Saying nothing, Terry tells it how it is
By Jonathan Green
The Age
July 15, 2005
Waiting in the boardroom of the Richmond Football Club. Waiting for Tuesdays with Terry. Which is not to say that it isn't Tuesday yet; it is, albeit one that is for the moment Terry-free.
Richmond coach Terry Wallace is due at 2.30pm, or as close to it as meets the demands of An Entrance, a theatrical device whose necessary prerequisite is a well-judged degree of lateness. And so we wait.
Tuesdays with Terry (unlike the club's ill-fated attempts last year to arouse enthusiasm for Saturdays with Spud) is a routinely popular affair and already the regular media crowd is shuffling into position around the long board table. Some even have favorite seats, a pecking order respected by their colleagues.
It's still 10 or so minutes to Terry. Time to take in the surrounds. This is the Richmond boardroom, so the carpet is a freshly laid and bloodless slate grey.
Ceiling-to-floor glass the width of the room gives out through slimline venetians on to the slightly soggy sward of the Punt Road Oval.
the middle of the vivid grey-sky green, a groundsman in bright yellow weatherproofs is fidgeting with a set of covers, caught in the act of either revealing or re-covering a sticky smear of brown-black mud, a sight that football traditionalists would recognise as a centre square, the sort of viscous ball-grabbing, boot-sucking morass that Wallace in his playing days used to furrow nose down, earning the lifelong sobriquet of "Plough".
Oh whom, by the by, there is as yet no sign.
On one wall is a tidily geometric gallery of club presidents past and present, a stolid and sometimes serious looking group of men who appear to have begun smiling only after the toothy example set by the beaming Barney Herbert in 1932.
He was a man whose reign sparked a jocular photographic crescendo that reached its highest and most hilarious moment in the brief presidency of one Alan Bond, whose toothy 10 x 8 is the only obvious relic of the club's otherwise undistinguished 1987 season (played 22, won five).
Almost showtime now. TV reporters are briefing their camera operators on the technical intricacies of the event. "Get a walk-in, then a widey. It normally goes for 10 minutes or so, till you sort of nod off."
Others recall the morning's highlights, early elements in the unfolding series of well-staged set pieces that propel each week's football reporting, a micro-managed triumph of spin over curiosity, of pack mentality over journalistic adventurism that is relieved only by the occasional piece of maverick investigation and the weekend's uncontrolled athletic chaos.
"Are you doing Collingwood?"
"You had the big guns out for Riewoldt at the hospital."
"Did you go to the Bulldogs?"
"Nice tie."
"Thanks."
There are four cameras, a pod of radio mikes, one or two notebooks out from the paper press.
A club minder enters through a side door, pulling it briskly shut behind; the equivalent of dimming the house lights. A hush falls.
Somewhere in the middle distance, another door clangs shut. Ears prick in anticipation. And there he is, another minder in tow, a can of diet Coke in hand: the coach.
"Must be a slow news day!" he quips to the crowded room and takes a seat between the microphones and a logo-crowded backdrop on which sponsor's marks outnumber the club crest two to one.
"Terry, Kane Johnson, how's he?"
The hard ones first apparently. Kane's going good, says Wallace.
"What about Richo, is he staying the same or getting a bit worse?"
Richo seems to be staying just about the same and Wallace works beady black eye contact around the room, long, brown neck gobbling out the answers.
"Everybody wants their best players out on the playing surface," he ventures.
It duly emerges that the MCG is "across the road" and, more enigmatically, "you read it the way you think it goes each and every time".
The press have circled, dabbed and parried. Now a thrust. What about the topical Docklands stadium surface? Wallace is ready, he's aired his thoughts on this subject before.
"You reckon you're going to get me to come out nice and hard and strong on that one?" After a moment's consideration, he offers an anodyne comparison with the MCG. "Look, they're just different surfaces. If you close the roof in one, it's slippery, you play out on the other one in the rain and it's very slippery."
It's 2.55 and the job's done. Wallace, saying nothing, has provided the essential grab that will pad the evening's sporting puff.
By late afternoon, FM radio has the story. "Richmond coach Terry Wallace has refused to fuel the growing controversy over the Telstra Dome surface . . ."
Tuesday with Terry has delivered.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/sport/saying-nothing-terry-tells-it-how-it-is/2005/07/14/1120934360882.html
