by Miriam Sved
‘Listen, mate.’ Martin squares his shoulders on screen. ‘Back up over that mark and belt up or I’ll pay him so many fifties he’ll be kicking backwards from the fucking stands.’
Someone up the back of the room cheers and gets a grim look from Rob, who pauses the tape and turns to Martin. Martin is focused on maintaining an upright posture in his chair. Rob clears his throat. ‘Now you know, if anyone understands about copping heat out there it’s me. I saw a lot of hostility in four hundred and twenty games, wasn’t always the most loved guy on the ground.’ A self-deprecating chuckle. Martin sits up straighter. ‘And you were right, mate, to give the guy a warning, we don’t tolerate that kind of umpire remonstration. But, mate–’ Martin thinks his back might break, he’s sitting so straight ‘–we have to maintain a certain standard. Our job isn’t just about making the correct decisions and awarding the right frees. Maybe you want to take a quick reread of chapter eight in your handbook, “Appropriate language, body language and comportment on the ground”.’ Martin nods. ‘Alright. I know you know where you went wrong out there.’
‘Yeah,’ Rick Mooney says, ‘should have given him another fifty.’
*
Martin knows where he went wrong, and he knows it didn’t start out on the ground. Much as he resents a condescending lecture from Rob, he’s not proud of losing his cool. It has never happened before. Through six years of abuse, two with his own dedicated anti-Martin-Phelan website managed by a group of club supporters, he has maintained his professionalism. Bemused when asked about it by the media, dismissive when asked by his kids, out on the ground he has never acknowledged it by word or sign. But on that day, game day last week, something had begun to shift, and he knows where it happened. At his dad’s.
Martin almost always visits the old folks’ home on Saturday mornings. This is because, with a bit of luck, Terry’s team won’t have played yet so the weekend is unscarred. It doesn’t stop him going back to the topic – continuously, compulsively, like a tongue to a toothache – but the emotion of it isn’t so fresh and doesn’t cause such a pang when it’s a week old.
A ten-bob Pom from the north of England, Terry came over when he was twenty and in the first year found his wife and a sporting obsession that quickly eclipsed his native round-ball. The old man loves AFL with the vengeance of a born-again, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game’s history; in the heat of match passion his lingering northern accent always thickens, and a good game usually inspires at least one Go on, my son!, which Martin used to mimic and get violently mocked for as a kid.
In Terry’s room that morning, six hours before the afternoon game where he lost his cool, nothing was so different; it wasn’t that anything happened, exactly. Martin made burnt coffee on the little hob, SEN blared at hearing-aid level in the background and Terry talked about the game last week. The game last week had gone well – and not just that game but the last half dozen. This is the new thing. After the usual disastrous start to the season it is looking increasingly plausible that the boys might claw their way into a bottom-four finals position. The different dimension, the new element in Terry’s life that has Martin off-kilter, is hope.
*
There were flowers on the sill in Terry’s room from a trip to some fancy nursery the day before. Long-stemmed tiger lilies that looked caged and out of place in the temperature-controlled pastel of the home, but Martin latched on to them as a conversational diversion.
‘Looks like a nice trip yesterday,’ he said. ‘Did everyone get flowers?’
Terry said, ‘The geri bus on the way back smelled like a bloody compost bin.’
Martin laughed. ‘Did Mrs Leaven go too?’ This is a recent thing he’s trying, teasing the old man about one of his lady neighbours, because one day when he came by Mrs Leaven was in Terry’s room having a cup of tea. She has a tremor in her hands but nothing gut-turningly wrong with her.
Terry just grunted.
Martin turned off the hob on the little stove, which Terry isn’t allowed to use anymore. ‘Who took you to the flower place?’
‘One of the new ones. Black lassie, can’t remember her name.’ Then, as if they’d been talking footy the whole time, ‘Did you see the goal count for little Damo last week? He’s looking like a contender for the Coleman.’
Martin checked the coffee for temperature, put two teaspoons of sugar in Terry’s mug, didn’t reply.
