GOODBYE TO CATS GREAT
RUSS Middlemiss loved the Geelong Football Club — and the Geelong Football Club loved him.
Overlooking the ground he graced for six years, the backto-back premiership winner said his final farewell yesterday to Kardinia Park.
With the 1951 and 1952 premiership cups standing proudly atop his casket, which was draped in a premiership flag, the Geelong great and keen yodeller was remembered as one of the toughest players to don the blue and white hoops.
Daughter Christine Farrow said her father had a tough but happy childhood.
As his mother struggled during the Great Depression, a two-year-old Middlemiss was taken to the Ballarat Orphanage with instructions that he was not to be adopted.
“His mother would visit the orphanage regularly with lollies until Dad was six,” she said.
“She later married and had three more children, perhaps this is why her visits stopped.
“Meanwhile, ‘Buster’ as Dad was now known, grew up happily in the orphanage with kids who became his 200 brothers and sisters and lifelong friends.”
Cats vice-president Bob Gartland said Middlemiss left the orphanage at 14 before finding work on a property in the Wimmera.
Shearing took him back to Burrumbeet, near Ballarat, where he started to carve out a name for himself as a footballer.
He declined early approaches from Geelong, preferring to continue to play country football.
“Shearing took him to Rokewood where Russ played in a premiership team and his football talent was beginning to be noticed,” Mr Gartland said.
“When Russ lived in Rokewood he worked for a local family as a shearer and one night he and the family were having an evening meal when there was a knock at the door.
“The boss answered the door to some men he thought were policemen.
“When asked if Russ was home, the boss said: ‘ He left here a couple of weeks ago’.
“Later it surfaced that the men at the door weren’t police at all — they were recruiters from the Melbourne Football Club who were keen to sign him up.”
Geelong eventually got its man in 1949 where he formed part of the formidable back line of Middlemiss, John Hyde and Geoff Williams.
Mr Gartland said the three boys were inseparable for almost 70 years.
“If you found one of them at a function, the other two wouldn’t be far away,” he said.
“They were great friends and looked after each other all of their lives and if you look through all of the old photos there they are — they’re like the three musketeers.
“Russ would become part of one of the greatest teams in the history of the Geelong Football Club, and the history of the game of football itself.
“He was a major reason for the success of that great team.”
One of Middlemiss’s greatest dislikes was Collingwood, famously refusing to swap jerseys with Magpies captain Lou Richards after the 1952 Grand Final win.
“Geoff Williams said the whole team hated Collingwood because of the way they played the game,” Mr Gartland said. “Russ declined Richards’ invitation to swap jerseys, saying he wouldn’t be caught dead in a Collingwood jumper.”
Middlemiss’s Geelong career ended in 1955 through a knee injury. He was just 26.
In total, Middlemiss played 74 games for the Cats, winning 56 of them — a remarkable win rate of 75 per cent.
Mr Gartland said Middlemiss never forgot the strong friendships he forged at the Ballarat orphanage.
“In his playing days he would know when the kids from the orphanage were at the game because he would hear them yell out ‘Hey Buster’,” he said.
Mr Gartland said when Middlemiss lost his wife Margie in 2006, the footy club became an even bigger part of his life.
“He spent the last few years visiting his teammates and checking in to see how they were going,” Mr Gartland said.
“He visited Geoff Williams almost every day, he met up with Les Borrack every Tuesday for 20 years, and he regularly caught up with his teammates because he cared about them.
“If Russ Middlemiss was your friend, you had a friend for life.
“It’s hard to imagine the Geelong Football Club without Russ around the place.”