There’s been fishing trips, weekend golf, even the cosmic lottery prize that is occupying a first-world liberal democracy; but not the Melbourne Demons.
Nobody wakes up humming germane to an affiliation with the Red and the Blue. Or at least not in Bindi Irwin’s lifetime. Consider Sunday morning’s riddle for partners, families or neighbours of your average Demons fan: stirring due to the lawn mower’s growl or the prohibitive gleam of a newly-polished car. They’d barely coped with Saturday night’s ebullience; enough to make a certain conservation park heiress look funereally dour.
Perhaps they’d seen the news; the AFL’s laughing stock of a whipping boy had pilfered the cane and given it a crack.
Birching Richmond’s bottom felt different to Season 2012’s six-point victory over Essendon. That’d been the lurid fun available until the cane was ominously snatched back. It was sporting donuts for breakfast; sugary folly swamped by a listless afternoon. Or season, as it happened.
Supplementing tough, substantive wins over Carlton and Adelaide as it did – and a viable attempt to oppose the Western Bulldogs – the Tiger-trashing was a hearty dollop of buckwheat porridge and drizzled honey. Coach Roos has brought spoons and portion enough to nourish each and every; and we are famished. Hail the Deliverer; this exorcist of Demons.
How gallant we are to consign ourselves to sporting teams. Even the pacts forged on our behalf can be rescinded; should that toddler-sized Collingwood guernsey you dribbled on seem like the punishment it was. There’s no contractual obligation, is there? No seldom-invoked law? Why do we expose ourselves to the inestimable trauma designed for losers? Doesn’t the ordinary life have us tread through the minefield and shot through the soul?
We subscribe because it’s worth it, and we know it to be so; even when we cry and remonstrate, switch off or walk out. Sport gets our sincerest gestures, our most categorical affections; keeps our brightest face and all the fidelity it finds mustered in our hearts. It walks us through lifetimes.
But what about our dividend in kind. We learn patience and resolve, munificence and joy seldom attainable through any other medium. Sport educates: just as the blithe call us nullified and distracted.
Stick solid, keep turning up, yell yourself hoarse; and weather the storm. The sun’s bound to show sooner or later: any Demons fan will tell you that.
And if Dolly Parton was prescient to claim that to “want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain”, consider the pretty colours respective stakeholders of this lot beheld.
Perhaps the most miraculous sporting turnarounds within credible memory.
5. Tampa Bay Buccaneers (American Football) – 1979
‘The Bucs’ had proved the Rosemary’s Baby of expansion franchises since their 1976 spawning; having lost their first 26 NFL games consecutively. By the time Season 1978 had spent them, that all-time record had stuttered to seven wins from 44 games; garnering ‘Demonesque’ status without the nascent heritage or distant glory years.
AD 1979 must have proffered its portents. But the roster had churned itself into a feasible mixture – bruised ego and burgeoning talent – organising sufficiently to go 5/0 and reach an inaugural playoff series with a 10/6 differential.
Undecorated tyros Doug Williams, Jimmie Giles and eventual NFL Hall-of-Famer Lee Roy Selmon had ‘breakout’ campaigns and drove their course to the 1979 NFC (Conference) Championship game; the winner of which snatched a Superbowl ticket. An assured, worldly Los Angeles Rams performance was enough to snuff the flame; but the Buccaneers had their lantern with which to proceed. Hope put down its roots; to bud and flower.
4. Atlanta Braves (Baseball) – 1991
‘America’s Team’ wasn’t novel; they’d just wallowed in mediocrity’s muck for an inscrutably long time. And the Demons fans nod and purse their lips. The Braves spent the 1980s declining more rapidly than popular music or sartorial fashion; stopping their 1988 MLB season at 56/106 with a statistical nadir not incomparable with Melbourne’s 2013 (2/20).
Campaign 1990 supplied another MLB-worst (65/97) and the franchise seethed with that familiar consternation; sporting department blaming front office and vice versa. Another bad season could’ve jeopardised the exercise. But then came 1991. Recruited veterans Terry Pendleton and Sid Bream combined with a bullish pitching battery to record a 94-68 regular season and a National League West divisional pennant.
The NL Championship playoff went the way sporting romance should; Atlanta winning two straight sudden-death ballgames at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium to turn 2-3 into 4-3 and a trip to the Big Show. The 1991 World Series.
