My Saturday: The Lion king

FOR AS long as I can remember Saturday meant football or cricket. Or wishing it was football or cricket.

As a kid I dreamed of playing AFL football for Fitzroy or Test cricket for Australia. I didn’t much care which it was. I just loved my sport.

I used to send down a few left-arm thunderbolts – or at least I thought they were thunderbolts – and I was fortunate enough to play a bit of A-Grade cricket with Wesley CBC in Warrnambool at 15. We even won a couple of premierships.

I still reckon the Boxing Day Test at the MCG is one of the great days on the Australian sports calendar, and I get there whenever I can. If things had worked out differently I would happily have pursued a cricketing career.

But footy was always in the blood. After my Dad played at Fitzroy he coached Koroit and Colac in the Hampden League so as a really little tacker, Saturday meant going to the footy with him.

Tuesdays and Thursdays were good because they were training days and I got to kick the footy around while Dad was 'at work’. But nothing compared to Saturdays.

I was going on four when Dad coached Colac to a 1985 premiership, and there was a picture in the local paper of me holding up the premiership cup. I remember it vividly. The cup was nearly as big as me, and it was the highlight of my early life.

As I got a bit older footy started to mean different things. At six and seven all the kids from our team would walk around the boundary line, behind the parked cars, recruiting kids from the other team for a game out on the back oval.

And it wasn’t just a friendly kick. It was serious stuff.  The first half was footy, but invariably the second half would deteriorate into a punch-up.

It was as fierce as it could get. And if things weren’t going our way we’d go and get some of the older kids to help sort things out.

Looking back, it was a defining time in my career. Maybe I can blame a few of the early indiscretions in my AFL career on those days back in the bush.

Whatever, I looked forward to it every week. And for a few years while I was learning to lace up my boots I looked forward to hanging it on a fella who went on to coach at St.Kilda.

Grant Thomas was captain-coach at Warrnambool, who were arch-rivals of South Warrnambool.

No matter where you played in the Hampden League, you either loved Warrnambool or you loved to hate them. Just like Collingwood. So he was public enemy No.1 in the Brown household.

Thomas was also a gun full forward, and was the HFL’s top football personality. Often he and Dad were direct opponents so I was right there all the time, changing ends every quarter to be near my old man and pay out on his opponent.

I had to eat a bit of humble pie, though. In between the Colac flag in ‘85 and a South Warrnambool flag in 1990 Thomas won four in a row. He also played in the HFL representative side under Dad before taking over as coach when Dad stood down so I had to ease up on him a little.

Footy wasn’t just about the bush. One Saturday, when I was 10, Dad took me into the Fitzroy rooms at Princes Park, the club’s home ground back then.

It was a real treat. I met guys like Richard Osborne, Paul Broderick, John Ironmonger and Michael Gale. For a country kid it was fantastic. A few years later I got an autograph from Paul Roos and Alastair Lynch who became two of my heroes.

Turning 10 also meant I was allowed to play juniors at South Warrnambool. Real footy. That was fantastic. And at 15 I played my first senior game. That’s another story I remember well.

We lived on a farm at Koroit and there were always plenty of chores to be done. But because Saturday was football day it was usually a day off. Not this day.

The old man got me up at 5am and made me go fencing on the family property at Bushfield. I couldn’t believe it. At the time I was filthy although I worked out later that he was actually just trying to keep my mind off the footy.

My second game at Camperdown was a bit special, too. There were some pretty tough farmers round Camperdown, although the South Warrnambool boys weren’t backwards in coming forward either.

There were three or four all-in brawls and three send-offs, and by the end of the match there were only two players in the South Warrnambool forward line – me and another 15-year-old kid.

It was a pretty quick learning curve. Most Saturdays were. But I wouldn’t change it for anything.