Whole Wild World

by Tom Dusevic

  10

  Where eagles dread

  Mama was still enslaved to her patented washing ceremony. I was playing basketball and rugby league, the only team sports available at St John’s. Dirty clothes were piling up in the laundry.

  ‘You’re killing my hands,’ Mama said, once again, so often I’d switched off. ‘Look at them! Why can’t you look at them? I’ve got rheumatism and this is just too much. If you have to play rugger-bee then don’t get dirty or find someone else to wash your clothes.’

  ‘Can’t you just throw it all into the machine?’

  ‘The machine,’ she said, contemptuously, the way you might refer to an inferior rival that was getting all the limelight. ‘Rubbish.’

  Clothes notwithstanding, rugby league was regarded with disdain by the adults at our place, seen as thuggish compared to the skills required in, say, soccer, basketball, water polo or European handball, sports at which Croatians excelled. True to form, Teta, was most contemptuous of footy, declaring as beast-like the way players packed in for a scrum. She called the code ‘bum sniffing’.

  Footy at St John’s was a guild, characterised by honour, devotion, ritual sacrifice and military discipline. It should have featured in the medieval pageant. League enjoyed an exalted status due to its storied past at St John’s and politics. Detentions could be escaped because of footy training. Except in rare cases, there was only one team for each age group. At assembly every Monday after lunch we heard a match report from the captain of every team, which always began: ‘On Saturday, we versed …’ On Fridays there was a footballer’s only newsletter Where Eagles Dare, highlighting the previous week’s games. The school’s elaborate war cry was belted out after footy victories and at combined De La Salle athletics and swimming carnivals. It was tribal, rich in Z and R sounds, similar to the African crowd chants in Kinshasa for Ali at the ‘Rumble in the Jungle.’ Who knew where this strange primal scream came from? In full voice it was a guttural explosion:

  Zoomba Zoom, Zoomba Zah

  Zoomba Zoomba, Rah Rah Rah

  Eagles Blue, Eagles Gold

  Eagles Red so loyal and bold

  Forward Lakemba Zoomba Zah

  Eagles Eagles, Rah Rah Rah

  L-A-K-E-M-B-A

  LAKEMBA!

  I subscribed to the Eagles code. The coach of H Grade, the Under-13s, was school principal Brother Luke, a bantam with the energy and charisma of Bob Hawke, who ran the unions at the time. He carried rosary beads and a mammoth key ring with forty keys on it, master of the entire Eagles realm.

  My taste for the high-sugar life meant I had loaded on several extra kilos over the summer. Early in the season, as we tried to improve fitness, we warmed up with a mile-long run around the streets encircling St John’s – with our shirts off. I came jiggling in at the back of the pack, all baby fat and breathless.

  ‘Hey Jelly Belly, we can’t wait for you all day,’ said Brother Luke.

  The nickname stuck. His approach to coaching was no different from the way he ran the school: iron discipline, muscular Christianity, idiosyncratic passion. After the team was finalised we went with the Firsts (or Under-15s) on a three-day footy camp to De La Salle Cronulla, where the order had a retreat: a weekend of prayer, tackling practice, specialist coaching and running the sand dunes beyond Wanda beach. We played a game against DLS Caringbah on Friday afternoon, with Brother Luke refereeing and making outrageous calls to frustrate, humble and run us into the ground.

  ‘Every time we get a penalty,’ he instructed Jerry, our best player, ‘I want you to kick it as far as you can into their territory down the middle. And I want the rest of you gentlemen to chase it.’

  It was a fruitless, punishing tactic. Caringbah cottoned on to it immediately, passing the ball forward and creeping over the five-metre line in defence, knowing Brother would not penalise them. We tackled ourselves to a standstill, but the blond surfie boys won easily. At least Brother Luke’s merciless ‘what doesn’t kill you only makes you love each other with the tenderness and trust of gulag prisoners’ meant we slept well. We had team meetings about honour and mateship, and pushed our bodies hard, toughening up as if we were in a State of Origin camp. Peter, soon to be ‘Bullfrog’, Moore, who ran Canterbury, visited us and spoke about his club’s ethos of respect.

