Tasmania's Heroes
The Age
Tuesday August 31, 1999
I found Johnny Greening, Collingwood's 19-year-old prodigy in the 1970 grand
final, through the Cooee Football Club in northern Tasmania.
Cooee is a thin slip of sand on Burnie's western side. Its football team doesn't exist any more, but its former great, Harold "Tiger" Dowling, certainly does and Johnny played for Cooee after he came back to Tasmania around 1980. I know because I watched him.
Initially, he captain-coached a Launceston club called City South (now South Launceston) and I saw him there, too. Silk to watch, every movement polished and assured, but always with a frown on his face.
At Cooee, among players he had gone to school with, he had no leadership responsibilities and while there was more personality in his play, there was still an inherent conservatism about his game. He let the game come to him and then responded. Only once did I see something of what Johnny Greening had been.
Cooee, an exceptional team by local standards, played Penguin, a gritty unrelenting rival from a few miles down the coast, in the match of the year. Cooee blasted them out of the park with a combination of strength and skill. That day, and that day alone, I saw Johnny Greening dance.
Johnny and his second wife, Bev Holman, were training racehorses at Spreyton, "Tiger" said. He rang back two hours later with a number. The paddocks were lush and green when I arrived and beheld a youthful figure with clear brown skin in shorts, walking towards a back shed. It was him, slightly humped but loose in his movements.
Greening could run through a pack at full pace bent double. From a similar position, he could also leap on to the roof of a pack, take a mark then fall off like a kid falling out of bed. At Victoria Park, they loved him. The judgment of the club was clear. Johnny played in guernsey 22, Bobby Rose's old number.
Rose had seen Johnny as a 15-year-old; within 12 months, he had him at Victoria Park. For years, Greening was the youngest player around the place - just a kid, in ruckman Graeme "Jerker" Jenkin's words. He couldn't enter public bars with teammates, not that it bothered him. His business wasn't making friends, his business was football.
"I wasn't going to be a doctor or a lawyer when I was growing up," said Johnny. "I was going to be a footballer." He was as young as six or seven when he realised his talent set him apart.
At Collingwood, he was regarded as a loner, but one of the reasons he didn't talk football to people was because he didn't think about it as they did.
Johnny saw league football as "archaic" - ridiculously slow and run by people who were blind to the opportunities opening before them. Johnny laughingly went his own way.
All his Collingwood teammates recall the day, in what Johnny calls his first full year, that he kicked seven goals against Carlton at Princes Park before three-quarter-time. Barry Price thinks he was on a forward flank. Peter McKenna says, no, he was ruck-roving; he remembers him gliding through the centre, effortlessly dodging tackles, going bang, bang, bang, and the balls going over the full-forward's head.
Johnny said: "Tuddenham read me beautifully that day." He means he predicted his moves, had the ball waiting for him as he slid past.
Johnny was 19 in the 1970 grand final. How's his memory? Better than a lot of his teammates. He recalls the exact temperature and gives it in centigrade - 22 degrees.
He remembers the supporters in the rooms at half-time. Johnny's word for the Collingwood rooms is eerie. As if they had a different sort of energy from the one required.
Johnny's one of those who doesn't go along with the business about Carlton coach Ron Barassi reinventing the game that day. He says it was a game Collingwood lost.
Like Phil Pinnell, Carlton's youngest player that day, Greening cramped before the match ended. Coach Rose's first response, one that was certainly worth trying given the collapse of his forward line, was to put him up forward in a position that required less running.
There's a moment late in the last quarter when big "Jerker" Jenkin is despairingly trying to clutch a ball bouncing about his knees; Greening is a yard away, shouting, "Give it to me, give it to me." "I would have turned on my left and gone pow," he said.
Pow means goal, six points, no doubt about it, but "Jerker" couldn't get the ball to him. Greening's cramps worsened; with a couple of minutes to go, he was taken from the field but umpire Don Jolley says the change was badly handled and Collingwood played a minute, possibly longer, with fewer than 18 men.
Like everyone else, Johnny's word for the mood in the Collingwood rooms after the match is devastation.
"It was a match that should have made us better," he said. Instead, somehow, it made a team he calls brilliant worse. He recalls the team's collapse under Rose in 1971. The club started '72 with a new coach, Neil Mann.
