My love-hate relationship with Port Adelaide
GRAHAM Cornes didn’t always hate Port Adelaide. Ahead of watching his son coach Port Adelaide in an SANFL grand final, he recounts how the relationship soured.
I HADN’T always hated Port Adelaide. That came much later.
I had watched my father running around in a black and white footy jumper when he played a few games for Lorne, which was then a small fishing village on a treacherous track called the Great Ocean Road.
It remains a first memory and it left a powerful impression of the game, mateship, and the tribal loyalty to a club’s colours. When, as a fractured family, we arrived in Adelaide a few years later, Port Adelaide was the obvious choice for a footy-mad youngster who had barracked for Collingwood from the age of four.
Rexie Johns, Malcolm Blight’s backdoor neighbour, was my first footy hero. He was a plumber, my father was a roof tiler and they occasionally worked on the same building sites.
My first autograph was his name scrawled with a carpenter’s pencil on a pack of Tally Ho cigarette papers.
Ian Hannaford, the star centre half forward was another favourite, as was Keith Spencer, a recruit from Broken Hill who fearlessly took on much bigger ruckmen. Fos was a God and I was a devout follower – until September 9, 1967.
You can’t always play for the team you followed as a kid and so it was in that first semi-final, in my third game for Glenelg I was confronted on Adelaide Oval by these powerful black and white heroes of my youth.
It didn’t end well. They smashed us, not only on the scoreboard, but physically as well. I was in hospital for seven days after. I didn’t know what a pneumothorax was but it was mighty hard to breathe. Still I didn’t hate them.
As Neil Kerley built Glenelg into the powerhouse club that it was in the 1970s we had a great rivalry with the Magpies. A trip to Alberton was rite of passage for every young footballer. They were always tough opponents but for a short time we had their measure. Still, we didn’t hate them. The nasty stuff started to creep in during the late ’70s and early ’80s. There were a couple of memorable moments.
The clashes of Wayne Phillis with Rod Burton and Brian Cunningham, Fred Phillis with Tim Evans and David Holst with Tony Giles restored our self-belief but inflamed the rivalry that erupted into open warfare when David Granger started to run rampant. The hatred was festering.
And 1990 was the tipping point. We all know the history. We hated Port Adelaide and they hated the rest of us. Could you ever forgive them? Could you ever wish them success? Could you ever imagine your sons would play for them? And how could one of them ever coach that Magpie team?
Malcolm Blight often talks of the football gods. Perhaps the more appropriate term is Karma. Having two sons drafted by Port Adelaide was football karma – a punishment for having inflamed the hostilities between Port Adelaide and us, the true South Australian footy fans.
However, a child’s success over-rides any of those old prejudices and enmities. Parents of every AFL footballer knows exactly what that means. When the boys played in Port’s first AFL premiership, the pride and celebration couldn’t be supressed. The emotions were so conflicting. The dilemma should have ended when both sons finished playing. Back to the normality of the old SANFL rivalry.
But Karma has intervened once again. Tomorrow’s SANFL grand final is the archetypical battle between good and evil. A courageous Sturt, back from the brink of extinction to win last year’s flag and challenge for this year’s, and their opponents from the evil empire at Alberton. Sturt, so well balanced, so strong in the midfield and well coached by Marty Mattner.
And Port Adelaide – essentially an AFL reserves team, which so many question should even be playing in the SANFL, coached by Chad Cornes. Who can’t see the irony? Who to barrack for? Well, blood is thicker than water.
It could have been worse. Port could have been playing Glenelg.