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Reading Martin Flanagan "Southern Sky, Western Oval". Wasn't a year I had great focus on the footy, having all consuming issues in my life but reading it gives great insight into the club and team at the time.
Here's an article by the same Martin Flanagan about The Footy Almanac:
When sport collides with life outside of sport
Martin Flanagan
Published: December 12, 2015 - 11:33AM
John Harms deserves an award. For the past decade, he has stood steadfastly in the way of all the usual predictions about the print media, the book industry and the way in which sports fans consume sports.
Fewer and fewer people are reading for pleasure. At the same time, sport is being packaged on television in ever more sophisticated ways. The screens get bigger, the cameras get closer – what can a sportswriter, whose job was once to convey the excitement of sporting occasions to those not lucky enough to be there, add to the television product? Plenty, says Harms.
For the past decade, with a small team of helpers, Harms has published The Footy Almanac. He gets fans to cover every game of the AFL season, to tell the story of each match in their own language, in their own way – in short, to behave thoroughly like writers. My favourite of his publications, Footy Town, was a group of about 20 people recalling their formative footy experiences. The result was a series of earthy, poignant, funny stories.
Harms' latest offering is Long Bombs To Snake: Stories From Australian Sport. That is, I have to say, an exquisite title. Phil "Snake" Baker played full-forward for North Melbourne in the '70s. Snake Baker leapt through the roof of packs like a man bouncing on an invisible trampoline. "Long Bombs to Snake" was coach Ron Barassi's instruction to the North Melbourne players before the 1977 grand final.
But now "Long Bombs to Snake" means something else. The long bombs are now long pieces of writing. The snake is the animal vitality to be found in sport and good writing alike.
The stand-out piece for me is by a Swans supporter who works three days a week in the bookstore at the Museum of Contemporary Art called Mathilde de Hauteclocque. She's written an intimate personal reflection in the form of a player profile. For example, under "Football honours", she writes: "AFL junior level 1 coaching card. Once given the title of 'best mum kick' at training by the under-nine senior coach; I think it was supposed to be a compliment."
Under the heading "Favourite position", she shows her eye for the game: "The dual action creativity and smarts of the modern half-back flanker are very covetable for life. Stop one flow and begin another. A mix of sturdy and dash, a bit of sensible and a bit of wild. The tension of the position is very appealing."
Most sports magazines use jazzed-up language to excite the reader. There's none of that here - this is sports writing au naturel. Mickey Randall uses a XXXX beer ad to explain why Queenslanders are different from other Australians.
Matt Quartermaine, from the old comedy duo Empty Pockets, gives a suitably racy account of life as a West Coast fan coupled with his perspective on AFL clubs, having worked at some as a comic during the 1990s. "This is a history untold," he writes. "When people oohed and aahed at the sophistication of the football world back then, we knew better. We knew it was a total f---ing shambles. I suspect football still is." I suspect he's right.
Borrowing the abbreviated style of Irish writer Roddy Doyle, David Wilson writes a story about an under-13 footy match in the western suburbs of Melbourne. In this manner, he recreates a moment we all experienced at some stage in our junior footy careers: "We're onto the field …Taking our positions. The Park Orchards guys are huge. Their ruck rover struts. Chest like a rooster. He's got stubble."
Damian Balassone is a classically inclined poet. Some years ago, I read passages he wrote that used an ornate poetic structure to tell the story of a young indigenous player entering the AFL; in some weird but wonderful way, it worked. In Long Bombs To Snake, he has a series of footy quatrains.
As with most publications that treat sport as part of the world and not as something to be compartmentalised and put in a box to one side, book shops don't know where to put Long Bombs To Snake. Is it sport or is it literature? It's both and it can be most reliably obtained through the Footy Almanac website.
Harms, himself a fine sportswriter with two essays in the collection, is gearing up to do two more issues of Long Bombs To Snake to see if it can attract a following. As I said earlier, he deserves an award and, under the heading "Biggest influence on career", the fantastically named Mathilde de Hauteclocque does award him some praise: "He [Harms] confirmed for me that it would be possible, even in the mainstream publishing arena, to ply a trade writing about the collision of sport and life outside of sport, sport as vessel and metaphor for an emotional world, footy and philosophy. And that both things can shine in the process."
