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| ISBN-13: | 9781741762402 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Barassi
The Biography
By Peter Lalor
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2010 Peter LalorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74176-240-2
CHAPTER 1
RON BARASSI IS DEAD
'Ron Barassi came from the country an unheralded country lad, and made a name in our national game for his sportsmanship as well as his ability. He departs a man honoured by his peers and those who cheer.'
— Sporting Globe, 20 August 1941
Melbourne's NO. 31 is dead. A gritty rover, a premiership player, cut down mid-season somewhere in northern Africa, half a world away from the muddy fields of Melbourne and its crazy-brave winter game.
He is 27 years old, married, and has left behind a five-year-old son of the same name. A Ron Barassi to carry on. A gift to the future. One who will lead his tribes to the promised land and walk on water, but all of that is for another, brighter time. In 1941 there is this terrible, terrible moment and nothing else.
This is the most important event in Ronald Dale Barassi's life. He is cut adrift, thrown into the world fatherless. Others will nurture and coach, but from now he is left to navigate the world without a father's love or guidance.
What is a five-year-old to make of death? Later the adult would speak of an emptiness that engulfed him in the dimly lit room of a modest bungalow in Melbourne's western suburb of Footscray.
What does death make of a five-year-old? It is Ron Barassi's earliest significant memory. A plank has given beneath his feet. Flames of grief engulf that dimly lit sitting room. Flames he would emerge from. Not unscarred, although they were marks nobody would be allowed to see.
'Ronnie, darling, Daddy is dead. He's not coming home.'
Memory is unreliable, but the sadness of that moment is indelible and remains with the man into his seventies. 'We were in the lounge room and there was absolute grief. My mother and uncle were sitting on the lounge crying and I snuggled into Mum. I knew she was in great pain. She was in absolute grief.'
Did they say he died a hero? Would they have known? He certainly left as one and the boy would forever be told his father was one.
Ronald James Barassi had played in Melbourne's 1940 premiership just 10 months before. That Saturday was a glorious time, the best day a Victorian could hope for. The Demon boys were the toast of the town, but the 26-year-old barely had time to celebrate. He is not in the 1940 Melbourne Football Club team photograph taken in the days after the win. There was no time for that. He had already gone. He had enlisted and the war demanded his presence; he was due back at the Puckapunyal barracks. The train was leaving for Sydney. The boat, for who knew where.
Ron Barassi kissed his wife Elza goodbye, ruffled Ronnie's hair and slipped off to the country town of Guildford to see the family and ask his father to care for the pair should anything happen.
The new football season was soon in full swing. Ron's mates were still chasing the ball on wintry parks, as men have always done, while a small band of soldiers began to dig into the hard ground of Tobruk, as men have always done, but Ron's body lay somewhere in a graveyard. It would be over half a century before anybody from his family could wet that grave with their tears.
Ron died on 31 July 1941 but news did not reach home for at least a week. Nobody was in a mood to note that the date of his death corresponded with the number on his jumper. A number that was to become the most famous in football.
He was a good bloke, Ron. Something of a good-natured larrikin, he loved a beer, a laugh, a game of two-up and whatever other game was on. And he was a VFL (Victorian Football League) footballer. A premiership player no less. That set him apart in the anonymous khaki world where men were divided only by rank and rancour. Soldiers pointed him out to each other. The Victorians did anyway. Maybe the South Australians and Western Australians too.
Plenty show up for his funeral service in Tobruk. Some of them may have seen him play less than 12 months before.
Elza was at work when the telegram arrived. Her brother opened it and met her at the bus stop when she returned from work. Ron Barassi Jnr was in the country with cousins but was brought back to the city the next day and remembers the devastation among the adults gathered in that dark room. Norm Smith took Elza on his knee and comforted her; somebody must have got news to Norm and his wife Marj who lived nearby. Norm, then a 26-year-old red-headed Melbourne forward, was a star of the competition and a close friend of the dead soldier and his wife. His mate was dead, but now he had to find the right words and gestures to deal with Elza in her grief. The Smiths and Barassis were like family. Elza had attended their October wedding alone. Ron had already gone to Sydney. She and the boy were left with her brother's family in Footscray.
When the ground opens beneath a child's feet somebody must catch their hand or they will fall. Elza, Norm and Marj were there, practical and reliable, down-to-earth people, people who could be relied on in circumstances trivial or tragic. They wouldn't indulge the boy, but they wouldn't abandon him either.
Elza must have looked at the lad and wondered what would become of them. Norm too would have looked at young Ron, so much his father's son, so much a Barassi, and determined he would do what he could to see him raised appropriately. Norm Smith was a man with a clear sense of duty, and his duty would be to see the boy and his mother through it all — to stand in as a father figure.
A child may know little about death except that his father was gone but there was an incomprehensible notion that he would never again feel the crush of those strong hands as they lifted him from the floor, or feel the scratch of his stubble, the warmth of his breath. To see the adults of your world weeping and lost must be a frightening experience. These were the people who comforted you and now they were beyond comfort. The situation must have been confusing and alarming.
