By Mark Butler This is the second of an occasional series of articles by contributing authors under the general title of FARRAGO*. MY initiation in 1956 as a seven-year-old into the realities of sporting fervour was terrifying. My father, who was taking my older brother and me on one of his post-desertion, pre-divorce excursions out of [...]
It was late November 2010, one of those red-hot November days that only the Western Desert can turn on. Over six hundred people travelled for days from far and wide to bury young Jampijinpa at the small town of Nyirripi, a four-and-a-half hour dusty drive west from Alice Springs on rough dirt roads.
One fella came up to me at the end of the second day and said the comedy that came out of the commentators trying to keep up with whose who on the field was “better than Roy and HG!!” The starting point in any footy commentary is to get a good team sheet in numerical order. The challenge out bush is that there are often three players wearing the same number, several players with no number and some players with no guernsey at all. That’s when you have to get creative and write the player’s name next to “red boots”; “barefoot”; “topknot”; “big tummy” etc.
This is a guest post by Preston Towers. It was originally published at The Footy Almanac. When I was heading towards the Showground with the rest of the GIANTS’ Orange Army last Saturday, there were a cluster of stories behind us and in front of us. For me, I remembered the early days of [...]
