It’s been a long time coming, Patrick Smith’s declaration that he can no longer support Essendon. That he’s become a Damien Hardwick disciple was a no-brainer; the Tigers have all the luck.
Nor was it all that surprising that Smith’s terminal dummy-spit came as late as 2011 — I’ve often thought his moral compass and stopwatch a bit iffy.
Unlike Patrick, I wasn’t born into an Essendon family – wish I had. For me, it was a sacrifice.
I’m the refugee who cherishes their citizenship while the homegrown take it for granted.
All anyone ever asks a five-year-old Victorian is who they barrack for. It was a tough time with one parent Collingwood and the other St Kilda. The tie-breaker was Barry Davis’ raking dropkicks. They were pathetic: “All to the Lost Dogs Home” was all they wrote.
You can be lucky though and I was, marrying into not just a Bomber family but the Bomber family – the McCrackens – and not a branch, the trunk. Peter, the patriarch, was the grandson of Alexander McCracken, the son of the founder of Essendon Football Club.
Peter was born at North Park, atop a hill just north of Windy Hill. The mansion is still there, the Australian HQ of the St Columban mission. The MCG and the Flemington home straight included, it might be Melbourne sport’s most sacred turf.
Peter’s grandfather, Alex, was a brewer by trade and a sportsman by choice. As a teenager in the 1870s he was the secretary of Essendon, a junior outfit playing on his father’s paddock. He went on to be the club’s president and built North Park.
Melbourne’s reputation as the sports capital didn’t start at North Park but it was consolidated there, around a king-sized billiard table surrounded by elevated leather benches in a dungeon under the mansion.
You can still smell the tobacco and the Scotch and hear the McCrackens and their guests chalking cues and talking footy, racing, athletics, rowing, shooting, whatever.
Hear Alex McCracken’s clipped-Scot dissatisfaction with the Victorian Football Association. By the end of 1896 he’d lured seven other VFA clubs away to form the Victorian Football League, with Alex McCracken the league’s first president — from little sins big things grow.
The McCrackens involved themselves in just about every ball, equestrian, rowing and shooting sport north and west of Melbourne city; even the odd cricket club, with ‘odd’ the operative term.
There was a circumspection about cricket, summed up perhaps in Peter’s observation that it was a game played against eleven opponents and ten teammates.
As McCracken’s Ale fuelled much of the activities, no doubt.
The Flemington-Essendon social set were at the heart of the resistance to John Wren’s shenanigans, their Presbyterian posses riding south armed with little more than fountain pens and the weight of the law to engage with Wren’s match – and race-fixers.
Victoria’s reputation for hosting the cleanest sport in the British Empire was hard won and McCrackens helped win it.
A century later, one of the latter public acts of Alex’s grandson, Peter, was to enshrine if not in law then in the footy culture’s mind the principle that what happens on the footy field does not necessarily stay on the field.
To him a king hit was a king hit and a kid’s jaw had been smashed. Already blind in one eye from glaucoma, he wouldn’t turn the other. Some said he was weak. I don’t think so.
Elderly, ailing and against the cold shoulders of a bush football community he’d spent a lifetime nurturing, he broke all its rules and told a court what he’d seen and what he thought.
Few noticed the precedent but soon afterward an awakened and emboldened police force weighed in after Leigh Matthews got Neville Bruns.
The footy culture struggled with that too, but the game taking such prominent leave of the king hit from its stopping tactics didn’t hurt it.
It’s called leadership. In Peter’s eyes, or his good one anyway, damaging footy was a sin; that winning by means other than football was losing anyway.
He spoke of its fragility; there were plenty of other good games around – he’d played and enjoyed them all, usually brilliantly and he saw their appeal. You had to be careful with it.
Peter had daughters and he wanted then comfortable about footy; the women were its social security, its point of difference.
A good footballer in his day, he played into his 30s. They say you could belt him all day and he never took his eyes off the ball. It was the game first and the club second; winning was in there somewhere too, but you had to read down a bit.
Unlike Patrick Smith, I wasn’t born into the “Essendon way” but I probably have a better feel for it now than when I was five-years old.
I’m not so sure about Smith, who’s spent the entire post-Sheedy era ridiculing the club’s administration.
Peter had a billiard room of his own in Victoria’s deep west. With one eye, he was still a player. As he’d say, you didn’t have to see them so long as you knew where they were and where they’d be next — always the hunter.
He demonstrated Lindrum’s nursery cannon. “What’s it prove? That you’re an conniving arsehole, that’s all.”
