Lou Richards: The little bloke who rose above the pack just by being Lou
LOU Richards gave a lot of cheek. Other footballers were bigger, stronger, more skilful. Other footy writers were more astute. But Louie the Lip rose above the pack just by being Lou.
Collingwood
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FOR a little bloke, Lou Richards gave a lot of cheek.
Other footballers were bigger, stronger, more skilful.
Other footy writers were more astute — a lot more astute.
But Louie the Lip rose above the pack just by being Lou.
Never in footy has a small man left so big a footprint.
Louie — no last name required, really — left his unique mark on seven decades of the game.
As a champion player, TV jester and abysmal tipster, the nuggety rover found a fond place in Victorian hearts.
The term icon is over-used, but Louie was one.
Much to his embarrassment, Lou was born in Tigerland, at Bethesda Hospital in Richmond.
But if any kid was born with black and white blood, it was Lou.
Lou’s mother’s father, Charlie Pannam Sr, was the son of Constantine Pannamopoulos, a Greek migrant with a tongue-twister surname.
EVERYONE SHOULD BOW TO LOU: EDDIE MCGUIRE
He anglicised that to Pannam and his kids picked a sport that couldn’t have been more Aussie, footy.
Charlie Sr took to Victoria Park for the Magpies on May 5, 1894 — in VFA days.
He was the first VFL player to reach 100 games, a dual premiership player and club skipper in 1905.
When Charlie retired after 1906, brother Alby started in 1907.
Charlie Jr donned the black and white guernsey for six seasons from 1917.
His son Alby ran on to Pie Park in 1933, captaining the Magpies 12 years later.
By 1945, when Alby hung up the boots, Lou was continuing the tradition.
Six of the family would end up playing a record 939 VFL games between them, kicking 1184 goals and winning eight premierships.
The Richards/Pannam dynasty made the Pies the only club to have been captained by three generations of the one family.
The die was set long before Lou squarked his first in that Richmond hospital.
“It was automatic,’’ he explained.
“Collingwood was churned into us. All mum’s family had been involved in football and we lived in the area.
“Dad’s family had run hotels in Collingwood.’’
In Depression times, Collingwood was a no-frills suburb, working-class for those lucky enough to have work.
Lou’s first home was a shopfront in Johnston St, Collingwood, that would become a Thai restaurant much later when times changed the suburb.
Homes followed in Lithgow St, near the Abottsford brewery, and Greenwood St, about 700m from Victoria Park.
Growing up, times were tough, and the glue that bound the suburb together, that put pride into the place, was the Magpies.
From 1927 to 1930, Collingwood was invincible.
Its four successive flags remain unequalled and formed the foundation that cemented the Magpies as Australia’s most famous club.
Knockabout kids ran wild in the streets, those days.
Lou would remember “ragged bare-footed kids slipping in and out of Coles and Woolies, nicking Violet Crumbles, Bullseyes and Humbugs’’.
In summer they’d go yabbying along Merri Creek.
In winter, there only was one game.
Money being tight, local kids kicked rolled newspaper footies under the Gipps St bridge.
In 1935, when Lou was 12, he started school at Collingwood Tech.
He was an average student who would regularly find himself on the wrong end of the strap.
But even in Form 1, his two real talents were obvious.
He gave plenty of lip and showed flashes of football brilliance.
Usually kids his age would be put in the school’s junior footy team.
The school’s coach, Les Hangar the woodwork teacher, selected him for the seniors.
It was unheard of, but the teacher looked like a visionary after Lou’s first game.
It was against Melbourne Tech at National Park, Yarra Bend, and Lou never forgot the day or tired of telling about it.
“I kicked six goals in my first match and the boys carried me off the ground,’’ he recalled.
“I thought I was a bloody marvel and a hero.
“It had never been done before. Les even gave me a nickname — The Ant. I was that small.’’
Collingwood Tech was in Johnston St. Kids kicked footies in the quadrangle, and over the fence into a barber’s shop yard or the pub on the Wellington St corners.
“It was Tonnini’s shop and we spent a lot of time retrieving our footballs as they were scarce,’’ Lou remembered.
“It was just after The Depression and things were pretty tough for some of the kids.
“We couldn’t afford footballs very easily.’’
Lou’s dad, William, was an electrician. Mother, Irene, worked in a boot factory when her husband was out of work.
The couple wanted their eldest boy to become an engineer.
LIFE AND TIMES OF LOU RICHARDS
For all his ball skills, though, Lou was all thumbs as a tradesman.
“It wasn’t for me,’’ Lou recalled.
“I was the worst woodworker and put nine sides on a six-sided copper stick.
“I’d bugger up all the jobs. I was hopeless at making things but I did like geometrical drawing.
“The thing I could really do was talk.’’
And play footy.
It was with a sense of the inevitable that Lou was recruited by the Magpies from Collingwood Tech, playing alongside his uncle Alby.
In 1941, when Lou first took the field, the Pies side was wide open, even for a five-foot-sixer.
