Round #17 - 1975
The image of Allen Aylett and Ron Barassi, each with one hand on the 1975 Premiership Cup, sharing a moment, their part in something that just a few years earlier would have been the ‘impossible dream’ for even the most committed Shinboner diehard.
Since that day, North has never stopped believing, and never will, as challenging as it has been, and perhaps always will be. They are a very special footy club.
They continue to colour the outline drawn by these two men, as does the game itself.
Both are connected by this moment and by almost everything important in our game today.
As leaders, we get to draw the outline of a future, something that inspires, knowing that others will need to colour it in.
Most of the time, however, we are colouring in the outline of a future, which at the time existed only in the imagination of a courageous and inventive few, but now so familiar that we almost forget who drew it for us.
The year is 1975, and here we are, fifty years later, still colouring it in.
These are the brave people, prepared to hazard themselves for the possibility of fulfilling the promise of the sport we love.
These are people who look at the future of the game and see radically different things from most. They are happy to sit at the frontier of what is known and unknown, seeking to turn the unknown into the known, if only to reveal another unknown. They are more interested in what we can become than who we think we are already. And it is us, the lovers of the game, who are the beneficiaries, as much as we tried to fight it at the time.
I thought of Allen Aylett and Ron Barassi, whom my drawing celebrates, clutching the 1975 Silverware - fifty years in the making.
They came to mind when watching on as the North Melbourne Football Club celebrated its Centenary in the VFL/AFL, as well as the fifty years commemoration of their first Premiership in 1975 and, of course, the first AFLW Premiership last year.
It might be my imagination, but both seem to be looking into the empty cup and the promise it holds, knowing there is so much more this game can be.
Allen Aylett was President of the Kangaroos, one of their greatest-ever players, having retired just a few years earlier.
The club was in terrible trouble, as is so often the case, it needed a hero as much as it required a President, and Allen stepped into the breach. It was he, with a storied group of great North people, who managed to convince the ‘Super Coach’, Ron Barassi, out of a short retirement, to coach their beleaguered club.
When appointed, the Kangas were mired at the bottom of the ladder, winning just one game. Three short years later, 1975, they were Premiers.
This was not a new experience for Ron Barassi. The 1975 Premiership was his ninth overall, his third as a coach, having played in six at Melbourne and coaching two at Carlton.
What makes this record even more remarkable is that Ron was only 39 years of age. Allen Aylett was a couple of years older at 41. The two champs played many times for Victoria in representative games.
To give this context, the youngest current coach in the AFL is Sam Mitchell, who will turn 43 later this year.
It was Ron Barassi, who, when coaching Carlton, 44 points down in the 1970 Grand Final against Collingwood, urged his players to move the ball quickly, ‘Handball, handball, handball,’ he said, and the Blues would win the most famous Grand Final of all, and the game would never be the same.
The outline was drawn, and every coach since has been colouring it in.
A couple of years later, Barassi would again coach North Melbourne to the Premiership. It would be his last. North would make the Grand Final the following year, only to be beaten by Hawthorn, which would be Barass’s last Grand Final as coach.
If someone said at the time that Ron Barassi, then aged 42, and who had played and coached in 17 Grand Finals for 10 Premierships, would never be part of the ‘last Saturday in September’ action, you wouldn’t have believed them.
The ‘17 for 10’ would become part of the incredible Barassi folklore. He famously wore the number 31 at Melbourne, as did his father, Ron Snr, who was killed in Tobruk during WWII when Ron Jnr was only four years old. Ron Snr’s last game was Melbourne’s 1940 Premiership victory. The numbers 17, 4, and 10 add up to 31, and you can interpret the 4 as ‘for’ or recognise the four Premierships he coached.
Ron would add the numbers 17410 together with the #31 to his signature for many decades when obliging, as he always did, the thousands of requests he received.
By 1977, Allen Aylett was President of the VFL. It was a time of change, the kind that can only happen when leaders have a compelling vision and the fortitude to make it happen with all of the uncertainty and personal risk it will ask of them.
My father, Alan, was a key person in all of this, having joined the VFL that same year after a very successful career, including three Premierships, as Secretary as CEOs were then called, of the Richmond Football Club.
I saw what their vision for the game was asking of them, but I now understand, having been in leadership roles for four decades.
Only five years later, the South Melbourne Football Club became the Sydney Swans, and ten years later, there were teams in Western Australia and Queensland, and the VFL became the AFL.
The first game the Sydney Swans would play at the SCG would be against Melbourne, the oldest club, now coached by Ron Barassi.
I am sure this wasn’t a coincidence. Ron had long championed the need for the game to grow beyond what had become known as the ‘Barassi Line’, the imaginary line coined by historian Ian Turner that divided the country, marking the boundary between Australian Rules and Rugby League.
I remember the game well. It was my first as a football administrator. I was eighteen years of age, my first job straight from school, and with the title ‘Assistant to the Football Manager’, but a job description that might as well have read “Do anything Ron Barassi asks you to do”, and as I have often reflected, it was the best job description I ever had.
The experience of being around Barassi was unrelenting, exhausting, at times mystifying, but also energising. Yes, he was uncompromising. The demands he made of those he needed to match his expectations, to find something, the willpower required to do the common things uncommonly well.
But for every withdrawal he made from your energy bank, he also made deposits of love, care and a deep interest in who you are and what you could be. A relationship with Ron was one of constant deposits and withdrawals, hour by hour, day by day, year by year, and this was not for everyone, but soon, I realised it was for me.
“Time to buckle up, young fella,” I often reassured myself.
I had forgone the prevailing wisdom of the time. "Gotta get a trade or an education,” but I was receiving both, such that I now reflect upon as the most important years of my working life.
During this period, the sport underwent its most significant change, often underestimated, but without which, it is unlikely we would be where we are now.
The game was mired by the parochial interests of the clubs themselves, each with a vote at the Board table, and was broke and broken as a result. Allen Aylett, the President, would hand over his leadership to an independent Commission to enable the game and the competition to save it from itself.
And so it did.
The outline was drawn, and every administration in the game since has been colouring it in.
The colouring-in continues as the Tasmanian Football Club, the Devils, prepare to take their rightful place in the National competition.
The image of Allen and Ron, each with one hand on the 1975 Premiership Cup, sharing a moment, their part in something that just a few years earlier would have been the ‘impossible dream’ for even the most committed Shinboner diehard.
Since that day, North has never stopped believing, and never will, as challenging as it has been, and perhaps always will be. They are a very special footy club.
They continue to colour the outline drawn by these two men, as does the game itself.
Both are connected by this moment and by almost everything important in our game today.
We are so thankful.
Play on!
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