Australian Football

Possessed of exhilarating pace, extraordinary fluidity and grace of movement, deft ball handling skills, and aerial prowess of the highest order it is small wonder that Jack Hamilton was accorded the title by his contemporaries of 'the Prince of Footballers'. Of course, this was very much a contemporary assessment, made at a time when footballers tended to be judged first and foremost in terms of the ability they displayed rather than the competition in which they performed. This perhaps goes a long way towards explaining the omission of some of the game's greatest footballers from the AFL's much vaunted, but often singularly myopic, 'Hall of Fame'.

Along with Walter Scott of Norwood and South Adelaide's Dan Moriarty Hamilton formed what, by common tradition, has come to be regarded as South Australia's greatest ever half back line. Of the three players, Hamilton was arguably the most eye-catching. and not merely because of his blond, vote-attracting hair, which gave rise to the nickname 'Snowy'. 

During the 1921 Perth interstate carnival among the many pairs of eyes to be captivated by Hamilton's effervescent displays included those belonging to members of the committee of the Subiaco Football Club. Negotiations soon began aimed at luring Hamilton west. However, for the 1922 season he contented himself with a much smaller move westwards from North Adelaide to West Adelaide. At the end of the season Hamilton joined his West Adelaide team mates on an end-of-year jaunt to Perth, and once there the Maroons' courting could resume in earnest. The upshot of it all was that the 1923 season saw 'Snowy' Hamilton residing in Perth, and bedecked each Saturday afternoon in the maroon and gold of the Subiaco Football Club.

Had this move occurred half a century or more later there is no doubt that Hamilton would have ended up in Melbourne rather than Perth. However, the sport of Australian football in the 1920s was a much more egalitarian affair than it has since become, a fact for which supporters of the Lions can be eternally grateful.

Football history is replete with the stories of big name imports who flopped. Snowy Hamilton was not one of them. Right from the very start he performed magnificently, and for two seasons he provided the Maroons with everything and more they could have wanted, winning consecutive club fairest and best awards, captaining the side to the 1924 premiership, and representing his adopted state with distinction in both years. In all, Hamilton played a total of 16 games of interstate football, seven of which were for his home state, and nine for Western Australia.

A hiccup came in 1925, however, when Hamilton decided to take up an offer to return home to coach West Adelaide. A protracted, and ultimately unresolved, clearance dispute broke out, meaning that he was forced to undertake this role in a purely non-playing capacity. Frustration over this state of affairs, coupled with Wests' failure to qualify for the major round, saw Hamilton returning to Subi in time for the start of the 1926 season. Playing chiefly as a centreman he spent a further five successful seasons in the west before returning to his original club, North Adelaide, in 1931. He retired just over a year later at the age of thirty-three.

In the opinion of many astute contemporary observers Jack Hamilton was not far short of being the greatest footballer ever. Perth journalist Harry Potter for instance rated Hamilton as better even than Haydn Bunton, calling him "the cleverest footballer ... a player of almost uncanny skills, cool and resourceful, whatever the situation". Unfortunately the lenses through which most people are compelled to view the history of football, tinted as they are 'Big V blue' after years of unbridled revisionism and distortion, mean that assessments as ingenuous as Potter's are unlikely ever to be accorded the credence or the prominence they deserve.

Author - John Devaney