By 1972, Johnny Greening says he was three-quarters of the player he would have become. What he calls "the incident" occurred in the 12th round of that year.
He remembers going to Moorabbin and Neil Mann saying: "Another big one from you today, JG," something like that, and then nothing.
None of the Collingwood players saw the incident, just turned and saw Greening unmoving on the ground, bleeding from the nose. He didn't regain consciousness for 16 days. In his coma, Greening called out Barry Price's name.
Asked to go to the hospital, Price was met by a figure in a wheelchair who recognised him but couldn't speak. "It was a tragedy for John Greening," said Price slowly, "and it was a tragedy for Australian football."
How different would our sense of the game be if Peter Daicos or Gary Ablett had finished their careers at 21? Or Alex Jesaulenko?
When Essendon next played St Kilda, Des Tuddenham, by then the Bombers' captain-coach, went crazy, running round seeking vengeance and screaming: "Today's Greening's day! Today's Greening's day!"
Johnny did make it back. His return match, 18 months later, was against Richmond at the MCG; by all accounts, including his own, Johnny played a blinder, kicking five goals from the wing. Everyone thought he was his old self, but he wasn't.
He says the skills were there but the motivation had gone. Others say the skills were there but not, like before, as one; what had previously been effortless now required great concentration. In all, Johnny Greening, the young man with magic in his feet and fingers, played only a further eight senior games.
Johnny's sentences have a way of arriving at unexpected destinations that amount to a sort of poetry. Before the incident, as he calls it, he was "on a road with a rainbow at the end". The football field was a blank sheet for him to compose on, his opponents "were lambs to the slaughter".
And afterwards? "Afterwards it never felt like that." The old freedom had gone and, with it, the old certainty. His life unravelled, his first marriage failed. He says he now knows it's not uncommon for people who suffer "head injuries" to suffer from depression.
If he had his time over again, Johnny Greening would be a professional golfer or tennis player - more money, less risk - but in the early '60s those careers were on offer only to the lucky few. Johnny Greening believes he was robbed of his career. I try to tell him there are people who played 200 league games whom no one recalls; Johnny played until he was 21 and they're still talking about him. He half admits the thought, then waves it away.
"Jerker" had described Johnny to me as an unusual bit of work and he was right - a middle-aged man who is youthful in manner and looks, who is both genial and solitary, whose self-confidence is a cathedral with a hole in the ceiling the size and shape of a fist.
When I met Brent Crosswell in Hobart the following day, it became apparent that no one in the 1970 grand final interested him more than Johnny Greening. He calls him "Collingwood's young champion".
Crosswell remembers being with a group of Carlton players and meeting Greening alone, late at night, in Sydney, after the two teams had played an exhibition match in that city. He liked Johnny's style, his mischievous humor, the way he took the game on his own terms. After the injury, the difference Crosswell noted was that Johnny's "irony" had gone.
Greening says it's the ability to think that makes the great players. "Footy's about creating opportunities," he said. He said a coach at Collingwood - he wouldn't say who - told him not to turn so often on to his left foot. Johnny saw it as a way of wrong-footing opponents. The coach said it confused his teammates.
In the first quarter of the 1970 grand final, he appeared beside an older player as he took a mark, called for a handpass and thundered towards goal. "We were hot," he said. "We'd gone out there to kill the bastards."
As he ran back, the older player chided him for trying to play "too fast". "I was 20 or 30 years ahead of my time," said Johnny.
Crosswell says talented individuals are often inhibited in team sports. They see things their teammates can't. Sometimes, he said, they see things their coaches can't.
Crosswell still says things which imply he's not seriously interested in football. But he looks serious when he says them. Maybe he's like an actor who lives a role when he plays it but is otherwise someone else.
Crosswell claims no one played particularly well in the 1970 grand final, it wasn't that sort of match, but I disagree. He did. Teammate Barry Gill summed it up best - not only did Crosswell have the ability to intersect with the game in a major way - for example, by taking a great mark - he could also think strategically.
