“Spinner” they called him, and “Vinny the Cat.” But that was years later, when Vin Catoggio had done everything he could to forget the worst day of his life. At his best Catoggio lit up football grounds around the country, baulking, weaving and pirouetting his way past opponents and running clear with the goals in sight.
Catoggio loved to run – along the wing, inside 50 or free into space. He was never happier than when he set off with the ball under his wing and found room to take a bounce or three. But the moment that marked Vin Catoggio’s life and the game he’s most cruelly remembered for is the 1973 grand final, when his Blues slumped to a bitterly disappointing five-goal loss against Richmond and he barely had a touch.
Back then Vin was skinny, shy and only 18 years old. He brought into that game the experience of just two late appearances off the bench earlier in the season, both in blowout wins. He spent so little time on the ground in his debut against Collingwood that he wondered whether he should bother showering.
Come grand final day, in front of 116,956 screaming fans, Catoggio couldn’t adapt to the heat of the game. “I was probably not ready,” he tells me as we settle in for lunch at Carlton cafe not far from the house he grew up in, the one his mother still lives in, just a couple of drop punts from the Lygon street end of Carlton football club’s home at Princes Park.
Under the finals system of 1973, the Blues had the weekend off in the lead-up to the decider. Vin had been a star in the reserves that year, winning the Gardiner medal as the league’s best player (he also won the Morrish medal in the Under-19s the year before), but he’d only bothered heading down to Princes Park in the week before the grand final because he’d corked his thigh in the seconds and wanted it worked on. “Go out and train with the boys,” Reserves coach Keith McKenzie told him after his treatment. “It’ll be a good experience.”
So he trained. He trained well. Blues coach John Nicholls ordered a scratch match on Carlton’s weekend off. Vin played, and he played well. There were injuries. Suddenly the little Italian kid with the afro was a chance. He couldn’t quite believe it himself but they actually picked him. “I thought, ‘shit, this is incredible’,” Catoggio remembers. “I suppose I was playing OK. But at that level, seniors is a great step up. It’s probably four or five times better than playing reserves. It’s quicker, harder, faster, stronger. I probably wasn’t ready to take that big step.”
Perhaps the Carlton selectors saw him as that year’s Ted Hopkins; destined to shine bright when it mattered and catch Richmond by surprise, offering something unexpected. In the end what they did amounted to throwing him to the wolves. Emotionally, Catoggio had worn himself out before he’d even walked through the gates. The night before he tried to calm his nerves by playing billiards on Sydney Road. It didn’t work. He felt sick to the stomach. His legs were like jelly. The rest is a blur.
What we’ve always known of the shameful reprisals that followed is from what Vin’s team-mate Brent Crosswell wrote in his classic Age column, “The year another Blue boy knew the ‘shame’ of grand final failure,” thirty years old this week, and still one of the saddest and most poignant things ever written about football. Crosswell penned fewer than a couple of dozen columns about footy, but the tender exploration of his friend Catoggio’s ordeal that day exposed football’s soul and its deepest flaws better than just about anything else ever written about playing the game.
“When Vinny came into the rooms after that game, he was pale and upset and made straight for the showers,” wrote Crosswell. “It was sad to see his solitary form sitting up in the bath, his arms resting on his knees, his head hanging down, his eyes full of tears.”
Crosswell was himself a preternatural talent who eventually played in four premierships, but also knew the sting of defeat. “If he’d had the dedication of Chris Judd,” Catoggio says of his mercurial former team-mate, “he would have won eight Brownlows.” But the personal fallout for Vin that day angered him. Crosswell had copped the same himself. At half-time of the 1969 grand final, in which he’d put in his own shocker, Serge Silvagni called him a “weak bastard” in front of his team-mates and pelted an orange into his face. Like Vin, Crosswell went to the showers and cried.
The feelings around those times are still raw for Catoggio, particularly the way he was treated by the club and some of his senior team-mates, though he’s always been his own harshest critic. “You feel like you’ve let the team down, so you feel isolated,” he says of the disappointment. “That game did hurt me in the sense that I was made a bit of scapegoat. I didn’t play the following year. I played reserves all year.”
For every moment of the decade-long league football career that followed, Vin Catoggio was, as Crosswell put it, “always struggling for a game.” His feats in the reserves were the stuff of minor legend but didn’t always curry favour with selectors, and the likes of club champions Rod Ashman, Jim Buckley and Ken Sheldon were hard to dislodge from the senior side. Nobody gave him an inch. Outward signs of encouragement or praise from coaches, selectors and senior players were rare.
Once, playing in the senior side, Catoggio had 20-odd kicks and booted a couple of goals, enough to be named second best on ground in the newspapers. Carlton dropped him for the next game. A selector told him he’d made a mistake but wouldn’t elaborate. “A mistake? Tell me anyone who doesn’t make one mistake.”
In full flight, with his afro bouncing, his stocky legs pumping and pulling off those signature blind turns, Vin Catoggio was magic. The trademark evasive skills had been honed in childhood matches - “seven or eight a side with a plastic ball” – in the narrow laneway behind his parents’ Carlton home, where he and friends were hemmed in and had no space to move. “You were forever trying to get around people.” In later years his routine moved inside the house, where he’d crank up a disco record in the lounge room and dance around three dining chairs placed in a row to imitate defenders.
In 1978 Vin finished fourth in the best and fairest in both the seniors and reserves, testament to his frustrating yo-yoing between league football stardom and total obscurity. Unless he’d kicked five goals he says he always felt insecure about his spot.
Still, Catoggio says he cherishes his time at the club and doesn’t regret a moment, even if the Carlton football club of his time sounds like Lord of the Flies. Not only did you have to earn your stripes and perform every week, there were unwritten rules and cruel tests of character. Stars of the senior side would sledge Vin and other newcomers mercilessly if their efforts fell short of expectation. It was tough love, he says.
