My Word: Kick to Kick [The Big Issue ed # 436]

DANIEL LEWIS REMEMBERS HOW A GAME SPANNED GENERATIONS.

AROUND THIS TIME each year, after autumn has surrendered to winter and office workers keep their souls invigorated with Australian Rules chatter, memories of my footy-fixated childhood come flooding back.

To when multiple games were staged on a Saturday afternoon. To when money-obsessed outsiders hadn’t yet fully dipped their fingers into football’s pie. To when my Collingwood-mad uncle rang pretending to be the Pies’ mercurial forward Peter Daicos after a semi-final win in 1984 – and I believed him. (This same uncle had to summon all available restraint to stop himself throwing his beer at the television during the 1980 grand final, as Richmond’s wispy-haired, cocksure Kevin Bartlett ran riot with seven goals against the Pies.)

And to when I met a kindly old man by the name of Stuart.

It was autumn, 1987. I was 10. We were new to the northwest Victorian town of Swan Hill, Dad having just accepted a job transfer with the bank.  I was charging around the bottom of our avenue, barefoot, weathered Sherrin footy in hand. The first drop in light signalled time-on in the final quarter. Collingwood five points down. I was tough-as-nails wingman Darren ‘Pants’ Millane, thundering towards full-forward Brian Taylor for the winning goal – between the light post and the mailbox two doors down. But a stray kick landed in the arms of an old, bespectacled man, who fired a 20-metre handpass back at me. This wasn’t in  the script.

Even though we’d never met, Stuart knew my first name, and also that I barracked for Collingwood. He was a

Fitzroy supporter; he said he wanted to see a premiership before he died.

His creaky bones hampered him somewhat, but he was skilful and nimble, his drop kicks spearing into my chest. We went back and forth until the ball and darkness became one and the closing credits for A Country Practice rolled in unison in the surrounding houses.

The following evening, I looked out the window and there he was again: the old man, hovering under the street light. And so it became a nightly ritual. In between kicks he’d quiz me about school and junior footy. Mum would reserve her best neighbourly smile for him, while he and Dad became mates. He would sometimes call around on Saturday afternoons and sit with us by the fire drum in the backyard as the ABC footy crackled from the wireless. The commentators would talk excitedly about St Kilda’s Tony Lockett breaking the record for most goals in a game. Stuart would agree; he reckoned Lockett was the best full-forward since 1950s Essendon legend John Coleman. His eyes narrowed somewhat on Sunday afternoons, however, when Sydney’s tight-shorted show-pony Warwick Capper stole the show.

By late 1988 it was time to move house again. I went next door to say goodbye. Stuart’s place was modest: a tiny kitchen and bathroom; a lounge room cramped with old china. Ancient Fitzroy Football Club paraphernalia filled the absence of family photos – he’d never married. On the coffee table sat a photo album filled with newspaper clippings, curled-up and yellowing. A footballer of promise, the war years had cut Stuart’s own career short.

He was sad we were leaving. I made a promise to visit him again. I never did.

Fitzroy became my second-favourite team – and I always associated them with ‘old Stu’, as Dad called him. But my teen years passed without much thought of the old man until 1996, when the Lions folded and merged with the Brisbane Bears.

I hoped Stuart had taken on Brisbane (now the Brisbane Lions) as his team after the merger. And I hoped he was still alive to see their three premierships just after the turn of the millennium. For me, the twin blows of Brisbane’s pair of grand final triumphs over Collingwood (2002 and 2003) were softened by the thought of a ninety-something Stuart in his armchair, soaking it up.

Now I’m 36, a father of two girls, and footy and I have fallen out. My short career peaked with runner-up in the best and fairest for Cobram Seconds in the Murray Football League. My pedigree as a Pies supporter has moved from one-eyed to almost ambivalent. Other interests – travel, love, words, music and booze – have taken the place of footy. I can hold a conversation with a footy nut, but my views certainly aren’t nuanced. Now it all seems too chaotic and complicated – and wrung free of colour. I spend my days chasing simplicity. It’s elusive, yet I find it. It’s there in my girls’ smiles. And it’s there at the local park whenever I see dads and their sons kicking the Sherrin back and forth, the tiniest sliver of sunshine breaking through the cloud, an old man’s twinkle-eyed smile going against the grain.

» Daniel Lewis is a Melbourne-based writer and media professional

»» Originally published in The Big Issue on July 5, 2013.

