The glory of this mad game
Martin Flanagan | March 15, 2008 | The Age
The Olympics have long been a plaything of big powers. But I'll be going to the footy. Footy's mad. You've got to understand that. No sane person would, for example, follow Richmond.
I can assert this as a fact because four days after the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 I went and stood with the Tiger Army as its team took on its most hated enemy, Carlton, in an elimination final.
The Tiger Army is insane. Four days earlier the world had tilted on a course that could lead to any number of disasters. I've walked into the MCG thinking if I was to hurt Australians on this day, this is where I'd do it, and I've gone there to watch a game. To watch what? A game!
I describe this incident at the start of my book The Game In Time of War and will not summarise it further beyond saying I surrendered completely that day.
I surrendered to the foul-mouthed pandemonium around me and forgot about the rest of the world and saw only the glory of this mad game we play as if something seriously depends on it.
I went home like a didgeridoo that's just been played — hollow but humming.
The day the planes struck the World Trade Centre something happened to me. I went to Richmond training. I wrote about a bloke of Middle Eastern appearance with a woman in a headscarf.
He was in a Tiger guernsey, tossing a footy around in his fingers. His name was Waleed Aly. You may have read some of his writing.
If this were written on my blog, it would trigger any number of rants about Muslims but I believe what my father-in-law, a working-class man from the west coast of Tasmania, says. Speak as you find.
Waleed's a good bloke. I rate him seriously as a writer. He's also a former Richmond mascot since his friend, a drama student called Geoff who had the contract for the job, couldn't do it several times and Waleed, literally, stood in for him.
Waleed ran around the MCG in a Tiger suit and people handed him their babies and took photographs. Waleed wondered what would happen if they knew the Tiger was a Muslim.
Waleed and I try to get to a game together each year.
As it happens, we went to Jason McCartney's comeback game after the Bali bombing. It's the only time in my life I've seen a Buddhist monk in saffron robes at the footy.
A couple of years later, through former Freo coach Gerard Neesham, I met Andrea Goddard, the woman who took the monk to the game. Playing for the Kangaroos in that match was Troy Makepeace. At one point, he made a mistake, turning the ball over. "Geez, Makepeace!" cried a voice. "Ah, I understand now," said the monk. "It is a holy game". True story.
Waleed and I also went during the last Olympics. That's when I knew footy was a great game. The Olympics were on TV that afternoon. It was raining.
And 20,000 people had turned up at the MCG to see Hawthorn, itself not the power of yore, play Richmond, the cause of perennial suffering to its followers. Footy's mad. We need it to be. Go Tiges!
Full article at:
http://www.realfooty.com.au/news/news/the-glory-of-this-mad-game/2008/03/14/1205472087149.html
