Richo by Martin Flanagan

Author:Martin Flanagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2010-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Gypsy and the Doc

AT THE START of the 2009 finals series, the Saints looked a good bet. I’d seen it before, the unique excitement that accompanies a St Kilda premiership challenge, the rebirth of the dream called ’66, the numbers denoting their one year of glory, the year of the premiership team led by Darrel ‘the Doc’ Baldock. The Age asked me to get an interview with the Doc. The Doc has had a couple of strokes and doesn’t like fronting journalists. I knew a mate of the Doc’s and said I’d see what I could do. The mate is Graeme ‘Gypsy’ Lee, captain–coach of the 1968 East Devonport premiership team. Gypsy’s successor as captain–coach of East Devonport was Bull Richardson. Gypsy’s known Richo since he was a kid. ‘Matthew was always a good kid. He hasn’t changed. He hasn’t got a big head like some of the others.’ As luck would have it, Gypsy and Richo were both accorded the status of legends in the Tasmanian Football Hall of Fame on the same night in July 2010.

Gypsy’s from Wynyard on Tasmania’s far north-west coast. He went to St Kilda in 1960 when he was twenty. In 1962, he played ‘fourteen or fifteen straight on the wing’, but he’d told his young wife he was going to Melbourne for three years and, when the three years were up, he went home again. ‘Victorian football wasn’t so big in those days,’ he told me. ‘People didn’t have television.’ Allan Jeans, coach of the Saints’ 1966 premiership team, says Gypsy was ‘a very good player and a fine fellow’. In 1966, when the Doc led the Saints to the premiership, Gypsy captained Tasmania at the national football carnival and was named All-Australian. You can make a case that Gypsy would have played in the Saints’ premiership team had he stayed in Melbourne. Having seen Gypsy in his prime, I can believe it. Playing centre-half back, giving away height, Gypsy was magnificent – swift, sure in his skills, attacking direct through the middle of the ground, kicking long, skimming drop kicks that speared through the opposition defence. When I asked the Bull his opinion of Gypsy, he said, ‘A very tough cookie. And a beautiful kick.’

I didn’t see Gypsy for another thirty years when I was doing a publicity tour for The Call, my imaginative reconstruction of the life of Tom Wills. (I didn’t say who he was; I tossed in a few ideas about who he might have been.) On ABC radio in Hobart, I had been asked where I got my love of footy from. I said from my father and Gypsy Lee. When I spoke in Launceston a few days later, Gypsy turned up. It was a great pleasure to find he was the man I thought he was at thirteen, wise and worldly, the sort I intuitively trust. We had a good talk. I learned he started the brawl in the 1968 NWFU preliminary final. I also learned that

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