Flanagan and Harms

[thejester]

Seeing as people enjoyed the Whately article so much I thought I'd bring two others to everyone's attention:

Flanagan: On the Button with Tommy

JOHN Button, the former Hawke and Keating government minister, was a small, snowy-haired man with a razor-sharp edge to his intellect and a love of the Geelong Football Club that was as long and as wide as a river. Indeed, it could be said that Geelong brought out the boy in the man otherwise remembered for "the Button car plan".

Button died in 2008 and on Wednesday I went to Skilled Stadium to deliver the first John Button Memorial Oration for the Geelong Cats Sports Foundation. My subject: That Tom Wills is an Australian legend no less than Ned Kelly or Burke and Wills.

I generally enjoy Flanagan's work, though sometimes it can be a bit exuberant. It's interesting to see Wills put alongside Ned Kelly and Burke and Wills as 'Australian legends'; I suppose they're all pretty tragic figures. Having read de Moore's biography I was left wondering why the club hasn't done more to acknowledge Wills' connection to the GFC - the (figurehead) father of the game played most of his footy at Geelong and would surely rank as one of our most influential captains.

In the article Flanagan also mentions Harmsy's latest addition to the Footy Almanac:

Theo takes a great leap forward at Princes Park:

“You can’t sit there,” he said.

“Why not?” said the nanny.

“Girls can only go on the pink horse,” he decreed, in a slightly agitated way, pointing at the pink nag.

I was grimacing. While I thought he might get away with it, I knew that the chances weren’t great. We were in Northcote.

There was no hint of humour or playfulness in the dissertation which followed and I was left wondering whether we were in a playground, or a sociology tutorial room at the University of Melbourne. Theo is three. Not only does he now understand that girls can choose whichever see-saw horse appeals to them, he has been introduced to the idea of gold-medal lugubriousness.

Love everything he writes and this is no exception. From the perils of having your child gob off in the hippie paradise of inner Melbourne to the way Princes Park strips away the aura of players and makes you realise they're ordinary blokes...great stuff. Pity about Theo but there's still time.

And just as an aside, a bit that had me genuinely angry: we lost Manning Clark to Carlton?! People reckon we've done well with Whately and Harmsy: imagine what Manning Clark would have written after '89 if he was diehard Geelong!

 

[jim boy]

Wills is an awkward figure, his importance to the game is often undervalued, however he was the Fev of his day as well.

Sounds like a good event, I wouldn't mind going to similar events like that in the future, although the pond may be a little small.

 

[Farmer2Goggin]

A small anecdote about the late John Button.
A bit bizarre but I happened to be next to him at a restaurant urinal. After shaking off the drips we made eye contact - I ventured a comment as to how good the Cats were the previous evening. His eyes lit up and we proceeded to have a 10 minute discussion about the Cats - he was so knowledgeable and passionate and only stopped talking when he realised he was very late for his speaking appointment in one of the private rooms !!
That's what I call a true Cats man !!