FAREWELL to a year to forget, but not without a few stories to tell, writes RON REED:
WHEN I was still gainfully employed in newspapers, writing about sport, there were two certainties about the week before Christmas. One, the Boxing Day Test couldn’t arrive fast enough. Two, you would be asked to bash out a thousand words or more about what was good, bad or indifferent, inspiring, funny, sad, memorable and controversial about the year in sport, and naturally there was never any shortage of grist for this well-worn mill. “Year-enders,” the Editors called them, when what they really meant was guff to fill the vast amount of empty space in the pages as the usual news cycles in every aspect of public life shut down in favour of the festive season celebrations. The silly season, everybody called it.
I’m glad I am not obliged to waste much time on any such exercise this time around.
Because it was such a wretched experience for one and all, and because the usual sporting smorgasbord was so drastically reduced, there is not much point dwelling on the year that was – or wasn’t, to be more accurate.
Except perhaps to offer one more thumbs up to the women’s cricket team not simply for their popular triumph in the T20 World Cup but for pulling nearly 90,000 people to the MCG to watch it, thus resetting the boundaries of what is possible as the women’s sport revolution – perhaps the biggest sports story of the second decade of the 21st century – continues to gather pace. By common consent, it was the highlight.
And, yes, a salute to the footy community – not just the AFL but the NRL and soccer, too, as well as netball and a few other entities – for refusing to buckle under the dreaded virus and each getting a meaningful season to the finish line. It kept some of us sane. I, for one, had been slowly arriving, year by year, to the melancholy conclusion that footy was no longer all that important to me, that I could easily live without it if I wanted to, or had to, that unless Carlton was playing there was no compelling reason to tune in on TV, let alone go to the trouble of actually attending a game.
But when it wasn’t there any more, I quickly realised the truth of that old adage – you never fully appreciate what you’ve got until you haven’t got it. Without labouring the point, can I simply say that when there was a game on every night for a fortnight – the frenzy – I was in one room and the wife and the dog were in another, them immersed in Netflix and me focused on all the footballers from other clubs whose names I had forgotten or, more likely, had never known. I was hooked all over again. Whether that will remain a permanent condition, time will tell. But I’ll certainly be one of the first through the gates at the G when the Blues take on the Tigers in round one, 2021.
If I had to pick the worst moment of a dispiriting and often tragic year, it would be the evening of September 24 when news filtered through from India that former Test cricketer Dean Jones had died of a sudden heart attack at 59, far too young. It would be an exaggeration to say that Deano was one of my best mates, but we had been rather more than acquaintances for the best part of 40 years, in which time we had played a bit of cricket together and spent a lot of time talking about the game we both loved – and about footy, too, him being a fellow devotee of the old dark navy blues. At the risk of repeating myself, our relationship was another example of not realising the value of something until, suddenly, it’s not there anymore. I think that was the case with many people in the cricket world who suddenly found themselves re-assessing their levels of respect for a provocative but charismatic character who had been such a positive influence on the game, and therefore their lives.
When another old mate from the cricket world, exactly the same age as Jones, had his own heart attack a couple of months later – surviving without major trauma, happily — it reinforced the point that you should never take family and friends for granted. You never know what’s waiting around the corner, and if that’s not the most pertinent observation to take away from 2020 it will do until someone comes up with a better one.
The one thing I missed most was the chance to attend the Tokyo Olympics, for which I had accreditation, flights, accommodation and travelling partner all locked in. Despite its multiple negative issues, I’m a long-time fan of the five-ring circus and this would have been my 10th attendance, the motivation this time stretching well beyond the chance to watch good sport in an exotic location. The closing ceremony was to have been held on the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which brought the war to an abrupt end. My late father, Private Bill Reed, was a prisoner of war in that doomed city and he and 23 other Australians escaped more or less unscathed – a truly remarkable story of survival that I was planning to make the basis of a book that would also record whatever was to happen at the Games, as well as a few old tales from my own working life in the press boxes of the world.
But to employ one of the cult words of 2020, I had to “pivot” and complete the book without any Tokyo content. Fortunately that wasn’t difficult. A lot of other things have happened along the journey, probably enough to full two or three books, and in the end the publisher decreed that I had busted the word limit. The story of my old man’s resilience – he also lived through being torpedoed at sea – and that of his mates fills 10,000 of a total of 85,000 words, prompting the title WAR GAMES. After being in the works for two years the book is now a reality, arriving from the printers just in time for Christmas and due for general release in the middle of next month. So at least my year has not been a complete waste – and I’m still planning to get to the Games when they do happen next July.
Merry Christmas. And, yes, Boxing Day at the MCG can’t come fast enough.
RON REED has spent more than 50 years as a sportswriter or sports editor, mainly at The Herald and Herald Sun. He has covered just about every sport at local, national and international level, including multiple assignments at the Olympic and Commonwealth games, cricket tours, the Tour de France, America’s Cup yachting, tennis and golf majors and world title fights.
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