Hoop dreams are much more than a fantasy

WOULD a national basketball team help make Hobart great? Former premier David Bartlett thinks so.

Former premier David Bartlett at his favourite Hobart cafe, Hamlet, on Molle St, talks up the benefits of an NBL side based in Hobart. Picture: PATRICK GEE

DAVID Bartlett remembers being tapped on the shoulder by a Labor stalwart after he became leader of the state party in 2008.

“Son, premiers can’t wear thumb rings,” Michael Polley told him. “You have to take that off.”

He did, and when its absence was noted, Bartlett thinks he might have told the media he’d lost it down the back of the lounge.

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The ring, embossed with fagus leaves, was a first anniversary gift from his now-wife Larissa 18 years ago, marking “a romantic moment” they shared atop Mt Field on a hike to view the turning of the highland shrub.

David Bartlett and his thumb ring in 2008. Picture: KIM EISZELE

A fortnight after ditching it, he defiantly slipped the titanium treasure back onto the opposing digit of his right hand, and he is still wearing it this morning.

We are at Hobart Rivulet cafe Hamlet, where Bartlett, who stepped down in 2011, is possibly the most frequent customer, holding coffee meetings here up to three times a day. The IT software business he co-founded post-politics, Asdeq Labs, is next door to the not-for-profit cafe.

Bartlett exudes positivity as he lashes out on eggs benedict as well as his long black.

Why not? It’s been a big few weeks for the former premier, who is back in the spotlight as part of a consortium bidding for a National Basketball League club for Tasmania, a bid that involves buying Hobart’s biggest indoor arena, the Derwent Entertainment Centre, from Glenorchy City Council.

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Also this month, as chair of national Hobart-based charity Brave Foundation, he is monitoring the rollout of a $4 million federal grant to implement 1000-day pathway plans for teenage mothers. Born to a teenager himself, it’s a project close to his heart.

The Hobart Chargers president, zipped up in a New York Knicks hoodie, is clearly excited about the NBL club bid. Its branding will be revealed at Friday night’s Chargers game in shades of the aurora australis. That’s the purple and green southern lights, not the orange icebreaking vessel.

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The club would be known as the Southern Huskies, evoking the loyalty and pack mentality of the sled dogs that set out from Hobart with intrepid Antarctic explorers.

Bartlett would love to see a WNBL team here too, but for now his efforts are directed at getting the blokes’ game going.

Three pillars make a city great, says Bartlett, and Hobart has only two of them: a distinctive food and beverage culture and a thriving arts and cultural scene. What we are missing, he says, is a national sporting franchise to energise and unite the city.

Obviously, he would like that sport to be basketball.

Tre Nichols in action for the Chargers at the DEC. Picture: PATRICK GEE

Though he would accept AFL at a pinch, he is not a fan. It’s something he could never say in high office – even if he did thumb his nose at convention with his ring.

“One thing I’ve started to say that is almost sacrilegious is that I hate AFL,” he says. “One of the great joys of leaving politics is I don’t have to follow football.”

So that he could banter about it on the streets, he forced himself to follow the code by entering departmental tipping comps.

“Truth be told, I’m pretty sure that in my last year as premier one of my staffers did my tipping for me,” he says with a chuckle.

He has spent two years lining up the ducks to launch the multi-million dollar NBL bid, the most notable duck being the backing of former Tasmanian basketballer Justin Hickey, now a tech entrepreneur with pockets much deeper than the hemline of his old basketball shorts.

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But Bartlett says he fully appreciated the goal’s potential only in January, when he had what he calls an epiphany in Oklahoma City. He was on a two-week road trip with his son Hudson, 14, to celebrate his 50th birthday, when the pair attended an NBA home game in the once-struggling city’s old warehouse district. Bricktown is now a thriving downtown cultural and entertainment precinct with boutique breweries and hipster Tex-Mex restaurants.

“On game day, the whole city just came alive,” he says. “People were coming out of every corner to walk down to the stadium. Though we were the only two people wearing Philadelphia 76ers singlets, there was a sense of being on an epic journey with 18,000 other people on this 15-minute walk from the city and converging in this almost religious kind of ceremony in a – by NBA standards – small arena.”

That’s when it really hit him that creating this level of excitement and local pride through sport would unlock another level of potential in Hobart by becoming the city’s missing third pillar.

The top-league team he is shooting for, with its superstars living in the community, would make Hobart “the greatest small city on the planet”, a beacon for people wanting to visit, live, study and invest here.

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