In The Age on the Monday after the match, Crosswell received 14 of the 15 votes cast by the newspaper's team of football writers for best-on-ground (second, on five votes, was Price), yet even then he was both within the game and outside it, planning his actions, executing them, withdrawing and thinking again.
In defence, he plundered Collingwood's supply lines, yet in attack he kept coming from unexpected positions.
At my request, Crosswell showed me some clips of his playing days sent to him several years ago by the Seven Network. Most are of the later stages of his career. His chest is permanently expanded, fists clenched by his side. He is almost comic, either hitting or being hit, throwing his head in the air. This is "Tiger" Crosswell as most remember him.
My favorite clip is when "Tiger", on hands and knees, amuses himself by racing an opponent, who is on his feet, to the ball; from the look of mock seriousness on his face, you'd think it was an Olympic final.
But the clips also include a mark from his very first game, against Geelong, at the age of 17. He came from the side, like a high jumper to the bar, and climbed a goal-square pack like a man vaulting a building in a single bound.
The jump coincides perfectly with the arrival of the ball, which he takes from the air with a single grab. After he kicked the goal, the camera followed him, a skinny kid with sideburns and hands swinging like lead weights at the end of his arms.
"Look!" he shouted, "I'm even walking like Barassi!"
Crosswell and I met in 1985 in The Age office. We were both in our first year of football writing; from the outset, he was positive and supportive. Nor had I met anyone who talked football as he did, with the same insight and emotional depth. If he was the football equivalent of an actor, he was one who had studied his part.
His first piece of writing to set Melbourne talking was about sex before games. It was like Fawlty Towers with erections and dealt in part with an interstate trip, during which he had roomed with McKenna.
But it wasn't his best piece for the year. That appeared on grand final day when he wrote about Vinnie Catoggio, a little Italian who started with Crosswell at Carlton and finished with him at Melbourne.
Vinnie and "Tiger" used to take off during the long pre-season training runs and hide among the rushes by Albert Lake. Crosswell claimed Vinnie made better duck calls than him because he was bilingual.
Vinnie's first full senior game, at the age of 19, was the 1973 grand final, the one in which Carlton was belted by Richmond. It was one of those days when Carlton looked vulnerable to strength in the way that Collingwood had in 1970; their good players were never able to find the space to play well.
That year, wrote Crosswell, Sergio Silvagni, "a player I respected", hit him in the side of the face with a piece of orange during the half-time break.
In this, his one and only appearance at footy's summit, Catoggio managed only two kicks and a couple of handballs. After the match, a Carlton official walking among the players thanking them for their effort pointedly passed Catoggio by.
Crosswell's story was about what happens when games get out of order, when people lose their perspective on winning and losing. He said it was uncivilised.
Three years later, Crosswell wrote another piece that etched itself into my memory. Only about 400 words long, it was written for a bicentenary supplement, in which a cross-section of the citizenry was asked to reflect on what it meant to be Australian.
Crosswell wrote about John Goold, the great individualist from his time at Carlton.
As a character, Crosswell might be seen as belonging to the Regency. Goold is from later in the 19th century, around the time of Oscar Wilde, and almost equally unafraid socially.
Crosswell's piece measured the ways the "club" tried, unsuccessfully, to deal with such an individual. In the end, in a largely unspoken way, it became an issue of loyalty. Was it to himself or to the group?
In the story, the final whispered judgment made of such a person is that he is un-Australian.
Goold hadn't seen the piece and was mildly disconcerted when he heard the content of it. "I thought I had more friends at Carlton than that," he said.
When Barassi went to North Melbourne, he tried to encourage Goold out of retirement to join him, but a gentleman like Goold does not swap clubs.
In discussing Crosswell, however, Goold does say people don't realise how much further outside an outsider stood in those days. "People at Carlton tended to see Brent for what he was not," said Goold. He saw him as a conservative - like himself perhaps, of the landed variety, with a horse between his legs. Not quite.
People habitually mistook Crosswell, whose progenitor had gone to Tasmania as a convict from Norfolk Island, for a scion of the aristocracy. Not at all. He was from the northern midlands, one of the island's oldest rural areas, but his father was a butcher.
As a boy, Crosswell saw a group of men he knew and respected belittled by a local squatter. They accepted this treatment. He determined then and there that he would never be spoken to in that way by any authority figure.
