Richmond legend Neville Crowe faces new battle Mike Sheahan
Herald Sun
March 19, 2011 HE'S a Richmond legend but at 73 he is facing a new battle. Nevile Crowe talks candidly to MIKE SHEAHAN about the challenges of growing old. NEVILLE Crowe is closing on his 74th birthday. Sure, there's going to be the odd memory lapse.
Of course there is, for "senior moments", as they are most sensitively described, are pitfalls of life in the twilight zone.
The concern for the Richmond stalwart and his family and friends is that those lapses have become rather more frequent than they would like during the past two years. That there's an emerging problem.
Crowe, 74 on June 1, is self-conscious yet remarkably candid about his situation.
"Life is what it is," he says at his Burwood home. "Hopefully, I'll be able to get through. I'll be a bit scatter-brained here and there."
His confidence and self-esteem had taken a beating the previous Friday at a Vingt-Cinq luncheon in Melbourne when he lost his way while introducing a guest and long-time friend to fellow club members of the famous sporting group.
That's just not his form. As a former Richmond captain and president, and the face of a previous long-running TV advertising campaign, he has spent plenty of time on his feet in front of audiences and cameras - relaxed, confident, often humorous.
In accordance with the theme for lunch - friends from school - Crowe was to introduce another Melbourne High School graduate and friend of 50 years, Bill Meaklin, Richmond's historian and secretary of the club's former players and officials association.
"I don't know what happened," Crowe said. "I don't know how the wires got crossed ...
"He (compere Leon Wiegard) just moved on, he didn't leave me embarrassed or anything of that nature. No one laughed, but I just felt very, very ordinary.
"I just disappeared. I rang (wife) Valy and said 'I've really done this badly'. It put me in shock mode.
"I haven't had that experience before. I thought I'd been coping fairly comfortably over the last 12 months."
He called it "a little hiccup", yet often referred to his "demons" during our talk.
He rejected the suggestion of Alzheimer's disease.
"No, not at all," he said. Yet, he couldn't identify his problem. "I don't know ... it's just there. I can go days and days where I'm as happy as a pig in poo sort of thing, then the wheels come off and I can spend two or three days jittery and scared."
EVEN with our appointment, he fretted when I hadn't arrived at what he thought was the appointed time. Worried he had forgotten the agreed hour.
"It's just a very, very awkward time," he said.
Meaklin, 77, said this week: "Neville got up at the luncheon and said 'I've got Billy here ... ', then the next bit just didn't come out.
"He's introduced me 50 times before; he's normally just super at all that sort of thing. He said 'I'm sorry I embarrassed you', and he apologised three or four times. Not that he needed to.
"If he's not my best friend, I don't know who is. He's always saying 'I love you like a brother', gives me a big hug and just about crushes my ribs."
Crowe, one of football's premier ruckmen during the 1960s, is in excellent shape physically, yet more self-conscious and softly-spoken than I remembered, and certainly much thinner. His weight has dropped steadily from 97kg to 82, a fact he attributes to his new passion for cycling, his long-running financial concerns and the growing unease about his memory.
Fortunately, Richmond remains a constant in his life and the Tigers are planning a benefit lunch for him at the Regent Theatre on June 10.
The club, the past players, officials and the Vingt-Cinq club are working on ways to assist the Crowe family.
He no longer works and the family lost its life savings a couple of years ago to a shyster and so-called financial adviser who continues to elude authorities.
They were duped of $318,000 in a scheme that promised plenty and delivered nothing, not even their own money back.
"They (his benefactors) may save our lives," he says grimly. "We've been grinding away on the edge since this p---- pinched our dough.
"We've just got to march on and do what we do."
VALY Crowe works three jobs to keep the family functioning - the Crowes have identical twin daughters, Isabella and Susara, 21, living at home, and also accommodate Valy's mother in a granny flat.
Meaklin is involving Crowe once a week in former players and officials matters and there is a prospect of a role as a tour guide in Richmond's soon-to-be completed museum at Punt Rd, with his own proviso: "Given that I can rally my mental troops."
The involvement is important. It gives him an on-going link with the club and an interest outside of home.
"Rather than sit around and just read and dig the garden up again, they've invited me to come down. That's terrific, I'm back amongst people again, Richmond people."
The Tigers know they owe him. Crowe's involvement with the club started as a boy when his elder brother, John, told him he would barrack for Richmond or put his life at risk.
He started as a player in 1957, was captain from 1963-66 and won the best and fairest three times.
Sadly, unjustly, he missed a place in Richmond's 1967 premiership team when Carlton champion John Nicholls refused to admit to the VFL tribunal Crowe's slap with an open hand in the second semi-final failed to make contact. He was suspended and had to watch the Tigers win their first flag in 24 years from the stands.
He never played again, gone at 28.
He was club president from 1987-93, perhaps the darkest period in the club's history. Crowe and coach Kevin Bartlett led a supporter rally 20 years ago that saved the club.
Crowe loves Richmond, and Richmond is responding in kind.
HE is humbled and thrilled with the offer of financial help. "They've been great. Whether they raise two pound 10 or two thousand (dollars), it's great."
Almost as important as the money is the engagement with the people at the club.
When asked how he occupied his day, he said: "I do a fair bit in the garden. Like everybody else who's retired, I mow the lawns every five minutes.
"I read a bit (Matthew Richardson's biography), I like watching the footy. I don't really understand what they bloody well do these days. It used to be easy in the good old days - just kick it to Royce (Hart), but I still enjoy watching the game."
He has taken to bike riding. When the weather suits, he does the 32km round trip to the city three or four times a week.
I tell him he's too thin. He blames the bike, the anguish of the financial disaster and, he suspects, the growing fear about his memory lapses.
"I'm in very, very good shape, physically speaking. It's the 'boogey' thing."
It's much worse when he is alone at home.
"I can walk over there (to the cupboard) and then wonder what I went there for." A couple of times in conversation, he would ask: "Sorry, where was I going?"
Yet he's good with faces and names. He says he will rely on notes when he next needs to introduce someone.
"It's slowed me down in that area. I don't want to get up and go blurt, blurt, blurt."
As for the future, he remains optimistic, heartened by Richmond's genuine interest, the friendships that have been rekindled with players and officials from his playing days.
2He is back in the fold, relenting to the pressure of former players' boss Mike Perry and former president Ian Wilson to accept he belongs at the regular get-togethers of premiership players.
Crowe was a certainty to play in the '67 premiership in normal circumstances. He was robbed of a lifelong highlight by an opponent who let him down and an over-zealous tribunal.
"I stayed away simply because I was never involved in the premiership action. I'd had a couple of kicks in the a--- and just moved on. 'Big Red' (Perry) just kept chasing me to get involved again."
Is he scared of the future? "I don't know how it will resolve itself , but no, I'm not worried. I know that I'm physically very well conditioned to take on anything of that nature."
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/afl/richmond-legend-neville-crowe-faces-new-battle/story-e6frf9jf-1226024267757
