Collingwood

by Daley, Paul

  Doc’s interest in transport, which had been spurred by his work delivering footwear, had effectively saved him from the fate met by so many of the young men who grew up in Collingwood—a spot on a production line in one of the local breweries, tanneries or boot factories. Williamstown, although linked to Collingwood via the city by the train network, was a long way from Doc’s home. But the daily travel was worth his while. His time with British Imperial, which would later become Shell, imparted to him some invaluable experience that would not only grant him entry to a specialist corps during the upcoming world war, but help set him up in a lucrative business for life.

  Doc and Percy were not, by any means, a natural fit, neither when they first met nor while they played football together. Doc’s natural athleticism, combined with his commitment to fitness, made him a physically confident and very imposing, noticeable presence. But his looks would best be described as pleasant and his temperament amiable, if somewhat stand-offish. He was determinedly reliable, with an innate, fierce loyalty that made him a renowned team man. He could also be a very dirty player, committing violence behind an umpire’s back, but he rarely acted upon impulse, and he was not easily given to the whims or the spontaneity of others around him, especially those who headed to the pubs after work or training. He could tell a story, but he was not by any means a natural raconteur, being reticent and thoughtful. Generous by nature, Doc could exude warmth and compassion—once he became your friend, he was almost the best that a man could hope for. But too often his shyness was an impediment to familiarity.

  In short, Doc lacked the presence that is more often afforded to those possessed of stunning good looks and charm—those such as Percy. Percy, swarthier, smaller-boned and finer-featured than the burly Doc, was fleet-footed and fiery, an impulsive and confident charmer who demanded attention both on and off the field. He was sweet-natured and quick, compelling to watch and to listen to.

  Doc was a man with a plan. He intended, through his commitment on the training track, to fulfil a boyhood dream to join the Magpies; he held a steady trajectory. Conversely, Percy was a chancer—a bloke with an outside shot at making a success of himself. He must have known that, if he could get himself noticed, then he would have a greater chance than most of making it. But while Percy was never, it seems, the type to let an opportunity pass, he could not fairly be categorised as a cynical opportunist. He was a young man in a hurry, and with a keen sense of self. He won popularity easily among his workmates and fellow football players, and he was supremely confident in his own skin.

  While Doc had seen, and at times even felt, poverty firsthand on the Flat, it is unlikely that his experience would have matched that of Percy, who had endured an oppressive rural deprivation where life was a constant, bitter struggle, and hunger and terrible sickness an omnipotent threat that claimed the lives of half his siblings. Melbourne offered Percy liberation from such a life. It also dealt him an opportunity to earn money, primarily as a salaried labourer for British Imperial and later as a professional football player on a weekly wage—money he could spend on supporting his family back in the bush.

  But even though Doc and Percy did not seem to have a natural alliance, they became friends immediately. Indeed, it is said that they quickly became as inseparable as some brothers.

  One thing that would have drawn them together was a shared love of football and cricket. Doc was already playing footy for Collingwood District and he was being touted as a strong contender for the 1911 senior list at the Magpies. He was also an extremely promising cricketer. Percy, meanwhile, besides being an exceptionally talented footballer, was also a valuable all-rounder on the cricket field.

  There is no record of precisely how Percy first established a link with the Collingwood Football Club. Certainly, given the immediate strength of their friendship, Percy would have wanted to play at Collingwood alongside Doc, and Doc would have mentioned his mate while down at the club. But there was another obvious conduit for Percy’s ambition—John Wren.

  Malcolm ‘Doc’ Seddon (standing, back row, third from left) and Percy Rowe (sitting, fifth from right) played cricket for the Collingwood Football Players’ XI (about 1914). Seddon family collection

  Wren was a silent patron of the club, someone who did not seek and only rarely received public acclamation in return for his support of the Magpies. But he was passionate about the game and for many decades he enjoyed an influence in terms of the team lists that was second only to that of the coaches and the official selectors. Contrary to the pervasive view around the club that all players should be treated and paid equally, Wren was always willing to slip a £10 note into the pocket of any man whom he thought had played exceptionally. Wren would have known the ambitious Percy as a boxer, and the fact that he was a mate of Doc, a man of whom Wren was fond, would also have helped to pave the way for the boy from St Arnaud.

  Percy had another link to the club: Tom Baxter. Baxter had been recruited from Maldon, a Victorian town just a stone’s throw from Percy Rowe’s rural home. A brilliant and fiery rover possessed of a deadly left-foot kick, Baxter was a player of the type who has always been at odds with the Collingwood ethos that the team is the sum of its individuals and that no player matters more than the group. He was personally flamboyant and as controversial on the field as he was off it. He had the capacity to single-handedly win a match, just as he apparently had the capacity to throw a match if he so chose—allegations that he had played dead in the 1911 Grand Final ended his career with the Magpies (although the charges were later deemed to be unfounded).

  Baxter knew Percy Rowe from his time in the Bendigo League and he would have recognised something of himself in the younger man. Baxter was also a boxer for Wren—all too often, it seems, on the football oval as well—and they were said to be close mates. So Percy already had at least two points of contact with the Collingwood Football Club; Doc gave him one more.

