By Bob Murphy
I remember an afternoon, in the twilight of my footy career for the Bulldogs, preparing for a game deep in the bowels of the Docklands stadium. Shoulders and ankles were being taped, some arms were being oiled, a glob of Vicks was smeared in the odd set of nostrils.
All the while, you got the sense that each player’s inner voice was silently seesawing on a familiar pre-game pendulum. Loneliness and camaraderie, doubt and confidence. Tick tock, tick tock. The physical and emotional armour needed to play the game.
At that moment, our other teammates, the reserves, entered the change rooms, having already played their game earlier in the day back at the Whitten Oval. Many were limping, cut open or carrying ice packs taped to their bodies; the sight of them snapped me out of my tick-tock meditation.
Having more or less missed the age of reserve-grade football being played as the curtain-raiser to the main event, it dawned on me that I’d never seen even the regulation damage a game of footy does to someone so soon before taking the field myself.
It was only a fleeting moment and then it was gone, but I remember it clearly to this day. A moment where you realise, “that’ll be me in a couple of hours, if I’m lucky”.
Footy, even at the elite level, isn’t just about winning and losing. This game demands of its participants more physical and emotional threads than Egyptian cotton. To reduce footy down to a single thread would be disingenuous to the game – and at a stretch, maybe to textiles.
Neil Sachse passed away this week, at the age of 69.Credit: David Mariuz
Of those threads in the great quilt that makes up Australian rules football, the thread of bravery is held in high regard. If winning is king, bravery might run a close second.
There’s as many ways to be brave on a footy ground as there are to be a coward. One of my old coaches, Rodney Eade, had a good saying about this: “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” The gut-burning chase, the awkward floating ball, the tumbling ball on the ground with danger all around – all are situations where a player must make a call: should I stay or should I go?
These moments can keep players up at night. And they do. Better think quick – you get less than a heartbeat to decide. How will I react? How will I be judged? What will the moment reveal of my football heart? Footballers train for these situations, but the problem is, which one will it be on any given day?
In a way, it’s a shame we only enthusiastically laud the bravest of the brave. You know the names – Archer, Ward, Selwood, Kellaway, Riewoldt, Brown, Hodge. But they are a rare breed. They are the group that always went, that never flinched. But they are not the norm. They are the sprinkled chocolate dust on the top of the cappuccino, the rest of us are just froth and milk.
For the most part, league footballers are most proud of the times they went and haunted by the times they didn’t. More often than not, we go. Bravery is partnered with fear like music is with our ability to hear it.
Neil Sachse passed away this week, aged 69. It was in his second game with Footscray back in 1975, as a 24-year-old, that he gathered a loose football 30 metres from goal at the Barkly Street end of what was then called the Western Oval.
During a flurry of chaotic play, Neil, with the ball in his hands, half stumbled as a Fitzroy opponent charged in to make a defensive stop. Neil reacted on instinct, putting his arms up and his head down to protect himself. A nasty collision ensued. Neil was hit front-on, awkwardly, and his spinal cord was severed instantly. He would never walk again.
The footage from that day is hard to watch, but that is mostly because we know the outcome. Maybe the most unsettling thing is that after watching it, you’ll be able to reel off a handful of incidents over the years that looked far more dangerous. It sends a shiver every time.
For 18 years, I ran laps and drills around the piece of turf where that horrible accident took place. But the significance of that spot never really occurred to me until this week. Maybe it should have.
Neil Sachse did an interview with The Age’s Jake Niall in 2005, 30 years after his life changed forever. The headline read, "The One". The one none of us can bear thinking about. These are the most grim and grisly thoughts a footballer can have, but just like that day back at Docklands as I watched my battered comrades, we push them away as fast as we can.
To be in Neil’s presence was to feel a tenderness and grace. A single moment in a game, less than a heartbeat, ripped away so much of his life, and it just doesn’t seem fair. Was he desperately unlucky, or are the rest of us incredibly lucky?
Just to step out on a football field is a brave act. The ball doesn’t do what it’s told, and there is danger all around. No amount of rule changes can remove the inherent risks.
We need to keep this in mind as we watch each generation of players come through under a microscope that becomes more acute as each calendar page turns. Everyone is a judge these days and the verdicts are increasingly acidic – especially in cyber space, where no bravery is needed.
And we should remember Neil Sachse, a brave man. A true gentleman and a son of the West. Rest in peace, comrade.