Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  After getting a taste for the atmosphere of the track while attending a few meets at Rosehill Race Course with my grandad and his friends, men with names like Lesley, Desmond and Noel, I would make the journey out to Warwick Farm in a pair of tracksuit pants, clutching the Best Bets while my friends emptied their energies into the upkeep of the school spirit by supporting the various sporting teams that competed on the weekend. Each time I had to rely on the bookies’ responding to my clearly underage efforts in good humour. The craze only petered out when I discovered that I could augment my physique through developing a training regime in the gym, and in this way combat my perceived impotence in the esteem of my female contemporaries, who were fast becoming the sole arbiters of worth in my mind.

  Like all addictive rituals, my punting involved a highly specific set of continually evolving requirements. The form guide had to be the Best Bets . There was something right about the pocket-sized format and the layout that featured colourful jockeys’ silks next to each runner. I also enjoyed the lively, often humorous style of its editors, I continued. It was a deep disappointment whenever I was forced to make do with the admittedly more detailed the Sportsman or even, god forbid, the Wizard .

  The newsagencies from which I purchased the Best Bets also took on the air of something important. They were my providers, giving me access to the format that enabled the pleasure of my predictions. A feeling of things being in order always overcame me when I saw the small, colourful package of the Best Bets displayed behind the perspex shelf in front of the other dull and flabby racing papers.

  During my spare time in the Odyssey in between jobs, I would splay the Best Bets open on my lap and allow myself the luxury of assessing some of the tipsters’ predictions at length.

  I shared all this in a more halting fashion with Coach as we travelled back to Redfern on the Eastern Suburbs and Illawarra Line. At various points in my discourse Coach would get up in the aisle and encourage me to follow her in a series of stretches focused on the glutes, hip flexors, quads, calves and lower back, all of which were becoming increasingly sore.

  On this occasion more than any other I saw that Coach received my confessions with a sense of warmth, avidly nodding throughout and encouraging me with yeses and low hums of agreement.

  When I finished she reassured me that the perceiving of special information in periodicals wasn’t an uncommon practice. For instance, said Coach, one of my previous students would meticulously circle the specials on offer in various shopping catalogues, although he never purchased any of the products – and my mother and her friends would organise weekly gatherings to discuss the discoveries in the catalogues that arrived in their various letter boxes.

  Coach suggested that I might try finding a surrogate for the Best Bets by replacing it with another periodical that did not share the same connection to the gambling and horseracing industries, which despite their central place in the history I shared with my grandfather, ought to be regarded not as a benevolent force, but as one connected to pernicious habits.

  You need to update your solitude techniques, she said, and enquired as to whether I was able to call to mind any fields of interest less well established in my routines that nonetheless delivered a comparable sense of excitement.

  The thing you need to find, said Coach, is a publication that you might receive semi-regularly, something that involves experts and the dramatisation of their discriminatory faculties. Ideally something related to where you live.

  After we parted near the station I mused at length on Coach’s question, making vague arrangements for a run again soon, next weekend at the latest.

  As I made my way back to the Odyssey, down Redfern Street past the sets of terrace houses and melaleucas, I passed the Glengarry, a pleasingly wedge-shaped pub on the corner, and decided to drop in for a beer and see if there were perhaps any interesting prospects in the day’s final races.

  While sipping my beer, and attempting to make predictions based on the inadequate racing information displayed in the weekend Herald, I realised that for some time I had been incubating in my mind the perfect candidate to replace punting and the hints of trouble I was coming to associate with the habit.

  Since my later high school days I enjoyed reading the café and restaurant reviews and other food-related suggestions in what was then called the Good Living section of the Sydney Morning Herald. I regarded the advice outlined in the pages of the Tuesday supplement to be of a special kind, a fact often puzzled at by my friends who then gave me the label ‘rustic bourgeoisie’ on account of the pretensions associated with the publication and with food criticism in general. None of this mattered to me because I was on the inside, so to speak, a believer in the good news featured in the pages.

