September 01, 2010

A story for Father's Day....

IT belonged to Mum and Dad’s mate Bill. He played for West Geelong. Back in the 1950s, I guess. Bill played for the blue and gold West Geelong that still plays in the local district league, not the red and white Geelong West that played in the old Victorian Football Association.
Bill was a green-grocer, with a corner shop in Shannon Avenue, only a few hundred yards from Bakers Oval, West Geelong’s old home ground.
I never saw Bill play – it was before my time – but I imagine Bill might have been a tough defender. Years later he was a trainer, the hands that carried sacks of potatoes and onions and oranges working their magic on another generation of players wearing the blue and gold stripes, players who sucked on oranges that came from the corner shop.
Bill ran that shop with Rita, a woman who loves her sport. She was still playing golf at Winchelsea until a few years ago. ‘Got too hard on my back,’ she told me. ‘And after your dad died, well, it wasn’t the same.’
Now closing in on her ninth decade, Rita’s a keen lawn bowler. And she keeps her eye on the Cats, on the telly.
Rita has given me her blessing to wear Bill’s old football jumper. I found it amongst my dad’s clothes in Easter of 2009, nearly 10 years after he died.
The jumper had been a gift from Rita to my dad some time after Bill died, way too young, about 25 years ago. I can imagine my Dad wearing it through the winters, walking along the Moggs Creek beach, or through the bush tracks. Remembering Bill, remembering Mum, thinking about his children. Thinking about that duffed five-iron on the seventh hole at Winchelsea. Wondering which horses might get up in the daily double.
Dad probably wore the jumper while fishing, too, under his old brown jacket or his old red tracksuit top. Standing on the shoreline, rugged up, waiting, hoping for a tug on the line, feeling the blue and gold wool protecting him from the cold, from the wind and the rain, from the spray of the surf, from widowhood.
I reckon Bill’s jumper was Dad’s favourite footy jumper too. Not that Dad ever played footy, save for a game between city and country TAB staff in about 1970. Dad lined up in a pocket at the Bacchus March Oval, back or forward I can’t remember.
He lasted about 10 minutes, wearing the country team’s colours of green and gold stripes. He came off with a broken finger, though he might have come off for a beer as well.
That was the extent of my father’s football career.
So I was a little puzzled to find a footy jumper amongst his old clothes. And excited too – excited by the nostalgia of the fibre, the stitching, the long blue sleeves, the yellow collar, even the two buttons. And excited by the jumper being the same colours, though not the same strip, as my local team Williamstown.
The jumper has weathered the years well. Rita must have looked after it back in the 1950s. In the middle stripe at the front of the jumper is some repair work – about ten neat stitches. The number on the back, 31, is torn in two places, revealing a second number, four. (Did Bill have to relinquish the lower number to someone, or did West Geelong regard him as the club’s Barassi?) There are no sponsors’ or league logos, though a tag on the collar, hanging by the proverbial thread, reveals the jumper was made by Jason Knitting Mills.
It took me a few weeks to figure out the origins of the jumper. My siblings didn’t know but an old mate of mine who grew up near Bakers Oval figured it out.
Pete recognised the jumper’s colours immediately. For him it brought back memories of his childhood, of the green-grocer corner shop, of West Geelong footy club, of Bill saying to him some Saturday afternoons, ‘Pete, young fella, can you pop down to the shop and ask Rita for some more oranges. The boys are going to be thirsty today.’
But I didn’t know any of that when I found the jumper in Dad’s wardrobe. All I knew was that I wanted to wear it. I had no hesitation in pulling on the jumper that Easter Saturday, the first round of the 2009 season, and asking my teenage son – who sometimes wears his grandfather’s brown jacket or the red tracksuit top - for a short kick-to-kick session on the gravel road outside the beach-house, outside what had been my parents’ retirement home, outside the place where they died, seven years apart, from failing hearts.
It had been about 35 years since I’d worn a football jumper (a red cotton jersey for the under 13 Boomers) and flushed with pride I managed to land a few drop punts and even some drop-kicks on my son’s chest.
I pull on Bill and Dad’s jumper every Sunday morning for kick-to-kick and circle work with half-a-dozen mates. I wear a t-shirt underneath because the wool’s pretty scratchy.
We play on Fearon Reserve, where the local amateur team wears blue and gold too, but blue with a gold sash, like Williamstown. Many, many years ago, 100 or more, Williamstown played on this ground too.
The Sunday morning sessions last about 45 minutes but I peel off the West Geelong jumper after about ten minutes because I get so warm.
My favourite football jumper has not worn thin yet, and it won’t for a long time, a long, long time.

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