Perhaps it had to be this way. For so long the heart, soul and spirit of the Western Bulldogs side that finally broke through for an AFL premiership on Saturday, club veteran Bob Murphy suffered the misfortune of being sidelined with injury right as the club’s finest hour arrived.
As sports fans, we have a habit of making a big deal out of moments as obviously loaded with emotion as one here, when Luke Beveridge draped his Jock McHale medal over Murphy’s head on the presentation dais, right when the Bulldogs coach might have taken his own bow for the football miracle he’d just engineered. It was the kind of sight that reflects the best of these games we devote so much of our own hearts and souls to.
There is meaning beyond just the winning. It’s why we remember John Landy not just as a record-breaking athlete and one of the great Australians of his generation, but as the man who stopped in the middle of a 1956 national championship race to pick his opponent Ron Clarke up off the track.
Clarke, on the other hand, is recalled primarily for being unlucky; he won neither the race in which Landy lent him a helping hand, nor gold in any of his Olympic campaigns. But he did actually get an Olympic gold medal in the end. In 1966 fellow track great Emil Zatopek walked Clarke to the steps of a plane he was boarding in Prague and pressed a package to his hand with the words, “Not out of friendship, but because you deserve it”.
Inside was the most meaningful of gifts – Zatopek’s gold from the 10,000m event at the 1952 Helsinki Games. The medal Clarke honestly deserved. Away from the crowds, hidden from cameras, one gentleman champion was showing mutual respect and fraternity with another.
What a moment for @BobMurphy02. #AFLGF https://t.co/xSMujdXJF4
— AFL (@AFL) October 1, 2016
And what better way to describe Luke Beveridge and Bob Murphy than gentleman champions? We already knew this of Murphy, because for so long he’s been a humble, self-deprecating and even, yes, gentle man in a world dominated by extroverted alpha males. The Bulldogs coach has likewise shown that humility and plain-speaking dignity have a place in a game that tends to favour those with far coarser character traits.
Not that the Bulldogs lacked for grunt today. Veteran Dale Morris was revealed after the game to have played with a broken back for the last month of this wondrous premiership campaign, and a game in which he so often threw himself across the boot of opponents and backed recklessly into packs. “Everyone plays through injuries,” Morris said afterwards, as though he’d merely stubbed his toe. A Son of the Scray indeed.
There will be an endless party out west now. It’s not a champagne kind of suburb, Footscray, but they’ll truck plenty of it in regardless and spray it everywhere, which is what they deserve. But if winning is about whooping and hollering and letting off steam, it’s also about finding small moments among the chaos and respecting the human endeavour it takes from so many individuals to create something as grand as what the Bulldogs have done here.
That’s what Luke Beveridge did when he was up on that stage on Saturday. He found composure among the mayhem to point out Murphy, remove the medal he’d just been presented by the game’s greatest player and selflessly hand it over to the man who was operating the Bulldogs’ heartstrings as Beveridge himself was playing puppet-master to the arms, legs and heads of the 22 players out there in Murphy’s place.
So often this season, as players disappeared onto the injury list and his team slid further down the pecking order as a plausible premiership chance, Beveridge sat in measured silence after games. Then he’d calmly talk his way through the positives and suggest a way forward for his team, with a face that hid what is clearly inside; some tranquil estuary at the brink of a raging sea.
Beveridge’s side has made history, that is now plain to see. But the way he honoured Bob Murphy – standing back in such silent and undeniable grace as the Bulldogs hero and stand-in captain Easton Wood hoisted that long-awaited cup into the spring air? That told football fans there are men and moments of which the game can be truly proud.
