The Fairytale

by H. G. Nelson

  The need for redemption is always changing. The demand is never satisfied. Hub life confines in 2020 produced a whole new series of unforgettable images that required the gentle touch of the redemption persuader. With teammates crammed into five-star resorts like Pringles in a tube, sharp-eyed viewers on the couch at home were presented with an array of once-seen never-forgotten modified dick pics and date-hunting images, especially during the energetic renditions of post-hooter club sing-a-longs.

  These old-style football high jinks were stamped on pretty quickly by club media managers well aware of the damage uncensored live television images can do. Occasionally they were too late to bring down the forehead curtain on the club chorus line doing the modified elephant walk. In a crisis, media managers swung into action to smooth over the damage done to the club’s ‘brand’.

  Pundits and fans outside the hub-life experience began asking what the club brand stood for and wanted explanations from the new bad boys of footy. These delinquent players who had no idea of how close they came to shutting the whole shebang down appeared shame-faced at a packed press conference on Monday morning. There were apologies all round, using well-crafted lines embracing time-honoured themes and a plea for forgiveness, as a prelude to a redemption that only sport can provide:

  Everyone here? Everyone ready? OK . . . Hi, my name is Trevor ‘Frosty’ Pew. I am sorry about the todger tugging with Poxie and Crumpy. I was excited about the win against the premiers, but I went too far. I have let the jumper down. I have let the club down. I let the fans down. I let ‘Big Flutey’ our coach down. I let my family down. I have let my mates back home down. I let my suburb down. Most importantly, I let myself down. It just wasn’t me out there!

  I’ve now got seven days to think about it. I want to put this episode behind me. Hopefully I can get a couple of goals next week and move on. After this experience, I am certainly going into the room of mirrors as soon as this is over to have a good hard look at myself.

  By this stage, the press did not know where to look. ‘Frosty’, a likeable bloke but a known goose, had said more than enough. The football media could see it was just one of those things that had gotten out of hand after an unexpected victory.

  Trevor had said almost too much. The wheels of redemption were now in motion. Any more than those carefully chosen words and the apology would suddenly sound insincere. It’s a script that every club media manager has wedged in their hip pocket or handbag, ready to be pulled out and passed to the offending player on these embarrassing occasions.

  Trevor was a role model before these hub incidents. He did a lot of work in schools helping younger kids to read and with sick kids in hospital. He did not have to do it. The top club role model is a tricky burden to carry. They have a place, but not all Australians can be stars. There have to be one or two passengers, even in a premiership team.

  It is a national stupidity to imagine that every youngster who pulls on a pad in the school yard can play for Australia, or every teenager who pulls on a boot can win the Brownlow, or everyone who has sandshoes can win the 100 metres at the Olympics. These results are extremely unlikely. In fact, each year only twenty-two players can win the AFL Grand Final, only one horse can win the Melbourne Cup out of the twenty-four starters, unless there’s a well-organised and well-managed dead heat, and only seventeen Australians can win the NRL flag. It is just not possible for everyone to be a winner. But the speculation gives hacks something useful for that hard-to-fill weekend think piece.

  At troubled times like these, when things go wobbly, sporting clubs always talk about cultural change. It is code for ‘we are having a run of outs, and Trevor’s changeroom antics did not help. But we need to move and dump someone into the ash can and start winning. That is what the fans want!’

  Cultural change has everyone ducking for cover as someone is bound to cop it in the neck. Usually, it is the coach who gets the flick and wanders off for a think about spending more time with their family. The new appointee talks at length at another hastily arranged press conference in front of the sponsor’s logo about a new culture that they will be bringing to the club. A culture of winning is all that is required to turn the joint around.