“I remember as a young player, if you didn’t play up to the standard of the senior players, some of the senior players would walk past you and say ‘you weak prick, you didn’t put in’, or ‘you fucking dogged it’ or something. Oh mate, you’d feel low. Because they were all good players. You’d have to earn their respect to get back to them wanting to talk to you. At the time I listened to it and thought, ‘well I probably didn’t do the right thing, I probably didn’t have a red hot go.’ I took that as a thing to improve. I’ve gotta improve so those blokes look at me and think ‘I want him in our side’.”
That quest for approval never left him. Later in life he’d walk into club functions and suffer the same sinking feeling: Have I made the grade here? Do people know who I am? Am I in this class? At Carlton there was an “inner sanctum”, and then there was “the reserves world”. The constant striving for validation would affect Catoggio deeply. It’s something he’s thought about often and talks about with an endearing honesty. You wonder how such a sensitive soul even survived in such harsh surroundings.
Catoggio remembers one night at training early in 1976, when Blues coach Ian Thorogood told the assembled players to split into seniors and reserves squads. Vin had played 13 league games the season before, so figured he belonged with seniors. Wrong. “What are you doing?” Catoggio remembers Thorogood hissing at him, before directing him to the reserves group. “You belong over there. You’re not good enough.” Having worn as much abuse as he could take by then, he took off to Western Australian and played a season for Subiaco.
What Vin Catoggio really needed was a coach who’d encourage something special out of him, give him a little more love. He returned to Princes Park in 1978 and finally got it in the unlikely shape of Ian Stewart, ironically one of the fearsome Tigers who’d destroyed him in ‘73 and a coach who rubbed many Blues players up the wrong way. “I like the way you play,” Stewart told Catoggio during the pre-season. Almost 40 years later Vin beams as he repeats it to me with emphasis: “I like the way you play.”
Then three rounds into the season, under a cloud and following big losses and high-profile axings, Stewart was gone. Thankfully, better opportunities came under the coaching of Alex Jesaulenko, and in the late 70s Catoggio established himself as not only a cult figure in the game but a player of unconventional and crowd-pleasing gifts.
If he hadn’t have been knocked out by Collingwood’s Phil Carmen in the 1978 semi-final Catoggio would have played second rover to Garry Wilson in the Victorian side a fortnight later. He’d known that one was coming from what he heard as both teams walked down the race at the start of the game. “Billy Picken was yelling out ‘You’re fuckin’ dead Catoggio. You’re gonna get carried off today’,” he laughs.
When his time was up at the Blues, Catoggio was recruited across to Melbourne by Ron Barassi, who also told Vin he liked his game but then tried to change his instinctive, flamboyant style of play. “He was always saying that I was hanging onto it too long,” Catoggio says. After Catoggio kicked 4.4 on his Dees debut, Barassi upbraided him for the misses. “I couldn’t believe he gave me a spray in front of everyone. I was thinking he was going to come in and say ‘well done’,” he says. “He didn’t inspire me at all.”
There was also a late call-up for Ricky Quade’s Sydney side in 1983, Vin’s last year in league footy. He has no regrets about any of it. “I reckon I reached my limit,” he says. “My heights were what I did, and I’m proud of that. I wouldn’t have even thought I was good enough to do that.”
Through it all, Vin’s eyes still light up brightest when he talks about playing for Carlton, and what it means to him that people remember him even 30 years on from his final days as a league player. “It still feels close,” he tells me.
Perhaps he would have thrived in a different era and maybe more valued by those around him, but when Vin Catoggio talks about his life now it’s gladdening to know that he genuinely does feel the love from fans – love he didn’t always feel when he was battling away for a game at the Blues.
“I’ll be honest about this, I reckon it’s only been in the last ten years...I hope this doesn’t come out wrong...I never thought I was any good,” he says. “My mates who know me really well always say, ‘you don’t realise how good you were.’ I just think I did my part. One mate of mine is real honest. He said, ‘wake up to yourself, you don’t realise how people perceive you’. And I don’t. I never look at myself like that.”
“Over the years I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and say what a great player I was. I found that hard to believe, but what changed it was that I thought there was enough of these people coming up and saying that. They can’t all be making me feel good. I’m thinking, ‘geez, maybe I was a little bit better than I thought’. It took me a long time to get comfortable with that. I’ve always been a bit embarrassed about it.”
Maybe it’s because there was nobody else like Vin Catoggio, something not many old footballers can say. People remember him. His career lives on through the signature curly afro, which adorns t-shirts, coffee mugs and phone covers. Catoggio had a real effect on people, and four decades on from the grand final that set his unique, often brilliant football career in motion, he’s finally let himself admit it.
As we finish lunch Vin shows me photos of some of fans he meets when he’s out and about. When they ask him for a picture he takes one on his own phone too. “I went to the footy a couple of weeks ago and had about 30 people come up wanting a photo, and telling me they wore my number,” he says. “I’m blown away by that. I always speak to people, always say hello and thank them for spending time with me. If they never came up to me I wouldn’t have known them either.”
His journey to peace hasn’t been without its challenges. “I always doubted myself,” he says. “I was always down on myself a bit. I was never comfortable with myself.” But Vin Catoggio is 62 years old now, he reminds me, and not only has he figured out where his life and footy career sit in his own mind, he appreciates how others see him too. Finally, football has smiled upon him, made him feel loved for all the memorable things he did on those mud-caked fields. What a wonderful thing that is to know on grand final week.
“I was just happy to play and grateful to do what I did,” he concludes. Vin Catoggio never got his premiership medal, but as he bounces away down Nicholson street and waves me off with beaming smile, it’s impossible to conclude that he’s anything other than one of life’s winners.
