Barassi the Brave Heart

[Marns]

Just thought I'd post yet another good little piece by Martin Flanagan regarding the great Ron Barassi. Brief look back at Barassi and his ties to the MFC, as well as the night where he went after the ******** who was belting that woman in St Kilda.

Also interesting to see the very last line of the article. Looks like we might be seeing a Flanagan-written piece about the Dees some time this year or next

http://www.realfooty.com.au/news/news/barassi-the-brave-heart/2009/03/20/1237526331102.html

Barassi the Brave Heart

Martin Flanagan | March 21, 2009

THE OLD knight is 73 now. On New Year's Eve, Ron Barassi went to the defence of a woman being attacked in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. He actually chased the perpetrator of the assault and brought him down.
I ask him to describe the tackle. "Push in the back," he says. "Definite free kick." His responses to life are mostly humorous now, but there is still something mercurial about him. A relentless curiosity, perhaps. At the end of our interview, out of the blue, he asks my religious beliefs.
He's as big a name as the game has ever produced. Probably the biggest. And what a name! Barassi. Three syllables coming off the tongue in a hiss of passion. His statue at the MCG is Barassi as he is remembered as a player, jaw clenched, under full bodily assault from an opponent, getting his kick away.
Then there's Barassi the coach. Barassi is the game's great modernist. The game changed around him, went from being a static man-on-man game to what is called the running game with defensive zones. But Barassi is worried about what he's seeing now. He's conscious people will say he is just another old player saying the game's not as good as it was in his day. But people who criticise him in this way are missing the point. He's not saying the game is not as good. He's saying it's not as good to watch.
Most countries in the world have only one winter code, he says. Ireland is unusual in having three. Australia has four — soccer, rugby union, rugby league, Australian football. Barassi says there's not enough doubt in the spectator's mind any more when the ball goes to a player. In the old days, he would have had to beat an opponent. Now the art is in making sure that when the ball goes to a player there's no opponent around. On this issue, Barassi says, the ball, is in the court of those administering the game.
People who know Barassi talk about his honesty. His legend as a supercoach is based on the belief that he invented handball at half-time in the 1970 grand final. When I wrote a book about that match, he reluctantly agreed to meet me, sat down, fixed me with his famous stare and said, "I did not invent handball. Len Smith did at Fitzroy in the 1960s."
Len Smith was the older brother of Norm Smith, AFL coach of the century. Barassi lived with Norm from the age of 16. Norm was a teammate of his father's, also called Ron Barassi and the first VFL/AFL player killed on active service in World War II. Barassi's first memory of his father is hearing his uncle break the news of his death to his weeping mother.

I ask Barassi where he got his values from. "From my mother," he says. "She believed in honesty and courage." It took courage to become the sole bread-winner in 1940s Australia with a small son. A Melbourne Football Club group called the Coterie offered money. She declined the offer. Instead, she took a night job in a city theatre. By day, she ran the canteen at Miller's Rope Works in Brunswick, a Melbourne Football Club stronghold.
As a coach, Barassi was associated with four clubs — Carlton, North Melbourne, Melbourne and Sydney. I ask him if Melbourne is his club. "Yes," he says. Why, I ask. "They were my father's club," he says. "I grew up around the place." The second person Barassi says he got his values from was Norm Smith. "Norm lived his values," he says. The famous story is that Smith, the Melbourne coach, didn't tell Barassi when he got his first senior game, letting him read about it in the paper like any other young player. "You can't play favourites when you coach," he says. "You can't be seen to have double values."
I interviewed Barassi during his Sydney years and found him fascinating for many reasons. He persuaded me of the case for a national competition. He told me he would have liked to have been a venture capitalist working in the area of inventions and, for a time after his coaching stint at Melbourne, did so. He told me Melbourne's famous ruckman-forward of the 1940s and '50s, Jack Mueller, used to get called "The Hun" by the crowds after World War II. That's roughly like calling a Muslim player Osama Bin Laden.
What did he cop with a name like Barassi? It's clearly not something that worried him. In the 1950s, when he started as a player, "They used to call out that name to me". But he can't remember what it was. Wog, I suggest. Yes, they used to call him a wog. Later he tells me if he didn't live in Australia, there's no question about which country he'd set up residence in. Italy.
It is important to understand that, initially, as a player, Barassi didn't fit in. A position had to be invented for him. The invention is always credited to Norm Smith but Ben Collins' biography of Norm Smith, The Red Fox, suggests the idea arose in conversation with a trainer, Hugh McPherson. Basically, they put a Greco-Roman wrestler with an explosive physical nature into the heart of the game — the packs where the ball is won. He was bigger than a rover and smaller than a ruckman so they invented a new term for him. Ruck-rover.

