Port Adelaide players, coaches and administrators past and present brought together for anniversary celebrations
Port Adelaide’s start to its 150th celebrations sought to pack away some pain for some high-powered club figures caught in the fall-out of the major AFL controversies, writes Michelangelo Rucci.
Michelangelo Rucci
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Time heals all wounds … and across 150 years, the Port Adelaide Football Club has had a few.
For a club that now lives to the anthem of Never Tear Us Apart, there were some major rips to be mended in last Friday’s gala opening to Port Adelaide’s 150th anniversary season.
Advertiser photographer Sarah Reed’s image of Port Adelaide’s four AFL coaches – John Cahill, premiership winner Mark Williams, the incumbent Ken Hinkley and the sacrificed Matthew Primus – on a bench at Alberton is a picture of a million words loaded with emotions. And they all share the pain of the inevitable ending that strikes all coaches at all clubs.
The most significant moment of healing for Port Adelaide was with people who gave without taking from the club … in particular with those who for more than a decade have struggled to return to Alberton.
Publican David Basheer, a club president (2004-2006) when the Magpies had to be separated from the Power by SANFL rules and then an AFL club board director, is one of these devoted men. He started the morning of the 2012 AFL grand final in AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou’s office being dismissed in the “day of the bloody knives”.
Basheer’s face on the Qantas flight from Melbourne to Adelaide the next day told of the pain of a man who had given a fair bit – for no fanfare – to Port Adelaide, including personally underwriting the exit payment to Williams in 2010.
Calling all the living Port Adelaide FC presidents – and a daughter of the late Bob McLean – to the Adelaide Convention Centre stage last week to take a long-overdue applause of gratitude should heal some wounds.
Those who directed Port Adelaide from 2008-2012 will find their names attached to a period known as the “darkest chapter” in the club’s 150-year history. On the field – where Port Adelaide prefers to be measured – the Power won just 34 of 110 games in five seasons between 2008-2012.
President Brett Duncanson and his fellow board members seek to remember they made three major off-field achievements.
They secured the release of the Port Adelaide AFL sub-licence from the SANFL. They ended the SANFL-enforced separation of the Magpies and the Power to create “One Club” at Port Adelaide. They took the game back to Adelaide Oval to generate a financial model that benefits more than just Port Adelaide.
They might have been pawns – in a repeat of 1990 – of AFL masters with a grander agenda that has delivered two profitable AFL clubs and a much-admired new sporting arena in Adelaide and still maintained the SANFL as the premier state league.
Every tectonic shift in SA football has so-called martyrs. Bruce Weber, the Port Adelaide president during the 1990 saga that broke the AFL impasse in Adelaide, paid dearly in life and business. At the 150th gala, Weber was revered in a way once reserved for club heroes Russell Ebert, Fos Williams, Bob Quinn and Geof Motley (another who needed time to heal the deep wound from his 1977 sacking as selector at Alberton).
Basheer’s presence at the gala event would have been noted by his closest friends and those who, like him, have the scars from that ruthless morning in Demetriou’s office in September 2012. All of them will hope the healing was completed on a night Port Adelaide sought to do more than just celebrate 150 years of phenomenal achievement and change.
And still there are those who seek to tear the 150 count apart.
In 1920, Port Adelaide was 50 – and ranked fourth of seven as the club dealt with putting together a new team after World War I. In 1970, Port Adelaide was 100 – and jumped from a non-finalist sixth in 1969 to the minor premier. Hinkley must wish trends work in threes.
From the outside, there will be those who will mock the 150th anniversary saying the “Power” is not the “Magpies”. Did they in 1920 say the “Magpies” – that had existed for just 18 of the club’s first 50 years – were not the “Magentas” who won Port Adelaide’s first three premierships?
Whatever the colours (and there have been many since 1870) or the nicknames, it always has been Port Adelaide since 1870.