There were naked men everywhere in the rooms, a fact that didn’t daunt me in the slightest. I guess I was so used to seeing my father strolling naked around our house the idea of a penis parade of VFL players wasn’t too bothersome. I would march up to nude twentysomethings as they towelled themselves off, holding out my autograph book and blithely ignoring the dangling manhood between their legs.
‘Excuse me, Mickey,’ I’d chirp, unfazed. ‘Could you please sign my book?’
They’d sign it, unsettled by the sexless little pixieboy in the tiny dufflecoat gliding its way around the changing rooms at eye level with their genitals, and suddenly feeling the awkwardness of their nudity, as though I was a serpent offering them a shiny apple.
‘Here y’go, mate,’ Ross Lyon would say, scribbling his autograph with a flourish and giving my hat a friendly pat as he shoved me in the opposite direction. ‘Stay in school eh?’
Fitzroy footballers in the 1980s were golden, brawny, glorious. There were the Osborne brothers—cocky, glamorous Richard and his shy, acne-scarred older brother, Graham. Enthusiastic, puppyish Duane Rowe. Toothsomely mysterious Gary Pert. They moved as a pack, all fleshy arrogance and pride. They slapped each other’s arses and spat on the grass.
Tim Pekin was twenty years old when I first spotted him loping around the team, all stick arms and milky-spindle legs, with a terribly inconvenient fringe that fell over one eye whenever he found his way near the ball. My parents christened him ‘The Poet’ as he looked like he belonged at a writing desk, penning lengthy soliloquies for wealthy dowagers with a quill, rather than sprinting around Kardinia Park covered in mud or standing miserably in the rain at Junction Oval waiting for David Strooper to kick a torpedo his way. He wore a guernsey with the number 24 on it and I thought he was utterly perfect.
I was the first kid ever to wear his number on my back. I loudly insisted to all who would listen that he was my new favourite, needling my parents to purchase the iron-on transfers ‘2’ and ‘4’ to attach to the back of my official VFL merch Fitzroy Cubs jumper. They duly complied, privately and disproportionately amused by my somewhat eccentric choice of heart-throb. I pasted over old pictures of Corey Haim with black and white photographs of Tim sitting on a bench with a towel over his head. At night I would talk to the pictures as though they were alive.
I saw him naked plenty of times, sneaking up on him in the change rooms and playfully squirting water on his exposed buttocks or just sitting next to his locker and staring silently and innocently at him while he rushed to get dressed. I used to force my way into the weights training room at Junction Oval and stand by admiringly counting as he did his reps. He was baffled by my sudden devotion, and was ribbed mercilessly by his teammates.
‘Peeks, your missus is here,’ they’d snigger, flicking him in the testicles with wet towels and gesturing over to where I stood in the doorway, oblivious to anybody else in the room. I would write down topics of conversation in advance (‘You know, you were really outplayed by Michael Tuck last Saturday. I’m only saying that to be constructive’) and follow him from the physio’s office to the car park, where I would grin adoringly into the window of his Barina until he politely locked the car doors and drove away, being careful not to run over my foot.
We would circle warily around each other during my patented Thursday night chocolate cake handouts—he gawkily uncertain of how to handle a determinedly devoted pre-pubescent, me in my numbered jumper, plotting and planning the perfect marriage proposal (should I mention the age difference or just gloss over it as though it wasn’t an issue?). Tim was a horrendously shy Colac boy who wore stonewash jeans with pleats in the front, raised a Catholic with umpteen brothers and sisters. I regularly invited him over to our house for dinner, pushing insistently every time he affably sidestepped my requests with friendly chuckles.
‘Oh, that’s . . . that’s sweet,’ he would murmur, desperately trying to make eye contact with somebody across the room to come and save him.
I fixated upon the idea of dinners and wouldn’t let it drop. I invited everybody. Michael Gale, Paul Roos, Gary Keane. Suddenly there was a new addition to our family’s already busy football-obsessed week: Wednesday night dinners. My parents would cook up enormous platters of tortellini and spaghetti that would be inhaled in a matter of minutes by these bullish man-mountains. At first everybody was very shy. Our dining room resembled an odd sort of country barn dance, with three or four players crammed over one side of the table staring demurely into their laps, and my family on the other side attempting to coax them into conversation. After half an hour or so somebody would break rank and the room would exhale and talk would turn to sport and politics and music. And pasta. The players always liked to talk about pasta.