  No one will ever remember a team because it didn’t break protocols and curfews. A side will not be remembered if none of the players skipped out of the hub, a five-star luxury resort on the Sunshine Coast, around the witching hour to take in the late show at Hollywood Showgirls on the strip in Mooloolaba. If, when the on-stage underpants stopped hitting the floor around 3.30 am, the boys, still on the loose and feeling peckish, didn’t decide to nip across the road for a late-night kebab takeaway. Who doesn’t feel like a kebab at 3 am? Have you tried one at that hour? That is the sweetest time in kebab land. At that time Aussie lamb is awesome.

  No one will remember any of this because the only thing that really matters is winning. That is a given.

  No one will remember any of this because the only thing that really matters is winning. That is a given. Even though this book is written in an era of alternative facts, there is no alternative to challenge that simple idea.

  Sport forces supporters to live in the present. That list of jobs on the fridge – washing the car, clearing the gutters, doing the groceries – all of that can wait until the match is over. The list can even be forgotten completely after an impressive victory over the premiers; life can be put on hold until then. Live television coverage of sport is the only must-see TV, apart from a royal wedding. No one gives up hope until the final siren. And then there is always next week, and if the worst happens, as it usually does, there is always next year.

  If your team is lucky enough to make the Grand Final – and there is a lot of luck involved – there is nothing more important to you, there never will be. Time stops.

  If you win: jubilation. It was never in doubt. If you lose: there are months of pondering where it all went wrong, who was to blame. Winning doesn’t illuminate much; after all, that is what every team is meant to do. Losing on the other hand, well, there is so much to contemplate. So many questions, so many angles, so many talking points, so few answers.

  Sport is a great leveller. Walk onto a racetrack anywhere, and off goes your head, on goes a pumpkin. Stabbing a winner in the first and scoring a big collect makes everyone a deadset genius. Then by the end of the afternoon, after a run of outs across the rest of the eight-race card that hands back to the TAB what was won in the first and a lot more besides, suddenly solitude is sweet. The sorry punter staggers home shirtless wondering how it all went wrong, once again.

  As English football great and Liverpool legend Bill Shankly blurted out when bailed up by a fan who asked how important sport is: ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much more important than that!’ The COVID pandemic proved the wisdom of that simple truth.

  This is not a book about the stuff known by all genuine sporting Australians. There are no pages of football Grand Final scores, or descriptions of every ball and stroke from a memorable big innings from Australian tours of the subcontinent, or calculations of how much you would have won if you had invested a dollar on Winx at her first run and let it roll all the way to the end of her career. There is none of that because that is all available to everybody everywhere on Google.

  The Fairytale is an historical record of great sporting moments and events that may or may not have happened. Sport buffs have to make up their own mind about whether these events, these stories and these personalities were real and whether they were significant.

  The era of certainty in sport is well and truly over. This book is just a version of the truth. But it’s a version of the truth that is definitely worth telling. It’s a version of the truth that should be told somewhere. Even if it all seems unlikely, who is to say some of these facts did not happen?

  Sport was once described as the most important thing of the least important things in our
life. Hopefully this book proves it.

  Part 1

  HISTORY

  GRAND FINALS AND PRE-MATCH ENTERTAINMENT

  What a concept! An endless cavalcade of great musical ideas, few having anything to do with football.

  THE YEAR WHEN THE electrodes were applied to this lifeless lump and the creation rumbled from the slab and started wriggling about lewdly was 1977. This was a big year for Australian Rules football.

  Back in the day, before 1977 – and let’s face it, that’s last century – the Australian game, Australian Rules football, was played in South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia, but its heart and soul, according to the pundits who lived there, was nailed to the floorboards in suburban Melbourne.

  It was a mystical landscape. The game’s spiritual home was the MCG. The Australian game was always bigger, better and more meaningful when the august Victorian Football League controlled the players, the money and the rules.

  The teams from the football suburbs of Melbourne did their thing during the home-and-away season and once the first weeks of the finals were cracked, boxed and buried, the twelve teams that started the annual journey towards that one day in September were whittled down to two.

