An Affair to Remember — Hawthorn (Part 2)
The second of three parts about my life long love affair with footy and Hawthorn.
Here is the first section of the piece that I put up yesterday.
3. The Honeymoon
There’s a photograph of my sister and I wearing Dad’s jumpers, huge old woollen things that gathered around our ankles like wedding gowns, the yellow and brown vertical stripes wrapping around in the old style, front and back. Dad’s number 10 winks at the camera from its reflective white plastic backing. My older sister, aged four, is modelling the one Dad wore to premiership glory against St Kilda in 1971 in front of 118,192 people. It’s nice Dad has a photographic record of it, because the other kid in the photo is going to leave it in a Prahran Football Club change room twenty-one years later.
Dad’s career was over by the time I was born. He retired in September 1972 after 117 games, and I arrived in November that same year. My obsession with Hawthorn and dreams of playing for the club predate my earliest memories. It was never a choice. It was just a fact of life — like eating and brushing my teeth and breathing. I still have a hand-stitched yellow and brown teddy bear with the number 10 on its back. In a folio of primary school artwork, I uncovered a piece in which we were asked to illustrate twenty different words — ‘run’, ‘shop’, ‘dog’, ‘paint’, that sort of thing. Sixteen of my twenty illustrations are stick figures wearing yellow and brown jumpers in front of goalposts.
And then there’s the stuff I do remember. My favourite picture book was an underrated classic called ‘Carn the Hawks’, which I eventually stole from the Deepdene Primary School library because Mrs Whiteside said I couldn’t renew it any more. When Leigh Matthews booted goal of the year against North Melbourne at the SCG, I painstakingly retraced his path, following the mapped figure of eights as laid out in the Footy Record the following week. I’d take screamers on the furniture in the lounge room, singing along with not just ‘Up There Cazaly’, but Mike Brady’s lesser-known hits as well.
You’ll be Hungry
You’ll be Knights
You’ll be The Hulk
And you’ll be Blight!
You’ll be flying with the stars and in the wars.1
Quickly I learned that switching the order of ‘Blight’ and ‘Knights’ meant that the natural syncopation of the verse would give Peter Knights the bigger fly, and so that is how it came to be.
At some point, Dad renewed his official connection to Hawthorn as coach of the Crimmins Squad, an under-17s development project that spawned such greats as Dermott Brereton, Gary Ayres and Chris Langford. Every Sunday morning we would venture to Glenferrie, where legendary trainer Bob Yeoman would welcome me at the door with a dim sim and a sausage. ‘Hey kid, get a couple of these into ya!’ he’d growl, wearing the widest of grins and a once-white singlet that was a museum piece to sausage and bourbon stains. ‘You gotta feed yourself up, kid, so you can become a player like your old man!’
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