By Les Carlyon
Les Carlyon, journalist and a former editor of The Age, on football great Ted Whitten. We revisit his work with this article from the archives, first published in The Age on December 31, 1995.
Captain Ted Whitten is chaired from the ground after Footscray defeated Fitzroy in his 300th game.Credit: The Age Archives
IT'S 1963 and we're at the Western Oval, the working-class cockpit behind the peppercorns and palms of Barkly Street.
Around us, out here on the Footscray plain, are rusting curios that will one day rank for Paul Keating's ''industrial museum''. Wool stores, abattoirs, foundries, red-brick warehouses stacked with blood-stiffened hides.
And Edwardian workers' cottages, thousands of them, weatherboard look-alikes with smoking chimneys, iron lacework, and picket fences. Step inside one and you'll see a ceiling rose.
Birmingham-by-Maribyrnong, it is. A hard place. Honest and simple. Much changed now that the Italians, Greeks and Yugoslavs have moved in. But still in essence a workhouse. Which means that, like Birmingham or a Welsh mining village, it needs its sport. It needs Saturday folk-heroes to leaven the weekday drudge.
In today's main event at Western Oval, Teddy Whitten, pagan god of these western tribes and a football hero for 12 years, will shirtfront Peter Hogan, a 17-year-old Richmond rover just down from the scrub. As Hogan crumbles, his jaw and his boyish dreams both smashed, Whitten tells him: "You're playing against men now."
But they have heart out in the west. Whitten visits the kid in hospital, bringing a milkshake as a present. "After all, the youngster couldn't eat solids. . . I thought this was a lovely gesture on my part." Teddy is tough and tender. Beautiful to watch, brutal to encounter.
IT'S just before the last race on a chilly night at Moonee Valley trots in the 1970s. The horses stand in their stalls, double-rugged, heads down, quietly waiting to go home. Country women share tea from a thermos.
Suddenly there is bedlam. Profanities, each louder and more strident than the one before, rumble out of the blackness. Someone is delivering a lecture on how to drive trotters. Suddenly all those tired horses are shuffling nervously and clanking their tie chains.
The big man with the expletives has an interest in a runner in the last. He looks as though he has hurried from a vaudeville show to be here. He wears a white summer suit and a red shirt. The shoes are unusual too; they might have been blue and white.
Teddy has arrived to frighten the horses. He's allowed to do these things: play at the clown, greet people with "Gidday, knackers", be as vulgar as he likes. He's a football hero, and do you remember the day he kicked that torpedo punt 90 metres?
IT'S the 1988 Bicentennial Carnival in Adelaide. Victoria loses to South Australia. Whitten, Victoria's chairman of selectors, heads for the team bus. Hundreds of SA fans wait for him, taunting and threatening. Whitten turns to Ian Cover of the Coodabeen Champions. "This could be nasty," he says, "Walk right behind me."
Chest out and wordless, Whitten strides through the mob. On reaching the bus, he turns and snarls: "Why don't you all go and get f.....". Cover thinks the words so felicitous, the gesture so stylish, he turns and says much the same himself - only to find Whitten is on the bus and the door closed.
Whitten leans out of the window. "You get 'em, Cove," he shouts. Teddy, he of the blue eyes set in a face of pure mischief, loves a joke. The blacker the better.
Ted Whitten in the locker room, 1969.Credit: The Age Archives
THE same year, during the Seoul Olympics. Whitten is lecturing schoolkids about sport. When he began playing for Footscray in 1951, he was leggy and skinny. Now, barrel-chested and big-bellied, he leans forward, his face intense, hot-gospelling about commitment and fitness and the sporting virtues. His belt breaks and his trousers slide towards his knees. He grabs his trousers and keeps talking: "And lay off the junkfood."
AROUND 1990, Whitten is in hospital with prostate troubles. The man in the next bed has a stutter. "W-w-w-what are you in h-h-h here for?" he asks. "Because I pee like you talk," Teddy tells him.
