A complicated hero is Dipper
If you want a 1989: The Great Grand Final book as part of your gift stash, I've got to post everything by next Thursday. Below is the Dipper's ribs bit in Chapter 1, 'Seeing the Light'
In the 1989 Grand Final, Dipper famously broke his ribs, whcih in turn perferated the lining of his lung. He developed what’s called a subscutaneous emphysema, which is even more difficult to say if you’re Dipper. But he tells the story brilliantly, with all the extravagance you’d expect from one of footy’s greatest ever characters. I’ve republished a few pages below.
I’ve got a box of ‘1989 The Great Grand Final’ books as well as many of my childrens book titles, which might make great Christmas presents. I usually sign the books with ‘a gift to you from [insert name] who paid the price! (+postage)
I leave for Palermo and the Paladino d’Oro Sport Film Festival next weekend, so hit me up with any orders by Thursday.
In terms of the Hawthorn board elections, I’ve signed a letter supporting Andy Gowers and the Nominations Committee’s recommendations, alongside Hawthorn greats like David Parkin, Chris Langford, Peter Schwab and yes, Dipper too. We’re coming off an exciting year on the field and the off field traumas and sadnesses of the last few years are close to behind us. I’ve written fondly about Don Scott’s eccentricity and energy in this publication before. Indeed one of my most popular posts is about his vow of silence in 1980, and his love for Bernie Jones. Don will always be a legend at Hawthorn. My own view is we don’t need his eccentricity or energy in the boardroom at this moment. I’m for extending the terms of Ian Silk and Tim Shearer, the club endorsed encumbents.
Here’s the story of Dipper’s ribs.
The Geelong players bow their heads, feeling the crumpling weight of defeat. In the first quarter, they trailed by 42 points. To have come as close as six points is a small miracle, but their faces reveal that only the full miracle would do. They almost delivered it. If the game starts at quarter-time, the Cats win by five goals.
Full-forward Gary Ablett has played the most exhilarating individual game in Grand Final history: nine goals one, equalling Collingwood legend Gordon Coventry’s Grand Final tally set in 1928. It’s not just those goals. Ablett has electrified football’s biggest stage with a virtuoso display of speed, acceleration, skill, strength and power. It says something for his genius, and the form he is in, that he was even better the week before; in the preliminary final against Essendon his return was 23 disposals and 8.5. Ablett’s four finals have yielded 27 goals and 16 behinds, a mark that surely will never be matched. When he receives the least contentious Norm Smith Medal in the award’s history, he gives the shortest of speeches: “I would like to congratulate Hawthorn and thank God for making it all possible.”
By then DiPierdomenico, the man whose lung Ablett punctured in the first quarter is on his way to hospital. In the moments after his embrace with Tuck, Dipper collapses to turf. The Hawthorn trainers arrive and escort him from the arena. There’s some urgency now. His neck is blowing up like a bullfrog. Whatever adrenaline and willpower had sustained the rambunctious, talismanic 1986 Brownlow medallist until the game’s conclusion has deserted him now. Herald reporter Shane Templeton is standing next to the race as Dipper hobbles up it, and the sight and sound of what happens next stays with him forever, so that he can recall in awed tones: “I could actually hear the air hissing out of his lungs,” Templeton says. “It was frightening, and he was doubled over. The ambulance was parked at the inside door of the rooms and thank heavens it was. The paramedics bundled him into the ambulance and headed off. If they hadn’t been there, I hate to think what might have happened. It was a scary end to the game.”
DiPierdomenico receives a shot of adrenaline as the ambulance speeds to the nearby St Vincent’s Hospital. He is admitted to emergency and lies on a gurney, struggling to breathe. As early as halftime he’d wondered if something was wrong. The skin on his chest and shoulders had dimpled, he says, “like it was turning into bubble wrap.” When he pressed the protrusions with his finger, he could hear a soft popping sound. “And my voice was going really high,” DiPierdomenico says. “So, I’m running back on the ground after halftime squeaking, “Kick it to me, kick it to me,” and I’m thinking, ‘what the fuck’s going on here?’
