Love, loss, loyalty and football
Fifty years on, Ian Cole relives a fateful grand final, a lost tooth and a dear mum
BECAUSE I am approaching my 100th article for the Mercury’s Talking Point pages and because the 50th anniversary of the North Hobart Football Club’s 1969 premiership is on the horizon, I felt I might be allowed to tell a personal story.
One winter’s evening while training for footy at the North Hobart oval in 1969, I knocked out fellow team member Dennis Keats’s tooth. Those who remember footy training in those days will know it was normal for a coach like John Devine to kick the ball 50 yards away and tell two players to go and fight for it. One night it was myself and Keatsy. In those days I was tall and skinny, all elbows and knees and I accidentally knocked out one of Dennis’s teeth. I felt terrible as he was one of the most popular and friendly players ever to play for the club.
As fate would have it, in a strange way I was able to repay him for my misdemeanour.
Fast forward to September that year when the Grand Final came around. We were to play Clarence. I was lucky enough to be selected to play centre-half-forward. My dear mother who had never been to a footy game in her life decided to come because I had received a fair bit of publicity in the week leading up to the final. The publicity was mainly due to the fact that I was new and would be playing on St Kilda premiership player and Clarence captain-coach John Bingley. I think my mother came as others just expected her to be there. My dad meanwhile was in Sydney visiting my older brother who had been conscripted into National Service.
Nearly 20,000 people poured into the North Hobart Ground that day and my mum had to stand during the game. Maybe the excitement of the match, the crowd all around her, standing for so long and even undiagnosed health issues all got too much for her and unbeknown to me out on the ground, she collapsed from a stroke during the last quarter. She was only 49 years! I was a uni student at the time and still living at home and so I went home to get ready for the celebration dinner where my two younger brothers had just got back from the hospital. I hurried there to discover her condition. She may not last the night!
There are times in life when it is OK to lie. As I sat by her hospital bedside that night (no thoughts of a premiership dinner), she woke for a moment and all she said was, “Did you beat Bingley?” “Yes!” I lied. Well, it was what she wanted to hear and I thought it may be the last thing she would ever hear, so I said yes.
She did survive the night, but her life was in the balance for the next two weeks. Subsequently I withdrew from the State Preliminary Final
There are times in life when it is OK to lie. As I sat by her hospital bedside (no thoughts of a premiership dinner), she woke for a moment and all she said was, “Did you beat Bingley?”
and the State Grand Final and Dennis Keats took my place. We both got to play in premiership teams which was great, especially after what I had done to him.
My mother continued to progress and although she lived for a number of years more, her stroke was debilitating. She lost the use of an arm, a leg much weakened and her speech was greatly affected while she never worked or drove again. It was a life-changing moment for her and all the Cole family.
The poet Percy Shelley once said, “There is no armour against fate.” So, it is best to look at that fateful event of 50 years ago positively. Firstly, my mum did survive. Secondly, Dennis Keats, a future North Hobart captain, best and fairest winner and present-day erudite contributor to the Mercury’s Letters to the Editor page, got to play in a state premiership team albeit minus one tooth. And I got to play in a grand final in front of my mum!