mr Clarke,” I said, feeling very much like that 10-year-old again. “Can I introduce myself. We actually met 30 years ago, but ...” He interrupted me: “Aren’t you the editor of The Age?” he asked. “I think I should be calling you Mister.”
I tell the story only to underline his humility, a trait of the truly great. I assured him that whatever position I held or might ever hold, our relationship had been set in stone four decades ago. I suspect that’s the case with all footy followers and their heroes. We can never hope to rise above their achievements; in a sense, the true fan doesn’t even want to.
That said, it is sometimes dangerous to walk among the gods as they can disappoint and disillusion – but not Jack Clarke. We reminisced for 30 minutes about his extraordinary career and, of course, that ’68 grand final. He remembered it minutely and passionately. I thought it was great that after all this time, footy could still mean so much to him. I got him to sign another piece of paper and we said our farewells. Just five years later, at age 68, he would be taken by cancer and I shed a quiet tear when I learnt of his passing. But I’d chosen my hero well.
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Anglers will tell you that if you don’t teach your son to fish, well, you’re not much of a father. When my boy Scott was born in April 1994, I had pretty much the same thought in relation to footy. If I didn’t at least try to impart to him my love of the game, then I wouldn’t be much of a dad. After all, it had taught me so much about life – the fruits of effort, perseverance and teamwork – and brought me so much enjoyment, both on and off the ground.
I can still recount moments in school and club games won and lost. And, of course, watching VFL and later AFL games, I witnessed the extraordinary skills and athleticism of Essendon stars like Tim Watson, Ken Fraser and James Hird, and opposition standouts, including Malcolm Blight, Darrel Baldock and Ted Whitten. How could a new father not want his son to experience and, hopefully, learn from that?
As a player, various coaches had described me as “above average”, but despite a half-baked invitation from North Melbourne talent scouts to come down and train with them in the early ’70s, I was realistic enough to know a league career wasn’t beckoning. But no matter. I’d made plenty of friends and memories playing junior footy, picked up some trophies along the way – although I’ll never forgive coach Barry Riefel for turning my Broadmeadows’ under-17 best and fairest gong into the best trier award – and, of course, there would always be the Bombers.
That seemed a good place to start with Scott. If I could get him following the game, then maybe one day he might want to play it. If he chose not to, that would be fine, but it was incumbent on me to educate him about the sport. Trouble was: how do you do that in New York?
We had moved to America in the autumn of 1998. If we’d remained in Melbourne, where fields are routinely dotted with goal and behind posts and most conversations start or at least contain a reference to footy, my job would have been easy. But in a land of hotdogs, baseball and gridiron, how do you convince a four-year-old that the best game in the world is actually the one we’d left behind?
In the late ’90s, ESPN screened an hour of AFL highlights once a week, but Scott was having none of it. I called for reinforcements and an Essendon committee member dispatched a parcel of Bomber posters. I wallpapered Scott’s room with them one night and sent him off to sleep with a kind of footy lullaby: “It’s OK buddy, you’ll sleep well tonight, because the Bombers are looking down on you.” (No matter that it was the ’97 team, a relatively under-performing unit that is actually the last Essendon team to miss a finals series.)
By morning, I realised my task was going to be harder than I’d imagined. When I went to rouse him, I found the posters littering the floor of his bedroom, all lying face down.
Scott, what happened?” I asked, with mock shock.
“Dad,” he said, with appropriate solemnity. “There’s a werewolf in that team and I don’t like him looking at me.”
The posters never made it back on the wall and I never bothered to find out the identity of the offending player.
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By 1999, we were back in Australia, living in Sydney. Now despite the success of the Swans, Sydney is not what I’d describe as a footy town. In fact, one of the things that truly defines and distinguishes the city is its inability – or unwillingness – to limit itself to one great sporting pursuit. Given its geography and history, so no one can agree on what to play. This is not to suggest Australian football hasn’t made tremendous inroads, but it is still seen as a southern sport.
As a football town, it had never been kind to me. In 1996, while still living in Melbourne, I had a rush of blood the night before that year’s preliminary final. I grabbed the last hotel room in Sydney and the last flight from Melbourne – at huge cost – to catch the game. The match was ours with two minutes to play, but somehow we frittered it away. Tony Lockett famously put Sydney into its first-ever grand final with an after-the-siren behind.
For a father struggling to educate his son in the ways of AFL football, Sydney’s superficial fondness for our game wasn’t going to be helpful. There was a detachment that seemed to magnify my son’s feeling towards the game. I could spend my entire day reciting the blessings of the code, but if it’s never mentioned in the school playground, much less the nightly news, what hope did I have?
Then I remembered that 1965 autograph session at Windy Hill and how it still resonated almost 40 years later. When Essendon visited a rain-swept Sydney during its stellar 2000 season, I arranged to visit the dressing rooms post-match with Scott, then aged six, in tow.
As we filed into the rooms behind Michael Long, the superbly gifted utility who won a Norm Smith Medal in our ’93 premiership, he turned and ruffled my son’s hair. Then the theme song started up. James Hird, Dustin Fletcher, Matthew Lloyd belted it out watched by team officials, a couple of reserves grade players and one or two hangers-on, my son and I chief among them. There would have been 50 of us in that room, tops. As I watched, I felt supremely confident that this would help Scott across the Rubicon, that a lifelong commitment would be forged here tonight.