‘Course he’s still got a lot of developing in him,’ his dad went on. ‘D’you know what they’ve got him doing for upper-body strength? Did you read about this?’ Knowing though – he must know – that Martin doesn’t read the team forums or the team newsletter or the team website anymore. ‘Pulling trucks.’ He sat back into the depths of his chair for emphasis. ‘Bloody trucks, mate. Got the idea from that fatties show on TV. Apparently the little fella’s not so motivated in the gym, but you get him out to the car park and rig him up and he’ll work out all day.’ Terry laughed, and Martin was struck by the change that had come over his father. So animated.
Martin said, ‘Yeah but he’s pretty rough, right, as a player? Undisciplined, they reckon.’ Even this level of involvement in the gossipy world of team-building was unusual and felt contraband, but he couldn’t stop himself. Terry’s enthusiasm rasped against something dormant inside him, making dread flare up like goosebumps. Jackie has said to him that he should let the old man dream, let him have his fun while it’s there for the having. But Jackie has the kind of temperament that can find a way to revel in defeat; and besides, she supports a good team: the team whose supporters so violently and inexplicably despise Martin. A winning team. She can’t understand the dark threat that traipses in with hope. It’ll be the same as it was in ’06. So Martin said, ‘Anyway, Dad, I wouldn’t get your hopes up; even if they can lift his consistency, the kid’s so flimsy that chances are he’ll be injured before he can drag the team into any kind of long-term form.’ And then immediately knew he’d gone too far. Terry slumped forward over his coffee mug and his mouth became a tight little sphincter. Just like one of Martin’s kids when they don’t get their way. He was never like this – so skinless and vulnerable – when Marie was alive.
In an almost laughably sulky voice, Terry said, ‘Easy for some to criticise and be negative. Easy when you can pretend not to give a shit.’
Martin sipped his coffee and tried to let it wash over him, tried to cling on to the facts.
This season, the way the club is performing, could almost be a cruel joke, a giant jack-in-the-box wound up by football and the universe to shock the old man into an early grave. There was the steady, battered decline, coinciding so neatly with the aftermath of Marie’s death. Martin’s mum, Terry’s wife for forty-six years, avid footy fan, graceless in victory, dead before the third dose of chemo. Terry was in his late-sixties, and Martin couldn’t believe the speed and scope of his decline, which corresponded with the team’s: losing more ground every season, every defeat. The last eleven years have been mapped on a shrinking square of personal space – from the house in Newport to the assisted-living flat to his room in the home and now finally into the recesses of his big recliner chair – and a slowly draining store of football fight. In the early days he fought them all: he called talkback stations to give his two pence worth about the coaching tactics that, as he saw it, were dismantling the team structures which won them two premierships in the eighties. Through the bottoming-out years – rebuilding, the club publicity machine called it – he scrutinised draft picks and kept getting himself to games, even after it meant sweet-talking the carers into taking him to the grounds and picking him up, even when it meant sitting through the kind of bollocking that drives most fans away by half-time. The first season they got the wooden spoon was three years after Marie died, a few months after the move to the home, and Martin walked in on him crying. Terry pulled himself together quickly and buried the noises in a coughing fit, and Martin tu
rned and walked back out. They had not shared grief during the grey days after Marie’s death and they didn’t share it now. What Terry would share – with his son and the carers and the world – was the living spark of his anger. His resentment and righteous indignation, which gained momentum over the long days of the decline, peaked during the trough years – the three wooden spoons, ashen press conferences and rapturous opposition mockery – and looked set to burn itself into something clean and transforming in ’06, the year everyone – club officials, fans, media – billed as the comeback season. Martin looked forward confidently to the old man’s revival. He felt like Marie was looking forward to it as well.
The glory days never came. After a confident start to the season there was an unaccountable run of losses – all those high draft picks the club had assembled, the big-name scalps filched from other teams, the confident new game plan – all of it somehow ran headlong into itself and emerged in a strong, fast, fumbling mess. That year they at least avoided the wooden spoon, skidding into the end of the season in twelfth place, missing out on a top draft pick and closing the year with a series of embarrassing internal leaks from warring club factions. Terry clamped down after the last game of the season and shook his head, his mouth a grim line in response to the reasonable analysis Martin tried to enter into.
