Barassi: The Biography

By Peter Lalor

Long before Ronald Dale Barassi played his first match of Australian rules football, he'd already made a significant impact on the game. At the age of five his soldier father was killed at Tobruk, and so great was the footy fraternity's respect for the Barassi family, that several years later the father/son rule was introduced. Innovative, creative, visionary, and ferociously tenacious, Ron's achievements are legendary. As a champion player he is credited with having all but invented the position of ruck rover and as a premiership coach he is said to have revolutionized the use of handball. He was also one of the first (and certainly one of the loudest) to push for fully nationalizing the game. But as integral as Ron Barassi is to football, he is quick to point out that, "It was never my life." Now for the first time Barassi tells his story—the whole story—in his own words. Barassi goes behind the legend to reveal the devoted family man, the dabbler in the arts, the champion for disadvantaged kids, and the tale of a fatherless boy who was determined to make his own way in the world. Barassi is a wonderfully warm, astonishingly self-deprecating, and deeply personal portrait of an Australian sporting legend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Unwin
• Release date: Nov 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781741762402

Peter Lalor

Born in Bendigo, educated in Melbourne and later marooned in Sydney, Peter Lalor is an award winning author and journalist. He has written a number of books including the best-selling Ned Kelly True Crime prize-winning Blood Stain and The Bridge, a history of The Sydney Harbour Bridge. A cricket writer for The Australian newspaper he has worked as a journalist for 25 years.

Book preview

BARASSI

PETER LALOR

BARASSI

THE BIOGRAPHY

First published in 2010

Copyright © Peter Lalor 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia

www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74175 212 0

Set in 11/15 pt Electra LH by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Mum, who called me in from the backyard to listen to the last half of the 1970 grand final. For Dad, for introducing me to the game. And to Sue, Lucy and Harry for all their patience and support over the years compiling this book.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Walking on water

THE FIRST QUARTER: THE HAND HE WAS DEALT

1 Ron Barassi is dead

2 Raising Ron

THE SECOND QUARTER: PLAYING THE GAME

3 What do you do with a boy like Ronnie?

4 A ruck-rover is born

5 The first premiership

6 Marvellous Melbourne

7 A wedding, a perfect game?

8 Ape Head blows the grand final

9 Ten mad minutes of football

10 Captain material

11 The biggest name in the game

12 Drop Barassi

13 A body blow

14 One more for the road

THE THIRD QUARTER: THE SUPER COACH IS BORN

15 The death of loyalty

16 My captain, my coach

17 Learning on the job

18 A finals flop

19 A premiership coach

20 A last lap

21 Handball, handball, handball

22 Bye-bye Blues

23 A winter off

24 The coach takes two

25 Shinboners shine

26 One for the downtrodden

27 Not a natural

28 A car crash

29 Love me two times

30 The super coach and the superstars

THE FOURTH QUARTER: THE LEGEND

31 The prodigal son returns

32 Home is where the hurt is

33 A curious mind

34 Between jobs

35 Swan song

TIME-ON

36 Still fighting

References

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

WALKING ON WATER

THE SCREEN FLICKERS high in the stands, a fit old man steps out onto the brightly lit Yarra River. Bearing a torch, dressed in white like a prophet from some strange religion, he sets the jaw, grits his teeth against the tremors in his hands and legs, and continues to walk. On the bloody water, but it’s not Jesus Christ, it’s ‘B’rass’, as they say down these parts, clipping his name back to a single hissing syllable.

On certain occasions he’s Ronald Dale Barassi. So familiar that strangers use the second name with the intimate formality of a mother. Not even the birth certificate is hidden from them. You would know that bristling moustache, that set of the jaw, that look that says ‘if it is to be it is up to me’. It’s the look he got every time the football was in dispute, every time courage was called for, every time a challenge arose, every time a match needed to be won and the side needed him to resuscitate their spirit. Breathe life into their limbs. Raise them up.

He’s not making this look easy. This walking on water business. The effort is always obvious with Barassi. And in truth it’s no miracle he is remaining above the dark waters, only the ankles of his immaculate clobber wet. It’s trickery. He’s edging nervously along a submerged platform, holding the 2006 Commonwealth Games torch so tight there’ll be grip marks in the metal handle.