Tim Pekin finally came to one of these dinners. At first he was painfully bashful, and our overt attentions seemed to cause him distress. But then he came to another, and another, more regularly over time, until eventually his absence was a more notable thing than his presence. He got to know the layout of our house and would roam its perimeters more and more comfortably, running his long fingers over book spines and resting his drink on top of the piano in moments of quiet reflection while around him everybody chatted amiably. I followed him from room to room.
After my mother requested more Saturday afternoon white space in which to scream like Hasil Adkins in a voodoo froth and throw her boiling thermos at the opposition players, I was allowed to roam freely around the footy grounds unsupervised. To a child, this was heaven. I took up with a couple of broad-shouldered, smiling sisters named Cath and Jo and the three of us would duck and weave through the crowds, picking up half-eaten buckets of hot chips and trying to skeeze loose change from sentimental drunks. It was because of Cath and Jo that I was eventually inducted into the Fitzroy cheersquad, a motley collection of vocal bogans who gathered around the end of the ground behind the goal sticks and waved flags whenever Fitzroy kicked a rare goal. The cheersquad demographic ranged from three-year-old girls with earrings and bubble perms to hoarse middle-aged men sucking back durries. While the distant interstate code of rugby had rows of taut eighteen-year-old dames in butt-grazing skirts shaking little pom-poms and high kicking with excited squeals, Fitzroy had toothless slags and sporadic applause.
It was exciting being a part of something that was simultaneously so chaotic and so organised. The cheersquad would spend Tuesday nights in some freezing cold community hall, painstakingly putting together an enormous crepe paper banner celebrating Fitzroy’s achievements of the previous week, all while eating Chicken Crimpies and drinking litre bottles of Solo. On game day we’d troop out onto the field and unroll our precious burden on the wet oval, shivering in the cold, and on some secret signal stagger into packs at either side of the banner and raise it up for the rest of the ground to admire. Moments later, the team would run out of the rooms and run through it, tearing it to shreds—after which point we would carefully pack up all the torn scraps into garbage bags and retire to our regular position behind the goals, knowing that we’d been a part of a special moment. It was all very thrilling.
These banners were enormous. Some weeks they’d feature a cartoon lion, snarling menacingly at the opposition. Other weeks they’d go for a solid message of congratulations along the lines of WELL DONE GRANT LAWRIE 150 GAMES. On the ground, even when crammed into a pack holding up one side of these enormous totems, my face in a random armpit, I’d still try to catch Tim Pekin’s eye as he ran onto the field. I was for the most part ignored.
As I grew into my skin and became an irksome teenage runaway, keeping my parents awake at night with a persistent habit of slipping out of bedroom windows and hanging out at recording studios with morally bankrupt guitarists, I distanced myself with emotional jaggedness from my increasingly distressed family, becoming more convinced that the mysterious, elusive spirit-connections between drunken strangers were the only ones worth nurturing. I stopped going to football games. My family’s slavish devotio
n to the sport, the humiliating way they shouted from the sidelines, the overly hopeful way they attempted each week to bring us all together again in the name of the club . . . it was twee. It was a childish relic of a past from which I was eager to disassociate. When my father watched me dress for a night out, all hotpants and teetering teenage platform high heels, he would say in a hurt and hopeless tone, ‘But I thought we could go to the game tomorrow.’ I was cutting myself free from everything my parents loved, and the sacred, jolly ritual of football represented only a forgotten past.
Over the years, the club I had grown up with began to flounder. They won two games in two years. Ins and Outs nights became less a social gathering and more a place to mourn triumphant days of yore. My parents still determinedly attended games but left with sagging, defeated faces. Everybody looked tired and old, even the players. I was living a new life, running around town with goth girls and boys with facial piercings. I thought I was the shit. Every now and then my parents would try to make a connection and ring whatever slummy share house I was in and invite me to a game. For old times’ sake. I would make somebody else answer the phone, pretend I wasn’t home. When the telephone was returned to its receiver I would regale my stoned friends with embarrassing, self-deprecating stories about being in the cheersquad and turning up to training each week with my sunken little chocolate cake.