World War II had cut a swath through the VFL, although then Prime Minister Robert Menzies insisted the game continue for morale reasons.
Collingwood and Fitzroy had more players enlist than other clubs, more than 40 each.
Football, then, was a hobby more than a job.
With their rich-but-shady patron John Wren in the shadows, players copped the odd sling.
But footballers needed a real job.
Lou never became an engineer.
After a two-year flirtation as an apprentice fitter and turner, he joined the Boards of Works as a draftsman, designing sewage systems for eight pounds a week.
It wasn’t for him, though, and he chucked it in to work at the Town Hall Hotel in North Melbourne.
Later he’d buy the Phoenix Hotel in Flinders St.
The Phoenix was a stab pass down from the Herald and Weekly Times building, second home to hard-drinking reporters in an era when they all drank hard.
It was a gold mine.
Lou had an eye for business, knew the value of a dollar and got a reputation for being tight.
It was true he watched his pennies.
Rumour had it that the Phoenix got its basement bar after Lou dropped a sixpence down a crack in the floor.
Watered drinks were another rumour, the Phoenix reputed to be the only pub where you could have 60 scotches and walk away sober.
Others, though, recall Lou’s quiet generosity, how he would loan a bloke a house deposit when the banks refused.
What everyone acknowledged he wouldn’t share, though, was the footy around goals.
He had dash and goal sense, topping the Pies goal kicking three times, the first time being in 1944.
Incidentally, the three years before that it was Alby leading the scoring.
As the war drew to a close, in 1944, the day before Lou’s 21st birthday, tragedy struck.
His dad drowned in the Murray when he fell overboard from a boat on which he was working.
Life went on, though, with Lou a Magpies fixture with a twinkle in his eye.
In 1943, Collingwood Town Hall was the players’ idea of a good night out.
They would arrive at Saturday dances with a few sherbets under the belt, liniment on so they’d be recognised as footballers.
Then they’d test their luck with the girls.
The Regal Dance Band did weddings, parties, anything, and the female drummer caught Lou’s eye.
Edna, whom he’d marry five years later, wasn’t so taken.
“He had a lot of cheek and he asked me for a dance but I told him I was all booked up,’’ she would recall.
“He just kept at it and I finally told him that if he’d like the 9pm slot next week I’d keep it open for him.’’
Lou, typically, turned the week’s wait into a month-long ordeal and a better yarn.
“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story,’’ he’d explain.
Edna used to go to the footy at Victoria Park, and should have, at least, known of Lou.
“I really didn’t notice Lou much when he was on the football field in those early days,’’ she would recall.
“I was far more interested in another player who kicked a lot of goals and was tall, dark, and handsome.
“Nothing like Lou,’’ she added.
Lou and Edna became one of footy’s most enduring romances.
The nuggety rover once told friends: “If Edna ever left me I’d go with her!’’
They married in 1948 and it agreed with Lou.
He topped the Pies goalkicking when Victoria Park was at its greatest, a feared arena that fitted more than 47,000 fans howling for victory.
On-field, though, times were lean.
From 1927 to 1936, the Pies had won an incredible six of the 10 flags on offer.
After then, though, the club was in the doldrums.
Lou, who would later coin the term Colliwobbles, knew what a premiership drought was.
By 1953, he was skipper of a team that hadn’t tasted victory for 17 years.
That was about to change.
Geelong was near-invincible coming off back-to-back flags, the last over Collingwood.
During the season it chalked up a VFL-AFL record winning streak.
Under Lou, the Pies ended it, beat the Cats again in the semis and held on grimly to win by 12 points on the last September Saturday.
John Wren and legendary former coach Jock McHale both had heart attacks after the game and were dead within weeks.
Lou outdid his famous forebears, the first premiership captain in the Pannam-Richards line.
It was his finest football achievement.
Lou never won the Copeland Trophy for Collingwood’s best, and with the lip he gave, would never charm umpires enough to win a Brownlow.
But he did win Herald and Sporting Globe footballer of the year prizes, in the time of out-and-out greats such as Bob Rose, John Coleman.
And, of course, a rough-headed Tigers ruckman who would come to be his great friend and foe, Captain Blood, Jack Dyer.
In 1955, Lou played his 250th game for the Pies and was satisfied with the milestone.
He tapped coach Phones Kyne on the shoulder at training.
“Yes Lou, what’s up?’’ Kyne asked.
“Aw, I think I might turn it up ... resign ...,’’ Lou managed to get out.
“That’s fine Lou ... OK Murray, pass it to Thorald, that’s right ...’’
And with that, training went on with no hint of sentiment and his career ended, mid-week.
But the next Saturday, before the Fitzroy game, players formed a guard of honour.
Lou ran around the ground, got a standing ovation.
“It brought tears to my eyes,’’ he’d recall.
“It was 15 years at the club, 15 of the happiest years of my life.
“It was a great thrill but a very sad moment of my life.
“When you are running around in front of 25,000 to 30,000 people, naturally you get a tear in your eye.’’
