THE PROTÉGÉ II

by Whispering Jack

There used to be a great little Italian restaurant in Hardware Lane in the heart of the city where they served superb pastas with vino, delicious lemon granitas and decent coffee. Campari attracted a mixed clientele of lawyers, office workers, sporting personalities and shoppers. At lunchtime, it was always crowded, noisy, full of atmosphere and lively conversation. Then one day about five years ago it just closed down never to reopen its doors although, for a long time, a sign on a window carried an unfulfilled promise that it would reopen "after renovations".

That was the venue where, back in the early eighties, we completed our great recruiting "coup" for the Melbourne Football Club.

Our little group, made up mainly of young lawyers, had a regular lunchtime table at Campari. There was "Redleg" who posts here on Demonland and who was on the MFC board at the time, "Night Life" who fancied himself as a cricketer and who has since passed on and an assortment of other characters including yours truly. From time to time, we had visitors to the table including VFL footballers and even the occasional County Court judge.

One of our guests was a young bloke by the name of Mark Louis who was coach of the Prahran Thirds in what was then known as the VFA. He assured us one day that he had a player who would make it all the way to the highest level in the game. His protégé was, he claimed, a "bloody good footballer."

Well that was enough for me. I pointed out to Redleg that Prahran was located in Melbourne's metropolitan zone and there was a fair chance that this "bloody good footballer" was tied to the Demons. We bent his arm a bit and Redleg promised to arrange for someone from the club to come down to watch one of his games. That promise was duly kept and the following year Graeme Yeats was wearing red and blue instead of Prahran's two blues.

That's how they used to recruit players before the days of drafts, trades and list managers. From the early fifties to the seventies, the MFC secretary Jim Cardwell was a one man recruiting department and that was only one of the many jobs he single-handedly carried out at the club. Today, clubs have about three different departments doing Jim's job. By the eighties there were a few part timers helping out but often the club relied on word of mouth advice from supporters and other spotters. In many ways therefore, it was a stroke of good fortune that a lunchtime chat at Campari in 1983 with the Prahran thirds coach led to the securing of his protégé as a player of a dozen years' excellent service and standing.

Melbourne and Yeats got a taste of finals football four years later and while the month of September 1987 was an exciting time, it ended in tragedy when Jimmy Stynes was penalised for crossing Gary Buckenara's mark as he lined up for the last kick of that year's Preliminary Final.

September was also an interesting time for the lunch time crew at Campari. Someone had come up with the idea of doing a radio show on 3CR to fill in a vacancy on their Thursday night programming so for about six months we were required to turn up to the Fitzroy studios and talk nonsense about sport. We were tucked in between a reggae music show and a lesbian discussion group and I reckon we might not have fitted in with the station's image. Mind you, I always thought the banter on our programme was easily the most coherent on their roster.

The week after our dramatic final loss to Hawthorn I made up a news item reporting that the Melbourne Football Club had successfully obtained an injunction in the Victorian Supreme Court to force a replay of the preliminary final because the 15 metre penalty against Jimmy Stynes was "unjust" and "unconscionable". We thought nobody listened to our show but the switchboard fairly blew up that night as our receptionist fielded dozens of calls from irate Hawthorn supporters. The excuse we gave the station boss was that I had become somewhat disoriented by the lingering fumes from whatever the reggae boys had been smoking in the studio during the hour before we came on air.

Anyway, my feeble attempt to win some justice for Jimmy, Yeata and the boys fell flat. and eventually 3CR gave us the flick and replaced us with a group of people who rambled on mindlessly about some national liberation movement in South America. Several months into their stint they were still getting phone calls halfway through their programme from a bloke who wanted their tips for the coming weekend's races.

Redleg and I bumped into Mark Louis at Etihad this year on 1 July and watched the Under 18 championships games with him. He's still involved and does some coaching at one of the APS schools. Like all of us, he was suitably impressed by his protégé's protégé.

It's uncanny when you think that more than two and a half decades afterwards, not only is Yeata coaching the young footballer who is likely to be taken by the Demons at #1 in this year's draft, but somewhere else there's someone else's protégé running around in a two blues guernsey who might well be selected at number two. Not only that but from what I've seen and heard about them, they're both "bloody good footballers".

FOOTNOTE

"Night Life" whose brother had played a few games for the Dees in 1981 suddenly and tragically passed away in 1989 from an aneurism still in his thirties. It was only a few hours after he'd watched his beloved Demons win a game at the MCG against the Swans. He would have loved Demonland and I dedicate this article to his memory even though his role in Yeata's recruitment was rather limited on account of the fact that he was more interested at the time in quaffing Campari's fine house red while the rest of us were busy recruiting a Demon.