The Statue of David

It was May, the air just cooling after an unnaturally long summer. I had been speaking for weeks about a football game that Chris and I were due to see. Overdue, actually, since I was from the country and had never gone anywhere near a live match. I’d been doing so much speaking because I was desperate to know what I was in for, how to behave, how to supress enough of my basic tendencies, such as an aversion to crowds, fluorescent lighting, most organised activities beyond the boundaries of the home.
        ‘What do I do?’ I lamented, and in a moment of pity, a friend from work brought me her Fremantle Dockers scarf for the evening. I wound it around my neck, surveyed myself in the reflection of the shop’s windows, and thought I may as well have been wearing the wig and galoshes of a clown. I was totally without allegiance. I was not in the business of starting anything up.
        ‘It might come to life and strangle me.’
        My friend shrugged and produced a lint roller from her pocket. ‘This is all Zelda,’ she said, taking to the hairs stuck in the scarf’s polar fleece, before explaining that her cats had been Dockers’ Purple Paws members for over a decade. ‘A scam,’ she admitted. ‘But an adorable one.’
        I smiled, scrunching it into a ball inside my bag. After all I had no loyalty, no curiosity about being loyal, no cats.
        But when we got to the stadium – late, because of the train – it was windy, the sun already set, and I shivered up the stairs to find our seats. We rounded a corner into the stands, and suddenly the grounds splayed out in front of us, like a glittering, circular rug.
        ‘Enormous,’ I half-panted, gesturing to the field. ‘Really gives new meaning to the idea of alfresco living.’
        I waited for Chris to laugh but nothing came, so I said the alfresco joke again, but there was no chance of his hearing me – already he was eyes and ears on the game. I was eyes and ears on the moon, which was also huge, motionless and pale. In fact it was the moon that interested me most. I took photos, made exclamations, couldn’t get over its size and roundness, and when we sat down, I sent texts to my friends about how big it was in comparison to the players who, from this height, looked like mechanised toys.
        ‘Are you cold?’ Chris nodded towards my ballooning handbag.
        ‘Yes,’ I whispered, ‘but I can’t,’ and pointed discreetly at the Collingwood supporter who was sitting right beside me. Then I looked across from where we were seated to the opposite stand, and down to the men running around on their tiny legs. None of it seemed particularly believable: the size, the scale of the event. I was not in awe so much as a state of unfeeling, a wiping of the senses. A pillar reality could unravel around but not penetrate. I turned towards Chris. He could be cold, too. Or hungry. His back could be hurting in that stiff plastic chair. His having a good time was my responsibility, I thought, as I often did.
        I wondered why we had come in the first place. Because Chris loved football? Because I wanted to experience – ironically or unironically, it didn’t matter – this defining part of our national culture? Because I’d left regional Western Australia so many years ago that the only way I could connect with my old life was by watching a game I knew very little about other than that it has always been played for the amusement of the working class – for the simple, honest man – and we from the Midwest are nothing if not simple and honest, priding ourselves on it, on how we can get past anything.
        Just then there was a noise behind me, a commotion from the crowd. Someone’s beer had been knocked out of their fist and was now cascading down the stands in a frothy, auburn waterfall. People jeered, hurled abuse good-naturedly at the offender, but I stayed silent, and didn’t bother to lift my feet.

Some months later a proof from Melbourne University Press shows up at work: The Football War: The VFA and VFL’s Battle for Supremacy by Xavier Fowler. Well, it’s the logical next step. First you watch the game, then you learn about the game’s origins, then, once you know everything, the task is complete.
        I finish the book in my studio over a series of days. At the end of the week I’ve got virtually no recollection of these days’ passing, having read in a fugue state, immersed in an alien world, privy to the thousands of hours of one person’s life spent combing through archives and minutes from various clubs and organisations, the result of which is a chronological detailing of the scuffles between the Victorian Football Association (VFA) and Victorian Football League (VFL) from 1896 to 1949. Fowler himself says in the acknowledgements that his research topic has been described as ‘narrow, almost quirky’, which seems true considering The Football War has probably less to do with football than with the history of sporting administration in wartime Victoria. Fowler tries hard to pique our interest early in the opening chapters by establishing a passionate, Montague-v-Capulet style rivalry between the two branches of what we know now simply as the AFL. War. Chained to a corpse. Noble yet futile fight. Usurpation by an upstart. Unleashed a propaganda campaign. Plot a mutiny. Life-preserving incentive. The language! I wander around the house reading snippets aloud to Chris.
         ‘It started off friendly,’ I say. ‘Everyone was with the VFA, but then a money problem happened, and a bunch of clubs split and started their own thing and called it the Victorian Football League.’
         ‘Which ones?’