In case you’re wondering, the Minnesota Twins didn’t read the script; clinching Game 7 to spoil baseball’s yarn for the ages. Intriguingly – and delightfully – their recent past had been nearly as horrendous.
3. Wimbledon FC (football) – 1988
The semantic or dismissive call it soccer; and Wimbledon FC had played it poorly for an initial 90 years in existence. England maintains complex league architecture based upon performance-based promotion and relegation; with Division One (the FA Premier League’s precursor) as apex to three subordinate fully-professional leagues, several semi-professional and manifold ‘park’ or amateur competitions.
So contemplate this for cheek. Wimbledon attained ‘league status’ in 1977 by earning promotion to Division Four and consolidated before climbing three levels in four seasons from 1982/3 to 1985/6. Not a Russian oligarch or Qatari consortium in sight, either.
They retained top-tier tenure for 14 consecutive seasons, but posterity grins hardest upon the sunny May Saturday the ‘Crazy Gang’ beat an imperious Liverpool FC in the 1988 FA Cup Final. Staffed by miscreants (future ‘actor’ Vinnie Jones among them); coached by a ratbag (Bobby Gould). Take every untenable, cliché-choked sports movie plot and junk it: the fairytale turned real.
2. Boston Celtics (Basketball) – 2008
Sensible American pro-sport analysts cite the Celtics as the most successful franchise to play in their major competitions (the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL). Try 17 NBA titles out of 68 contested since foundation – a ratio covetable by VFL/AFL’s Demons even in celebration of their last premiership flag in 1964.
Boston’s 2006/07 had been one for the boo-boys; a 24/58 differential and the rawest scar in a catalogue of damage due to their ‘Big Three’s’ departure (Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish) and All-Star small forward Reggie Lewis’ death.
Two decades had stewed and lapsed by the time Kevin Garnet and Ray Allen signed-on for 2007/08; bona fide NBA class sprinkled upon a workmanlike roster led by stalwart Paul ‘The Truth’ Pierce and Rajon Rondo. The refurbished Celtics compiled a 66-16 regular season – the most miraculous one-year turnaround in NBA history – stomping through division and conference titles to an NBA Championship series against the Kobe Bryant-led Lakers. The annals record a 4-2 decision, an MVP trophy for ‘The Truth’, and a sporting exorcism to cast 20 years of tragedy and underachievement astern.
1. Western Suburbs Magpies (rugby league) – 1934
The Magpies’ deliverance from evil counts as sport’s greatest restorative miracle for two reasons: it occurred without the dispensational correction of a salary cap or player draft, and my confession as a pre-merger Western Suburbs fan. Not that I had the chance to personally revel in this one.
Those Pratten Park boys staggered through 1933 – winning four games and that loathsome wooden spoon – only to strap eleven victories together in 1934 for 12/2 and a minor premiership playoff against a ritzy Eastern Suburbs outfit.
Some things never change. St George presented next, but the Magpies surged on by; dusting the Dragons 16-6 for a thirteenth consecutive win and a NSWRL Final berth. This was indefatigable Frank McMillan’s final season – a skipper, talisman, durable Western Suburbs legend – and they’d have their chance to dispatch him in triumph.
So the Tricolours buttered up again, succumbed again, and sought recourse to flee and lick their wounds. What an archetypal swansong: a rampant McMillan, backed by Les Mead, lock Frank Sponberg and two-try Kangaroo winger Alan Ridley, defied expertise and got the proverbial biscuits. Full time: 15-12, fourteen straight wins, and the best last-to-first sporting story anyone would care to know about.
So what about those exorcised, Paul Roos-steered Melbourne Demons? They needn’t replicate the 1934 Magpies’ or 2008 Celtics’ heady deeds; launched from second-last as they have. And the most strident among us would giggle at the notion. Demons fans don’t need a miracle, and most wouldn’t have the temerity to ask.
We’ve franked our dividends already. Sport’s abundant tap has deigned to trickle, and we’d wrenched with all our might and set our parching tongues beneath the faucet perchance to quench. But we remained and we survived. A few drops will do for now.
Because this is what sport means. And this is what it does. It is allegory and spectacle; it is pageantry and purpose. Therein lays the reason we sign up.
But about those Demons. Another win for 4/6; and September’s not impossible. Oh, we’re playing Port Adelaide? Never mind then.
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