For more information go to: www.footyalmanac.com.au
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-new...11-glkcpw.html
Here's an article by the same Martin Flanagan about The Footy Almanac:
When sport collides with life outside of sport
Martin Flanagan
Published: December 12, 2015 - 11:33AM
John Harms deserves an award. For the past decade, he has stood steadfastly in the way of all the usual predictions about the print media, the book industry and the way in which sports fans consume sports.
Fewer and fewer people are reading for pleasure. At the same time, sport is being packaged on television in ever more sophisticated ways. The screens get bigger, the cameras get closer – what can a sportswriter, whose job was once to convey the excitement of sporting occasions to those not lucky enough to be there, add to the television product? Plenty, says Harms.
For the past decade, with a small team of helpers, Harms has published The Footy Almanac. He gets fans to cover every game of the AFL season, to tell the story of each match in their own language, in their own way – in short, to behave thoroughly like writers. My favourite of his publications, Footy Town, was a group of about 20 people recalling their formative footy experiences. The result was a series of earthy, poignant, funny stories.
Harms' latest offering is Long Bombs To Snake: Stories From Australian Sport. That is, I have to say, an exquisite title. Phil "Snake" Baker played full-forward for North Melbourne in the '70s. Snake Baker leapt through the roof of packs like a man bouncing on an invisible trampoline. "Long Bombs to Snake" was coach Ron Barassi's instruction to the North Melbourne players before the 1977 grand final.
But now "Long Bombs to Snake" means something else. The long bombs are now long pieces of writing. The snake is the animal vitality to be found in sport and good writing alike.
The stand-out piece for me is by a Swans supporter who works three days a week in the bookstore at the Museum of Contemporary Art called Mathilde de Hauteclocque. She's written an intimate personal reflection in the form of a player profile. For example, under "Football honours", she writes: "AFL junior level 1 coaching card. Once given the title of 'best mum kick' at training by the under-nine senior coach; I think it was supposed to be a compliment."
Under the heading "Favourite position", she shows her eye for the game: "The dual action creativity and smarts of the modern half-back flanker are very covetable for life. Stop one flow and begin another. A mix of sturdy and dash, a bit of sensible and a bit of wild. The tension of the position is very appealing."
Most sports magazines use jazzed-up language to excite the reader. There's none of that here - this is sports writing au naturel. Mickey Randall uses a XXXX beer ad to explain why Queenslanders are different from other Australians.
Matt Quartermaine, from the old comedy duo Empty Pockets, gives a suitably racy account of life as a West Coast fan coupled with his perspective on AFL clubs, having worked at some as a comic during the 1990s. "This is a history untold," he writes. "When people oohed and aahed at the sophistication of the football world back then, we knew better. We knew it was a total f---ing shambles. I suspect football still is." I suspect he's right.
Borrowing the abbreviated style of Irish writer Roddy Doyle, David Wilson writes a story about an under-13 footy match in the western suburbs of Melbourne. In this manner, he recreates a moment we all experienced at some stage in our junior footy careers: "We're onto the field …Taking our positions. The Park Orchards guys are huge. Their ruck rover struts. Chest like a rooster. He's got stubble."
Damian Balassone is a classically inclined poet. Some years ago, I read passages he wrote that used an ornate poetic structure to tell the story of a young indigenous player entering the AFL; in some weird but wonderful way, it worked. In Long Bombs To Snake, he has a series of footy quatrains.
As with most publications that treat sport as part of the world and not as something to be compartmentalised and put in a box to one side, book shops don't know where to put Long Bombs To Snake. Is it sport or is it literature? It's both and it can be most reliably obtained through the Footy Almanac website.
Harms, himself a fine sportswriter with two essays in the collection, is gearing up to do two more issues of Long Bombs To Snake to see if it can attract a following. As I said earlier, he deserves an award and, under the heading "Biggest influence on career", the fantastically named Mathilde de Hauteclocque does award him some praise: "He [Harms] confirmed for me that it would be possible, even in the mainstream publishing arena, to ply a trade writing about the collision of sport and life outside of sport, sport as vessel and metaphor for an emotional world, footy and philosophy. And that both things can shine in the process."
For more information go to: www.footyalmanac.com.au
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-new...11-glkcpw.html
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