I see Crosswell more as a gentleman bushranger, asking the squatter's wife for one last indulgence as he leans forward to remove the brooch from her panting bosom.
It was his skill at sport that earned him a place at a school for the sons of the rural aristocracy. He hated snobbery, but like Byron, another chap with a fondness for the classics, had considerable proficiency at boxing. That skill worked for him both at school and later on the football field, but what most people habitually confuse in discussing football, according to Crosswell, is courage and toughness.
Far from being courageous, he says most acts of toughness, including his own, are born of fear. He will go through his video tapes saying: "That's a courageous act; that's not."
I put to him that football is more physically demanding now, but less violent. He disagrees. It's still violent, he says. It's just done in different ways.
But a football field is not the only violent place in our society, and a private school boarding house in the 1960s is not the only place you encounter snobbery and prejudice.
For most of his football career, Crosswell was at university. Most people find it hard to carry the burden of one truth through their lives. Imagine carrying two - that of the athlete and the intellectual artist - in a polarised culture that insists the two are mutually exclusive.
That's what gives his writing its special edge; it is truly the voice of an outsider, one who has never belonged wholly to any of the groups or sub-cultures he has found himself in. There are people in the football world who grin and say of his football writing, yes, but "Tiger" writes fiction.
If inquiring into a match played 30 years ago teaches you anything, it's the subjective nature of individual memories, but putting that issue to one side, there is still the question of whether he writes good fiction. That is - does he reach truths otherwise left unspoken and unsaid?
Sitting at Victoria Park, Ross "Twiggy" Dunne told me he hadn't seen Colin Tully in 25 years. Some people thought he had returned to Bendigo, most were unsure of his whereabouts.
In fact, he was south of Hobart in a small town called Margate, selling insurance from the back of a local real estate office. I was slightly nervous about meeting him. No Collingwood player carries the burden of the 1970 loss more than Colin Tully.
He is a genial man, slightly plump but with a sportsman's aplomb and composure. Most of the Collingwood players say he was the best sportsman in the club. But for football, it is said he might have played Shield cricket for Victoria (his cricket club was also Collingwood), but he was also good at golf, tennis - anything, it seemed.
Sport continues to be a major part of his life. He has the highest grade of coaching qualification available from the Australian Cricket Board and until recently was president of the Channel Football Club, Margate's local team. The club wears St Kilda colors; a Channel guernsey, signed by all the players, is on the wall.
When a couple of Channel's players were having trouble with their kicking, Tully quietly took them aside and suggested they run laps bouncing the ball off the white line, first with one hand, then with the other. It was something an old fella called Harry Collier taught him at Collingwood.
We talk about Syd Jackson. They met again in Hobart several years ago. In the course of a long night, Tully displayed the tooth Jackson had loosened with his fist in the course of the 1970 second semi-final.
"It's dead now, you bastard," he said, wobbling the inert incisor about with a finger.
Jackson was abashed. He hadn't known it was Tully beneath him in the pack, would never have done it if he did. He put down his glass and invited Tully to hit him back, to square up, to make it even. Tully was joking, but Jackson wasn't. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, as a famous old book of tribal lore puts it. Jackson told me his father practises Aboriginal law.
Colin Tully, self-imposed exile, is a Collingwood traditionalist. No one gave me a more detailed insight into the culture of the club, but the conversation became more halting as we approached the 1970 grand final. It's something he doesn't normally talk about.
After Barassi, the biggest name associated with that grand final is Ted Hopkins. ("I played 150 games, he played half a game, but he's the one they remember," teammate Gary Crane had said). That's also why they remember Colin Tully. Tully played on Hopkins, or, rather, he started the second half on him.
Early in my inquiries, Collingwood ruckman Len Thompson had leant across the desk and told me that criticisms made of Tully for Hopkins' four goals were "grossly unfair".
As a result, I had investigated the matter in some detail. Hopkins was an interesting player to study. Quick and lightly balanced, he played like a soccer striker. He didn't make his goals, but he certainly put them away.
Once cracks appeared in the Collingwood defence, he was through them and gone. But in the hurly burly of play, when he is on roving duties, he is less assured, less certain in choosing options.