         ‘Geelong. A few others.’
         ‘Right.’
         ‘And then the Victorian Football Association freaked out and brought in this rule called the throw pass to try and make their games faster and more exciting than the VFL’s.’
         ‘Right.’
         ‘And the Brighton team was called the Penguins. Somewhere else was the Zebras.’
         ‘That can’t be true.’
         ‘It is. It is true, everything I’ve told you.’
         I keep on like this for a day or two, reading out whatever. I don’t get the hint. I never do. After a while Chris is forced to say, gently, ‘Maybe you should call Xavier and talk to him about it.’
         Immediately I’m defensive. He must not care at all about what went on in the Williamstown dressing rooms in July 1940. Just bad manners. Perhaps it’s because I’m cognisant of the work that has gone into its writing, but, without really registering it, I have become attached to the book – to the athletes it depicts, who were real and most often severely underpaid; to Fowler himself whose devotion leaks onto the page and sustains a fifty-year story of elaborate infighting, and who, in the acknowledgements, mentions his wife and newborn daughter as primary motivations (not completely relevant, yet not irrelevant either). At the end of the introduction Fowler reminds us that ‘no individual, body or corporation truly owns Australian rules football and that all share a role as custodians of the national game’, and for me this is what The Football War feels like: an accounting not for anyone’s personal benefit, but for the benefit of AFL. To Fowler, football is less a game than a responsibility, a cultural artefact to be maintained and protected at all costs. Regrettably I have never experienced any sense of custodianship over the national game, and upon reflection, this may be the most interesting part about The Football War: the hint at a broader stroke of life, the knowledge that while its contents do not pertain to me, they do pertain to someone. A reminder that the world does not simply halt at the borders of our own intimate frames of reference.

Another proof arrives: Helen Garner, The Season. She follows her grandson’s under-16s football team over a single Melbourne winter. It’s affectionate, forthright, teetering – deliberately, I assume – on the edge of belligerence. Garner is more than eighty and still writing, and there are some parts of the book that make me think, ‘Nan, you can’t say that.’ Then I think how I’m glad I never have to read The First Stone. But in this new book Garner is not a journalist, she is a grandmother, and a devoted Western Bulldogs fan. A fan to such an extent that Text Publishing has recently released photos of her visiting the Bulldog’s pre-season dressing rooms: Garner, dressed in a pair of denim overalls and a sunhat, beaming beside Marcus Bontempelli; Garner posing with a shirtless Cody Weightman, her head hovering dangerously close to one of his sculpted pecs, the joy on her face so heedless that it’s difficult to reconcile her having written all that harrowing non-fiction.
         ‘I learnt that when the chips are down, football rises,’ she says in The Season. ‘It revives us. It sustains us. In a time of fear and ignorance, it holds us above the abyss.’
         Serious claims. I’m not sure I believe in anything so passionately, with such a lack of moderation, but Garner’s frankness is echoed almost exactly in Fowler’s book, where the time and place of fear and ignorance is 1930s Melbourne with its thirty percent unemployment rate. And then the real war. Lest we forget.
         In my hometown – where, according to the latest census, the median weekly income for families is nearly twenty percent lower than the national average – football is ubiquitous. Kids grow up immersed in AFL, through schools, or programs like Auskick, and the ovals, in contrast to everyone’s gardens, stay green year-round. Yet, as a child, you wouldn’t have caught me touching football with a stick, let alone believing it capable of helping anyone. I don’t know why this was. Or what I mean to say is that I do know, it’s just that my equivalent of football was the novel, and staying out of people’s way, because I was afraid – of a lot of things but especially of men and the violence on the street which I saw as roughly the same as the violence I knew the AFL represented. My beliefs were not totally unfounded either, considering the origins of football are rooted in violent behaviour. In the thirties and forties, police were regularly forced to intervene in matches in order to break apart brawls that involved not just players, but umpires and officials, angry spectators. Arrests were made, players spent the night in jail. Historians Sandercock and Turner (cited by Fowler) explain how one interesting sociological feature of post-war VFA and VFL games was their tendency towards brawling. Though the war had ended, it was almost as if men didn’t want it to, or couldn’t separate themselves from its structures. Not a clinging to violence necessarily, but rather its consequences, its emotional intensities, communal intimacies. Garner, quoting an unnamed friend, says that ‘football’s a mirror of war … and the reason why people are so crazy about this particular mirror is that war is as close as we ever get to being in the midst of life and death simultaneously.’
         A simultaneous mix of life and death does not sound particularly appealing, but then I haven’t experienced the misery of unsafe factory labour, or compulsory military training, or getting on a boat that’s sailing you away from your family. Maybe when that’s happened to you, dying mixes itself up so thoroughly with living that you start looking for it in places where it doesn’t naturally exist.