What was going on medically was a pneumothorax, or collapsed lung, resulting in subcutaneous emphysema—air leaking from the thoracic cavity into the region under the skin. “I just imploded like the Michelin Man!’ is how the perennially colourful Dipper later explain it. Lying on his hospital gurney, air hissing from his lung, still wearing his sweat- soaked Hawthorn jumper. “I felt peaceful,” Dipper says. “I really felt peaceful. I felt okay. I wasn’t thinking about the game. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I’m just lying there, staring into this light, still with my jumper on. Somebody grabs my hand and I thought it was my wife or something, but it was the hospital priest. Just talking softly in my ear.”
Dipper is a storyteller, and this is his grandest tale, the one most frequently retold, its narrative pattern a familiar monologue. His teammates now tease him about the light and the priest, and chuckle at Dipper’s poetic licence. His former teammate John Kennedy Jnr asks, laughing, “Have you spoken to him yet?”. “Did he tell you about the light, how he saw the light when he was nearly dead? And then he wakes up the next morning and notices there’s a skylight in the ceiling! Fair dinkum! But it was a courageous effort, nonetheless.”
Dipper’s life was saved by an emergency intervention. According to his memory, a nurse runs into the room, cuts his premiership guernsey up the centre, and into the famous barrel chest, plunges a needle. “She just goes bang with the needle,” Dipper says. “It looked like a knitting needle. It released the air that had been building up under the skin. Without her, I might have been pretty close to moving on.”
I ask him whether it was definitely a nurse with the needle. “Doctors and nurses, whatever. But I remember her cutting the jumper. As soon as the needle went in, I began to feel a bit better. A friend of mine reckons she was just with the nurse that did it! She’s from Frankston. I’d like to meet up with that nurse and find out what she remembers of it.”
Dipper’s hospital stay lasts six days. He misses the celebrations, although on the Monday his teammates visit and present him with his medal and the premiership Cup.Jeans apologises. Unaware of Dipper’s situation, at three-quarter time, a full 90 minutes into Dipper’s ordeal, Jeans had berated his wingman, sensing a drop in his work rate. “(Neville) Bruns is getting a few kicks, son!” Jeans yelled. “You’ve got to get on the bike, Robert. You’ve got to run, and run, and run. I have never seen a boy die of exhaustion out there yet!”
“I fucking nearly did!” Dipper now roars, almost 30 years later. “Nobody’s ever died on the field of tiredness. I nearly did!” Jeans’s apology, as Dipper recalls, is coupled with a bedside thank you. “Now listen son,” he says, “What you did for the football club andwhat you’ve done for your family and what you did for me, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
At Dipper’s bedside in those days is his anxious wife, Cheryl. “It’s a horrible thing to think about, he’s just very, very lucky they got to him in time,” she tells The Sunday Sun’s visiting football writer, Scot Palmer. “I would be quite happy if he said he was going to retire tomorrow.”
When Dipper is discharged, the club sends him and Cheryl to Queensland’s Magnetic Island for two weeks of rest and recuperation. On Dipper’s return, “tanned and wearing a white suit”, he must face the Tribunal, a full month after knocking Garry Hocking’s teeth out with his forearm during the third quarter of the game that brought him his fifth and final premiership medallion and almost cost him his life. He cops a five-match ban, his fifth and final suspension.
A complicated hero is Dipper.
Film screening news
Ange & The Boss is back at the Astor for an SMFC club night, but it’s a 1000 seater and Good one, Wilson readers are welcome. Wed 4th Dec, 7pm. Filmmaker Q&A afterwards
We are also on at the Thornbury Picture House on 5th Dec (sold out) and 21st December (18 tickets left)
And our screening date in Palermo is 9th December!
Best wishes
Tony