Melbourne won six premierships in 10 years under Norm Smith. Barassi played in them all, as captain in two and as vice-captain in two. Barassi was best on ground in the 1957 grand final, kicking five goals. In 1958, the Demons were famously upset by the Pies. Melbourne was sucked into playing the game Collingwood's way, Barassi got in fights. Two years later, in the rooms before the 1960 grand final also against Collingwood, Barassi unwittingly looked right through his father-in-law. He's only seen one other team as switched on as Melbourne was that day and that was Carlton in 1972. "We were in the zone," he says.
Collingwood's leading hard man with the Johnny Weissmuller good looks, Murray Weideman, hit him in the mouth. Twenty years later, that part of his mouth was still sensitive to touch but when the blow was struck he merely looked at Weideman and played on. "Nothing," he says, "nothing was going to interrupt my thoughts that day." His last game for Melbourne was the 1964 grand final in which he captained Melbourne to another win over Collingwood. The next year he went to Carlton.
Leaving Melbourne, he says, was one of the two hardest decisions of his life. The other is private. "I changed my mind several times. I must have driven Carlton mad." But, as a player, Barassi had seen the tension that developed between Norm Smith and the last great Melbourne coach before him, "Checker" Hughes. Norm Smith offered to stand down for Barassi to take his role. "I wasn't having that." So he left.
In 1968, Carlton won its first premiership under Barassi and then, in 1970, he pulled off what appeared to be the greatest miracle in grand final history. He says he enjoyed coaching more than playing by virtue of the simple principle that a coach puts in more than players and you get back what you put in. He won two premierships with North Melbourne in 1975 and '77, appeared to fail on his return to Melbourne in the '80s and then stepped in to stabilise Sydney when the club faltered in the '90s.
Barassi's memory of the incident on New Year's Eve is that a man attacked a woman who fell into his wife as they were eating at an outdoor cafe. He chased the man and pulled him down. A number of other men then set upon him. He thinks he was lucky they were wearing soft shoes. If they'd been wearing hard boots, he would have been in trouble. He says he's over it now physically and scoffs at the suggestion the blows took something out of him.
The response amazed him. He was in Canberra seeing a friend and dropped in to see question time in the House of Representatives, something he has enjoyed doing in the past (he believes politicians in this country are viewed in an unduly poor light). The Speaker saw him in the gallery and drew his presence to the attention of the house.

When whisky maker Chivas Regal conducted a chivalry contest, he won it in Victoria and came third in the nation. Second was the tall bowler for Australia — he makes the action of a leg cutter. Glenn McGrath. He can't remember who won it.
Barassi says he alternates between wanting to belt the living daylights out of the young men who assaulted him and asking them what on earth they thought they were doing. "There are things you don't do. You don't hit women. You don't kick a defenceless person on the ground." He says it might be the old authoritarian coach talking again but he thinks people have to learn discipline. "They have to have self-control."
He says there's a generation of failed parents in this country. He blames his generation and the one immediately after them. He says it with a look in his eye which tells you he means it. But he also wonders if people over the last few decades have had too much wealth. "Life's been too easy," he says. It might not be for much longer, I say. Yes, he agrees. In which case even more self-control will be required.
Our day begins and ends talking footy. In my experience, Barassi will always talk footy. As of last weekend, he is also Melbourne's No. 1 ticket holder. I ask him his message for the Melbourne Football Club. "There's no better time to show your best than when needed."
Martin Flanagan is embedded with the Demons for season '09.

 

[Bartram_Class]

That "embedded" comment has been on a few of his articles I think Marns.

Just thinking about it, he has written quite a few pieces on us already this year, the Jurrah article springs to mind, and there was one about Jimmy too.

Whoever convinced him to do that needs a pat on the back, Flanagan is the best writer the Age have on their books.

 

[Marns]

That "embedded" comment has been on a few of his articles I think Marns.

Just thinking about it, he has written quite a few pieces on us already this year, the Jurrah article springs to mind, and there was one about Jimmy too.

Whoever convinced him to do that needs a pat on the back, Flanagan is the best writer the Age have on their books.

Yeah good point, I was thinking more along the lines of a book though. Here's hoping

But he is without a doubt the best football writer going around, period. Everyone else is a pretender.

 

[Bartram_Class]

Yeah good point, I was thinking more along the lines of a book though. Here's hoping

But he is without a doubt the best football writer going around, period. Everyone else is a pretender.

A book would be tops.

Reminds me actually, I'm still to get started on "The Red Fox".

 

[RandB]

A book would be tops.

Reminds me actually, I'm still to get started on "The Red Fox".

You'll have to give us a review of that book once you've finished, I thought about buying it but don't have the time to read it atm.