‘I used to cry when Fitzroy lost,’ I would tell the room, to howls of delight and derision. ‘I used to go home and talk to the team poster.’
In 1996 it just got too hard for Fitzroy and they crumbled, brought to their knees by heavy debts and bad management and a footballing body intent on expanding the game to a national level, leaving no prisoners in its wake. There were murmurs of a merger with North Melbourne, then Footscray, then finally some dreadful half-arsed deal was done with Queensland team the Brisbane Bears and, just like that, one hundred and thirteen years of history was over. No matter how many fundraising nights or tin-rattling doorknocks the dyed-in-the-wool supporters devoted themselves to, Fitzroy would fold at the year’s end. There was a dull sense of inevitability about it all. Fitzroy was never built to last. It was the lame dog, a sentimental family pet who everybody knew would get taken into a paddock and shot eventually.
I was dating an ex-AFL player that year, and at an awards night he publicly noted my disloyalty to the club I’d once adored.
‘I’d like to thank my girlfriend for missing so many Fitzroy games to come and see me play,’ he said in his speech, adding with a smirk ‘though to be fair she wasn’t really missing much since they haven’t won a match in about seventy years.’
It stung because it was true; I’d abandoned Fitzroy just like I abandoned broken romances and broken friendships and things that were difficult and awkward and took time to fix, like my relationship with my parents. I resented the implication and what it said about my careless personality.
Fitzroy played their last ever game of AFL in Fremantle, Western Australia, at the Subiaco oval, on 1 September, 1996. My father had to work in Melbourne, but my mother decided to fly four and a half hours to mark the moment. We had only just begun speaking again after another vicious round of bruisings and name-callings, but in an offhand moment she asked if I would like to come and in an offhand moment I said yes. I bought a plane ticket and we sat together uncomfortably, existing in that emotional limbo parents must suffer when a child has slipped from their discipline and grasp. She had long ago accepted that I would never come home again, and seemed determined to let this trip pass without incident or recrimination. She offered me a Fantail and we sucked in comradely silence.
Once in Western Australia we behaved like tourists. We went to the old Fremantle gaol and inhaled its bloody history. We had a beer and lunch on the water. We talked benignly about the climate and the passing trade, never really acknowledging aloud why it is we were there and what the end of the team meant to us personally.
The game was a disaster—of course, of course. Fitzroy were never a chance to win, not even with some big dumb sentimental stroke of luck involving all of Fremantle’s players succumbing to severe food poisoning and being suddenly unable to stand up straight or function. They fumbled and sloped their way across the oval, missing opportunities, dropping marks, kicking the ball out of bounds on the full as though they’d recently suffered a serious stroke. They looked sorry for themselves and everyone in the crowd and clearly wanted it all to be over. The handful of supporters who had made the trip across clapped politely with heavy hearts. It was unclear who was hurting the worst.
When the siren eventually signalled the game’s coming to a merciful end, my mother and I turned to each other and we were both weeping. There was an unspoken shared heartbreak, an overwhelming cavalcade of memory—of falling in love in the outer, tending to a blossoming pregnancy, agitating with the cheersquad, trotting around obediently after broad-shouldered icons. I watched the team shuffle down the race into the rooms, heads lowered, full of shame and disappointment and a dark, confusing grief.
My childhood shuffled off with them. My family rituals shuffled off with them. When they had all left the ground, trainers trudging behind, I heard something click shut in my heart.
At that moment I felt my mother reach across and take my hand.
People made a lot of noise about Fitzroy’s euthanasia at first. Shook their heads and muttered about ‘the death of the game’ and how stripping local football of its dignity was the beginning of the end. How there was no more heart in football. Corporate greed had taken over. Some drifted across with guilty expressions to Brisbane and quietly bought memberships, attending games when they could and trying to muster up the enthusiasm to follow a newer, flashier team that had essentially chewed up their little dreg of a team and spat out the remains in fleshy gobs.
