The Eaglet and I have flown the coup this week … to the country.
There’s nothing like the change of air, a change of scenery. As you drive south along the coast, you are weaned from the city first by the southern suburbs, then the national park, the mounts above Wollongong, until you are driving in vulgar, rolling green hills, hills that look like they’ve greedily swallowed all the water of the state and are only too happy to boast about it. Every time I make the trip, I expect that the physical transposition will affect a similar kind of internal change on me – that I too will become clear thinking, spacious, wholesome. If only it were as simple as changing the concrete greys to greens.
As Barry Hall’s white ute rounded the boundaries of the SCG on Saturday afternoon, past the little Auskick kids whose shorts meet the cuffs of their socks as they willingly drop balls just past their boots but gallop forward no matter, his face became more and more broken. Each metre seemed to give way to a dawning, for him, of everything he had given away by not being able to change his ways. Many suggested that the big leopard never would. It wasn’t for a lack of opportunities.
The sadness for me, what I read in the trickle of the big man’s tears, was a knowledge of the potential regret that will come from never knowing whether he might have had a better exit, whether he could have changed those spots.
Unless, that is, he changes his stripes. Unless he finds a new guernsey to pull over that scone in 2010.
* * *
On the eve of Round 15, esteemed tipster and provocateur extraordinaire, Travis, sent me a brief message:‘I don't know if I would feel good or bad about Barry kicking a 'bundle' for another team. He's says it would be tough to play the Swans, in fact he said he couldn't. If I did feel good about this prospect it would be coming from a bad place.’
He qualified this for me by revealing the ‘bad place’ to be the desire to see Swans people ‘have to ordeal with the Medhurst Principle’.
How the sting of the traded player remains.
There are a bag of notables running around today: Judd, Cousins, Gardner, Medhurst, Akermanis, Motlop, Hudson. Whether voluntarily traded, caught in the bonuses of November deals or looking for the yellow brick road ‘home’, however they got there, there they now play. They wear the colours, they sing the song.
When your traded player goes and plays about the same, there’s not so much to begrudge. No-one’s crying rivers over Schneider, Dempster, King, Johnstone or (Judd’s fall guy) Kennedy.
When they go and break down, well, that’s the footy Gods closing their karmic circles: Nathan Brown and his broken leg, Playfair and his irreparable hammy.
There are those few – club champions, high achievers – who leave to a chorus of ‘good riddance’ and what follows is largely irrelevant. Somehow, these players never look quite right in the colours they end up in – Aker in blue and Carey in Crow hoops. Hall in …?
When the heart and soul of your club goes, it’s unfathomable. Imagine being an Eagle and losing Judd and Cousins having already slipped a grip on Gardner. Can you conceive of Kirk leaving the Bloods or Richo leaving his nomenclaturally appropriate Richmond? It’d be like giving away your grandmother’s antique furniture to Vinnies.
And what to do with those rare few, like Josh Carr, who go for some time and come back again? Port to Fremantle and back to Port. How are you supposed to feel about those guys? They give their best years to someone else and want you to nurse them through the dribbling.
The pain to which Travis refers – when your traded player departs, only to find a very blustery second wind elsewhere – that must sting. Farren Ray has slipped into Sainthood this year with as much ease as Mary MacKillop is having difficulty. Words are sworn over those releases.
Travis is right. Us Swans have rarely ordealed with the Medhurst principle. Perhaps it is our turn with Baz. We have, until now, been on the other side of the bridge. It’s a risky business – like doing the Saturday garage sale circuit. You can find gems or get exactly what you paid for. We have been mostly lucky, or astute. The Swans have absorbed the discards of other clubs and after a quick wipe and a new set of batteries, they have become favourite additions. These players change like phantoms as if they never were who they’d been, appearing to have only ever been who they now are.
