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I'm not sure how I got interested in football. It was not an enthusiasm shared by my family. Memory suggests I was about nine or ten when I attended my first match at North Sydney Oval sometime in the mid-1950s. It was, I think, a cold, wet afternoon and the game a tough, muddy, low scoring affair. Who North's opponents were, I've long forgotten. Perhaps a seed was sown that day. Curiously, my vague recollection of that afternoon has become wedded to another memory. On an old 78rpm record of my father's, the Scottish comedian Harry Lauder laments his involvement in a game of rugby: “They threw me up in the air and they rolled me in the mud and then they tried to stop the circulation of my blood.” Here was drama tempered with humour, a viewpoint I would later be grateful for.
Cammeray-born Ken Irvine was a small, nuggety, handsome man, blessed with phenomenal speed. I would often position myself at the southern end of the ground under the scoreboard that later bore his name, waiting for his regular sprints down the sideline, those moments of sheer excitement when I'd leap to my feet as he dived over in the corner only a few feet away. A fixture in the Australian Test team (the 'Kangaroos') and possibly our finest ever rugby league winger, on one occasion that attracted much media attention he matched himself against a racehorse. Surprisingly, to our disbelief, the racehorse won! Then there was Brian Carlson, a Novacastrian fullback who kept a house in North Sydney during the winter months and whose close affinity with Irvine on the field gave Norths the edge in many games. Remarkably for a man who rose to Test level and whose captaincy could be inspirational, he was often criticized for lack of involvement, not an eighty-minute player they said. Some called him lazy, even overweight. He liked a beer and he didn't like training and the knockers called him 'Reschs'. It was even rumoured that he kept a friend positioned near the sideline to feed him the race results during Saturday matches. But Carlson had natural speed and a predator's judgement that could change a game in the flash of an eye. “He moved”, said playwright and Bears fan Alex Buzo, “like a man who had lived in the tropics all his life. There was never a wasted gesture, never the feeling that he had run a yard or two more than he had to. Yet he always seemed to be in position, always in control of the mayhem …” In the early 1960s, while I studied for the Leaving Certificate at North Sydney Technical High School, my character as a local fan was honed to a flint-hard maturity by the flagging fortunes of the Bears and the wit and sarcasm of my best friend, a traitorous supporter of the Western Suburbs Magpies. Irvine and Carlson were the rock on which I stood. |