  In a very real sense, the Good Living was gospel. Whatever the items regarding new restaurants, bakeries, providores and bottles of wine and beer suggested, they were meaningful to me in a comparable way to the selections and display of information on show in the Best Bets . In contrast to my relationship to the Best Bets , I was under less of an interpretive burden with Good Living, with the main requirement consisting not in weighing up alternative candidates on which to bet, but rather in forming an idea in my head of where the goods and services under consideration could be viewed, bought and experienced, and how the event of my collecting or encountering them might be woven into my weekly routines.

  In the absence of an actual visit, I was simply happy to inhabit a restaurant, café or bar virtually, which, considering my means, was what I did almost exclusively during the years of my apprenticeship to the Good Living at high school.

  I wondered whether my strong feelings for this information were a consequence of the role the publication played in my school days, when I spent a good deal of time imagining the freedoms of early adulthood, key among them buying dinner out in restaurants and drinking alcohol in pubs and bars. I read about wasabi mash, tapas, Balmain bugs, scallops, bruschetta and duck confit. I imagined people drinking cocktails in the street in jaunty but unadventurous outfits, smiling with the knowledge that an evening of diverse and steadily intensifying pleasures awaited. It was as though those imaginings from the last days of the previous millennium had crystallised within me and continued to offer a source of motivation, impervious to the ridicule of my contemporaries.

  I looked up from the paper to the screen, to some anonymous race in Western Australia, where the daylight still extended and where the dry bush which overlooked the course appeared an unlikely thing to be captured in the media and then find its way into this pub on the other side of the country.

  I thought back to my early days with the Good Living in the first years of the new millennium, when the chief critic was Matthew Evans, and how I had developed an increasingly involved fantasy dialogue with the section’s subsequent critics, Simon Thomsen and Terry Durack.

  As per Coach’s suggestions, I reflected on the minutiae of the practices that were so pervasive in my life that their importance seemed self-evident and therefore difficult to articulate. I began to recognise a distinctive set of routines I’d built around reading the Good Living which until that point had remained inexplicit.

  The first thing that came to mind was the game I played with reading the review section, where the critic offered a written evaluation of a restaurant and score out of twenty. After buying the paper on Tuesday I would conduct what was essentially a flirting ritual with the review, circling it like a shark on my initial reconnaissance reads of the paper and often managing to last until Thursday when I would, at the end of the day, ideally during a meal time, finally confront the review, marking the event rhetorically by vocalising expressions such as What have you got for me now, Durack, and Ah, Durack, we meet again, and sometimes, at the review’s conclusion, Durack, you’re such a dick.

  For some unknown reason my dialogue with the current reviewer had taken on a tone of theatricalised antagonism, as though in reading the review I was in something of an ongoing du
el with the writer. I suspected that this attitude was in part provoked, very unfairly, by Durack’s floppy hair and an image I’d hallucinated where he was wearing what appeared to be a lavender-coloured suit.

  Another section of the Good Living that brought purpose to my life was the page of wine reviews by Huon Hooke. I found this section particularly important due to its naming of the different bottle shops that were named as housing the wines under review. In more recent times this gave me the opportunity to take the Odyssey to some place I might otherwise not visit and enabled me to build up an ever-improving mental catalogue of my favourite bottle shops, including Kemenys on Bondi Road, Vine Providore in Redfern, Platinum Liquor in Bellevue Hill, Prince Wine Store in Zetland and Summer Hill Wine Shop. Once sourced, I would stow the wine under the seat of the car and reflect regularly on its being there during moments of boredom or unease experienced throughout the day.

  Pleased with these discoveries, I finished my beer without placing any bets, and wandered down the dark streets to seek out a rewarding meal for the evening.