A small but vocal group of supporters refused to say die, setting up a Fitzroy Football Club website and meeting regularly to discuss options for the future. They no longer had a team to follow. There were no games to attend. They were simply a club of members with an AGM and a photocopied newsletter. They were rudderless, a theatre without a play. They met in a church hall at first, then a function room, then downgraded to the odd beer garden as fewer and fewer people attended, feeling foolish at attempting to keep the dream alive.
In 2007 I penned a piece for The Age about Friday night football coverage and mentioned in passing my fondness for Tim Pekin’s number 24.The same day it appeared in print he emailed me, for the first time in months. I asked him if he’d read the column. He replied that he’d not seen it, adding: It seems we have a rather intriguing way of communicating, beyond the realm of ink on trees, and for that I am grateful. He had grown into his boyish nickname, finally encompassed the soul of a poet.
I still have my tiny jumper with the iron-on 24 peeling from its back. I still believe in football and its sweeping passions. I just can’t explain why I no longer have a team. How I miss the searing memory of ritual and family. And it still exists, sort of, kind of. In a different form. Or maybe I just need it to. Like those Fitzroy supporters, meeting once a year in some dusty pub, with worn-out photographs and A4 folders full of memories.
Excerpts from this story first appeared in The Age.
Pour l’album
There is a secret unofficial age, it seems, when travel with one’s family crosses over from being a unifying lesson in worldly concerns and open-mindedness, and is instead looked upon as a rather sad admission of defeat. Backpacking around Europe in a shitcan Kombi with your parents at the age of eight is life affirming and to be celebrated. Doing the same thing at the age of thirty-five is embarrassing and to be pitied. Have you not got a husband?
You escape your family by moving out of the home in which you grew up, in a wilful and pre-emptive display of misguided independence. I can do what I want now, you tell yourself as you stretch out on a bed fashioned from milk crates and foam cuttings, admiring your dream catcher and the stereo system you have made fro
m a stolen Discman and a pair of speakers. They don’t own me anymore. You ration out visits to your ex-home like an unfeeling kitchen hand from a pantomime orphanage might ration out gruel. Once a staple part of life around the noisy breakfast table you become instead an elusive figure, breezing in and out of the family house in a flurry of sorry-can’t-stay excuses and pervasive hangovers. As you build your own life a necessary distance forms between you and your parents, through guilt-laden phone calls that end in petulant, regressive bursts, and your selfish inability to humanise them in any way.
‘They won’t mind if I cancel their wedding anniversary dinner,’ you tell your friends through a fairly brutal chemical aftermath. ‘They’ve got things on. They’ve got each other. They’re probably just going to spend the night in front of the television watching The Bill.’
After a while a sense of nostalgia creeps in, like months after a break-up where you text a once-maligned ex a friendly but meaningful hello. You forget the deeply entrenched destructive patterns enmeshed in every family unit and start to see your parents as affable chums, comrades with a shared history and a secret language. They’re not really like Debbie Reynolds and Peter Sellers. They’re more like the Cosbys. You should go on holiday with them again. Nothing bad can possibly happen.
A holiday with your parents when you are a fully grown adult is an exercise in patience, ego and humiliation. No longer a free agent, lying in bed ’til 3 pm reading newspapers and drinking champagne with a naked redhead, you’re now beholden to the brisk, no-nonsense schedule of two health conscious over-60s who develop a quiet but significant panic when their sense of routine is in any way compromised.You must rise when they do (‘It’s 6:30 am, what better time for a power walk! Here, you can borrow my intensely stupid-looking handweights’), eat what they eat (‘We’re on Atkins! My colon has never felt better! Look, I have a photograph of my last bowel movement!’), and sit in the back of the car trying to tune them out as they bicker over whether Brides of Christ was a miniseries or a novel. You are taken back to your seethingly hormonal teenage years when your parents were foolish enough to invite you with them on a trip to the States, possibly reasoning that if you were at least under their noses for the majority of the time you wouldn’t be compelled to indulge in the sorts of behaviour that may result in a stint in juvie.
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