Sydney took a triple grand final emergency player in Craig Bolton and made him into an All-Australian club captain. Does anybody remember him in maroon? We took a second tier ruckman and made him into one of the big men to beat in the middle. Can anyone still ‘see’ him in the navy blue and red? We took an inconsistent, hot headed thug of a kid from St Kilda and made him into an imposing, hot headed thug of a man in Sydney. We won a Premiership with these three. The jury’s out on Richards and Mattner, although both have been more than handy. And as for the # 2 … sometimes you have to invoke a kind of colour blindness. Swans supporters were reluctant when a Shaw came to Sydney. But, now, as he heads the Swans’ kicks and disposals, is 4th in the league’s rebound 50s and 1st in bounces, he is ‘Rhycey’ to all of us in the O’Reilly, as familiar and uniquely ours as the intersection of the SCG’s centre square and 50 metre arc. It’s better to take from Collingwood than to give to them, n’est-ce pas Travis?
It’s not easy to give away your colours nor to take the colours of others. It messes with your sense/s of loyalty.
I have dealt with the inevitable duality posed by loyalty, in general, since the day we took the tram back to Paul’s place after the 2006 grand final. While we expressed our sorrow over the Swans, the look on the Eaglet’s face told us that his heart had already been tempted to the other side of the continent. I have strummed his defiance gently. But there is a part of me that longs for him to lie in the gentle down-lined nest of the Swan under the wings of his mother and father.
And then, on Saturday, the Eaglet changed his wings from the noble wedges of the great bird to the steely span of the Bomber. What do you call a baby Bomber? A ‘bomblet’? Well, yes. Toby informed me, on Saturday, that there is such a thing as a Bomblet – any of a number of explosive, incendiary, or fragmentation bombs packed into a larger bomb or canister that releases or scatters them to explode separately. Multiple trouble. Sounds extremely appropriate.
Just like players, supporters (and tipsters) have been known to seek greener pastures. To be fair to the Bomblet, he has always laid claim to the Eagles and Bombers. He started his barracking life with the two team system in place. (There’s a whole separate bulletin to be written on the politics of ‘having a second team’ – Can you only be a true lover if you love one? What about parents with more than one child? Don’t they profess to loving two or more equally? Can you switch your second team from year to year? …)
People say that children lack the complexity to understand loyalty, because they don’t have any years behind them in which to have cultivated the hindsight-only benefits of long term commitment – the strength that comes, the lessons learnt in steadfastness. We treat their shiftiness as flippant and are lenient on its lack of experience.
But somehow, looking at the sometime Eaglet, part-time Bomblet crying for the big Swan looking for a reincarnation as … a Dog?, it was apparent that he was not shirking the complexity of loyalty by trying on all the colours, he was embracing it. Sitting looking at the Bomblet and at Barry, with Travis’s puzzle ringing in my mind, made me realise that the possessive, one-eyed supporter or the proud, one-club player, has no exclusive monopoly on heart and soul.
Children understand the essence of things not the connotation of things. They know they can love two parents, so why can’t they love two teams? If Tilda Swinton can live a polyamorous life, why can’t we all? Perhaps the Bomblet truly understands that human loyalty transcends singularity, that humans are good at switching their own loyalties, even while defending their right to loyalty from others. He is an honest loyalist.
I suspect our attachment to loyalty as a singular thing comes from the hope that it guarantees some kind of sturdiness and familiarity, a hearth to return to when we feel like we might get lost – the club as a home, like the central powerpoint into which the multiple powerboard is plugged, the server which allows you to go off wandering somewhere and welcomes you back after your adventures.
So, as the natural daylight tilted and Barry bundled up the opposition race, I decided that if he were to go and kick a bundle for the Dogs or the Crows … can I truly add Pies? … I’d be sad he couldn’t do it with us and I’d be pleased for him and for them. A little bit of my loyalty would go with him. And most of it would remain. And I'd be pleased that he might finally be able to check his spots in the mirror.
* * *
The Bomblet and I sat out on the deck at 7am this morning, fresh from a silent night’s sleep, seeing ‘cockatoos’ and ‘hens’ in the newly sunlit clouds hanging out over the coast, waiting for its rays to warm our own small patch of ground. I asked him:
‘Do you think Barry should play footy again?’
‘I think rugby league or union.’
‘But what if the Bulldogs offered him a guernsey?’
‘No. He looks a bit too much like Eagleton so I don’t think the Bulldogs. Maybe boxing.’
The sun popped over the escarpment and turned the grasses green. Danny Green.
Happy tipping!
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