He no longer supported Essendon because, like Patrick has only just decided, the club had lost his respect.
Sheedy worried him. He’d seen him with Richmond and called him “the Prahran cricketer”. The Richmond mercenaries worried him; Raines’ professional disinterest; Wood giving them an eyeful; Clayton out of retirement to mind Dipper. Moore’s split testicle and its remorseless aftermath had question marks all over it.
Peter’s view was that if it was happening then it was being tolerated.
He didn’t think Dick Reynolds would have tolerated it, nor would he have called the cops onto Hawthorn with insinuations of substance-assisted performances.
He didn’t think that was a good look for footy, the drug squad swooping on a footy club at the behest of an opponent’s groundless allegations; not much sport in that — not very Essendon.
The lanky kid ruckman he’d pointed out in the reserves one day, a born ruckman he thought. Sheedy played him at full forward and Peter turned blue.
Sheedy’s exploitation of the 15-metre penalty to give the Bombers time to flood back infuriated him – Sheedy’s nursery cannon.
He gravitated to Steve Waugh, who he thought an Essendon man at heart. Footy-wise, he pitched for Hawthorn; tough enough to keep playing footy in the face of Sheedy’s nonsense; no asterisks. He thought the Hawks went about it the right way — the hard way.
I said you don’t change clubs. He said you don’t change your principles and that was that. It was déjà vu as the Bombers and the Hawks slugged it out through the ’80s. I felt right at home, like I was five years old again.
We didn’t talk much footy after that. War and Waugh were easier subjects. He sneered at cricket’s gimmicks. Get the wrong crowd in and it’ll change the game, he’d say, looking at me and then the billiard table. He thought the ’84 and ’85 flags were Lindrumesque in the wrong way, forcing a rule change as they did — asterisks.
By the time the lanky kid ruckman arrived there, Peter was a 10-year Hawthorn member. “See,” he said breaking our footy silence one day, “Salmon was a ruckman. Bloody Richmond … that Hird though, he’s a Bomber.”
Typical McCracken, Peter set his sights on the 2000 Olympics. “That’ll do me.” He didn’t make it, passing away with his leather-cased tranny by his side, his connection over that last hard year to the prosperous lands the McCrackens once farmed at Flemington, Moonee Valley and the footy.
I’ve stayed thick with the Bombers for the journey but it’s not been easy, not with Peter still audible.
Like when it was revealed Essendon had salary cap issues during the early ’90s — “another bloody asterisk”. It was a good flag, 1993, but maybe it was more G. Richmond than G. Essendon.
I heard Peter when Corcoran and Judkins and Bomber Thompson and others headed off in search of oxygen while Sheedy wasted draft picks on Lazarus projects, and his latter years at the club playing like Boycott on 99, his eyes fixed firmly on his prize, oblivious to the situation.
I heard a gruff “bullshit” when Sheedy accused his coaching counterparts of cynicism for using flooding tactics and not looking after the game. That was me; Peter didn’t say a word.
I saw Essendon declare and I saw Sheedy throw his bat down on the way back to the pavilion; nothing needed to be said.
Patrick Smith has respected all that, or at least tolerated it
Yet he cannot tolerate the club bending over morally backwards, not to win a flag or a final, but to get a couple of authentic Essendon people back into its fold.
It’s a curious line for Smith to draw. There are no asterisks involved this time.
If only Sheedy could have trod so lightly, or supporters like Patrick Smith who tolerated the nursery cannons and administrative steroids then cracked it over, relatively speaking, cannabis use at board level; dopey but not dangerous to others or the game.
Will Essendon’s opponents feel cheated losing to Essendon because Bomber Thompson was in the box?
How about to a team stacked with talent due to salary cap fiddling or playing outside the spirit of the game?
Damien Hardwick has the job ahead of him. The Tigers supporters have got a conscience and a mouthpiece now. Can he get Richmond playing the Essendon way?
Before too long, Richmond supporters will be as confused as some Essendon supporters have been during and after their Sheedy era; they won’t know Tigerish behaviour from a hole in the ground.
Is that an authentic Richmond backhander or an ex-Essendon dropkick? Depends on which paper you read.
Peter was an opposite man to me and Patrick Smith — he didn’t say much and what he said was all worth listening to.
I don’t know, but I think he’d happy to see Hird where Matthew Knights and Kevin Sheedy once were, and for whatever it took so long as that only damaged egos and not the game.
Adieu, Patrick.
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