The great John Kennedy always used to say: “Be humble in victory and gracious in defeat.”
So it was no difficult decision for me to go along last week and launch Ross Oakley’s book on his history as chief executive of the VFL/AFL. His tenure included the notorious period in which the league moved to merge the Footscray and Fitzroy football clubs, potentially leaving the entire western region of Melbourne bereft of a VFL team.
History records that the west rose up to raise the funds and support the club, just as history now shows we have more than 10 times the membership and 10 times the annual revenue of those days.
It could not have been known to the commissioners of the time that western Melbourne would today be the fastest-growing area of the entire country, with new money and new industries pouring in every day. They would not be able to track the likes of Facebook followers or Twitter trends, or consider the economics of multi-tenanted stadia such as Etihad, or the need for pay TV to have nine games across each weekend.
I pondered these things a few times over the weekend as we completed a successful trip to Cairns. I wondered how some of those commissioners would feel to know we’d play in Cairns against a Gold Coast team, that the majority of the supporters there were Bulldogs, and that our boys over-ran a team of hand-picked first round-draft choices genetically engineered by the league for the quick, easy premiership success we’ve had to battle for 60 years.
In our many years of battle-scarred existence, we continue to “cede nullis”. I saw some of those commissioners in the audience as I launched Ross’s book and was reminded of a line one of my oldest friends likes to use: “Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.”
BULLDOGS IN FOCUS
THE PLAYERS
Daniel Giansiracusa | A family affair
Tom Liberatore | Keeper of the kennel
Tory Dickson | Fatherhood and football
Jason Tutt | My best moment so far
Mitchell Honeychurch | My first six months
Jordan Roughead | Still living the dream
Tom Campbell | Heartbeat of the West
PETER GORDON