It’s an in-joke, and everybody born on the right side of the Barassi Line, even a fair few born the other side of it, get the joke. Who knows what the other elite sporting sons and daughters of the Commonwealth will make of it. The Indians will suspect he is some form of guru. Others will look at the flying trams, little boys, poetry and ducks, and conclude that Melbourne has more than fluoride in its water.

Australian football is the religion down here in Victoria. Barassi is its firstborn son, the boy who became its prophet and its messiah. In 1965 the Bulletin ran a cover story that talked of the Barassi cult. He was the hot gospelling coach. The miracle worker who turned sweat into premierships. The evangelist who said the faith must be spread.

The grand final is this tribe’s judgement day, an annual day of reckoning. And he has gone there 17 times. Winning it is the rapture. Six times as a player he was there as a winner, and four times, with two clubs, he did it as coach.

When he said ‘winning is better, trust me, I know’, they trusted him.

He took the tablets from the Smith brothers, Norm and Len, the pair that divined the essence of the game and the sacrifice it required, and he carried them down the mountain.

He was more than a coach. He was the evangelist who pushed for the game to be taken into heathen lands. Calling for the church to root itself in sinful Sydney, even to drive on into the tropics of Brisbane.

They call it the Barassi Line because that is the invisible division imagined by an academic to describe the two tribes of this country. On one side lay those who know Australian Rules, and on the other side lay the others who only knew one thing about football—and that one thing was his name. The spirit was too big to be contained by arbitrary boundaries.

The screen flickers again.

Ron Barassi, it seems, has always been among us, urging us towards heroism, even if it is only to watch and feel better because it exists.

Ronald Dale Barassi emerged from the topography of Australian history. Heroism and football were coded into his DNA.

Grainy black and white images flash across the screen.

Images of muddy premiership celebrations and death on the battlefield in Tobruk. The first Ron Barassi done too soon, the boy sent to the bush and raised on the hard ground, silhouetted by the light, reared among the straggling migrants left behind from the gold rush—frontier people burnt hard. Great-grandma, an English rose transplanted to the colony, gave birth in a slab hut to the first white baby ever seen in those parts. Great-grandpa Giuseppe brought his foreignness to a most foreign place.

The boy left alone on the dirt road, kicking the ball and retrieving it, pitched in battle against himself. Yearning for a place where there are enough kids to form a team. A league. A crowd.

The football journey is a movie script. Dad’s jumper, a lonely bungalow for the teenager at the back of the stern coach’s home in the city, the failures and the flash of inspiration that saw No. 31 come to symbolise the fierce determination of the game. The set of the jaw again. The clenched fist. The fanaticism. The eras and the colours change. A red-leg no more, he becomes a blue-belly, a Shinboner and then a swan and there is endless ticker tape. Champagne filters through the bristling moustache and pours down the chin onto that alpha male chest, and the images come thick and fast. Endless miles of newsprint stretch out, around the continent and back, every page another Barassi story. A car crash. A fiery clash with Brent ‘Tiger’ Crosswell. A spray at the umpires, a jostle with the opposition coach. This grand final. That grand final. The relentless, pitiless pursuit of victory. A call to arms. The game must test its boundaries, but Ron Barassi has no limits.

He keeps pushing into time. If it is to be it is up to me. A public figure he is elevated and venerated, but he is forever slapping away hands that would pat him on the back. He is forever Barassi. Urging and challenging. Himself alone and ageing now. He scrabbles the Kokoda Track crab-like. Knees that won’t let him walk forward force him sideways, lurching with a hip and shoulder charge against the mountainous jungle. The 70-year-old knocks aside a hand offered by a guide as they cross a river on a slippery log, just as he had knocked away the hand of a young player as he struggled to get up in the last of his 254 games. A Mongolian bike ride. A charity walk. State and national awards. But he is forever Ron and sometimes he flashes back. The muscles twitch beneath the crisp shirt, itching to be in a sleeveless jumper. Thirty-one on its back. New Year’s Eve 2008 he is crashing a pack again. Flying across a St Kilda footpath, he brings a young punk down and the gang turns on him in the gutter with their boots. He grimaces into the camera the next morning, a latter day Clint Eastwood, bruised and bloodied. Must get that shoulder seen to. It is news so big it is relayed around the world. He still resonates. At 72, Ron Barassi stepped up to save a woman and when he fell down they kicked him. Do you need to know anything else about how far we’ve fallen? You don’t piss on statues and Ron’s already cast in bronze outside the MCG, a towering icon putting his high-laced boots through the ball in a classic pose.