  Botany Road

  Coach had told me to be at the ready for a run down Botany Road as soon as the weather got a bit hotter. She said that she had to answer a deep need to immerse herself in the wattle smells of early spring while tracing that particular route from Redfern Station all the way down to the port near the Sir Joseph Banks Park where I’d run my laps in the months prior.

  It just seems like a good place to be on a hot day, she said, something about the combination of industry from the different eras, the glimpses you catch of old weatherboard houses and humble churches, some of which, she reassured me with a nod, make you feel as though you’re in the south-west of America. Coach emphasised that we would lather ourselves up with sunscreen and get ice creams to ensure the full atmospheric effect of summer.

  The hot day arrived and with it a northerly wind that was at our backs for the first stretch. We sailed along the footpath past the remnants of brick factories converted into apartments, self-storage facilities and car dealerships. This, said Coach Fitz, is the postmodern city, the heritage-listed brick shells of industry giving birth to minimalist apartment blocks distinguishing themselves in a contradiction of gaudy minor flourishes: feature walls, anodyne sculptures made from leftover materials, fake structural elements added to give the appearances of a functionalist modern style.

  Certain strips were populated by kebab shops, fish-and-chipperies, Thai restaurants, bottle-os, cafés and pubs, while others featured garages, apartments and the old weatherboard houses that Coach often stopped to admire. She drew my attention to two red-brick Art Deco façades: the red-and-yellow paint scheme of one followed the contours of the brickwork, making it look like a giant, dormant, Transformer robot. Coach remarked on the peculiar compulsion to ruin good buildings with paint, in the name of reducing maintenance or signalling deals.

  The other façade was preserved without paintwork. Coach thought it an instructive comparison, illustrating how nice the first building might look if left unslathered. I was unsure of my own feelings about the paint and even thought that more elaborate decoration might improve the thing. Coach became particularly animated at the sight of some two-storey red-brick apartments with curved corners, and a light-pink cottage with a green, steeply sloping corrugated iron roof and two white columns. We passed several churches on the first stretch that seemed particularly surprising in a context dominated by industry and modern transport, with aeroplanes passing overhead, circling overpasses and traffic streaming past.

  These churches, in particular one of weatherboard and another surrounded by solid palm trees, along with the swampy wetlands we soon came to, did indeed give the place the feel of a naïvely imagined American South-west, a fact which I remarked upon to Coach who said the distinctive, heady atmosphere of the area made her feel as though she was entering a place of profound mystery whenever she ran down here.

  We ran through a gauntlet of branches thick with sweet, musky wattle smells, and passed a decent stand of swamp oaks before Coach paused to read the information panel at the Botany Wetlands, which described the area as the largest freshwater wetland in Sydney. Ringed by overpasses, corporate parks and golf courses, it was pleasing to stare for a while into the thick, muddy morass of lilies and other underwater plants, and for a moment to feel as though we were staring into some churning portal that led back to the primordial soup. Coach noted that the swamps and sandy soil, along with banksia scrub, would have once been the dominant geological and botanical features of the region now known as the Botany Lowlands.

  Remember the sandy soil we trod through around the perimeter of Centennial Park? Coach asked. That’s part of the same geological community. It gives me great comfort to think, she continued, that there is a large volume of water resting or flowing in the sandy ground beneath me whenever I run over this terrain.

  Coach reaffirmed this observation before we set off again, noting that there was something in general about the notion of underground water that seemed to supply her with a sense of imaginative belonging and calm, and that I too should work to establish geological or domestic atmospheres which would reliably induce such agreeable affects.

  The wind picked up and I worried about the abundance of plane tree fibres I’d noted earlier in the day. Coach suggested we quicken our pace for the next three kilometres before we stopped for refreshments. She began to offer a theory on why the Botany area appealed to her but, realising we should focus on running, abruptly cut the discourse off before starting up again as we refilled our bottles at one of the many ‘secret taps’ she had located to ensure a reliable source of water on her running tracks. I was surprised that the barely visible thing protruding from a beaten-up brick wall managed a stream of water, and puzzled at the idea of how she’d found it, but soon enough our bottles were brimming, the water bearing only the faintest tinge of rust brown.