The grief Ron felt sat dormant inside him for years. At times he would check himself against his father and his achievements, but he was older than his father most of his life, and achieved more than him very quickly. The sadness came more readily with age. Later in life he would sometimes cry for Ron Snr, for the father he never had.
When Ron Jnr and his second wife Cherryl made the journey to Tobruk he stood by his father's grave and wept. Alone on the hard ground where they had laid the young man to rest, he poured his heart out, but has little or no memory of what was said.
'Cherryl and I are the only family people who have been there,' he says. She left him alone at the grave.
He was wearing his mother's wedding ring around his neck at the time and thought he might leave it, but changed his mind. 'It was very emotional. I talked to him and I cried and I had to clear my throat and I spat ... on his grave.' Ron remembers saying, 'Sorry Dad.' It's a story he tells to try to lift the awful sadness of his situation — a defence mechanism. But there's also a sense that here in this war cemetery a family reunion took place. Finally Ron felt like a boy in the presence of his father. It is the only conversation he has any memory of between them. He had never been in the habit of speaking to his absent father through life, although it might be argued his whole life was a dialogue with the man. 'I had thought of bringing his body home, but I changed my mind on that too, because I thought that if he was able to speak he might say that he wants to stay with his mates, you know? So he's still there.'
Ron has marked 31 July in a quiet way over the years. Sometimes he goes with Cherryl to lunch, sometimes he reads a book about Tobruk. 'I think about him, but it's not good for me to go too deeply into it,' he says with a quiver in his voice. 'I have, but it is not worthwhile.' Psychologists would say he sealed the lid on his grief, only too aware how crippling it could be if opened. Ron Barassi knew all his life that with the right physical or emotional effort all situations could be managed or overcome.
Ron Barassi knows that you pick yourself up again and there is nothing to be gained from wallowing. Set yourself a task. Achieve it. Do it again. Never, ever allow the empty moment, lest the earth open again.
Almost 70 years after this terrible day Ron allowed himself to be subjected to complex psychological analysis by two psychologists. They were genuinely stunned by his ability to rise above the psychological trauma of his father's death and lead an apparently undamaged life, but one made a guess that he has carried it locked up inside for his whole life. 'There's a lot of unresolved grief, there's a lot of this pain, and what he's done is put it in this little box and tucked it away and he doesn't open that box for anyone. If he opens it he shuts it very quickly,' psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg said.
The death of a parent is the most crippling psychological experience a young person can suffer. 'He shouldn't be as good as he is. He should be a bloody wreck. He should have insecurities. He should have anxieties. He is one of the most remarkably resilient human beings we have ever encountered,' Carr-Gregg added.
Ron survived because from this terrible moment on he was surrounded by charismatic, strong and loving adults who nurtured and encouraged him, who told him he was both normal and special. They were people with old-world integrity who never left any doubt about the difference between right and wrong, achieving and underachieving, success and failure. Three of them, Elza and Norm and Marj, were in the room in Footscray that July day.
Ron lived his life with a sense that his father was a good man, a man he would have liked, and hopefully a man who would have been proud of his achievements. It is partly circumstance that saw him play out his early football life in the same colours his father had worn and that the men who trained and showered and played with his father were still there when he did the same thing. It is no coincidence that he wore his father's 31 for all but one of his 254 games.
Back in 1941, Ron and Elza were catapulted out of their relative comfort zone. They were already buffeted about by Ron Snr's enlistment, leaving the small home the couple rented and moving in with relatives, but over the next decade mother and son would move from one place to another, not always together, forever on the rebound from the tragedy that had unfolded when the telegram that originated in the dust, din and tragedy of Tobruk arrived at Coral Avenue, Footscray, in the middle of a cold Melbourne winter.
* * *
The Barassis weren't city people. They had moved to town when Ron Jnr was three months old so his father could play for the Melbourne Football Club. Almost a century earlier the disparate strands of their family had travelled in the opposite direction. Ron's great-grandfather had set up home on an old dirt road outside Guildford, a gold mining settlement between Castlemaine and Daylesford, and the family still lived on the modest farm in much the same way they always had. There was no electricity, no running water and just a few neighbours scattered along the isolated dirt track.
There was grief here too when news from Tobruk made its way to Carlo Barassi, Ron Snr's father, the boy's grandfather. He knew this would happen. He had been heavy with the thought his son would be taken for some time. He had dreamed of Ron's death before the news arrived and hadn't been able to shake off the feeling of dread.
Carlo had asked his eldest daughter Daisy to accompany him to the station to wave Ron off when he left for the war. She couldn't do it. Carlo went alone, and when the train started to slowly pull out of the station his son stepped back onto the platform and snatched another moment. Standing in his uniform, he saluted his father before climbing back onto the train and making his way towards the war.
Carlo shuddered.
'I knew then I would never see him again,' he told the family as they gathered together in sadness in the old home on Shicer Gully Road.