  For Doc, playing for the Magpies meant representing the suburb that had been home to two generations of his family, in an on-field fight against the surrounding suburbs—especially Fitzroy and increasingly Carlton—that had long looked down upon it. It was a matter of intense community pride to represent the team that had been derisively known, until its early success in the VFL grand finals of 1902 and 1903, as the ‘The Purloiners’ and ‘The Flat-ites’. The motives of Percy, like the other non-local players who were increasingly pervading the senior list at the Magpies, would have been far less parochial and altruistic.

  Regardless, in early 1911 both men received an envelope that would bear the best news each had yet received in his life. Each envelope held a letter bearing the crest of the Collingwood Football Club, a magpie sitting aloft a tree; in a symbolic acknowledgement of the club’s deference to the social history at its foundations, the bird was decisively facing the left of the page—the past. At the foot of the crest was the club motto, lifted from the British public school Eton, the educator of generations of British royals and Tory prime ministers. Floreat pica, when figuratively translated from the Latin, could be said to read, ‘May the magpies prosper’. The letters to Doc and Percy said that Collingwood wished to offer each man an opportunity to train with its senior squad. They were advised that they should decide quickly if they wished to accept the offer.

  In the second decade of the Collingwood Football Club’s existence—the first decade of Federation—it did much on the oval as well as off it to silence the critics and the rivals who would dismiss it as a lowly bunch of Flat-ites or thieves. While other clubs had foundered after the depression of the 1890s, Collingwood grew to become the nucleus of the community that it represented. It was the rallying point for the people it played for. Local businesses and district farmers delivered food, firewood and other goods to the club, knowing that the informally democratic Magpies network would ensure fair distribution to those most in need. And it has been said that, sometimes, when John Wren heard that certain families
were struggling, he’d help out with gifts of food, money and heating and cooking fuel.

  Meanwhile, Collingwood played in six grand finals, winning three (in 1902, 1903 and 1910) and losing three (1901, 1905 and 1911). It was the most successful club in the VFL and had the biggest supporter base. As a club that had sprung from the ashes of the hapless Britannia, its legitimacy could not be challenged.

  From Collingwood’s earliest days, discipline was the mainstay of the team. Hypothetically at least, individualism was not tolerated unless it could be demonstrably proven to be to the benefit of the whole team, and players were supposedly content to play for the glory of wearing the black-and-white guernsey and could not be swayed by the promise of rank or position. The reality was somewhat different. In an era when players were paid only enough to cover their transport costs—they had to buy their own boots and even their own club memberships—Wren made sure the best players were rewarded and, therefore, that most of them stayed put. Outlandish egotism was often tolerated, if not encouraged, if it equated to scoring goals. And although it was uncommon, some of the club’s finest men, such as triple-premiership player and former captain Charlie Pannam, were willing to shun the black-and-white guernsey in favour of better offers elsewhere.

  Players whose crowd-pleasing and match-winning brilliance was qualified with quirky individualism were dealt with through an informal code. They were, quite simply, tolerated until their behaviour brought the team—or worse, the club—into disrepute. During the 1890 finals series, then captain Dick Condon abused field umpire Ivo Crapp with the insult that his daughter was ‘a whore’. He was suspended from the VFL for life, a decision initially unopposed by Collingwood (it was subsequently overturned in 1902) and which led to Condon permanently falling out with the club. Tom Baxter’s personal antics led him to a similar fate.

  Sixty, seventy, eighty years later, as a legion of former Collingwood bad boys could testify, the same approach would still fundamentally apply. Today, if not demonstrably outside the law, bad behaviour is still tolerated by members of the Australian Football League, not least at Collingwood, until it dominates the dressing room or impedes a club’s on-field success.

  Physical fitness became Collingwood’s hallmark in its second season, in 1893, when Bill Strickland became team captain. Strickland had played for Carlton against Collingwood in the Magpies’ inaugural VFA match in May 1892. Lured to Collingwood the following year after a dispute over the captaincy at Carlton, Strickland insisted on the highest level of fitness among his teammates. He also rooted out those he considered were not playing for the team and insisted on absolute on-field discipline—meaning that the players had to obey him. He was a master tactician and strategist, and his approach paid an obvious dividend—the 1896 Premiership.

  Strickland’s tenure as captain coincided with the appointment of Wal Lee, a former Britannia player, as Collingwood’s head trainer in 1895. According to Richard Stremski, author of the seminal Kill for Collingwood, under Lee’s guidance, ‘the team radiated a glowing fitness that was coupled with an intense will to win and inspired by a belief that fitness and discipline were indispensible to victory … Lee was devoted to the Club, perhaps more than anyone in its history’. Lee reputedly reported to the club committee any player who missed training, and so impartial was he that he initially considered his own son, the soon-to-be champion Collingwood goal kicker Dick Lee, unworthy of inclusion in the senior list.

