At some point, though it’s hard to say exactly when, the late Les Murray became a cult figure in the Australian sporting landscape. This happened long before he slipped into his silver fox years, those more recent times in which he began to ration his onscreen appearances while the relatively younger brigade, like Craig Foster, took up his work and the central tenets of his ideology. It even happened before 1995 when Melbourne band TISM released their ARIA-award winning album Machiavelli and the Four Seasons, which featured the track, What Nationality is Les Murray?
If the exact year Murray’s cult status came into being is hard to pin down, the reason isn’t. He could – and, more to the point, would – curl his tongue around a “foreign” name as well as Lionel Messi can curl one around a defensive wall. When Murray said something like “Roberto Baggio” it sounded, at least to the ears of a generation of white-bread eating Anglo-Australians, like a precursor to foreplay – the exotically-European kind featured on those late-night SBS movies.
Perhaps, at times, Murray was more enthusiastic in his pronunciation than he needed to be but we knew why. Murray had an appealing, raised-eyebrow sense of humour, for one thing, but I think he sometimes rolled an extra R or two because, quite simply, he was practically singing for joy. Such was his love of the game and his joy to have a job he loved. It’s easy to be beguiled by and swept up in someone else’s passion, and Murray swept so many of us up in his.
Murray, like his mother station, the national broadcaster SBS (or Soccer Bloody Soccer, as it became known), was unapologetically “other”. However, as it turned out, it was an otherness that embraced and drew in the prevailing culture. “Phoodball,” he told us, was “the world game”, and we needed to see it and be part of it. If we didn’t we were missing out. Along with his long-time soul mate and colleague, Johnny Warren, Murray made it his mission – on shows like On the Ball and The World Game – to bring football to the masses. People who, for the most part, were actively dismissive of the game. As Warren noted in his 2002 biography, Anglo-Australians were inclined to circle their wagons and pin back their ears. Never mind the game’s British origins; football, they sneered, was the game of “sheilas, wogs and poofters”.
Since Murray first arrived on our screens in a short-lived Channel Ten weekly football show (a gig he got after changing his name from László Ürge and sending in an audition tape from England on which he’d recorded himself commentating a First Division game between Chelsea and Nottingham Forest) he saw Australia’s football landscape change markedly. For one thing – though it will forever remain a loaded word to some; the equivalent of a challenge, if not a threat – the word “soccer” began slipping from usage.
More importantly, Australia found room for a new national league, an attempt, if not a seamlessly successful one, to take football in this country into a new era. Murray, like Warren, also revelled in the change of fortunes experienced by the national men’s and women’s sides, particularly the Socceroos’ drought-breaking qualification for the World Cup in 2006, the same year Murray was made a member of the Order of Australia. Murray, of course, was not responsible for all or any of this, but if all that is part of the tapestry of modern Australian football, Murray was one important thread that helped create it.
There are many who dismiss sport as mere distraction, as childish ball games. But, for Murray, football was always much more than that. Upon arriving in Australia with his family as refugees from Hungary, football was a lifeline, a connection with his past, his homeland, with all that he had left behind. He clung to it like a stricken sailor to a life buoy. In this way his experience mirrored that of so many who arrived in Australia after the Second World War, so-called New Australians who understandably sought the familiar among the unfamiliar and started so many of the ethnic clubs the modern game is built on; people for whom the game of football in Australia owes a great deal of gratitude
Years ago, Murray told me in an interview that when his family moved to Wollongong his parents tried to enrol him and his brothers in a Catholic school. But the Murray boys (well, the Ürge boys), refused to go having discovered that only rugby league was on offer. So they were enrolled in Berkeley High School instead and there, “quite by instinct,” Murray said, “I tried to convince every Australian kid in school that football was the beautiful game. I’m still doing it.”
Outside of his family and two daughters, of course, football remained Murray’s great love. But he had other passions. He cherished his morning coffee and the wide-ranging discourse at Double Bay, for instance, and he maintained an enthusiasm for singing, one that began in 1968 when he joined a rock ‘n’ roll outfit called Rubber Band. Four years after that he joined another group which became one of the busiest cover bands in Sydney and they played weddings, dances, presentation nights and even “a P&O cruise to the Far East”. It was, he said, “one of the happiest periods of my life.”
If his singing career didn’t quite take off his football career did. And for that the game in Australia, never mind the viewing public, his fans, will be forever grateful. Some sporting cult figures earn their strips simply because of a funny moustache or a penchant for settling on-field disputes with violence. Murray’s elevation to culthood was built on a foundation of achievement. And his way around a name. Vale Mr Phoodball.
