It can’t be easy making a film about Australian rules football. The testicular, pretty much womanless and altogether peculiar world of the football club doesn’t exactly lend itself to a wider lens. The way men speak to one another, form hierarchies and pummel one another is difficult to capture without resorting to cliche. From a production point of view, the sport is problematic – its velocity, its chaos, its 360-degree nature. There have been tentative attempts, most of which have been turkeys. Blinder, which tackled the rape of a 15-year-old girl and made a right royal hash of it, was surely the nadir.
The Club, directed by Bruce Beresford and released just before the 1980 grand final on the back of David Williamson’s successful play, veers between the sublime and the ridiculous. A significant proportion of its retro, ironic appeal lies in its absurdity. The dialogue is clunky at times. The tacked-on footy footage is cartoonish. Jack Thompson’s handball technique would have him escorted from any football club south of the Murray. The ending, in particular, is preposterous. The hitherto useless Geoff Hayward suddenly morphs into Gary Ablett Snr, playing in front of 130,000 people at the MCG, slotting goals on his opposite foot from the half back line.
But in a game that is unrecognisable from a decade ago, let alone 1980, the film still somehow stacks up. It could be Williamson’s one liners. It could be the acting. It could be the cast of heroes and villains – the megalomanic club president, the Machiavellian administer, the grizzled veteran, the reluctant recruit, the blathering old fossil – all of whom are instantly recognisable.
The film’s focal point is Hayward (John Howard), who arrives with broad shoulders, a lantern jaw and a question mark. He is, after all, “just a kid with potential”, having run legs around his “bandy-legged and cross-eyed” Tasmanian opponents. Hayward likes to think he’s cut from a different cloth than some of his more rough-hewn team-mates. He lives in a terraced house in the inner suburbs, studies economics, shops at the Queen Victoria Market and is partial to a midweek spliff. He is almost certainly based on Brent Crosswell, the Tasmanian, bohemian, perennial student, sublime writer and big-game specialist. Crosswell would quote Keats to his opponents and was tortured, like Geoff, by the thought that he was merely “chasing a lump of pigskin”.
These days, boom recruits undergo psychometric testing, are shown how to build their personal brand and speak like middle managers. Poor Geoff is afforded no such favours. He is, as the president later says, made to feel “about as welcome as a blowfly at a butcher’s picnic”. At the recruit’s first training session, coach Laurie Holden (Jack Thompson) conducts a drill that, at a conservative estimate, would have hospitalised 90% of its participants. Hayward is pitted against Tank O’Donoghue, played with suitable surliness by Collingwood player Rene Kink. VFL footballers had second jobs in those days and when he wasn’t acting, Kink worked as a ladies hairdresser. Tank and Geoff charge at one another like rutting bulls and the Tasmanian is twice put on his backside. But he then gathers a dribbling ball, pivots, swivels O’Donoghue out of the way and – in a deviation from the drill – executes a highly suspicious looking torpedo goal.
It’s that sort of film. Underpinning everything is a pent up, seething resentment, a very Australian truculence. Virtually every scene features an argument of some sort. Everyone’s either storming in or flouncing out. The script could have been written entirely in capital letters. What elevates it is a truly astonishing performance from the late Frank Wilson as Jock Riley. The chairman of selectors, games record holder, muckraker, wife basher and resident pisspot is also the owner of Jock Riley Enterprises, a shambolic export/import arrangement, flogging mortal Taiwanese toasters and defective Russian alarm clocks. The business alone warrants its own film. There has surely never been a better depiction of the effects of marijuana on unsuspecting septuagenarians. Graham Kennedy and Harold Hopkins were both nominated for AFI Awards but it is Wilson who owns the film. It a whiskey-soaked, bryl-creamed, Taiwanese-toasting masterclass.
The club, of course, is Collingwood, which gazes misty-eyed towards the past, while blundering into the future. When Williamson was penning his play, footy was in state of flux. There were strikes and boardroom bust-ups. Many Victorian clubs teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Loyalty was just a buzzword and money was changing everything. Between 1972 and 1980, average player payments increased by nearly 2,000%.
But there was still a massive disparity between footy’s haves and have-nots. The great wingman Keith Greig earned just $30 a week when he won consecutive Brownlow Medals in the mid-70s. Some of his team-mates, meanwhile, were lured with garbage bags stuffed full of cash. Williamson’s depiction of Hayward’s contract negotiations, where Jock salivates as if the recruit was “a giant pork chop”, doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
Football in the 70s was a sea of sideburns and a flurry of fists. And it was very much Ron Barassi’s decade. He signed his contract at North Melbourne on a pink napkin. This most short-back-and-sided of men suddenly turned up sporting powder blue suits, polaroid sunglasses and flared lapels. But he was a terrifying individual. Indeed, he is channelled in The Club through the absurd figure of Rostov, the opposition coach who tears shreds off his players. Rostov doesn’t have a Christian name but he does have a way with words - “Where are ya balls son?” he berates some poor sod whose appetite for the contest is less than voracious - “Wake up to yourself or you’ll play the rest of the game in a bloody skirt!”
Sometimes, when Fremantle has asphyxiated the opposition, I imagine that Ross Lyon is still giving them a Rostov-like bake. But these are gentler times. Chances are he’s probably going through the Inside-50 differentials. You’d probably get arrested or sued if you went the full Rostov these days.
Indeed, things change. Graham Kennedy is dead. Frank Wilson is dead. Harold Hopkins is dead. Suburban tribalism is dead. John Howard, who achieved greater acclaim on All Saints, doesn’t resemble Geoff Hayward these days. Australians are reluctant to name their kids Jock, Laurie or Dulcie. “Gorgeous lookin’ shelia you’ve got there Jeff…” or “none of them was worth a pinch of poop” have disappeared from the lexicon. The suburbs of Abbotsford and Collingwood, where the players went on their 10km runs and copped abuse from the local booze hounds, are now populated by young men cultivating biblical beards, perusing incomprehensible breakfast menus.
But certain things remain the same. The game, despite all the tinkering and posturing, is still a central tenet of life in many Australian states. Coaches are still sacked at the drop of a hat. Young stars are paraded like they’re at a yearling sale. Older players are traded like livestock. And every year, when the number one draft pick is wheeled out, you ponder the cautionary tale of Geoff Hayward – stoned, scanning the sky for the prince of seagulls, “dazzling me with blasts of pure white every time its wings caught the sun”.
“It’s not a game, it’s a business,” Geoff’s girlfriend Suzie tells him, as she hands him a joint. But it’s both, Suzie. And whether you captain Hawthorn or kick the dew off the grass in the boondocks, the football club is The Club. The back room blowhards, the sentimental swill, the unspoken tension between loyalty to the club and protecting your own ass and the terrible beauty of the game itself – it’s all in The Club and it’s at any club, at any level, in any era.