  Brother Luke disappeared on Saturday. We had a guest mentor, an old boy who was a first-grade player with the Newtown Jets. In the afternoon, we went for a run to Elouera beach and had a swim. Turning up at dinner, his feet bandaged, Brother Luke called us into a close huddle, as if he were, at this very moment, revealing one of life’s great mysteries.

  ‘Make sure you cut your toe nails properly, straight across the top, like this,’ he said drawing a line in the air. ‘If you try and cut around the toes, like this, you’re likely to leave stray bits that become ingrown, like I did. They grow into your skin and it hurts a lot. Trust me. Then you need an operation and that’s not a nice thing.’

  I knew about operations. Cut straight. It was the most important lesson I took from camp.

  We played DLS Bankstown on Sunday afternoon and won comfortably, despite the presence of a wild-eyed forward, fearless and fast. He’d scream as he ran at us and tried to out-hurt us by running over the top. I thought he was nuts. He played prop; by the end of the game he’d punched everyone in the first two rows of our pack; he just couldn’t reach the lock. That kind of mongrel lifted, but also shamed, the rest of his team and ours.

  What I enjoyed about footy, in fact all sports, was the ‘play’ aspect. I liked having the ball in my hands, using my brain, reading the play and having fun in a team. My job as a forward was to gain field position through attrition and to guard the middle part of the defensive line. Run straight, don’t pass, tackle, do nothing fancy.

  Brother Luke’s priority was making men of us; invariably the season was leached of fun. Training was a forced labour camp. We did ball work over the length of four fields, end to end. We practised scrums until we could barely stand, sometimes against the state champion Under-12s, probably the best team the school ever had. Their moves were a few levels of difficulty above our own and they never dropped the ball. They radiated class; we reeked of BO.

  On Saturdays, Brother Luke wanted us at school two hours before a game for a team talk, prayers and the recitation of our football holy office. He’d open up a classroom, any classroom, and pass around our team sheets. Then the group recitation started:

  ‘Tackle, tackle, tackle.’

  ‘Always back up the ball carrier.’

  ‘Push as soon as the ball goes in the scrum.’

  ‘Stay onside.’

  ‘Move up in a line in defence.’

  There were about sixty-four parts in this litany. We sat there, nerds and tough guys, comedians and shy boys, joined in a ritual, cult members in our jeans and thongs and hoodies. Then we went to the ground, put on our pads, boots and mouthguards, Vaseline on our knees, and practised moves.

  One day we were playing East Hills, a nondescript blue-on-blue team we always beat.

  ‘I want you guys to be careful and not to fight them today or say anything to the crowd,’ Brother said before the game. ‘There could be people who will call out to you and say things just because we are Catholics, so don’t let that put you off your game.’

  It sounded far-fetched to me. I’d heard the nuns’ stories about being hassled in the street because of their habits, but they always ended too neatly with a moral about going to Mass or the courage of Mary MacKillop. I’d not seen any evidence of such sectarianism. In the first half we received a penalty and Jerry kicked for touch. The ball rolled to rest against a wire fence. We didn’t have ball boys or linesmen; spectators were behind a waist-high fence. Due to injuries I was playing on the wing and went to fetch the ball for the tap restart.

  ‘Stop wasting time, ya fat wog,’ snarled a woman near the fence.

  No adult had spoken to me with such venom, not even Teta Danica. Would she actually
hit me or throw something? I kept my head down, picked up the ball and ran it back to the hooker. I felt shame and crushingly self-conscious, as if the woman and the people she was with were watching only me. God, I hope no one calls me Jelly Belly and she hears it. I thought better to avoid the ball altogether than to draw attention to myself.

  ‘You’re the slowest winger I’ve ever seen.’

  She was spot on. I was relieved to be on the opposite side in the second half, grateful we weren’t playing against her. The East Hills players were soft – ill disciplined and sooky – and poorly organised; they dropped the ball, ‘bagged’ each other. We won the game, but not to Brother Luke’s satisfaction. On these occasions – win or lose – it meant we had to run laps of the oval in our playing gear. Then we’d practise scrums or tackling for half an hour, moves we needed to improve. It was humiliating, especially as the victors or vanquished, and their parents, watched on bemused and amused. This was club junior league, this was meant to be fun. It was worse doing this post-game penance in front of St John’s players and parents, as if we had let them down and the school, not shown the Eagles’ spirit.

