So St Kilda's 19-game streak is broken: the best run to start a season since Methuselah first started noticing the girls’ ankles poking out above their sandals. Big deal! Globetrotting basketball team from Harlem, the Harlem Globetrotters, trotted around the globe while winning 8,829 games on the trot! Of course, it helped that they only ever played one opponent, a team that would just as soon dance as play basketball and sometimes barely score for an entire half. And no, it wasn’t Fremantle.
2. Don Knotts
The bug-eyed actor first met the Globetrotters on the set of ghost-hunting reality TV show Scooby Doo. Knotts was a good choice for the role, too, as he pretty much always looked as if he’d just seen a ghost (and not Jimmy Jess). Knotts’ professional high came on May 16, 1961 when he won an Emmy just days after celebrating Essendon’s thrilling one-point win over Hawthorn, despite having 14 fewer scoring shots. “We really got out of jail there,” he told fellow winner and Bomber nut Barbara Stanwyck at the after-party.
3. VW Beetle
Knotts is probably best remembered for sharing an alarmingly close relationship with a possessed VW Beetle in the 1977 film Herbie goes to Monte Carlo. The plot revolves around a mad-cap motley crew trying to make it to Monte Carlo’s famed casinos in time to place a bet on Graham Teasdale winning the Brownlow. All is going to plan until Herbie falls in love with a military Jeep that looks a little like Rene Kink and hares off down a side street.
4. Adolf Hitler
The Beetle came into being when Bernie Ecclestone’s favourite despot ordered carmaker Ferdinand Porsche to produce a vehicle “of the people”. Drawing inspiration from 1933 premiers the Bloods’ all-for-one-and-one-for-all football philosophy, Porsche promptly ripped off a design from Czech carmakers Tatra, which caused a bit of a problem . . . until another German vehicle, the Panzer, sorted that out in 1938.
5. Tom Cruise
In 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg took the curious attitude that something should be done to curb the megalomania of his short and twitchy Fuhrer and planned an assassination. Like Glenn Archer’s strike on Dean Solomon in 2000, the attempt was unsuccessful, as the film Valkyrie, starring everyone’s favourite scientologist, attests. Cruise later removed his eye-patch and took Katie, Suri and Xenu to see the Pies fix up Essendon at the ‘G in round 14, a match he labelled “every bit as epic and intriguing as Battlefield Earth”.
6. Steele Sidebottom
Did not feature in the Essendon game but word on the street is that young Magpie Sidebottom is displaying all the skills of a Globetrotter since his thetans have started following the dietary plan.
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the clubs or the AFL.