He retired and his accomplishments were counted: 250 games, 423 goals, nine broken bones, “mostly accidents, a few backhanders,’’ he said.
Legendary footy writer Alf Brown tossed “brilliant rover’’ and “scintillating dashes’’ into the mix.
“A big little man,’’ he lauded Lou.
“He was one of the finest exponents of psychological warfare applied to football.’’
And he added, what opposition players had learned only too well.
“Lou had a slow moving football conscience. He was often sorry — after the game — for things he did during a match.’’
In an era when the career path of past players meant a pub or, less often, the media, Lou’s life moved on.
He already had a pub. Daughters Kim and Nicole never lived in a proper house until they got married.
The media came in 1956, when The Sun News Pictorial asked him to fill in for Jack Dyer.
Dyer was going overseas. He’d been on six pounds a week, so Lou, typically, asked for 10.
Later, Dyer would say the only things Lou ever gave away were boomerangs, homing pigeons and handshakes.
For the inflated wage, Lou started writing straight football commentary of no real distinction.
In 1957, though, sports editor Harry Gordon gave the Lip free-rein to joke around.
Lou’s columns clowned around all right, and the one-liners and nicknames came fast.
“Sometimes I’d get an idea for a gag in the middle of the night and jump out of bed to write it down,’’ Lou remembered.
With a series of ghost writers polishing his prose, jokes were often a team-effort, Lou’s columns became required reading for footy fans.
Players were branded for life with nicknames like “The Flying Doormat’’ and “The Galloping Gasometer’’.
At the same time, his footy calling on 3XY, and the on-air jousting, took broadcasts into the entertainment era.
Later callers such as Rex Hunt follow the lead.
Television was the next step and Lou was the heart of the most iconic shows of several decades.
Dyer, Geelong’s Bob Davis and Lou were the three wise monkeys of League Teams where match selections were lost amid the wise-cracking.
World of Sport, a shambolic few hours, came to define Sunday mornings.
With the wood chop, the tug-of-war and plenty of pie-eating, it was low-budget fun.
But it was fun and mandatory viewing for football fans on all budgets.
Prime Minister Robert Menzies came on the show and left with a Huttons ham, Thomas Hardy champagne and a pair of socks.
Prime Minister John Gorton appeared another time. He got a ham too.
Dyer and Lou sniped at each other, non-stop, more thought gone into insults than footy analysis.
Lou would be a fixture on Channel 7 for 27 years before moving to Nine in 1987.
In the media he covered more territory than he ever did roving, but his newspaper stunts stood out.
Lou’s tips were crook. He earned the title Kiss of Death and wore the label with pride.
A generation of footy tipsters were punished for lateness by getting Lou’s selections.
And the cockier he got, the more readers loved it.
He mouthed off in print — and it backfired enough to keep his enemies happy.
There was one time he cut the lawn outside Teddy Whitten’s grocery shop with nail scissors.
Another, he rowed Billy Goggin across the Barwon River in a bathtub.
Jumping off St Kilda pier at 5.30am in July, sweeping Swanston St with a feather duster — it was Lou being Lou and crowds would flock to watch.
In 1981, Lou was honoured for his achievements with an MBE.
Bigger still in Melbourne at the time, he was crowned King of Moomba.
True to form, the monarch predicted a fine day for the parade.
The first wet Moomba in its 27-year history eventuated, to Lou’s delight.
A year later, incredibly, the little rover was classified by the National Trust as a person of importance.
He was a favourite with grass-roots fans, even if his life had moved well beyond Victoria Park.
Lou and Edna had their 18-square Toorak apartment and 25 hectares down the Mornington Peninsula.
When Lou turned 60, Bulldogs great Charlie Sutton paid tribute, appropriately, with a back-hander.
“He’s like an old footy boot,’’ he said of Lou.
“All tongue and no wear.’’
Lou would agree, if only about his lack of wear.
Silver-haired, to the last he would claim a likeness to Cary Grant.
In the late 1990s, with World of Sport and League Teams gone, and his Kiss of Death era over after 26 years, Lou’s star faded, but he still had his opinions.
“Shorts, mediums and talls — crikey, they’re making it sound like Myer’s lingerie department,’’ he complained of Americanisms creeping into football.
In 2003, Lou farewelled his old sparring partner, Dyer, with a customary dig.
Dyer once commented: “Lou doesn’t have any enemies, but his friends don’t like him.’’
Lou, typically, got the last word in.
“He was a genuine legend of the game,’’ Lou said.
“Or as he would put it, ‘A legion in his lifetime’.’’
In his later years, Lou still kept working, even though the schedule was less punishing.
Early in 2008 he committed himself to another year of Channel Nine’s Sunday Footy Show.
But away from the studio, life had lost its laughs.
Edna had long been in decline, Alzheimer’s coming between the inseparable couple, and she had passed away in March of that year.
Lou had visited his wife of 60 years daily at an aged care facility, living with the pain of losing her gradually.
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