  ‘What happens when you lose?’ the woman sneered as we jogged past. ‘Can’t you just say ten Hail Marys?’

  Oh no, when we lose we sacrifice a player, often two, burn them at the goalposts.

  What kind of person harasses boys like this? I could envisage one of the neighbourhood’s no-nonsense mums with six ragged kids being severe with her own, but this contradicted the laws of nurture. There was nothing on the surface that marked the woman as a menace, which was also unsettling. And how did she know about Hail Marys? I thought it was a Catholic-only thing. She wasn’t drunk – it was far too early in the morning.

  After thinking about it when I was older, I could only conclude she hated us, was offended by the idea of us with our gold jerseys, a red eagle and resolute coach. Perhaps she thought we were showing off. After all, here we were after an hour of footy against her son’s team, and still we had the energy and obedience to run laps. Our tip-top condition may have hardened her position.

  Sam was hooked on TV the way I had been relying on the intravenous drip when I got blood poisoning. I was just as devoted to the box but spent less time at home. Most nights we did our homework on the dinner table in bursts during ad breaks. As much as school and sport, TV set the tempo for the week.

  Unlike today, there was something vital on telly every night. With fewer choices, everyone watched the same set of programs, give or take clashes of taste. Mass culture was exactly that, influencing the way we spoke, introducing ideas to us and setting norms of behaviour. TV was a bedrock, shared experience, with its sitcoms, drama and variety shows, locally produced and from Britain and America.

  It was the epoch of the mini-series: Roots about slavery in America, Edward VII and schlocky dramas like Rich Man, Poor Man. I sought out documentaries, especially on World War II and the Olympics. On school nights we watched Paul Hogan and his sidekick Strop, then stayed up for Don Lane and Bert Newton and their guests in the studio or via satellite. TV filled our gaps in learning, led to nicknames and explained topics our parents would never broach with us.

  When colour TV began in 1975, Sam and I went to the electrical shop in Lakemba near our school, and spent Saturday morning watching a wall of monitors. Other people did this, too, and the shop staff never bothered us, eyes glued to the screens, knowing we were becoming hooked on the product: good for business, long-term. We’d break up the wait before the music video program Sounds by flicking through new-release LPs.

  Several years passed before we owned a colour telly, courtesy of Teta Danica’s compo payment. On the eve of an English FA Cup final, with Sam a die-hard Arsenal fan, it was time to strike. He knew the best brand: Rank Arena. He’d spotted an ad in the Herald that had deals that very day. Teta’s budget could stretch to a 26-inch in other brands, but research and development (Sam) said a 20-inch Rank Arena would blow the competition out of the shop. Forget width, feel the quality. Ipswich beat Arsenal 1–0.

  ‘Brady to Rix, beats his man, passes to Stapleton. Stapleton. Stapleton! Goal to Frank Stapleton! Arsenal lead 2–0.’ Sam would do soccer commentary in his sleep. He did it in the style of Match of the Day, which we’d watch on Monday nights on Channel Two. The first time he woke me I thought I’d fallen asleep in the lounge-room.

  St John’s didn’t offer soccer; few Catholic schools did. But that didn’t stop Sam from running along the side of the house, bursting into stride and launching a cracker of a shot through goal. He’d call an intricate series of passes culminating in a strike from outside the box. There was no goalie but he once hit Mama – head down, hoe in hand – in the middle of the vegetable garden at the end of the pitch.

  ‘You almost killed me! Have you lost your mind? You’re ruining my tomatoes!’ Or beans/spinach/lettuce/cauliflower/cabbage. Out of range and hardy, the watermelons were never threatened.

  Sam’s dual manias of TV and learning came together in a national TV quiz show called It’s Academic, for students in Year Ten. St John’s was a regular in the NSW competition, which was shown on Saturday afternoons, after the Aussie Rules. We’d both gone by charter bus early one Saturday morning to watch the recording of the show at Channel Seven’s studios at Epping, a long trip from Lakemba. In the reception were photos of the network’s stars: newsreader Roger Climpson, Miss Patricia from Romper Room, Donnie Sutherland who hosted Sounds, Rex ‘The Moose’ Mossop who called the footy on Sunday night and It’s Academic host Andrew Harwood. There were stars on dressing-room doors in the corridors.