And we now have seen the arc of the life we value the most. A heroic sporting life. From boy to man to elder statesman and statue. It’s as if he has taken the minerals from the landscape of his birth and through will and the heat of his passion forged them into a metal.

And still he is at it, whispering and laughing in a friendly, avuncular style on the radio once a week. At least once a month, the press drop by like relatives visiting grandpa. A picture story because he has shaved the moustache. His thoughts on that. Their reports on his latest adventure. He never tires of a challenge.

To understand how Ron Barassi shaped football it might be best to ask what shape football would have taken without Ron Barassi. As a player at Melbourne he was in six premiership sides. It was a team of stars, but he rated its most inspirational player week in, week out, year after year. His bone-shattering bumps and blood-and-guts war cries urging them to a higher plane and getting them over the line when they had no right to. He played what is rated by many as the greatest ever premiership game in the hard-fought 1959 final. Norm Smith talked of that ‘cold fury burning inside him’. The coach said his charge was never beaten. It was just that the games were called off before he could win.

It’s a matter of debate as to whether the ruck-roving role was invented for him or others. The term certainly entered the football lexicon because of Barassi and it was defined by his hard-hitting, gut-busting running and clean ball use. Not to mention the overhead marking.

Coaching? Well, that’s a big one. Would Carlton have won in 1968 and 1970 without him? Carlton might have won 1968 without Barassi, but in 1970 it was his impulsive decision to put Ted Hopkins on and his revolutionary demand they handball that changed the game. Changed football. Yes the players were disciplined in the second half, but from where had that discipline come?

North Melbourne had the players too, but it was the very presence of Barassi that attracted many of them. Malcolm Blight and Keith Greig were superstars, but both would be forced to admit he urged them on to something greater. By the time he was at the Kangaroos his very presence attracted success. The great players wanted to play for him and rushed to the club to study at his feet.

He was in the middle of a project. He wanted to create the one true, whole and national footballer. A man in his own image.

Ron might have lived an unexamined life in his own head, but others have tried to decode the signals.

Robert Pascoe wrote in The Winter Game: ‘His football career would contain a curious paradox—it seemed to most of the football fraternity that he was the rugged individualist. In classic photographs he is the man whose fierce kicks goalward win the match, despite the efforts of his opponents to pin back his arms. So he stands as a potent symbol of postwar Australian masculinity. But Barassi had also learned well the Golden Rules enunciated by Len Smith and was wedded to the discipline of the team plan . . . By one of the great ironies of Australian sporting history a man who was to help shape modern Australian notions of masculinity himself grew up fatherless.’

Ron Barassi learnt about life through a game, on the field and in the sheds. He was the first to do it in full public gaze—its first multimedia celebrity. The first larger-than-life sporting figure the game produced. Others stole the spotlight here and there, but never here, there and everywhere else over half a century. Ronald Dale did. Ron Barassi has been part of Australian life, from the moment the haunting strains of the Last Post floated across the MCG to remember his fallen player–soldier father in 1941 until now.

If there were better footballers, there weren’t many, although it could be argued that many were born with more talent. If they were more determined or more spirited, more dedicated or more relentless, more passionate or more fearless, they have hidden themselves well. Others may have had one, two or most of these traits. Barassi had them all. Barassi is them all: first son of the modern game, the original ruck-rover and ever the innovator. There were few who did all that and emerged believing they owed the game a debt. Few who followed the call to foster and expand it so passionately.

The Barassis were migrants. Gold seekers turned farmers in a place they called Shicer Gully. A mischievous German joke, it means shit hole. Maybe that’s where the determination comes from.