  But it was the addition of James Francis ‘Jock’ McHale to the player list in 1903 that was arguably the most critical appointment the club made in its eventful early history. The versatile McHale played in the 1903 and 1910 premiership teams. But it was as a captain-coach, a playing coach and then solely as coach that he would make his greatest contributions, leading the team to eight premierships over three decades. McHale would be at the club for forty-eight years, thirty-eight of them as coach, and during this time, physical fitness, relentless training, respect for tradition and, most importantly, personal discipline would remain paramount. McHale was also a firm believer in the power of ‘list building’—that is, planning teams two, three, four or even five years in advance in pursuit of hegemony. He was respectful of the more experienced, older players, but he made sure that younger, stronger men with ever-sharpening skills were constantly yapping at their heels; experience never remained in the team for experience’s sake. It is a blueprint that was adopted by the more successful Magpies teams that followed McHale, not least the 2010 Premiership side coached by Mick Malthouse.

  McHale, together with his club officials, did something else that was just as important. Using the club’s purported distaste for rampant individualism as a starting point, they inculcated players with the importance of what can best be described as ‘brotherhood’. For teammates, this meant respecting one another’s personal strengths and weaknesses, lending physical and emotional support to one another both on and off the oval, sharing the load and the glory, and helping each other to win in life and in football. It is ‘the Collingwood method’. At the club, adherence to this principle has waxed and waned greatly over the years. But such fraternalism has always been in evidence during the team’s most successful years, including in 2010.

  Many would argue that all football clubs aspire to such an ethos. Perhaps. But in 2011, it is certainly best exemplified by Collingwood, which is given a strong chance by most football followers of winning a second successive premiership. Club insiders point to the attitudes of players both on and off the field, and to the absence of hubris that marks the conduct of club officials and coaches. Then there is the controversial and potentially risky, though so far orderly, handover by Mick Malthouse of the lead coaching position to former club captain and now assistant coach Nathan Buckley. This calculated risk, taken while the current coach is clearly at the very height of his game, is underpinned by the utilitarian principle that it will be good for the team.

  That is the ‘Collingwood method’. And some say there is no better example of it than the bond between Doc and Percy.

  7

  When Percy Met Louie

  By the time Doc and Percy made the senior list at Collingwood, many of the club’s most revered first-generation players, including Monohan, Condon, Proudfoot and Pannam, had retired. The 1911 season was also to be the last for Tom Baxter, who was no longer trusted after the Magpies’ narrow Grand Final loss against Essendon.

  Although Collingwood won the 1910 Premiership against Carlton, the final quarter of which was marred by several brawls, its finals dominance was under threat from this new rival. Since its controversial genesis from the ashes of the Britannia Club, Collingwood’s traditional nemesis had been Fitzroy. But Carlton was fast assuming that role, mainly because the Blues, unlike Fitzroy, were seriously challenging Collingwood’s pre-eminence on the football field—and, therefore, on the honour boards. From 1902 to 1910 Carlton played in six grand finals, emerging from three as premiers. What’s more, although Collingwood had also won three premierships during that time, the Blues had nonetheless achieved something that the Magpies had not—three grand final wins in a row, in 1906, 1907 and 1908.

  Collingwood also found itself adapting to rule changes that had been specifically designed to speed up the game, transforming Australian Rules into a faster and much more athletic contest that centred on the game’s followers—or rovers. These were the players who began the match in the centre of the ground at the bounce and whose job it was to stick with the ball, striking opportunistically when it was tapped out of the ruck or emerged from packs. While Doc had played in the backline at Northcote under Jack Monohan, both he and Percy became the mainstay of the Collingwood followers from 1912 until 1915.

  Percy was first mentioned as a player to watch in 1911, after he had played his first senior game in round 5 against South Melbourne at Lakeside Oval. Doc would have to wait another seven matches to debut for the Magpies, running onto the ground in round 12 agains
t Geelong at Corio Oval. In round 15, Doc and Percy had their first dual mention in commentary, being described in the frequently acerbic weekly football column of the Sporting Judge as ‘showing excellent combination’.

  Both Doc and Percy were classic Collingwood six-footers, which meant that even though their individual heights came in just under the magic measurement—Doc’s by an inch, Percy’s by over 2 inches—they were often played as second ruckmen. Despite being the shorter of the two mates, Percy played second ruckman more frequently than Doc. Percy would tap the ball to Doc who would then clear it to the forwards, more often than not by using the long and extremely accurate drop-kick that became one of the hallmarks of his early league games. Both men would then follow the ball, looking to secure it out of the packs or repeat the entire process if a ball-up was called for.

  Percy was nuggetty and versatile, often very quick to move the ball out of the centre and into the forward line himself. He also showed throughout the 1911 season the capacity to play on the wing and in the forward line. This led to Percy playing in the 1911 Grand Final with some distinction. But ironically, perhaps, for a player who had spent his life waiting for this moment, Doc did not make the grand final team.

  It would be another eight years before Doc fulfilled his premiership dream. War would deny Percy the same opportunity.

  The year 1912 was one of the least successful to that point in Collingwood’s league history, marking an inauspicious beginning for McHale as coach. ‘Season 1912 will probably be long remembered as the most disastrous in the Club’s history, and for the first time since the inception of the league—sixteen years ago—our team failed to secure a place in the final four,’ the club’s annual report recorded at the end of that year.