  The set was smaller than it appeared at home. There was a long desk for nine students, three teams of three. Sam was in Year Nine, and had been picked in the squad for next year. There were three rounds of ten questions for each team to answer in one minute and a beat-the-buzzer round at the end where any one of the contestants could answer. The audience sat on bleachers in two sections and an applause light would come on at the end of each stanza. They’d tape at least four thirty-minute shows every Saturday, with the winners progressing further into the competition, through semi-finals, series finals, state final and beyond. The questions were difficult and I marvelled at the ability of students a few years ahead of me to pluck knowledge from thin air under the glare of studio lights.

  ‘Don’t be nervous,’ Harwood instructed the players. ‘If you think about all the people watching at home you won’t be able to come up with the answers. Just concentrate on me, pay close attention to what I say and the rest will take care of itself.’

  Once the ‘on-air’ light came on, this guy was a pro: relaxed, polite to the studio crew, a faultless quizmaster. Just as professional was Cedric Fernandes, the St John’s coach. For Sam’s year he picked the squad twelve months in advance and they practised a few days a week after school. The boys recorded audio of the show on cassette players and typed up questions and answers on index cards. As well, the boys were allocated topics and asked to make up questions; there were thousands of cards by the time Sam’s team came along. But the secret weapon, made years earlier by a father, was a set of three buzzers; a simple instrument, the buzzer was a wooden box with three buttons and a coloured light bulb (blue, red and yellow). Mr Fernandes, an exacting mathematics master, expected the boys to do the prepwork on their own.

  Sam was selected along with Phil and Mark, who was team captain. Tata drove us to the studios. Mama and Teta sensibly stayed home, fearing they would jinx Sam or that the contest would be too tense for their ‘nerves’. The St John’s boys were unstoppable, near perfect in the one-minute periods and coolly efficient in beat the buzzer. They won both rounds that day. All three were confident and often answered in unison. But they weren’t robotic, like some of the teams, showing personality and poise.

  A few weeks later they won two more rounds. On they went, six straight wins to become national champions. A few close calls would have tested the Lukin sisters’ nerves but – ignora
nt of how amazing their triumph was and the strength of their competition, and because I idolised all three – I never doubted them. The prize booty of televisual equipment and cash for the school was substantial, but the boys were big winners, too. They received 500 each, a windfall in those days, plus a fully paid seventeen-day trip to Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

  ‘You’re the best kids in Sydney, the best kids in New South Wales,’ Brother Luke would say in moments of maudlin passion at school assemblies after a sporting win, good results in the school certificate or a successful funding round from Canberra.

  We were designated a ‘disadvantaged school’, which seemed bizarre to me because we felt like kings compared to the schools around us. Beyond our district we didn’t have a clue about fancier schools or their facilities. When Sam, Mark and Phil won It’s Academic, Brother Luke said we were the ‘best kids in Australia’.

  Who were we to argue with his assessment, given he’d know about such things? With due deference for the triumph, a precursor to Hawkey and the America’s Cup years later, Brother declared a day off school to celebrate. Like pilgrims gripped by the same idea, half the school turned up to the 11 am session at the new Hoyts in town to watch Star Wars, which had opened that week. Just before Christmas the national champions, Coach Fernandes and deputy principal Mick Keeble, along for the ride, set off for mysterious parts of the world, still wild in the mind of a boy fascinated by a slowly spinning globe.

  One morning as the MoD was droning on about some serious breach of school rules – boring, hurry up – I glanced at the time on Mop’s new watch. One of the brothers had given curly-haired Anthony Khoury that nickname. I never called him anything else after that. Mop had the latest in technology, a digital watch with a red display. With his left arm hanging by his side, I strained to see the time.

  The display said LEB. I was startled. LEB. Turning my head 180 degrees I realised the time was 8:37. My Lebanese mates would be 837s from now on, Lebs Downunder. It caught on, perhaps too quickly for Mop, JH, Boots, Kaz, Yaz, Eddy, Chids, Shemoun, Baz and Harpo.