The magical lost art of the spiral punt

THE scent of perspiration and liniment in the Windy Hill clubrooms was suffocating as trainers strapped bandages on the swollen ankles and bloody knees of battle-hardened Essendon warriors.

It was training night. I was a boy clutching a handful of footy cards. My father, one of the trainers, greeted the boisterous Dons tribe as it stampeded in from the track; ankle-high studded boots thundering on worn wooden floorboards like an earthquake.

I asked Bombers flanker Robin Close to tie his boot laces like he was pictured doing on my footy card. He struck the pose and I held my card up to compare. I smiled.

About the same age, I was put on a camel at the annual Essendon barbecue and the belligerent beast refused to rise from its reclined position. Its handler yanked its chain but the animal rolled over, splashing me into the warm wet steamy poo it had evacuated with gusto just moments earlier. I was covered in dung. Decorated Bombers winger Ken Fletcher tried to wipe the faeces off before Mum and Dad poked me into the back of the car and took me home for a bath.

So began life as a Bombers supporter. It was not the last time the historic Melbourne club would land me in excrement. I’d rather roll in camel turd than go through the 2013 drug saga again.

My childhood was full of footballs. Dad said North Melbourne legend Barry Cable became one of the game’s greatest rovers because he carried a footy with him day and night. Living in hope, me and my two brothers did the same. We thrived on the magic of cracking torpedoes. We kicked the spiralling marvels for hours at a time at Langley Park at Somerset on the North-West Coast.

When a torp is struck perfectly it flies. It’s a lost art that requires exacting timing more than brute power and the perfect strike to launch it fizzing like a sidewinder missile. Occasionally an AFL player tries one nowadays, but it’s never a proper barrel. Torpedoes don’t wobble, they spin like a maniac top and hold their dart-like form.

The last big league practitioner of the spiral punt was 400-game Bomber Dustin Fletcher, son of Ken who came to my aid when I was up to my armpits in camel shite.

IRECALL a boyhood mate awkwardly juggling four saveloys as he climbed the grandstand steps at West Park Oval in Burnie. The savs had been doused in tomato sauce and wrapped in thin white bread by chortling canteen ladies always quick with a witty line. Wearing matching woollen Starsky jackets, me and my mate tucked into the fabled footy fare while ogling pretty girls parading past. On the field, Cooee teammates spilt blood for their cause.

As a cub reporter, I covered a game between Latrobe and East Devonport at Girdlestone Park where the wind blew so hard off Bass Strait that the players could not keep the ball in play. The ball flew repeatedly out of bounds next to a point post in the far pocket. The gale blew the footy back over the head of the kicker each time. The boundary umpire had even less success throwing it in.

I don’t know how the impasse was resolved because a veil of horizontal rain hit and blocked all view out of the press box window. At the final siren the scorecard read something like East 1.11 (17), Latrobe 1.9 (15). Rushed top scored and the Bass Strait gale won best on ground for most possessions.

I remember watching my older brother deliver a brutal coathanger in a Sandy Bay U-19s game at Queenborough Oval. The shortest but widest player on the field, the human tank held his arm out like an iron bar as his opponent ran past. The stiff arm caught the top of his opponent’s chest and laid him out flat on his back. No free kick was awarded and the player peeled himself from the turf and staggered groggily to the bench, as much a victim of shock as any physical injury.

I recall Carlton firebrand David Rhys-Jones lighting up a smoke at halftime at York Park before addressing his North Launceston teammates as playing coach. I had heard many such addresses but nothing like this one this day.

Butting out his durry, he looked his teammates in the eye and decreed that he was NOT going to lose. His words were nothing special but he said them with such conviction, without ranting or histrionics, his teammates were mesmerised. You could sense the hairs on their arms and on the back of their necks rise with each word.

Rhys-Jones returned to the field to play the perfect game at centre-half back. He marked or punched every ball that came his way. His loping stride delivered him to every contest with immaculate timing. The Bombers, hackles raised and inspired by their leader, played the best half of football I’ve seen from a Tasmanian team.

I recall the furore when Dons coach Kevin Sheedy dropped Derek Kickett for the 1993 grand final after he had played every game of the season. Kickett refused to speak to Sheedy until last year when Essendon cajoled the pair into getting together. After a quarter of a century stewing, the slighted warrior gave his coach an old-fashioned spray. Sheedy apparently accepted the lashing.

Kickett had a sublime leftfoot torpedo. It held altitude at the peak of its arc longer than seemed physically possible.

DAD said sport was a metaphor for life with lessons, such as how to win with humility and how to lose with honour, applying directly to real life. His philosophy stemmed from Ancient Greece and the 20th century French founder of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin.

Aussie rules is like art in its chicken and egg relationship to life. Life can imitate footy and vice versa. We barrack for the underdog because in real life the little guy in the fight is usually us. We punt on the creation of footy legend to set a precedent for our own triumphs.

That’s why my heart’s with GWS in the big dance today.

Carn the Giants.