Footy satire by the book -
reproduced from www.realfooty.theage.com.au/articles/2005/04/08/1112815726897.html
By Greg Baum
April 9, 2005

Hawthorn's gym at Glenferrie Oval was once a kind of landmark in this town and training sessions there in September were a ritual.

Well-wishers and media lined the walls as Dermott Brereton, Robert Dipierdomenico and Jason Dunstall oiled and warmed up, sausages sizzled in the adjoining trainers' room and the image of bustle and anticipation was a staple of back pages and evening news bulletins.

The Hawks played in finals for 13 successive years to 1994 and won five premierships, and when at last they missed the finals in 1995, The Age ran on its back page a Stuart Hannagan photo of that gym, deserted except for a dog. It was a thousand words' worth of picture.

The Hawthorn gym was packed again one night this week for the launch of Tony Wilson's brilliant debut novel, Players. The venue was chosen because Wilson's father and mentor Ray played 105 games and won a premiership and best-and-fairest for Hawthorn, and Wilson junior played reserves for the Hawks during that halcyon period of Brereton et al. For Wilson, Glenferrie was a kind of home and school.

The crowd was eclectic, featuring most of Wilson's family and media colleagues, but also AFL commissioner Mike Fitzpatrick, maverick Hawk Don Scott and enough funny guys to open a branch of the comedy festival.

But the surprise of the night was John Kennedy, who coached the Hawks to their first two premierships and was later chairman of the AFL commission, and who Ray Wilson still regards as a mentor.

Severe, austere Kennedy was the archetype of the disciplinarian coach - his team was Kennedy's Commandos - but was not known for his smile or his humour. "It takes a lot to make me laugh," he began on Wednesday, whereupon all in the room dissolved. Kennedy was laughing at himself.

Kennedy read the book only after agreeing to launch it and then read it again; he could not put it down. It appealed to his sense, and the sense of many others, of how in football the messengers have become bigger than the message, and how some of those self-important messengers could do with a bit of cutting down to size.

Players is described as comedy, but it is also a stinging satire. Its primary target is The Footy Show and its principals, Eddie McGuire and Sam Newman. It is scarcely likely to improve the humour of McGuire, for whom it has truly been a big week, as his club and his show have hit a slump and he has been assailed from all sides.

But Players can give offence only to those who are first to admit that they recognise themselves in the ugly and unscrupulous characters at the book's heart.

Asked about umpires once when coaching North Melbourne, Kennedy replied pointedly: "Normally, I say, no comment. Today I say, absolutely no comment whatsoever." At the launch of Players, it was noted that the book's disclaimer should say that any resemblance to a living person or show was "absolutely unintentional howsoever".

Kennedy had a reputation for distrusting intellectuals in football. He once made this famous exhortation to his team: "Don't think, do!" He said on Wednesday that it had had a less philistine ring to it in its context, but accepted that he had to live with it. He even repeated it, by popular demand.

He told of how after a heavy defeat by Geelong, Ray Wilson questioned Kennedy's rigid insistence on a long-kicking game, saying it was so predictable that opponents did not cover leads, but clustered where the ball would land.

Kennedy told Wilson he was right, but when Wilson asked what he was going to do about it, Kennedy retorted in his always booming voice: "Kick it long!" Again, the gym howled with laughter.

When Kennedy ruled with his iron fist in the Hawthorn change room, he could no more have imagined that he would one day be back there to launch a book than the late Bob Rose could have believed that a Melbourne Book Festival lecture would be named after him.

But there is a growing movement in football that is welcome, if too long delayed. It has always been puzzling that a phenomenon that is so dear to hearts in Melbourne has inspired so little memorable literature.

John Powers' The Coach and Martin Flanagan's book on Footscray, Southern Sky, Western Oval, were two of few books that looked outside the square in the game's first 100 years, as well as David Williamson's iconic play The Club. There were also Garrie Hutchinson's essays. Otherwise, football scribblings were plentiful, but shallow.

But recent times have proved revolutionary. Flanagan, John Harms and Matthew Hardy wrote refreshing books, the Rose lecture was inaugurated and a quarterly journal of thought-provoking football writing made its debut.

Players crosses a new threshold. Later this year, sometime Age journalist Steve Strevens will cross another new frontier with the publication of Keeping The Faith. Strevens spent a season travelling with and as one of the Collingwood zealots, borrowing the idea from Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and Tim Parks' A Season With Verona, but giving it an Australian twist.

In contrast to Players, Keeping the Faith is written with no guile, edge or intricacies of plot, but rather is a stream-of-consciousness-style ramble through a football year and a football lifetime. It is about Collingwood, but it is also about all of football.

Strevens wears his heart on his sleeve, Wilson pins his on the sleeve of the fictitious Billy Nock. Players is acutely observed and sharply written. It is bound to appeal to those who believe football has fallen into the hands of media despots.

Yet its author's love for the game can never be doubted. Nor can his footballing bona fides.

At one point, Wilson describes a match as another example of "chip-a-thon" and a player's high-flying efforts as "flashes of colour in a millpond of short passes". Kennedy especially liked that.