Around this time Martin’s umping career was just reaching lift-off, his wages from the AFL overtaking his IT manager’s salary. He had two young kids and two careers and – this is the way he explains it to himself sometimes, why he failed to notice the change in Terry until it was too late, until some spark in the old man had been extinguished – he was in the game in a completely different way to how he had been as a fan. One of the umping rules that no-one ever exactly articulated but everyone knew: you couldn’t support a team. No matter how diehard a fan, how entrenched in family history and genetic make-up, the move into professional AFL umpiring meant all that had to be excised, with surgical thoroughness.
Martin never talked about this with his dad – his unteamification – and now he wishes he had, back at the beginning when it was shaky and strange: the not identifying, not cheering through games or eyeing team merchandise or thinking, in the dying moments before sleep, about the chances for some up-and-coming draft pick, the chances for next season, always more chances when you’re a fan. If Martin had shared the weirdness of the transition, maybe Terry would understand.
In the old man’s room that morning, under the sad gaze of the tiger lilies, Martin spent the rest of the visit smoothing over the wound and wishing he wasn’t the one who had to snuff out Terry’s hopes, the only one who could see the destruction approaching. By the end of it Terry seemed cheerful enough, but Martin suspected that later, alone, he would sit with his only son’s betrayal, brood over its dimensions, where it started and how deep it runs. Terry will never believe it runs all the way down.
*
After the galling review meeting there’s a light jogging session and a few training drills, and then the showers and he gets on CityLink to beat the kids’ bedtimes home.
Wednesdays are long and draining – from the office to the review to training. The finals are in a couple of weeks; he’ll probably get picked to ump if his performance last week doesn’t get in the way. He’ll have to take it, and not just because of the money – there’s a prestige that goes along with his finals record: not many guys get picked so consistently for so many years. But, if he’s honest with himself, he won’t be sorry to see the back of this season.
He parks around the back and goes through to the lounge room, where Jackie and the boys are lined up on the sofa, empty pizza boxes on the coffee table and crap on TV. Jackie looks up when he stands in the doorway; the boys don’t.
‘We put some leftovers in the fridge,’ she says, nodding at the pizza boxes.
‘Thanks.’ Tiredness coming over him suddenly, he flops down in the lounge chair, which faces the sofa and has no view of the TV.
‘Hard day?’ Jackie says, eyes flicking between him and the screen.
‘Nothing out of the ordinary. Bit of a tough review.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Steve says, eyes on the screen. ‘Did they bust you? For being, like, totally biased?’
‘Yeah,’ Blake parrots, ‘did you get busted?’
‘No, I did not get busted, there was nothing like that. Obviously I said a few things on the field that I shouldn’t have said.’ He takes a deep breath, knowing that however he handles this will set him up for the evening, maybe the week. He needs to take it seriously, but not too seriously. He needs to look unconcerned. ‘Happens to every ump from time to time, when things on-field get a bit heated. So I copped my talking-to and now it’s done.’
‘Sure.’ Steve’s attention is all on the telly. ‘Just because you, like, totally hate our boys.’
‘Come on now,’ Martin says, already floundering in the grey space around Steve’s goading. Is he serious? Joking? Somewhere in between? ‘Nobody hates–’
‘Yeah,’ Blake cuts in, ‘Brett at school reckons you’ve got it in for Reece.’ Reece is a young player in the team, their team, who got reported for striking and copped a lenient five-week suspension.
Martin looks at Jackie, appealing to her directly for back-up. She’s still glued to the telly, but she says to the boys, ‘C’mon now, everyone has their favourites in life, right, Blake? It’s human nature.’
Not helpful.
‘I don’t know about that,’ Martin says. ‘You boys know that my job means I have to be objective.’ Already hating the harping, pedantic note in his voice. ‘Do you know what objective means, Blake?’
Blake makes a stupid face, puffing out his cheeks and crossing his eyes, then smiles sweetly at Martin.
‘Objectivity means you don’t have favourites, you have to consider everything on its own merits and be completely even-handed in judging. And whatever Brett-at-school says, that’s how I approach my umping duties.’
‘Yesssss,’ Steve hisses, balling up his fist at something that just happened on the screen.
‘I know, Dad,’ Blake says. ‘Anyway, Brett’s an idiot.’