AND here's Whitten on himself: "Let's face it: I was a factory hand when I started out. I shudder at the thought of the life that might have been ahead of me had I lacked football ability.”
INDEED. Without footy, without his western suburbs lineage, we might never have heard of him, let alone made him Victorian of the Year.
And you might ask: why honor him? Why not some solemn figure from politics or business? Why Whitten in a year when the headlines were mostly about privatisation and hospital closures and the games economic rationalists play, such as the one that says two-plus-two can come up seven and my fee is $12.3 million?
Well, who loves an economic rationalist? And who will remember them? In the manner of his living and his dying, Whitten, 62, did things the solemn people couldn't do, and never will do. He brought joy to the people. In this corner of the country at least, he ended up immortal.
And don't worry that he's a sports hero, that we can't judge him by the standards we might apply to a scientist or a statesman. Sport isn't rational. Never has been, never will be.
Sport is a passion, and out of passion comes love. No point trying to work out why some become heroes and others don't. The chosen ones just go into the pantheon and refuse to fade. Think of Bradman and Les Darcy, Phar Lap and Tommy Corrigan.
Yes, Corrigan, the Irish-born jockey, killed in a steeplechase at Caulfield in 1894. He was broke and he couldn't write poetry like Adam Lindsay Gordon, but we gave him some funeral, too. When his coffin reached the cemetery, near the Carlton footy ground, the end of the procession was three kilometres away in St Kilda Road.
The mourners took 42 minutes to pass any given point. Nothing rational here: the people just loved the big-hearted Corrigan. It was the same with Whitten.
And why not? He was that rarest thing in sport: a natural. If you saw him as a kid, you can still see him in your mind: running hither and thither, always doing something, always looking pretty. When he booted a long drop kick, he would bring both arms up to shoulder height, his big hands open, like an eagle balancing itself up after some rash swoop. Beside him, modern players seem like minimalists.
When he marked, he would shake the ball in the air, a craftsman and a lair in the same body. You just had to notice him. There was even grace in the way he cocked an elbow before whacking someone. As kids, we watched him and saw everything we wanted to be and everything we could never be. He made us feel good.
Ted Whitten at training with the Victorian state-of-origin side, 1963.Credit: The Age Archives
And, near death, in June, he made us feel good again. Wasted by cancer and almost blind from a stroke, his face thinner and his skin papery, he was driven around the MCG in an open car before the Victoria v. SA game. He punched the air, a warrior until death, and slurred his war cry: "Stick it up 'em." The crowd of 64,000 loved him. Everywhere, people were weeping.
Others saw it on the 6pm news; they wept too. It was one of the sweetest, and saddest, moments in Australian sport.
And there was the manner of his going: brave and cavalier, just like his football on the outside, anyway. Halfway through his lap of honor at the MCG, he whispered to his son, Ted junior: "How much longer? I'm buggered." The exhaustion didn't show; at this late hour, Teddy wasn't going to let people down.
On this day, and at his state funeral two months later, Whitten became a remembrance of things past. We looked and saw a throwback to the days when footy was uncomplicated and not pushed around by corporate show-offs who are often famous for as long as one season.
We saw a throwback to the 1950s when hard men wound yellowing bandages around dodgy knees before going out to to play in the ruck for a quid a game. It was tribal then: no one thought of changing clubs. And honorable too: you never dobbed in another player at the tribunal.
When Whitten, the powder monkey's son who left school at 14, began with Footscray, Charlie Sutton, the coach, sometimes arrived at training in a horse and cart. This was before multiculturalism, feminism and other gentler values. The Korean war raged and commos were said to be everywhere. Frank Sedgman was the ABC sportsman of the year. Sir Robert Menzies was PM and Paul Keating was deregulating a Sydney primary school.
