WHAT attracts us to sport? That is,
sporting matches, sporting players, sporting codes, sporting culture and
sporting traditions. For some, the whole thing is absolutely abhorrent, and
they associate it with ‘low brow’ or ‘bogan’ culture, a kind of antithesis of
anything that is useful, or intellectual, or pragmatic or worthy. There are
plenty of people I look up to and admire for their intellectual prowess who
would not dare let an evening’s football or rugby match take them away from a
game of chess or backgammon, or a night out at the cinema, or a walk in the
park with the kids, or a chance to finish a bottle of red, as well as the
latest novel they have just purchased. Think Phillip Adams for example.
Then, on the other side of the coin,
there are others who are universally respected for their manners and good taste
who absolutely love going to a sporting venue like the MCG or the tennis
centre, and get anxious and highly involved both before and after the game.
So in a way I guess sport is a bit
like religion, as the Australian poet Bruce Dawe once said. You are more likely
to have a passion, or interest for it, if it is part of your DNA- if you grew
up with it, if you were exposed to it, if influential people around you when
you were young encouraged it.
My own interest in sport stems
mostly from growing up with football and cricket. If Australia is involved in a
test cricket series, particularly against England, I find myself getting
emotionally involved, with a voracious appetite for keeping up with the score
and watching or listening to the progress of the game when it is available.
More important to me, however, is
football. I started going to see North Melbourne at their Arden Street
headquarters when I was five, or even younger. I am the youngest born. I had no
choice. The rest of the family were going, so I had to be bundled along. It
wasn’t long before I was hooked. How could I not be? My brothers and sister all
had their favourite players. I developed mine too. My earliest memory of a
favourite player was when Wayne Schimmelbusch was at his peak. I even met him,
and presented him with a Ballarat Sovereign Hill ‘Wanted’ poster.
I go past the ground sometimes. The
club hasn’t played there for decades, though they still train there. The place
is much altered. However, with a slice of nostalgia and imagination, I can
picture all of us, my cousins included, standing in the outer nearer to the
smaller, manual scoreboard end, barracking with our hearts and lungs for North
Melbourne, and just as vociferously, against the opposition. I remember games
from decades ago when we were the poorest team in the competition, perpetual
winners of the shameful ‘wooden spoon.’ Collingwood, with its spearhead, Peter
McKenna, would give us the biggest thrashing. And then, all of a sudden, we had
a new coach in Ron Barassi, and we were flying. Malcolm Blight was the new
hero, and he could kick goals equally well with either foot, and was a
magnificent mark. We had a great team, mostly borrowed from other teams. The
mid seventies were the halcyon days, as they were for Hawthorn as well, and the
two clubs had a fierce rivalry, playing off in Grand Finals is ’75, ’76 and
’78. In between times, in ’77, North Melbourne beat Collingwood in the replay
of the famous drawn grand final, and suddenly we disappeared again off the
radar, fielding good teams and good players, but no match for the power of
teams like the newly resurgent Essendon Football Club.
My family travelled to away games as
well, even venturing down to Geelong when we had to, and for a number of years
winning more often than not, with lethal attacks featuring players that are
household names in the club’s history, like Doug Wade, the aforementioned
Malcolm Blight, Arnold Briedis and Phil Baker. There was nothing like finals
football, and I have lost count how many finals- including preliminary finals,
and semi-finals and qualifying finals- we took part in during those wonderful
years between 1974 and 1979.
As I said, things became quieter,
especially in terms of grand finals, after this period. By 1993 we were near
the top of the ladder again, and thankfully a new, and in some ways more
devastating era of success began again.
Amazingly it was still only two premierships (in the seventies we won in ’75 and
’77). In the nineties it was ’96 and ’99. However, we were able to reach the
preliminary final of every year from ’94 until ’99 which was no small feat.
During this era, I remember players such as Glen Archer, Wayne Schwass, Corey
McKernan and John Longmire, Mark Roberts and Craig Sholl. There was one player
who stood head and shoulders above the rest of the competition, however, and
that was the captain, Wayne Carey. It might be reasonably said that without
Carey during this era we may not have made any grand finals. He was the
pinnacle, even, in my eyes, exceeding the skill of Malcolm Blight, and was the
best footballer I have ever seen.