  What it is about Botany, Coach continued, is that it seems an exemplary case of the architectural messiness that defines Sydney more broadly. Everything is a wandering motley of styles, often bearing little or no relationship to the surrounding buildings or landscape.

  Coach demonstrated this with particular glee shortly afterwards when pointing out Botany Fire Station on Banksia Street. This is a fine example of the Federation Arts and Crafts style, she said, but it is a lonesome vestige among houses that each, to varying degrees of force and vivacity, express a style peculiar to themselves. In Botany we witness a rich and varied display of the past one hundred years, with domestic, industrial, religious and recreational artefacts squashed in alongside each other. None of it quite evokes the melancholy of a ruin, but, to the outsider at least, there’s a lack of overt contrivance that I hope, perhaps naïvely, ought to characterise the built environment.

  We continued on Banksia Street before taking the perimeter track around the ample fields of Booralee Park, with Coach remarking that it was the Indigenous way of saying Botany. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to find the old horse trough, which Coach assured me she had seen before, uncovered in the park during an archaeological dig, but we did find an old toilet block beneath a sizeable Moreton Bay fig, and a large group of ibis perched at intervals on the fronds of the palms surrounding a war memorial, at which point we both agreed that a large palm tree would be a good spot for a bird to perch and take stock for a while.

  The park was gazetted in the 1920s, said Coach, which roughly marks the time when the old fishing village of Booralee began to enter into the symbolic realm. The new focus on international trade and transport involved dramatic alterations to the landscape that irrevocably changed the liminal underwater environment where fish and other sea creatures had previously been abundant.

  We watched the assembled ibis unfold and inspect their wings. Of course new animals will come to thrive in the environments we create, I offered, which Coach responded to with a frown. Yes, she said, I suppose we’ll need to start eating ibis.

  We met up w
ith the main drag again and took the less salubrious route along O’Riordan back towards Redfern, fighting a nasty headwind and floating shrapnel from the plane trees. Before parting we ducked into a mixed business that Coach noted was one of her favourites. It featured ample aisles of newspapers and magazines and had the slightly sour smell I had observed to emit from the deep creases of some books.

  Coach and I browsed the different sections for a while, occasionally lifting and flicking through a magazine to see the messages it was attempting to transmit. The atmosphere reminded me of the internet café I favoured on Bondi Road, and I began to wonder whether now might be the time to either bring up some of the questions I’d been forming about certain seemingly irresolvable contradictions in Coach’s views on the value of entertainment and media augmentation, or lay the foundations for a future meeting where, in a more relaxed atmosphere, I could open up about my failures overseas and my relationship with Alex. The difficulty with the second option was the likelihood of having to once again endure Coach under the influence of booze.

  Coach tapped me on the shoulder, handed me a Calippo icy pole and gestured towards the exit. We re-entered the hot wind of the day, bid each other farewell and walked in opposite directions. Some way down the road, I turned and yelled back. Coach! She swung around on the spot as though eternally ready for the suggestion. How about another lunch? Sure. Sure. I know just the spot. I’ll shoot you an email. And she swung around again with a wave, leaving me to once again ponder my feelings about the lopsided distribution of agency that informed our decisions about places of recreation.

  Trumper Park

  The following week, on a perfect, sunny afternoon, Coach and I met at Trumper Park in Woollahra. The plan was to complete a speed session on the oval and then head to a pub up the road for a meal and a beer. I parked my car on the lower stretches of Glenmore Road and wandered down the hill to find Coach admiring the original sandstone gates that date the park to the early twentieth century. There was something charmingly redundant in such a conspicuous set of gates orphaned from any fence work. We admired the large, smooth-barked eucalypts clustered to the side of the gate and took the opportunity to experience crossing the grand threshold, walking through the gate and following the tarmac path to the picket fence of the oval.