An Affair to Remember — Hawthorn

This piece was written for 2010 book ‘Best on Ground, Great Writers on the Greatest Game’, edited Peter Corris and John Dale, Penguin, 2010. If you like my writing, join my Substack ‘Good one, Wilson’

1. Matchmaking

It was like racing for the taps on an overflowing bath.

‘Ay yay yay yay yay,’ I bellowed, at a volume that surprised my wife, Tamsin, and scared our daughter, Polly. Tam thought my behaviour ridiculous, completely inappropriate from the father of a two-year-old. I thought I showed considerable restraint, given the urgency of the situation. I mean, I didn’t tackle them to the ground, did I? I just yelled a little. And jumped between them. And okay, perhaps my hands ended up over my daughter’s ears. But what was I supposed to do? The taps were running. Somebody had to turn off the taps.

What Tam had been saying — patiently, and with the best of intentions — was this: ‘Now Polly, there are a lot of footy teams you can barrack for. There are Lions and Tigers, and Cats and Dogs and Kangaroos …’ I’m not sure she got as far as ‘Kangaroos’. From half a room away, I began the shouting and hollering. Oh my God! She’s telling her about the high-end mammals! Never tell a two-year-old about the high-end mammals!

‘What? Why shouldn’t she get to choose?’ Tam asked, bewildered, after my bellowing subsided.

‘Because she doesn’t get to choose!’ I exclaimed. ‘Because on a level playing field, she’ll never choose Hawthorn. I mean what two-year-old girl in her right mind is going to choose yellow and brown and a second-rate bird of prey that never gets a mention on Play School?’

‘She might choose Hawthorn,’ Tam said. ‘If you’d let me finish, I was going to tell her that Grandpa played for the Hawks.’

I was suddenly filled with a tidal wave of regrets. Why hadn’t I insisted on the yellow and brown doona cover with the tasteful insignia? Why hadn’t I invested in the ‘I’m Small But I Know My Footy’ romper suit? The marketing people down at the club had tried to smuggle some traces of navy blue into the designs, and had I supported them? No . I’d guessed that Tamsin wouldn’t like yellow, brown and traces of navy blue any more than she liked yellow and brown straight up.

‘Which teams did you mention?’ I asked, moving into damage control.

‘I’m not sure. Lions and Tigers. Cats and Dogs perhaps.’

‘Jesus, Tam. Couldn’t you have thrown in a low-rent Crow? Or a Docker? Why couldn’t you have made it a simple choice between swooping hawks and heavily unionised singlet-wearing stevedores?’

She told me that I was being ridiculous. That choosing a football team was just that — a choice.

‘You don’t get to choose,’ I said.

‘You’re being silly. It’s just a game. Next thing you’ll be telling her what party she can vote for.’

I bit my tongue. I didn’t have a political intervention scheduled until Polly was twelve. Nor is footy ‘just a game’. This was Hawthorn Tam was talking about — my first true love — and although I may have moved on in the sense that I no longer passed time on road trips recalling A–Zs of Hawthorn players by given name and surname (A is for Alle de Wolde, B is for Bernie Jones, C is for Colin Robertson … where was Xavier Ellis when I needed him in the mid-eighties?), I still cared enough to limit my daughter’s choice of football team to a field of one.

‘Polly, you barrack for the Hawks, don’t you? Like Daddy? And Grandpa? And Granny? And Aunty Sam? And Aunty Pippa? And Uncle Ned? Hawks are fantastic big birds. Really fast. If you say you barrack for the Hawks, Daddy will go and get you a Hawks footy.’

‘I barrack for Hawks,’ Polly parroted. ‘Like Daddy.’

I stared at the floor, unsure whether I felt shame or relief. Either way, it was mission accomplished.

‘Pathetic,’ Tam muttered under her breath.

‘You don’t get to choose,’ I repeated softly.

2. The Courtship

My father got to choose.

In 1965 Ray Wilson became the first person in the history of the University Blacks Football Club to captain back-to-back B- and A-grade Victorian Amateur Football Association (VAFA) premierships. He played well enough to attract interest from five VFL clubs, and fibbed about his permanent place of residence well enough to ensure that he was zoned to none of them.

Jack Burns, then secretary of Collingwood, tried to simplify the decision. ‘Well, there are only three clubs worth thinking about, son — Collingwood, Melbourne and Essendon. Which one is it going to be?’

The young Ray had spent his childhood barracking for North Melbourne in the Collingwood heartland of Preston. It had hardened him against any notion of ‘born to rule’ or the assumption of superiority. Dad has rejoiced in keeping a premiership count for Jack Burns’ ‘three clubs’ since that day. None in the first nineteen years. Five in forty-five years. It warms his heart that Collingwood can boast a fifth of those.

The battle for his signature (and a yet to be contemplated son’s future childhood obsession) came down to a race between three legendary football administrators. Alan Schwab pleaded the case for the ladder-topping Saints, Graeme Richmond did the sweet-talking for the brink-of-an-era Tigers and Ron Cook did the wooing for a bottom-of-the-table Hawthorn. It was like being seduced by three great Casanovas. Most memorably, Graeme Richmond took my awestruck father inside the boundary fence at Footscray and sat him on the bench. ‘You see that kid out there? Half-forward could be your spot. We’re not sure about that kid there.’ The lightly framed eighteen-year-old he was pointing at had just returned from a serious hip injury. His name was Kevin Bartlett. Had Dad gone to Punt Road and sweated over that spot, he might have debuted in 1984 at the age of thirty-nine.