         But the thirties ended close to a century ago, and by all accounts the national game has since developed somewhat of a conscience for the newer generation of boys, the future stars like Garner’s grandson – a good thing considering, as she puts it, ‘their fragility, what they’re obliged to do to themselves in order to live in this world, the codes of behaviour they’ve had to develop in order to discipline and sublimate their drive to violence’.
         I have been wondering what Garner means by this. By ‘codes of behaviour’ is she referring to football itself, a sport played in lieu of violence because violence is now recognised as being ethically and socially unacceptable? Or do these codes have less to do with football than with everything else that goes on outside of it? For a few months I lived in an old apartment behind my town’s Railways Football Club, and, one day after school, saw a group of boys stomping on the carcass of an already dead bird. I went straight home and spent the evening in front of the piano working on a difficult Beethoven piece, Sonata Pathétique. Then Mozart and Pachelbel for a bit of relief. Afterwards, I stopped, languishing in the thought that no matter what you did there was no way of avoiding the boys’ club that perpetuated itself everywhere. I languished because I thought kicking a dead animal a terrible act, though I’d walked away without saying a word. I couldn’t tell you what those children were busy doing to themselves in order to live.

The release date for The Football War is brought forward, to coincide with Grand Final week. The copies we order at work go into the Sports section beside the LeBron James biography, and I look at them with a sense of my own personal success. Then an hour passes, and I begin fidgeting, I keep turning my head. I pull all the copies out and put them at the top of the shelf, flipped, so the whole book is visible. I take LeBron away and replace him with Guenther Steiner, whose cover is red and a more striking match with the pale colours on The Football War’s jacket.
         ‘You’re being a bit protective,’ my friend says.
         ‘Where’s the crime in that?’
         An older woman is first to get her hands on it. I resist the urge to walk over and tell her to put the book back. What’s your business with this? Who’s it for? I’m going to need to see 100 points of identification please. I feel a strange sense of loyalty towards Fowler. My first football game. My first book about football, as though it were as symbolic as my first day of school, or my first loose tooth.
         The woman flicks through without any real intent to buy. Not what she was expecting, or not completely relevant. Too many ‘facts and stats’, perhaps. As Garner describes it, men’s books about football are ‘full of facts and stats and names and memories. They have been formed by footy. I can’t do it their way. I don’t know how’.
         One look at the first chapter of Fowler’s book does give the impression of a man formed by footy, and his unambiguous enthusiasm for the ledgers. Where Garner’s book is devoted to her emotional relationship with her grandson and his team, Fowler’s is devoted to the archive. Devotion – to history, club, family, et cetera – is a key part of both books, most notably in The Football War, where switching between VFA and VFL clubs is described as just about the least loyal thing a man could possibly do. It would’ve been more suitable for a Collingwood player to abandon his wife than his team. Guernsey before glory. That’s the saying, I believe.
         When Garner claims that football ‘holds us above the abyss’, I understand but cannot empathise, which is not Garner’s failing so much as my own. The ‘tirade of anger and sorrow’ she describes her son-in-law experiencing, after the Bulldogs endure a ‘shaming loss’, hardly moves me. ‘I see that he is heartbroken,’ she says. ‘How deep this goes in men, this bond, this loyalty: I would never mock it.’
         Several times in my life I have seen this kind of loyalty and laughed in its face. Because surely it was not really loyalty, but arrogance. A gross patriotism. Isn’t it all basically the same? At any rate, I couldn’t fathom it, wanted no part of it, just as much as it wanted no part of me. Football excluded me, so I ridiculed it. I truly thought the people who supported AFL did so because they had nothing else to spend their time on. As if all of us would not immerse ourselves in just about anything to keep our mind out of its own way, or as if people cannot simply enjoy different pleasures. When I say football excluded me, I mean that it did not welcome me with open arms. But I made no attempt to be welcomed. I avoided ovals. If a game ever came on the television I’d hurry to change the channel.
         It was the television which originally indoctrinated Garner, though she puts it more poetically than that: in the year 2000, ‘footy shot its first arrow’ into her heart while she was watching a documentary called Year of the Dogs. Chris Grant, the captain of a downtrodden Footscray (which later became the Western Bulldogs at the end of 1996), had been persuaded to decline a captaincy offer from a more profitable club by a letter from a young supporter. ‘“Dear Chris Grant, please don’t leave. I haven’t got much money. This is all I can give.” And he’d sticky-taped on to the letter a fifty-cent piece.’