The first goal, in the second minute of the third quarter, Tully says was his error. The kick is from Robert Walls; Tully follows the line of the ball rather than his opponent. He goes left, the ball spills right to where Hopkins is waiting alone.
Tully also accepts blame for Hopkins' second goal a minute later, but the question is whether he had any choice in the matter. Peter Eakins has run down the ground and not made it back. When the ball comes in high, Tully wrestles with Carlton's resting ruckman, Peter "Percy" Jones. What should he have done? Let him mark? Again the ball spills to Hopkins.
The most contentious goal is the third, in the 10th minute. Tully claims that Hopkins was on the ball when he kicked this goal - that is, when Tully was marking Carlton's other rover, Adrian Gallagher. The replay appears to support his contention. A minute earlier, Hopkins is clearly on the ball because he is at the centre bounce. Hopkins is running from the centre towards goal when he takes the handpass from Walls.
In the edge of the frame, the blurred figure of Tully can be seen with an opponent in short sleeves. Hopkins wore long. It is after he has goaled that Hopkins jogs back to the forward pocket. Simultaneously, Colin Rose, the Collingwood runner, appears, and, having spoken to Tully, switches him and O'Callaghan. Tully responded angrily and swore at the runner.
At three-quarter-time, Tully says Bob Rose publicly blamed him for the three goals. Tully further believed he was "dragged" - that is, taken from the field - after the blow-up with the runner and before the third quarter ended.
In fact, he was taken off mid-way through the last term, but still a clear five minutes before Hopkins scored his fourth goal, the one created so bravely by Jackson.
Tully remembers the Collingwood rooms after the match. "What had promised to be the best day of our lives had turned out to be the worst."
But for him the ordeal was only beginning. A version of history was being conceived and for the next 30 years he would be dragged along behind it like a man on a water ski. Truth? Who wants to know the truth?
In bars, there was always a bigmouth wanting to remind him of Teddy Hopkins' four goals. Over the years, he has developed stock responses. "How come the people who weren't there know everything? How come the people who were there don't talk about it?"
Not a week has gone past in 30 years that he hasn't been reminded of the 1970 grand final, often when he least expects it. If he could erase any one day from his life, that would be the day.
If he was a kid again and offered the chance to play league football, knowing what he now knows, would he do it? "Fifty per cent of me would like the chance to change what happened. Fifty per cent says I don't want to go through anything like this again. I think I'd stick to golf and cricket."
Has he ever discussed any of this with the other Collingwood players? Never. He is struck by the thought. Never spoken ... he is visibly enlivened by the idea. He thinks he'll ring "Bubba" Price and a few of the boys.
When I get back to Melbourne I fax him a list of Collingwood phone numbers plus a copy of Crosswell's article on Vinnie Catoggio. He rings back the next day. The article is excellent.
I end with Barassi because I began with him. To what extent is the myth of the 1970 grand final true? Did he, through a combination of audacity and forethought, reinvent the game in the course of the 1970 grand final? Some pretty good judges, such as Walls, believe he did.
Before 1970, a grand final might be won by one or two positional changes, but what happened that year was that a team collectively changed the way it played the game.
To do this, the Carlton players not only had to possess a second method of play - Carlton had experimented with radical handball against Hawthorn late in the season - they also had to be able to implement it in the most testing circumstance the sport could provide. It's this second quality that Barassi calls discipline.
What of Barassi's statement that Len Smith invented handball? My understanding of the history of inventions is that they rarely occur in single moments, and are rarely the product of a single person's endeavors.
Rather, they represent trains of events, small incremental additions by various people and finally a moment when what is being experimented with rushes into being, like a geyser born of multiple pressures beneath the earth, and is thenceforth there for all to behold.
In football, that day was the 1970 grand final and the radical implications of the change opened the door for the game's next great innovator, current Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy. The word he would bring to the game was versatility.
* From 1970 & Other Stories of the Australian Game (Allen and Unwin) by Martin Flanagan
* Every grand final has got its talking points: Gabbo's run, Breen's point, Twiggy Dunne's goal and Gazza's freak show. Re-live every grand final as covered by The Age at our
special finals site at www.theage.com.au
© 1999 The Age