The grief-stricken old man later planted trees to create an avenue of remembrance on the road into Guildford. Daisy, like Carlo, never moved away from Shicer Gully Road and missed her little brother all her life, and would still weep over his loss when she was in her seventies.
The Barassis were well known in these parts and Ron was something of a local legend. News of his death echoed through the old mining district, and up the road in Castlemaine they flew the flags at half mast in honour of 'one of the district's well-known sporting champions' (Castlemaine Mail).
Football stops for nobody, but the Melbourne Football Club paused and caught a sharp breath when news that the good-natured rover was gone.
Norm Smith, Ron Baggott and Richard Emselle were team-mates of Ron Barassi Snr and his best friends. They shared a love of cricket and tennis and life. Photographs from the time capture them glistening with youth and success. Fit young men in the prime of life, they are masters of the game they love and it has served them well. Ron had been plucked from the Bendigo league. They lived in tight suburbs with little space, but there was electricity and running water and the bright lights of Melbourne. These young men were born during the First World War and raised in the Depression. They knew when times were good and up until now these had been times when a strong-bodied man could get a few bob for kicking a footy on the weekend and through his skill land a job arranged by the football club.
Ron Baggott sits on the edge of his bed in an old people's home over half a century later and sorts through what is left of the memories of the times he shared with Barassi as young footballers in 1940s Melbourne. The specifics are hard to locate, but there's a sense there of the men and their relationship that age can't fade. 'He was a good bloke, Ron Snr, a very good bloke. He wasn't a very fiery customer. He was in and out of the side a hell of a lot ... he wasn't that big.'
The footballers formed a guard of honour on the MCG after the news came through that No. 31 was gone. 'There were a few tears shed,' Baggott told Ben Collins some years earlier. 'Tough footballers who tried to knock your block off were crying.'
Baggott and Norm Smith stood in the middle of the MCG and cried like men have no right to, then wiped away their tears and played football.
It's a strange thing to search the newspapers of the time for the death of Ronald James Barassi. While his son can command front page at the age of 73 for shaving off his trademark moustache, mention of the death of the father, a premiership player the year before, is not big news.
It becomes stranger if you accept the common wisdom that he was the first VFL player to die in the war, although there is some quibble about this oft-quoted fact.
Football historian David Allen, co-author of Fallen, The Ultimate Heroes, a book about players who died in various conflicts, argues that Barassi was not the first to die in the Second World War. According to his research eight former VFL players were killed before Barassi died on 31 July. However, only one, Gus (Leo) Young of Hawthorn, could be considered an active player. The other seven had long retired from the game. Young, a promising forward, played 10 games for Hawthorn in the two seasons before his death at sea in the Middle East on 29 May.
Clubs lost a lot of players to the armed services. In fact on 6 August the sports pages of the Argus ran an account of the number of absent men. 'Camps were responsible for the absence from Melbourne of McGrath, Dullard, Lock, Lenne, Fischer, and Hingston, who will, however, be available. Players on active service who were reported to be well are Maher, Ball, Furniss (Darwin), Truscott, Atkins, and Ron Barassi.' Similar accounts were given from other clubs in much the same way modern papers run injury lists.
Of course Barassi was already dead a week when the Argus ran its report. News of his death appears to have taken time to filter through to the family and the public. It was not unusual for a time lag before a family was notified.
Round 18 of the 1941 season was played on Saturday 3 August with everybody apparently ignorant of Ron's fate. His mate Norm Smith kicked five for Melbourne in its win over Geelong in front of a crowd of 6,669, in a game that was reportedly 'below premiership class'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Barassi by Peter Lalor. Copyright © 2010 Peter Lalor. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
INTRODUCTION,Walking on water,
THE FIRST QUARTER: THE HAND HE WAS DEALT,
1 Ron Barassi is dead,
2 Raising Ron,
THE SECOND QUARTER: PLAYING THE GAME,
3 What do you do with a boy like Ronnie?,
4 A ruck-rover is born,
5 The first premiership,
6 Marvellous Melbourne,
7 A wedding, a perfect game?,
8 Ape Head blows the grand final,
9 Ten mad minutes of football,
10 Captain material,
11 The biggest name in the game,
12 Drop Barassi,
13 A body blow,
14 One more for the road,
THE THIRD QUARTER: THE SUPER COACH IS BORN,
15 The death of loyalty,
16 My captain, my coach,
17 Learning on the job,
18 A finals flop,
19 A premiership coach,
20 A last lap,
21 Handball, handball, handball,
22 Bye-bye Blues,
23 A winter off,
24 The coach takes two,
25 Shinboners shine,
26 One for the downtrodden,
27 Not a natural,
28 A car crash,
29 Love me two times,
30 The super coach and the superstars,
THE FOURTH QUARTER: THE LEGEND,
31 The prodigal son returns,
32 Home is where the hurt is,
33 A curious mind,
34 Between jobs,
35 Swan song,
TIME-ON,
36 Still fighting,
References,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgements,