Go the Hawks!!

On Grand Final weekend, I wrote two fan pieces in support of the Hawks. One hoping for victory, one basking in it. Here they are.

The Odds are Against Us, But Who Cares?

Shane Crawford was put on the Hawthorn senior list on November 6th 1991. I still have the newspaper clipping, not because I am some sort of stalker, but because I was put on the senior list the very same day. Crawf came via the national draft and Assumption. I came via father-son and Camberwell Grammar. The senior team had just won the AFL premiership, and both of us had our fingers crossed that we’d be around for the next one.  Neither of us doubted whether there would be a next one. It was a time when premiership cups were so commonplace at Glenferrie that we used to duck exiting the race for fear of getting hit by one.

It turned out I wasn’t even around for the next failure. My dream lasted until the June draft of 1992. Two hundred and eighteen days. The shortest time anyone has spent on an AFL list. Crawf was clearly a star in the making, dominating the reserves, attempting the almost impossible task of combining senior league footy with his VCE studies. For a few months, I remember helping him with his maths. We’d lie on the massage tables after training, contemplating permutations and combinations and probabilities. When the club called me into a small dark execution chamber to de-list me, I pleaded for mercy like the desperate man I was. ‘You can’t get rid of me! I’m Shane Crawford’s maths tutor!’

The seasons started to click by. Jarman departed in ‘95 leaving Crawford our best midfielder. Then Dunstall retired in ‘98 and suddenly he was our best player. There was the merger debacle, survival scares. For a dark few seasons, it felt like he was our only good player. There’s a garish team photo hanging on the wall in the Hawks Museum from the end of the Knights era. Players are lounging in Roman emperor reclines, pointing off camera, laughing at a long lost joke. The photographer obviously decided that standing tall with fist-assisted bicep flexing was passé. That team won seven and lost fifteen. Looking at the names underneath, it was Hawthorn that was the joke.

The nature of the national draft means that if a team is a joke for long enough, it should eventually come good. Nevertheless, a club still needs leadership, and in late 2004 we got it in the form of Alistair Clarkson, the savior none of us knew we wanted. He drafted tall, he drafted skilful, and most importantly, he drafted brave. He adopted the best parts of Mark Williams’s attacking game, and dreamed up a defensive set-up all of his own. And he made us tough. Through it all, the aging number nine has played his part, accepting the knife-edge of one-year-contracts when he would be well within his rights to ask for more.

Last Saturday, Shane Crawford delivered the most moving post-match interview I have seen since these things became fashionable. He spoke slowly. He said nothing particularly remarkable. But his brimming eyes spoke of the 6164 days he has spent as a Hawthorn footballer. The thousands of training nights. The 304 matches. The 16 attempts on the summit for 16 failures. He said simply and quietly that he thought this chance would never come, and now it has.  He eventually broke from the interview to pay his respects to the only current day AFL player who has run further.

The bagmen say that the odds are against us. The Hawks are paying $2.85, the Cats $1.45. If we accept that the totaliser rake is about 19%, that translates to a probability of … to be honest, I don’t really care. And I know from experience that Crawf doesn’t care either.

The Day Lightning Struck Again for the Bald and the Beautiful

‘I got hit by lighting 37 years ago,’ David Featherstone says. ‘I haven’t grown a hair on my head or body since.’

David is at the front of the MCC members queue, lining up to see his 59th Grand Final in a row. He’s a 71 year member of the Hawthorn football club and for many years it was his smiling eyebrowless head that welcomed players through the door at Glenferrie. He has a sleeping bag tucked under one arm, as well as deckchairs and multiple thermoses. David’s serious about getting good seats. It’s 11.30 Friday morning.

‘Do you think we’re a chance?’

‘We’re more than a chance,’ he says confidently. ‘We’ll win.’
 
It feels reassuring to be talking chance with a guy who’s been hit by lightning and lived. I decide that David is our talisman, our Harry Potter figure. The boy who lived. And by my calculations he was hit in 1971, a Hawthorn premiership year. I look up at a cloudless blue sky. David loves the club. I know he’d take another hit if he had to.

The ground announcer talks for so long that it seems we’re at risk of him attempting to call the game. Nor do we get the old fashioned balloons, apparently they cannot be environmentally justified, so we make do with a fly-by from an Airbus A380. The airline ad yields to the beer ad, and the announcer attempts a title fight rev. ‘Let’s play footy!’ If only he would let them.

And then it does start and it’s brilliant. Buddy is barreled at the seven minute mark, allowing 100,000 people to state their Buddy views, for and against. The goals flow at both ends. Ellis, yeeeeees! Moon-dog, noooo! The slurring drunk guy behind me keeps shrieking that Ablett is too good, and my gut feeling is that he’s onto something. He’s untackleable, as always, and he’s getting more of it than our own untackleable - Brad Sewell.

Geelong snag another from a fifty metre penalty, and we shriek with disgust. The Hawk fan three rows along cups his hand to his mouth. ‘I’d almost prefer Goldspink!’ The villainous man in green is the seriously bald Scott McLaren, and I’m suddenly worried that David Featherstone, my hairless lucky charm was the wrong option. Half the Cats seem to resemble him. The only visible umpire on the ground is a chrome dome. But the game’s a beauty.  Ottens is putting on a clinic. Thank god for Hodgey.

The Hawks spend the second quarter teetering on the precipice, as Geelong pistol shots veer wide like bullets in a Western. It’s reminds me of North’s disastrously inaccurate second term in 1998. Behind follows behind follows behind. Remarkably, the favourites go into half time behind. ‘We might just win this,’ I say to my wife Tamsin, citing the ‘98 game as evidence. She nods giving me the same face I give her when she talks about composting. ‘There’s a long way to go though.’

The third quarter is an impossible blur. ‘Fat Dew!’ I shriek in delight, and then clap my hand over my mouth, worried that I’ve accidentally sounded anti-Semitic. The former Port Adelaide man proves the catalyst. Of course he does! He wore the black teal and silver for nine seasons. The lightning bolt! In my feverish superstitious brain, there’s a direct link between David Featherstone and the Hawk number 31. He goals again and all the momentum is with us. Lightning striking twice.

We keep walking the ball through for rushed behinds and I panic that Guerra’s lack of panic will hurt us. Seventeen points the difference at three quarter time. I feel sick. ‘It’s like 1984’ I say to Tamsin, and I think she’s expecting me to say something profound about totalitarianism, when my head is filled with images of Leon Baker. Please don’t be 1984, I whisper. The Cats are kicking to the Leon Baker end.

All the boys stand tall, living out the words on the pre-game banner. Endurance. Mateship. Courage. Sacrifice.  Chance Bateman is wearing something that resembles the orthodontic headgear of my youth, and throws his body at everything. Crawford pushes the width of the ground, lays a tackle, gets up, runs the width of the ground again. Mitchell goes back with the flight and gets a hand in. Buddy goals from his own counter intuitively non preferred pocket. Brown cramps. Ladson goals. Hodge cramps. Mitchell goals. Guerra cramps. Crawf cramps. The chipping begins, the beautiful awful chipping. Behind us, the singing starts. ‘We’re a happy team at Haw-thorn…’ Cat fans fill the exits. The glorious ugly chipping gives me time to feel for them. Three losses in forty-five. It hardly seems fair. Then the siren goes and it’s back to thinking about us. Yeeeeeeeesss! They did it! They did it.