  The two finalists shared a dream. It was a dream shared by the whole competition when the field lined up for the starter back in late March. It was a dream of taking the Premiership Cup back to their club house for a wild summer-long shindig.

  The VFL Grand Final (the Grannie) decided the champion team, and featured at the ‘G’ on that 1977 spring afternoon were the North Melbourne Kangaroos, dolled up in blue and white, and the Collingwood Magpies, who turned up in their traditional strip, featuring the prison bars of black and white.

  On that September day, with another difficult, bleak city winter back in its box for six months, these two great Melbourne sides battled for the biggest prize in football anywhere in the known world. On that one day of the year the centre of the Universe was Melbourne.

  But 1977 was about change. It was the first year the Grand Final was televised live in Victoria. The live, free-to-air coverage was predicated on the idea that if the Grand Final sold out, then the Channel Seven football tap would be turned on and everyone could see the game and listen to Peter Landy and Lou Richards call the action in the most liveable city on the planet. Everyone across the nation would be united around the television in a festival of the boot.

  As the final Saturday in September approached there was great nervousness among Melbourne footy heads who did not have Grand Final tickets. They prayed that the magic ground-full number would be reached, lifting the TV curtain, allowing the modern world of sports broadcasting to catch up with VFL football.

  The days rolled by. Suddenly, the MCG was stacked to the rafters. The game was a sell-out. Footy-mad Victorians would have the big show blasted into their lounge rooms from the sticks on Mount Dandenong. The Grannie would finally appear across Melbourne on Astor twelve inches and AWA Radiola deep image screens in vibrant living football colour.

  As is often the case, the back story of these end-of-season events is often more exciting and dramatic than the actual game. So many VFL/AFL Grand Finals are lopsided affairs. The match is often done and dusted in the first quarter. By half-time, disappointed footy heads and serious punters are headed for the exits looking forward to the Boxing Day Test. But the big one in 1977 lived up to its top-of-the-table billing.

  Before we come to the main course, let’s nip backstage and see what the chefs and the fickle football gods had steaming on the stove by way of entrée . . .

  IN 1976, COLLINGWOOD WERE simply a joke. They were the wooden spooners. The ‘Side by Side’ team propped up the whole competition. In the off-season the hard-working, desperate-for-success Victoria Park committee realised they were waist deep in football excrement.

  The Pies did not see the funny side of being the joke of football and Melbourne. They wanted and expected respect. President Ern Clarke fell on his bayonet after the club hit rock bottom for the first time in their history. The Captain of the Skies, John Hickey, was cleared for take-off as president. Remember, this was decades before Eddie ‘Everywhere’ McGuire came lurching down the premiership cakewalk.

  First item on the agenda for Wing Commander Hickey and the committee was to find a new coach. They moved on 1976 coach, Murray ‘The Weed’ Weideman, from his position as custodian of the club’s clipboard. The Weed’s numbers were not great. He had his hand on the levers for forty-five matches but only managed to get the chocolates in nineteen. This was unacceptable!

  In an extremely controversial move, Richmond Tiger great, ‘T-shirt’ Tommy Hafey, was tapped and tipped into the black-and-white coach’s box. He was the first outsider to take on the team, but he came with big raps, having coached Richmond during a golden age, bagging the big one for the yellow and black in 1967, 1969, 1973 and 1974.

  Collingwood and Richmond were great rivals. In fact, they hated each other. With T-shirt in charge of the witches’ hats at Victoria Park, the long-suffering membership believed the premiership window was thrown wide open.

  All through the final series that September, there was talk in the Melbourne media of a fairytale finish to the season. The media, then as now, was always sniffing for an angle and latched on to the ‘last in 1976 to first in 1977’ rave. This was a modern football story told as a happy-ever-after saga. It was a powerful but slightly silly space-filling idea. Though then, as now, there was plenty of media space to fill.