         Garner went immediately to her computer and bought a membership. She never regretted it. And perhaps it would have been the same for me had I come across football fidelity a little sooner, had I been less inclined to stuff myself so full of books that there was no room for anything else. Theoretically at least football ticks the right boxes. You hold it, it holds you back. It’s large enough to get by on, probably for quite a long time. I see it all objectively, without much emotion. Definitely without the same weight of emotion as Garner when she discloses, ‘Really I’m trying to write about footy and my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die’.

I wish I could say I had gone to the game as a way of getting an arrow shot in my heart. It embarrasses me to admit I was nervous, but I was, though only for my sense of belonging, as a child might feel at an adults’ dinner party. Realistically, there was nothing to be frightened of. The fourth quarter was nearly over and the whole thing hadn’t even been exciting: Collingwood was pummelling the Dockers; I’d gone to retrieve pies but they were sold out. Half of Collingwood’s team were benched due to injury, so they had new boys on the ground that night, the first-timers, or debutants, as somebody said. When it’s your first game for the AFL that’s what you’re referred to. As though it’s Paris in spring.
         With eight minutes until the siren, Collingwood were ahead by twenty-five points. I was surprised to see the crowd start packing up. Families were stuffing jumpers and game-day magazines into oversized bags, rushing out the doors to try and beat the traffic. I thought about having come all this way just to miss the ending, and I was shocked this was something people did, or were permitted to do.
         I spun to Chris. ‘Is it done?’
         He said he thought it must be.
         ‘I can’t believe they’re going.’
         He raised his eyebrows. Fremantle could not come back, not with such little time left. No use in waiting with the outcome certain. I had just been looking at the clock myself, thinking that tomorrow I had to be awake early for work, thinking if we’d be able to make the first train home, if it stopped at all stops, and darker thoughts too, about whether I’d left the stove on (I was sure I had), and what was the point of my life.
         But then something happened. There was a Fremantle goal, quickly followed by another goal, and another. Beside me I sensed Chris straighten in his seat. People on the stairs began looking over their shoulders, stopping, hanging on to their belongings awkwardly. Now they didn’t know what they wanted. To stay or go. I felt the stadium begin to shift, to tighten, so that it turned up at the corners. Fans were starting to raise their voices, get to their feet, hover tensely over their chairs. They were gripping the nearest railing, they were shouting. Men began punching their fists wildly into the air, taking off their scarves and spinning them around their heads. Even with my glasses it was still hard to see. I didn’t know what to focus on, or where to look. At once my whole body commenced a spontaneous trembling, as though something was very close, either behind or in front of me. We watched as a Dockers player with a taped shoulder leapt high above his opponents, fingertips barely brushing the ball, dragging it down to his chest. Then there was another mark, a diving, sliding skid across the turf, followed by another goal. Only one point behind now. Ninety seconds left, or something ridiculous. I swivelled left to right. People were in all kinds of states. Screaming, flabbergasted, heads in their hands.
         ‘God,’ I said to Chris. I could barely talk.
         And just like that there was one more point, the last of the game. A draw.
         I could quite easily have burst into tears.
         In the days following I would remark nail-biter as though I had any right to such a statement. I returned the scarf. We all joked at the bookshop about how Fremantle were now my boys. I would have to start wearing purple. I would have to do a bit of research into Wharfie Time. I pretended to be shy when a customer told me the Dockers were out for the season. I touched my collar and whispered, ‘Better to have loved and lost.’
         None of it’s true. I don’t care about the teams. Don’t like the sound of the word boys being used in conjunction with, or even with remote connection to me. I see the players as I saw them originally: as miniatures from a great distance – and not, as Helen Garner puts it, ‘Homeric’ with ‘all the ugly brutality of a raging Achilles, but also this strange and splendid beauty’ (a description I associate more readily with the sight of birds in a perfect chevron, or an ear of early-ripening corn).
         On the morning I write this, I look back to May, to see if I’ve taken any photos of Chris and me in the nosebleeds. Recently a friend gave us our first fridge magnet (a palm-sized replica of just the crotch of the statue of David) and I thought this would be a good opportunity to use it, to have something nice of us on the freezer. I scroll for a while, but no dice. The only photos I’d taken that night were of the moon.
         More than fifty thousand people went to watch that game, all with varying intentions. Despite my philosophising, my motives for attending remain unclear, though when have motives ever been of any particular importance to me?
         So I print the moon and pin it to the fridge, beneath David’s alabaster thighs, and I look at it from time to time when I’m on my way to the sink, or the windowsill to water Chris’ ailing plant, and am reminded of what it was like in the stadium, what I felt in the last few minutes of the game. It wasn’t splendour, or anything so elegant. It might have been simply a sense of leave-taking, a brief abdication from the usual private limitations, the pacifying exhaustions that arise from not being able to be anyone but yourself.