Sports Biblio Digest, 9.22.19: The Golden Age of Australian Football Writing
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Tour That Changed Rugby Forever; LA’s First Olympics; A Happy Place For Orioles’ Fans; What Makes Someone A Sports Fan; Barry Zito; Maradona Doc; Billie Jean King Library; Spain’s Basketball Glory; How Seattle Lost The Sonics; The Origins Of Early Baseball Team Nicknames; Sports Psychology Books
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This coming Saturday, a team that didn’t exist until seven years ago will play for the first time in the Australian Football League’s Grand Final.
What’s more, the appearance by the Greater Western Sydney Giants—against the Richmond Tigers, a venerable Melbourne side— represents another success story from outside of the sport’s birthplace in the state of Victoria.
The Giants play most of their home games at the 2000 Olympic Stadium and a few more in Canberra, the Australian capital. Hence the regional branding name, similar to North American teams that venture beyond their respective sports’ traditional breeding ground.
Since 1990, 13 Grand Finals champions have come from outside of Victoria, as the “Premiership” moved across the continent.
It was the decade before, the 1980s, that’s the focus of an engaging new collection about Aussie Rules as it was ready to break out beyond Melbourne and environs, and become a truly national endeavor.
“Electrifying 80s: Footy’s Outrageous Decade in the Words of Its Best Writers” (Slattery Media) celebrates the men (and a few women) who chronicled what would become the end of a more than century-long era.
The Victorian Football League, begun in 1877, would be renamed the AFL in the decade to follow (the VFL exists today as a regional league).
While the football wasn’t always so sizzling, the book’s editor, Russell Jackson, formerly a sportswriter with The Guardian’s Australian edition, showcases the columnists and reporters who revolutionized coverage of the game at the height of the print medium.
As Jackson writes in the book’s introduction, the 1980s was “a decade of chaos and upheaval off the field . . . but in the press box, fertile ground for a talented, highly innovative generation of journalists and writers.”
Their employers were, for the most part, the Melbourne newspapers, and the best of them ventured far beyond Aussie Rules, and sports, as their careers and lives carried on past the decade.
The revelation to me, an American uneducated about Aussie Rules, was Garrie Hutchinson of The Age, whose column The Watcher went far beyond the oval boundaries of the field. His penchant for standing “in the outer,” as Jackson puts it, helped place the game against the backdrop of changes in Australian society.
Hutchinson had been better known as a poet, before that, and continued in that capacity later. Indeed, many of his peers ventured off to write not only about other sports, but life outside any sporting boundary.
In “Electrifying 80s,” the on-field and sideline exploits of Kevin Sheedy, Tommy Hafey, Ron Barassi, Alex Jesaulenko and others are brought to compelling life in the hands of Hutchinson, Martin Flanagan, Trevor Grant, Garry Linnell, Mike Sheahan and others.
They were writing in a time before today’s 24/7 online world, which Jackson doesn’t hold against their contemporaries. “Footy is no longer a 12-team provincial competition played on mud-heaps,” he writes, “but a billion-dollar industry with the corresponding sensitivities.”
Among those travails were longtime VFL clubs Footscray and North Melbourne, the latter of which would decamp to New South Wales to become the Sydney Swans.
An early-season 1981 column from Hutchinson in many ways foretold the decade to come, as the Australian code of football could no longer be contained within its original borders:
“Born in Melbourne, it’s a unique sport. That’s something that’s better than the misguided idea of internationalism. Not only is it better than the whole world playing the same game, it’s important. We and every other region need to defend our identity or be swallowed by the forces of homogeneity, be they Russian, Chines or American.”
At the same time, the Melbourne game was moving away from neighborhood ovals into bigger, communal multi-team stadiums. Hutchinson wrote in 1982 that “we really have to make sure that a lot of good games stay at good grounds around Melbourne.”
But the bigger business of Aussie Rules was just revving up. In 1983, Sheahan, of The Herald, in a piece with the headline “What’s wrong with footy?,” worried about the big money infusing the game:
“If Collingwood and Carlton get serious on the idea of buying a Premiership, what happens to Footscray, Fitzroy or one or two others?”
As readers were to learn later in the book, Footscray exists today as the Western Bulldogs in the AFL, while Fitzroy, established in Melbourne in the 1890s, merged with another club in the 90s to become the Queensland-based Brisbane Lions.
By mid-decade, Peter McFarline of The Age admitted that how the VFL was being run had become antiquated, “heavily influenced by the kings,” in which the clubs are the “land barons and the players are the serfs.”
The VFL was about a decade behind North American professional sports, which were undergoing free agency that was making elite athletes extremely rich, and the convulsions were about to sweep through Australian football.
As the later 80s unfold, the Sydney Swans become a powerful force, and by 1989, a Grand Final to rival some of the best in the sport’s history took place at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, with the Melbourne club Hawthorn throttling Victorian rival Geelong in what Rohan Connolly of The Age called “a decent Grand Final after suffering years of tedious thrashings, and we got a lot more.”
