AND THE BIG MEN USED TO FLY

by Whispering Jack

It was the springtime. I was young. I followed the Demons and life was good. It also happened to be a long, long time ago and I have come to learn that if life's about anything then it's about learning and changing ... nothing ever stays the same or, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus put it, "everything flows, nothing stands still."

The events of recent weeks have served to remind us all of how we underestimate this fact.

The season ended, we chose a new coach and immediately the winds of change started sweeping across our football world. New appointments, retirements, delistings, talk of who we were going to trade, who would be recruited, the return of injured players, the anticipated improvement of our youngsters and new hopes and aspirations. Whatever would happen in the coming months we knew that with a new coaching regime our club was no longer fixed to a particular perspective and that the new broom was reviving our belief in the ability of the club to realise its untapped potential.

That was before the earthquake named Chris Judd. The adulation and the speculation that football's best player might choose our club as his new home and that he could prove the catalyst to a revival of the club to its former glory has been so overbearing and powerful that all else has faded into virtual oblivion.

The problem as I see it is that many of us regard his coming to the club he supported as a kid as being some sort of overall panacea to cure everything that is imperfect in a club that has failed to achieve its former glory and has wandered aimlessly through the football wilderness for more than forty years. That sort of thing won't just happen with the arrival of Judd – if he comes to Melbourne at all.

There are those who point to the fact that when Ron Barassi crossed to Carlton it was the making of the Blues and the death of the Demons and that a similar thing would happen if Judd decided to throw his lot in with the club. However, the Carlton revival of the late sixties did not come about just because Barassi walked into Princes Park one day in late 1964. Their success occurred because of the men of strong will who led a hard working visionary committee and adopted new standards of professionalism that left the likes of the staid and conservative Demons in their wake.

Similarly, if success comes to Melbourne in the near future, it won't be simply because of Chris Judd, or Brock McLean, or Nathan Jones or James Frawley for that matter.

Other things have happened in the past week that should have shaken us back to reality. On Wednesday, 19 September we celebrated the forty-third anniversary of our last premiership flag. That date always brings back happy memories, the abiding one being of the goal kicked by back pocket player, the late Neil "Froggy" Crompton (wearing the number 5) that gave us back the lead in the dying moments of the game. Seeing Collingwood lose a final by the narrow margin of less than a goal always gladdens my heart and the fact that it happened again last night was a nice sweetener for the coming week.

The memory of '64 also reminded me of how we celebrated premierships back in those days. I can recall watching an ABC screenplay of Alan Hopgood’s play "And the Big Men Fly". Long before the national competition and the Adelaide Football Club was even thought of, Hopgood wrote a play about an Australian Rules Football team called the Crows. They didn't have much of a team but they were determined to win a premiership so they set out to find their great white hope and they found him in Achilles Jones, one of "the great kickers". They discover however, that even with their new champion, life isn't so simple and things don't always go as planned. The play leaves unresolved the question of whether the Crows win the flag and much the same thing applies to us with the getting of Judd. There are questions that need to be answered; what will be the cost to the club, how will his groin stand up and will his coming be different to the false messiahs of the past – people like Jim Tilbrook, Kelvin Templeton and Peter Moore?

This week also saw the passing of Collingwood's greatest ever ruckman Len Thompson, who died of a heart attack, aged 60. He played 268 games for the Magpies and won the Brownlow Medal in 1972. He was the game's first mobile tall man and he set the trend that we now see in players like the game's current champion tall in Dean Cox. My personal view is that a champion tall like Thompson or Cox might be just as important to our hopes of revival than a Judd but that's an aside that I should be keeping for myself.

The game mourns the passing of its greats but Thompson's death brought home to me the reality of how desolate the Melbourne Football Club has become and how desperate we are to recruit a player like Judd to steer us on a new course and pehaps change our destiny (if it's possible to do such a thing).

You see, Thompson made his debut as a fresh faced kid almost twelve months to the day after Melbourne last won a premiership. He played out his career in the days when the big men used to fly, he lived his life and he has now passed on.

Everything has continued to flow. Nothing has stood still.