As the team hit the chorus, I felt a tug on my arm. “Dad,” my son said, “can we go home. I’m tired.” I felt like a fisherman whose boy had just confessed he hates the water.
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I stopped then. Gave up cajoling, gave up manipulating, gave up worrying. We were in Sydney and just as we’d embraced the city’s suburbs, restaurants and harbour, perhaps it was time to embrace its sport, as difficult and as foreign as that may seem.
My son went for soccer – it could have been worse, it could have been rugby – and I played the participating parent enthusiastically. I managed the team for three years straight and they lost only one match. Outside of those commitments, I followed the Bombers with my usual passion. And that took some doing. Television schedules were a mess, so I’d routinely have to sit up until 1am or 2am to watch replays. Worse, I was often forced into pubs on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons to watch games that were shown live on Optus. Remember Optus?
I recall the Saturday afternoon when Essendon stormed home against the Kangaroos to turn an 11-goal second-quarter deficit into a three-goal win. As I sat in a North Sydney hotel watching this extraordinary comeback, another drinker wondered very loudly, and not unreasonably, “Why the bloody hell are we watching AFL in a rugby league town?” Fortunately no one else took up his cry and the telecast was allowed to continue. But the question comes up again and again.
Season 2001 came and went. Essendon had dominated for much of it, but the baton was passed to the Brisbane Lions in the grand final.
Like most other Essendon supporters, I didn’t know what to expect in 2002. The fear was that we would go into slow decline. I’d decided that I’d fly down for the round one match against Geelong at the MCG. Then something remarkable happened. About three days before the game, my wife rang me at work – she’d deduced that it was important – to say my son had wondered aloud whether he could accompany me. How should I describe the moment? Well, I felt like I’d hauled in a marlin.
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Even though 2002 ended up being disappointing for the Bombers, it was a landmark year for my son and I. It was the year we discovered the game together. We drove the Hume to watch a couple of matches and, you know what, I never thought two people could get so emotional about spotting goalposts on footy grounds in Albury. At the last minute, we jumped on cheap flights to see matches; we went online to get Bomber and AFL updates; we predicted finals ladders way, way out from season’s end. Scott became a rabid autograph hunter. Asked to do a school project on heroes, he did his on Matthew Lloyd. No one in his class had a clue who he was talking about, but his teacher gave him a B+ anyway.
Then things went up another notch. We played kick-to-kick after school, started searching for a club to join, found one. Scott turned up at his first training session wearing his Bombers gear to find he was the only kid not in Swans colours. No problem – he felt good about that. He grabbed the ball during kick-to-kick and booted it out of sight. Maybe the kid could PLAY.
The Mosman Swans’ games are on Friday nights, Saturday mornings or Sunday mornings. The schedule is flexible so the private schoolers can play compulsory rugby on Saturdays and still play AFL if they want to. The dads are almost all Mexicans, sorry Melburnians.
As our sons run around on Middle Head Oval, we often discuss our curious status in this city. While we would sometimes wish there were more of us so that news editors and TV programmers might feel compelled to actually cover the indigenous game, a part of us likes being members of an extended secret society. There’s a cachet to being a true believer in a city of atheists. Certainly my son and I feel that way. So each day when he leaves for school, he makes sure to take a piece of Bomber paraphernalia – his autograph book maybe or perhaps a half-size Sherrin.
When I drop him at school and he’s clutching one of these footy talismans under his arm, I can hardly bring myself to drive away. Certainly I watch until he’s out of sight.
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It’s a Saturday morning, late August 2004. The Mosman Swans have gone through the home and away season undefeated, but are struggling to hold off a determined Forest, a team of northern beaches boys that Mosman has already beaten four times this season. Except this is a final and the Forest boys are playing like they know it and we don’t.
By half-time, there’s just a point in it and things are turning ugly. The umpire has been forced to warn one Forest parent for unruly behaviour and one Forest lad, not to put too fine a point on it, has been going the bash. And this is under-10s!
At three-quarter time, there’s just a goal in it and Forest has a three-goal wind coming home. Our golden season looks set to turn to dross. Suddenly, the bash artist is ejected and we’re starting to get on top. But their big bloke’s got the ball on the wing and he’s headed into attack. My son is on his knees, but he lays the tackle anyway and hangs on for dear life.
Slowly, like a massive tree, the boy falls to the ground and the ball spills out. Scott beams, spectators applaud and somehow the tide has been turned. We bang on three straight goals and win comfortably. I think I’ll always remember the look of determination on his face and the satisfaction of beating the odds with that tackle. I realise in that moment that footy is already teaching him life lessons. And though I might be kidding myself, I realise something else too: with a bit of luck and that sort of determination, life should go just fine for him. Mr Clarke would have been proud.
• Bruce Guthrie is a journalist, editor and broadcaster. He writes a weekly column for The Sunday Age in Melbourne. His wife and daughter have absolutely no interest in AFL, which suits everyone just fine.
Footnotes
This article originally appeared in Australian Football, Issue 2, published by Geoff Slattery Publishing, November 2004.
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