  Is there an actual fairytale that echoes the last-to-first football narrative? Does it matter that there are no near equivalents in the Brothers Grimm handiwork, the ancient Norse myths or in the popular versions of Rumpelstiltskin and Little Red Riding Hood? It did not matter to the bright sparks with fingers poised over the keyboard starring at a blank sheet of paper in 1977.

  Is there an actual fairytale that echoes the last-to-first football narrative? Does it matter that there are no near equivalents in the Brothers Grimm handiwork, the ancient Norse myths or in the popular versions of Rumpelstiltskin and Little Red Riding Hood?

  Remember everything in football has been said 5274 times already. Newspaper editors in 1977 suggested to writers, never be afraid to reheat a golden oldie. But no one knew that the fairytale theme as developed by the media in 1977 football would go way beyond the ordinary. This Grannie was looming as the most important event in the history of the city.

  The Pies had not won a VFL flag since 1958.

  Their subsequent appearances on the big day were disastrous. They always turned up with hope. Every year was their year. But after the final hooter the team got on the bus and drove away for the long lie down, disappointed and dispirited. Outraged fans were, well, outraged. Commentators had a term that described their losing run of outs. The malaise was referred to as ‘Colliwobbles’. A disease so virulent it put diehard supporters into intensive care.

  Coach Tom Hafey left nothing to chance in his quest for success in his first year at Victoria Park. Echoing the media approach to the looming fairytale finals he began reading Cinderella in chapters, by torchlight, to the players at the conclusion of training every night throughout that magnificent September.

  Training, in the seventies, was not the scientifically based, medically supervised, diet-driven, sophisticated operation it is today. The teams would run laps of the oval, do a bit of circle work (that is, kicking the ball to each other as they ran around in a big circle), then come in close for a chat from the coach about the meaning of life, football, the opposition and why ‘we have to win’, before breaking into groups to do handball work and tackle practice. Forwards then practised marking and goal-kicking. Defenders practised spoiling and thumping each other. To finish up, it was forwards v backs or a game of skins and shirts. Football is a simple game.

  That September the Pies won their final matches and the Collingwood players bought into the Cinderella concept. They were enchanted by the tale of the search for a foot that
fitted the special glass shoe left on the stairs at midnight. The players saw this as a football analogy. The search for the perfect boot and a magical finish to the story was surely a metaphor for a flag-winning end to the 1977 season. No one at training was quite sure what the pumpkin coach represented. That and many other details were stumpers for specialist football writers to unravel in the seasons to come.

  For decades, the Grand Final game day at the G was a football-focused three-pronged carnival of kicking. An early bounce got hostilities underway, not long after tip-out time at the North Melbourne Breakfast. The Breakfast was the must-attend event for everyone who moved or shook in Australia and Victoria since the mid-sixties.

  In 1977, the early risers had packed into the Southern Cross Hotel for a bowl of Weet-Bix, an average fried egg, a sodden baked tomato, a rasher of over-crispy bacon and a slice of slightly burnt toast, washed down with tea or coffee, plus a few beers for the early starters who enjoyed a Fosters at 8.30 am. The festive room was always chock-a-block with media types, footy heads, soap stars, celebrities, politicians, comedians, tipsters and sporting tragics.

  Over the years, the business end of the breakfast had featured a cavalcade of stars, but the guest speaker in 1977 was, surprisingly, ad man, filmmaker and notorious anti-sport identity, Phillip Adams.

  Big Phil ‘hated’ football. Unsurprisingly, his running mate on this occasion was Football Personality of the Year, Hawthorn stalwart John Kennedy, the ‘Don’t think, just do!’ man. John had coached the wee and the poo to flag wins in 1961, 1971 and 1976.

  It was a genuine meeting of minds down the deep end of the Hotel’s ballroom – something that only Melbourne can turn on. Phillip spoke for thirty electrifying minutes on the topic ‘Why the Pies will win!’ before controversially asking the room to stand and sing the Pies’ club song, ‘Good Old Collingwood Forever’.