It was the last VFL Grand Final before the AFL came into being, after nearly a century in a tight geographical and cultural coterie.
The GWS Giants, who finished sixth during the regular AFL season, may be the upstart when they face Richmond in the MCG later this week. But their presence reinforces the popularity of a sport that skilled writers of a previous generation anticipated three decades ago, when the initial ruptures of a long tradition could not be ignored.
A Few Good Reads and Listens
Charles “Chas” Brownlow, whose name bears the award for the “best and fairest” player each year in the AFL, was known as someone else during his early playing days during the 1880s. That’s because the Geelong Cats legend competed under an alias so his father, who wasn’t keen on his participation, wouldn’t find out;
The ninth Rugby World Cup got underway Saturday in Japan with two-time defending champion New Zealand, Australia and France winning the opening matches. They’re among the favorites in the 20-team rugby union event, as is England, which plays Tonga on Sunday. BBC Radio 4 presenter Justin Webb, a schoolboy rugby player, makes a case for that sport as “morally superior” to soccer, which he calls “infernal” and full of softies who feign injuries. That’s a rarity in rugby, he writes, where “in fact they normally play on with bits of them hanging off in the manner of Monty Python’s Black Knight: ‘Tis but a flesh wound …’ ”
Five years before the start of the Rugby World Cup in 1987, the Australian team many consider the greatest in rugby league history went on a 22-match tour of Britain and France in a transformational event. The 1982 Kangaroos are the subject of Mark Flanagan’s new book “The Invincibles,” featured on a recent episode of the Rugby Reloaded podcast. On another episode, host Tony Collins asks journalist and rugby historian Huw Richards why it took so long to start a Rugby World Cup;
One more on the Rugby World Cup, from The New York Times, on Australia’s Wallabies, with an eventful run-up to the event that includes Israel Folau’s banishment for religious-based comments about gays;
After 33 years, Gary Pressy is stepping away from his Wrigley Field keyboard as the Chicago Cubs organist in order to take care of his ailing mother;
A miserable season is coming to an end for the Baltimore Orioles, who as of this writing have a 50-104 record, better only than the Detroit Tigers. So why would a little more than 9,000 Orioles fans show up at Camden Yards in late September for a seemingly meaningless game against the equally futile Blue Jays? “It’s my happy place,” says one;
In the age of analytics, can such unfettered fans as those rooting for the woeful O’s overcome the onslaught of high-tech entertainment by today’s sports marketers? Social psychologist Rich Luker, who runs a sports polling firm, thinks the traditional narrative and historical appeal remains powerful. But he worries that “somewhere in the last three years, we’ve crossed the transom from being a sports industry to being a media industry. They are focusing more on the technology and the media than the sport itself;”
How a South Philly sports fan is trying to turn his passion for the Eagles into a newsletter business, and as a way of combating clinical depression;
The origins of early baseball team nicknames are discussed at The Hardball Times by baseball historian and author Thomas Gilbert, who reveals how the Brooklyn Bridegrooms were so dubbed, among many other now-defunct clubs, as well as the original nickname for the present-day St. Louis Cardinals;
Former major league pitcher Barry Zito admits in his new memoir that he rooted against the Giants in the 2010 World Series after manager Bruce Bochy left him off the post-season roster, and how he’s remorseful about it now, in his new life and music career in Nashville;
A new documentary of Diego Maradona that begins its U.S. television run Oct. 1 on HBO is a “fame-technique movie, measured in crowd roars, off-field revelry, media run-ins, and fan scrums as dizzying accoutrements to success, but also . . . in how those same trappings can suddenly turn vicious, and a hero’s fall can go shockingly unsupported;”
Spain won the men’s basketball World Cup (formerly the world championship), and it’s a testament of a veteran, teamwork-focused unit with many NBA players whose rise to international glory was long in the making;
A new podcast, “Sonic Boom,” by Jordan Ritter Conn of The Ringer, examines how Seattle lost its NBA franchise to Oklahoma City;
A year ago Joanne Boyle quit her job as the women’s basketball coach at the University of Virginia to deal with the red tape of getting legal status for her Senegalese-born adopted daughter. After more than a dozen trips to Africa, Ngoty Rain Boyle, now seven, became an American citizen in August, with a lot of help from Virginia Sen. Mark Warner;
The main branch of the Long Beach Public Library has been renamed in honor of Billie Jean King, who grew up in the Los Angeles suburb in a working-class community;
From Five Books, some recommendations for sports psychology reading;
With Los Angeles preparing to be an Olympics host for the third time, in 2028, a forthcoming book details the city and its environs as it successfully bid for its first Games in 1932. “Dreamers and Schemers,” by Larry Siegel, will be published October 29 by the University of California Press. More about the book by Siegel, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times who heads up the literary journalism program at UC-Irvine.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 179, published Sept. 22, 2019.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.