He feels a rush of gratitude, and a hotter rush of sympathy for his younger son. He hates that the boys cop it at school, that his umping profile is high enough to attract heat from some of their brutal little mates. When he first started working at AFL level, before the anti-Martin brigade and the hate-filled websites, the boys were proud of it. Jackie too – he’d catch her boasting sometimes, at barbeques or to the neighbours. Just a job, he’d say then. No big deal, a little extra on the side.
‘I know it’s tough for you boys,’ he says now. ‘But as long as we all know, here, that what I do as an ump is nothing to be ashamed of . . .’
‘We know,’ says Steve, and Blake makes a strangled noise as something bloodthirsty happens on-screen.
‘The boys know,’ Jackie says. ‘We know you’re completely fair and even-handed and objective at all times in all circumstances in all games.’ She has the knack of raising one eyebrow into a perfect peak while the rest of her face stays neutral.
Steve snorts and then turns it into an insultingly unconvincing cough.
‘Why don’t you go heat up some pizza?’ Jackie says in a softer tone. ‘You must be starved.’
He is starved, he realises now. He is uncomfortably hungry. But he wants to break through the TV stares of his family. He wants to talk to Jackie, alone; for her to untangle the knot in his chest.
Fucking maggot.
The three of them cheer simultaneously at something on-screen.
He goes to the kitchen and puts three pieces of pizza in the microwave, eats them standing up at the counter, worrying about Terry.
*
His dad’s team wins the first of their two finals-deciding games – they win easily, and club reps start appearing on the football programs, glowing wi
th a clamped-down smugness, as if this had been their plan all along, this eleven-year plunge into oblivion only to pull out their winning form when everyone has all but given up hope.
Terry is manic with delight, regressing overnight into full-blown northern brogue, analysing the game and the team’s structure with a zeal he hasn’t shown since before Marie’s death. With their percentage from the last round the boys might make the finals even if they don’t win the next one, the game against Jackie’s team which, even Terry will admit, looks hard to win. It all depends on how the other middle-of-the-pack clubs fare. Martin tries to temper his dad’s excitement. Making the finals seems to have taken on mystical importance for Terry, something that stands in for happiness and actual premierships. All he cares about is that his boys make the finals – after that sign of progress the press will get off their backs and next season will take care of itself, they’ll be on the up!
‘Remember,’ Martin says, ‘it’s a better draft pick if they don’t make the eight. Word is they’re speaking to a real talented kid from the Territory, might have a shot at him if they get a top-ten pick.’
Terry snorts, rolls his eyes. ‘Draft picks! Had draft picks out the arse for the last decade. All the bloody draft picks in the competition won’t add up to a drop of what those boys have going at the moment.’ He waits a beat, deliberately mysterious. ‘Belief. Self-belief is what we’ll claw back if they make the finals. Got all the talent they need right there, got the leg speed and the fitness. They just need something that’ll convince ’em: you lot can be winners again. Like back in the eighties, back in the day.’ His eyes are bright, he can’t keep his hands still. Martin is helpless to slow his momentum, which will just pick up speed until the inevitable crash comes.
Or must it come?
He stamps out the little flicker of hope, which has more to do with anxiety for Terry’s wellbeing than any realistic assessment of the game. Anyway, it’s not his place to assess, or to hope. To calm himself he thinks of a centre bounce – clean, high, cutting the field straight down the middle. He’ll be glad when this game and this season are over. At home Jackie and the boys have taken to calling him Fifty-Metre Phelan, which is one of the names that gets shouted at him on the grounds by red-faced men with tattoos up and down their arms. His wife and kids say it with a half-smile, and they usually bookend it with something domestic and friendly. ‘How was work, Fifty-Metre Phelan? You look knackered.’ The fact that, as often as not, this kind of thing comes from his wife means that he can’t fight it in front of the kids, and then when it comes from the kids he’s lost the authority to fight it. He takes it, knowing he’ll struggle if he tries to explain to Jackie the effect of these words, the sentiment behind them, and the fact that the sentiment gets smuggled in when the words are picked up by his family. The tattooed men – he has no doubt about this – genuinely hate him. In all the game training and attitude training and good umpiring comportment training, this is something no-one prepared him for: the knowledge that he is hated.