Ron Cook and Hawthorn eventually won the day. Cook was a famously persistent recruiter. One morning in 1966, Cook, then secretary of the club, was at his holiday house at Rosebud and rang a young Peter Hudson in Tasmania to talk about playing for the club. Hudson told him that he would not play at Hawthorn in 1967. Cook was walking up Hudson’s drive in New Norfolk a few hours later, dressed in a suit, having negotiated Rosebud to Blackburn, (to get the suit) to Tullamarine to Launceston to New Norfolk in about the time it had taken his future champion to rustle up some lunch.

For a smaller fish like Ray Wilson, the great attraction of Hawthorn was the quality of the people he met and the enhanced prospect of a game in a struggling side. The Coulter Law prohibited sign-on fees, but it was more honoured in the breach by all twelve clubs. Hawthorn’s wasn’t the highest offer — a £1000and the keys to a secondhand Morris Oxford — but for a student with eight pounds in the bank, it was enough. In 1966, a house in Greensborough could be purchased for £3000.

After Ron Cook called to make the offer, Dad went to breakfast at Newman College, where he was living while at Melbourne Uni. The college then had a custom which prohibited conversation at breakfast, and so communication was restricted to monosyllabic table requests. He sat silently, simultaneously digesting cheap sausages and the news that was exploding within. He had a chance to play league football. And he was 125 times richer than he had been when he got out of bed that morning.

3. The Honeymoon

There’s a photograph of my sister and I wearing Dad’s jumpers, huge old woollen things that gathered around our ankles like wedding gowns, the yellow and brown vertical stripes wrapping around in the old style, front and back. Dad’s number 10 winks at the camera from its reflective white plastic backing. My older sister, aged four, is modelling the one Dad wore to premiership glory against St Kilda in 1971 in front of 118 192 people. It’s nice Dad has a photographic record of it, because the other kid in the photo is going to leave it in a Prahran Football Club change room twenty-one years later.

Dad’s career was over by the time I was born. He retired in September 1972 after 117 games, and I arrived in November that same year. My obsession with Hawthorn and dreams of playing for the club predate my earliest memories. It was never a choice. It was just a fact of life — like eating and brushing my teeth and breathing. I still have a hand-stitched yellow and brown teddy bear with the number 10 on its back. In a folio of primary school artwork, I uncovered a piece in which we were asked to illustrate twenty different words — ‘run’, ‘shop’, ‘dog’, ‘paint’, that sort of thing. Sixteen of my twenty illustrations are stick figures wearing yellow and brown jumpers in front of goalposts.

And then there’s the stuff I do remember. My favourite picture book was an underrated classic called ‘Carn the Hawks’, which I eventually stole from the Deepdene Primary School library because Mrs Whiteside said I couldn’t renew it any more. When Leigh Matthews booted goal of the year against North Melbourne at the SCG, I painstakingly retraced his path, following the mapped figure of eights as laid out in the Footy Record the following week. I’d take screamers on the furniture in the lounge room, singing along with not just ‘Up There Cazaly’, but Mike Brady’s lesser-known hits as well.

You’ll be Hungry

You’ll be Knights

You’ll be The Hulk

And you’ll be Blight!

You’ll be flying with the stars and in the wars.

Quickly I learned that switching the order of ‘Blight’ and ‘Knights’ meant that the natural syncopation of the verse would give Peter Knights the bigger fly, and so that is how it came to be.

At some point, Dad renewed his official connection to Hawthorn as coach of the Crimmins Squad, an under-17s development project that spawned such greats as Dermott Brereton, Gary Ayres and Chris Langford. Every Sunday morning we would venture to Glenferrie, where legendary trainer Bob Yeoman would welcome me at the door with a dim sim and a sausage. ‘Hey kid, get a couple of these into ya!’ he’d growl, wearing the widest of grins and a once-white singlet that was a museum piece to sausage and bourbon stains. ‘You gotta feed yourself up, kid, so you can become a player like your old man!’

‘Pleasant Sunday Mornings’ they were called by the club, but for an awestruck under-10, they were more than pleasant. I’d sit in the property room with Andy Angwin and watch as he cleaned all my favourite players’ boots. Occasionally Andy would hand me the brush, and I could happily boast at school the next week that the shine on Dipper’s boots was all my work. Over several years, some players came to know me. I was ‘Willo’s kid’ or ‘Snowy’ or ‘Son’. And so I began living the wild, nine-year-old equivalent of the stuff depicted in Entourage. Russell Greene patting me on the head was big news. Don Scott teaching me how to hit the speedball was the stuff of dreams. Peter Knights gifting me a Puma T-shirt was a show-and-tell certainty. I befriended Knights’ son, Ben, even though he was five years younger than me, on the off-chance that he’d invite me to his party.

They were heady times. When Dad took me to home games at Princes Park, we didn’t just land prime seats in the Robert Heatley stand, we’d actually visit the rooms. It spoiled me. Before the game or at half-time, we’d mill around the door in a ruck of fans, and then the doorman would spot Dad and we’d be ushered inside, like the people I would one day so despise in nightclub queues. I got to see how different players prepared. Lethal Leigh — quiet and determined. The Big Dipper — hyperactive and vocal. My favourite part of any pre-match was when the boys bumped into each other, their oiled-up shoulders slapping into contact, the rough-housing eventually transforming into running on the spot or piston-armed renditions of ‘1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10!’ ‘C’mon boys!’ Dipper would be yelling. ‘C’mon boys!’ I would be mouthing too.

I wasn’t just spoiled by access. I was spoiled by results. I touched the premiership cup in 1983, 1986 and 1988. In each of the in-between years, the Hawks still made the grand final. It was also a period of development in my own footy career. I was invited to play in the under-15s schoolboys carnival, then in the Crimmins Squad at Hawthorn. Dad stepped down as coach, and I stepped up as captain. I was playing well enough for the dream to become hope, which in turn was becoming belief. I lived, breathed and slept football, and I mean the last bit literally. Until I was sixteen, I slept with a sherrin at the foot of my doona.