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photo: Quinn Rooney |
A guy stepped off a train and shouldered his way
Sydney-style through too much commuter traffic, words folding against his chest
and re-opening themselves just long enough to be read: When men can be made to hope, they can be made to win. Footy season
was only a week away when I noticed his sloganed shirt. All footy fans, in the
weeks before the season, live in that brand of suspended hope that they and
their team will be winners. By Round 8, it’s started to sort itself somewhat, between
ideal and reality.
Swans supporters hoped like hell we would win Round 8. For
all the buffed and tuned media chit chat, all the Zen non-attachment to past
play, for all the refusal to give any leg up to an opposition still finding the
top of its game again … reckon those boys hoped like hell they would win too.
Sam Reid, very professional, called it the
right mindset. The more maverick Rampe edged closer to the truth in calling
the burning GF hangover motivation
but was careful to camouflage his confession against the texture of individual
goal setting. Smart boy that one; I like the way he plays the lines.
If hope is a cocktail of expectation and desire, wary supporters
allow themselves to get more involved in desire. But players have to go as far
as expectation. What it must be to get dressed in that each week in front of
tens of thousands of people and wear it like you truly believe. Do many of us know
what sort of muster that really must be?
Sitting down in front of the match on Saturday night, it
occurred to me that part of picking a team and watching footy is the act of
renewing interest in the business of hope. Weekly. Easy to lose sight of it day
to day in this current version of world, but hello to the frame of the footy
game.
Boys came out so hard. Early goals and early pressure, some
kind of accurate thinking and doing. Kieren Jack looked the liveliest I’ve seen
him in an age; Midge McGlynn looked healthy angry; Goodes looked pure and
skilled, like the champion that comes out to run the really big race well. It
was the kind of exposition that keeps the reader reading, the start that
promised all versions of peregrination through hope and loss of it, win and
loss of it.
*
I came home from a day’s work in the gallery a few weeks
ago, the grey and chill of my inner city suburb, the low take-off of big big
planes going who knows where, launching their unthinkable flights across hours
of sky, setting off to find my Cygnet in someone else’s family home, carers
that group around when Dad is away for weeks. A worker from one of the nearby
rag factories was heading home the other way. She wore a vivid purple t-shirt
emblazoned with huge fluoro type: YOLO.
The sort of tee I would usually dismiss as annoying acronymic text talk, but
caught on a traffic island between port-bound lorries and suburban Subarus, the
stark reality overrode the glibness. You do
only live once.
But in footy you live at least once each week. These players
rise week to week. Yes, they train full time. Yes, they are paid their hundreds
of thousands to engage diet and recovery and massage and practice. Lots and
lots of practice. But mentally and physically, how they rebound each week for
the match-day contest—it’s venerable.
This Round 8 was—
Opportunity,
here take it!
Ooh,
missed it.
Opportunity,
here it is again, take it take it!
Oh,
missed … No! Got it, yep got it! Run!
Opportunity. Pass the bloody
opportunity on!
Yep. Beside
you! Score!
It felt like a stop frame of a whole life, played back at
high speed. Over and over again. Contest after contest. On a loop. When those
players fold in the frame at the end of a match—think Daniel Hannebery—I feel
this overwhelming gratitude that they wring every bit of capacity from
themselves and I vicariously glimpse what that type of intent can produce.
*
A Dad at a supermarket organised his kids into the car. He
wore a maroon square cap with patch-stitched lettering: OBEY.
Obey the hope, the effort, the instructions, the culture. We
as outsiders are told over and over, that a champion team is about everyone
playing their role, that patterns and geometry are in place to cope with nearly
every possible happenstance of a game. Some games look as if that’s just about
true.
Everyone played in place on Saturday night. Reid swinging
like a toddler who’s just learnt the manoeuvre. Rampe kicking pinpoint long
like Mal and Marty used to. Kennedy, Mitchell, Hannebery and Parker
miraculously side by side in perfect rhombuses most of the night long. Grundy and
Teddy high. Smith low. No need for the scoring superstar. He has other roles he
can play. And the Captain appeared on the horse for the ‘one last chance’ fairy-tale
ending.
That’s the rare magic of life, or writing, or footy, or … when
things just come together. Most often, it’s enigmatic, almost hands off. A
certain preparation is in place. And every now and then, it combines with hope and you only live once in that inexplicable melange, and your team wins
by almost nothing, but fiercely. It’s a lesson in being awake and obeying life
force.
Thank you, Swans. I appreciate it.
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