Follow the Bulldogs and enjoy a game. Just came across this story from Helen Garner and how she became entranced by footy while taking her grandson to footy practice.
Really interesting, perceptive and sweet.
People laughed at my interest in my grandson’s footy team - but I found it a source of strange bliss
Helen Garner
I always knew football draws to the surface a whole well of emotion. What I didn’t know was I too contained such a well
Sat 23 Nov 2024 01.00 AEDT
I hear a burst of cleats on the concrete behind me and turn in time to see the U16s emerge from the rooms and stride towards the ground. Our boys. My God, they are men, in their vertical stripes and white shorts, even the little skinny ones are men: the groupness of them is what makes them men, moving with purpose in a thick bloc. Why do I feel like crying?
What are these tears? What do they mean?
I always knew, without trying to articulate it, that footy goes very deep in people, particularly in men; that it draws to the surface and makes unshameful a whole well of otherwise inaccessible emotion.
What I didn’t know, late in the summer of 2023, was that I too contained such a well.
I was 81. I was finished as a writer – bored, burnt-out, a shell, too deaf to sit through a trial and too lazy to invent a story, let alone write a novel. My memory was failing. I had glaucoma, my joints ached, I’d lost three inches in height. I couldn’t ride my bike or climb on a chair to reach the top bookshelf in case I fell and fractured my osteoporotic skeleton. Whenever an editor tried to commission a piece of work from me, I would think, “I can’t be bothered”.
I volunteered in my idleness to drive my youngest grandson to twice-weekly U16s Aussie rules football training. I would drop him off and duly go straight home. But one warm February evening, watching this recently bulked-up creature jog away to his teammates on the sun-parched oval, I heard a little whisper inside me: you won’t be here much longer. Any minute now he’ll be fully a man, and you’ll be dead. Wake up, old girl. There might be something here for you.
I always knew football draws to the surface a whole well of emotion. What I didn’t know was I too contained such a well