I enjoyed this period of success
just as much as the one two decades before, and again you don’t ever really
believe it is going to end. During both dominant periods, the successful times
just seem to go on forever and you become sort of blasé about it. It is finals
appearance after finals appearance, and as well as the great joy of winning, in
’96 and ’99, there is the heartache of losses late during finals campaigns in
’94, ’95, ’97 and ’98. This last one, 1998, still sends a shiver down my spine.
We were the best team that year, and we allowed ourselves to be beaten by
Adelaide. We kicked ourselves out of the match, holding only a precarious three
goal lead at half time despite having all the play. I remember there were a horrendous
amount of points in that half, all gettable goals. The lead should have been
unreachable. The players were even clapped off the ground by the trainers at
half time!
Since that period of the late ‘90’s…
well, let’s just say we haven’t achieved any further ultimate glory, but for
most of that period the supporters have had something to cheer about. The
finals appearances have well and truly dried up, though. I miss those times.
The tickets themselves had colourful little stubs you tore off to give to the
man at the gate. You could keep the rest- which I did. We no longer play there,
as I said earlier, but it is the memory of the days at Arden Street that are
the fondest. I was too blind to see the main scoreboard, so I used to gaze at
the man on the roof of the secondary scoreboard, manually altering the figures
after each score. There was a short walk to the food area to buy a pie or a hot
dog. The little building across the other side of the ground was white with the
words ‘Stoke Motors’ emblazoned on it. I’m pretty sure it’s still there. The
huge gasometre is gone, though. We rarely sat in the stand- we could only
afford general admission tickets, Sometimes we went into the rooms after the
game. There was a male-only ‘family day’ one year in between seasons whose
details I better not go into here. This was a period of drifting for the club
before Denis Pagan came along with his hard-line but effective approach to
football coaching.
So here’s to the memory of seeing
the players relax and have a drink and a cigarette after the game like you
could back then. Here’s to the days of going onto the ground at the end of the
match and marvelling at the boot stud holes in the ground, and standing where
Malcolm Blight took another fantastic grab. And here’s to the days when every
game was played at the same time on the Saturday afternoon, and each team had a
letter of the alphabet, and Carlton might be ‘C’, and Fitzroy ‘D’, and you
could look at the scoreboard and see that it was late in the last quarter and
‘C’ was on 96 points and ‘D’ was on 63. And here’s to the long days when, as a
family, you would travel to Geelong or Waverley Park, that huge, vacuous
ground, and you could talk about the game afterwards, or even better listen to
a summary of the North game on a station like 3KZ. And here’s to seeing North
Melbourne at Arden Street, parking the car a few blocks away, walking through
the autumn leaves, wearing a football jumper and feeling either hopeful or despairing, or cocky and confident,
depending on the decade it was and the fortunes of the club. And afterwards we
would all go back to Nana’s house on Glenlyon Road, Brunswick, and she would be
excited to see us as she was undoubtedly a bit lonely, and the TV show ‘The
Winners’ was on in the lounge, and the dog, Jessie, was going crazy outside,
and Mark and I would be tearing around and jumping off the balcony out the
front onto the grass, and Carol would probably be playing with Wayne, and
Gordon with Craig, and sometimes if I recall correctly we would ride on the
old, dilapidated wooden scooter up and down the drive, and eventually dinner
would be ready. If it wasn’t fish’n’chips it would be a roast, not as good as
mother’s, but still tasty after a day of eating junk and yelling ‘come on
North!’ until you were beginning to go hoarse. And then evening would come on,
and father would insist on placing bets at the TAB on the way home (trots they
were, at night back then), and we would patiently wait in the car, sometimes
going mad. At the end of the night my head would hit the pillow and I would
reflect on the magical day’s events, thinking about every player in order from
jumper number 1 until jumper number forty something. At school that week there
would be something to talk about, and it felt good to me somehow to be
different because no one else ever barracked for North.
Arden Street, North Melbourne, 2014.
A shadow of its former self, but still a place of fascination and joy, as you
drive past sometimes, no longer a kid, but with kids of your own, and you try
to snatch some of the magic, with the window down, and with your hands
clenched, pulling, pulling snatches of the magic into the car, but the snatches
missing the mark, and the kids with total disinterest, creating their own
unique memories of other things in the back seat of your car.