The Youth-Clinger and Fletch

Two days ago I turned 36. The back-end of my thirties has commenced. But despite the looming inevitability of being, all of a sudden, closer to 40 than 30, it's not nearly as depressing as I’d feared. Maybe it’s having two young children and not having time to feel sorry for myself – or my playing the big kid to said children – that keeps me young at heart.

Or perhaps it’s because the yardstick I’ve long used to measure age – how my own compares with the eldest AFL player – is still alive for another year, with Dustin Fletcher in his 21st season at Essendon.

Growing up, my footy idols – Peter Daicos, Tony Lockett, Rod Carter – always seemed a lifetime older. They were men – strong, tall, burly men – with muscles, moustaches, chest hair and mullets.

In hindsight, many of them were only kids themselves. But through the eyes of a star-struck kid, they were giants: wise, gladiatorial... and hairy.

It wasn’t until I turned 18, after a couple of my junior footballing peers got picked up in the AFL draft (while I commenced a short, ignoble career with the Cobram seconds) that I realised I was closing the age gap on many of my AFL heroes.

Hitting the latter half of my booze-fuelled twenties, I started going past them. And yet, I retained a youthful, if delusional, brashness. My rationale was this: so as long as I fell within the age parameters of the AFL's playing elite, I still had some semblance of youth to hold on to.

Of course, those days are numbered. Each year the list has diminished, and for the past few seasons, since Barry Hall’s retirement, there’s only been one: Fletch.

Just as the thirty-somethings in the early '90s must have done with Michael Tuck, I’ve secretly cheered on the gangly, super-resilient Essendon stalwart each week, hoping he’ll sustain his stellar form and not cop any serious injuries. Luckily, he remains a key to his inconsistent, work-in-progress – and, recently, scandal-plagued – side’s fortunes. He may even play on in 2014, meaning I can tick the 'young box' – or my version of it – for a little while yet.

Deep down, though, I realise my youth is teetering by a boot lace; I know there's a reason I don't get called 'young fella' any more. Heck, I've now outlived Jim Morrison – who looked about 50 when he died – by eight years. I'm already 21 years older than Sindhuja Rajaram, who, in becoming the head of animation company Seppan at 14, is the youngest CEO in the world. The best AFL players – Judd, Ablett, Swan, Franklin – are all born in the '80s, while the next generation, led by 1990 baby Trent Cotchin and 1993 (yes, 1993)-born Jonathon Patton, arrived in a decade that saw the rise and fall of grunge, the Spice Girls and Monica Lewinsky.

More worryingly, half the coaches are, like me, '70 babies. Having grown up watching the likes of Allan Jeans and Tony Jewell ply their trade while looking as old as my pop, it's a little disconcerting to see the Scott brothers – just 11 months my senior – barking instructions from the coaches' box.

Asking around, I realised I wasn't alone in the practice of using the ages, actions and looks of prominent people to get a sense of one's own expiry date. My father-in-law, for example, knew his country footy career was almost up when Billy Picken retired; it was only natural given their careers – he at Echuca, Picken at Collingwood – started at the same time. My uncle says a similar thing about Peter Daicos.

Other sports and high-end celebrities got a look in, too. My sister, a self-proclaimed age-obsessive, is one of the few who'd prefer Lleyton Hewitt keep up the brattish on-court racket rather than hang up his racquet. They were born three weeks apart and watching him mix it with the best keeps her young – or at least feeling that way. My mother was struck by her own mortality when Olivia Newton-John – still blond and beautiful but 30 years on from that black lycra suit – turned 60 a few years back. Then there's my friend, an avid Royal watcher, who found herself confronted by Prince Charles's fossilled appearance at Will and Kate's wedding last year. She recalls him as a relatively young man – or, as she later worked out, the same age as she is now.

With almost all my childhood heroes having bowed out of their respective sports (did anyone else my age feel a little wistful when Steve Waugh retired from Test cricket in 2003 after 19 seasons; or when Robert Harvey, who debuted for St Kilda in 1988, finally hung up the boots?), perhaps its time to find a new measuring stick by which to gauge my age. Perhaps I’ll turn to the golf or lawn bowls circuit.

Maybe I'll even accept middle age – seen to begin at 35, 40 or 45, depending on your source – with good grace.

But for now, hang in there, Fletch.