It was 1951, the year Raelene Boyle, Evonne Cawley and Keith Greig were born. Victoria hanged a woman for murder that year. Young men wore crepe-soled shoes. Lou Richards roved for Collingwood. Those of us who saw him for the first time marvelled that he could run for 100 minutes while talking the whole time.
The end of an era. His 321st and last game. Ted Whitten waves farewell to the crowd as he leaves the field after his last match as a player.Credit: The Age Archives
How eerie it was: Whitten set us mourning for a lost age that, given the choice, none of us would want back. And here, in Whitten, was the western suburbs fairytale. As he said, where would he have been without footy? In Victoria, footy makes folk-heroes. Anyone who grew up in a country town has heard the conversation that goes like this:
First voice: "The Jones kid is a drunk, a lout, a thief, a bully and a complete no-hoper."
Second voice: "Yeah, true, but he's the best full-forward we've had for years."
First voice: "You're right, and a nice kid too."
The west needed a Whitten. As a journalist who grew up in Footscray during EJ's heyday recalls: "They loved him out there because he was a larrikin. He made them feel good. He was like them. There was a defensiveness out there - the place stank from the tanneries and abattoirs, and maybe other people looked down on us. But we could say to them: "We've got the best player in the league."
"I can remember going to the Chinese restaurant on Saturday night with my parents. We'd take a saucepan to take home the noodle soup. And Teddy would be there. He was the only one who knew how to use chopsticks. And he'd be working the room, going from one table to another. He knew everybody.
"Footscray was different then. If you lived there, you knew everybody. It was odd: the old-fashioned Australian male thing lasted longer there than in the eastern suburbs."
The truth is Whitten might not have become immortal had he been the son of a Brighton lawyer and played for Melbourne or Hawthorn. Who do rich kids from Brighton want to stick it up?
Whitten was the urchin made good, the battler who didn't feel he had anything to apologise for, the hard man with the mischievous grin. Here was a quirky tale of Melbourne: by being good at footy, a man could rise above anything.
Some say Whitten was the best footballer ever. Who knows? There is no way to measure these things. There were certainly more successful coaches: Barassi, Parkin, Sheedy and others. Whitten's charm lay in his larrikin character, the way he stayed true to himself. He is the sort of folk-hero Australians seem to like best.
Few remember the names of the generals at Gallipoli, or even the Victoria Cross winners. Everyone remembers Private John Simpson (real name Kirkpatrick) and his donkey. Why him? He was good-hearted but a brawler. His life had been a series of dead-ends: he had been a stoker, a miner, a swaggie.
He wrote letters to his mother; the spelling was phonetic, but he was always promising to send her "a couple of quid", and did. Yet this man from nowhere touched people, even though, as someone wrote, he was dead before Australia knew he was alive.
There is no comparison with Whitten: Simpson was a hero, EJ merely a folk-hero. Maybe there is one link: both possessed those down-to-earth qualities Australians like. Both came from nowhere. In other circumstances, we could have been them.
Why is Teddy Whitten the posthumous Victorian of the year? Jonathan Swift, a posthumous Irish child, told us the answer long before the names Melbourne and Footscray appeared on maps of the Great Southland:
Whoe'er excels in what we prize,
Appears a hero in our eyes.
Hero’s farewell: E. J. Whitten, supported by his son Ted junior, leaves the MCG after a special tribute to him in June 1995.Credit: Michael Rayner
`THE SUNDAY AGE' AWARD.
`The Sunday Age' Victorian of the year award was first named in 1992 when the Premier, Mr Jeff Kennett, was judged by this newspaper to be the person who had most affected the state in the previous 12 months.
In 1993, the award was shared by businessman Mr Lindsay Fox and the ACTU secretary, Mr Bill Kelty, for their work in finding jobs for the unemployed. Last year, Mr Ron Walker and Mr Lloyd Williams were joint recipients.
`The Sunday Age' Victorian of the year aims to identify the person or persons who had the greatest impact on our lives during the year. The decision is made by the senior editors of the paper.