And in the end he turned out to be humble, friendly and strangely private, despite a life conducted before the packed stands and microphones. He took life as it came and people as they came too. He was at the same time naive and knowing. The greatest ego in the game and yet a self-effacing entity oblivious to the stares and the absolute respect. He is, as Eddie McGuire once said, the only man in Australia who doesn’t know he is Ron Barassi. And you have to love him for that.

His place in our life is huge. Peter ‘Crackers’ Keenan once wrote that ‘you can’t have life without air, you can’t have football without Ron Barassi’.

THE FIRST QUARTER

THE HAND HE WAS DEALT

CHAPTER ONE

RON BARASSI IS DEAD

‘Ron Barassi came from the country an unheralded country lad, and made a name in our national game for his sportsmanship as well as his ability. He departs a man honoured by his peers and those who cheer.’

—Sporting Globe, 20 August 1941

MELBOURNE’S NO. 31 is dead. A gritty rover, a premiership player, cut down mid-season somewhere in northern Africa, half a world away from the muddy fields of Melbourne and its crazy-brave winter game.

He is 27 years old, married, and has left behind a five-year-old son of the same name. A Ron Barassi to carry on. A gift to the future. One who will lead his tribes to the promised land and walk on water, but all of that is for another, brighter time. In 1941 there is this terrible, terrible moment and nothing else.

This is the most important event in Ronald Dale Barassi’s life. He is cut adrift, thrown into the world fatherless. Others will nurture and coach, but from now he is left to navigate the world without a father’s love or guidance.

What is a five-year-old to make of death? Later the adult would speak of an emptiness that engulfed him in the dimly lit room of a modest bungalow in Melbourne’s western suburb of Footscray.

What does death make of a five-year-old? It is Ron Barassi’s earliest significant memory. A plank has given beneath his feet. Flames of grief engulf that dimly lit sitting room. Flames he would emerge from. Not unscarred, although they were marks nobody would be allowed to see.

‘Ronnie, darling, Daddy is dead. He’s not coming home.’

Memory is unreliable, but the sadness of that moment is indelible and remains with the man into his seventies. ‘We were in the lounge room and there was absolute grief. My mother and uncle were sitting on the lounge crying and I snuggled into Mum. I knew she was in great pain. She was in absolute grief.’

Did they say he died a hero? Would they have known? He certainly left as one and the boy would forever be told his father was one.

Ronald James Barassi had played in Melbourne’s 1940 premiership just 10 months before. That Saturday was a glorious time, the best day a Victorian could hope for. The Demon boys were the toast of the town, but the 26-year-old barely had time to celebrate. He is not in the 1940 Melbourne Football Club team photograph taken in the days after the win. There was no time for that. He had already gone. He had enlisted and the war demanded his presence; he was due back at the Puckapunyal barracks. The train was leaving for Sydney. The boat, for who knew where.

Ron Barassi kissed his wife Elza goodbye, ruffled Ronnie’s hair and slipped off to the country town of Guildford to see the family and ask his father to care for the pair should anything happen.

The new football season was soon in full swing. Ron’s mates were still chasing the ball on wintry parks, as men have always done, while a small band of soldiers began to dig into the hard ground of Tobruk, as men have always done, but Ron’s body lay somewhere in a graveyard. It would be over half a century before anybody from his family could wet that grave with their tears.

Ron died on 31 July 1941 but news did not reach home for at least a week. Nobody was in a mood to note that the date of his death corresponded with the number on his jumper. A number that was to become the most famous in football.

He was a good bloke, Ron. Something of a good-natured larrikin, he loved a beer, a laugh, a game of two-up and whatever other game was on. And he was a VFL (Victorian Football League) footballer. A premiership player no less. That set him apart in the anonymous khaki world where men were divided only by rank and rancour. Soldiers pointed him out to each other. The Victorians did anyway. Maybe the South Australians and Western Australians too.

Plenty show up for his funeral service in Tobruk. Some of them may have seen him play less than 12 months before.

Elza was at work when the telegram arrived. Her brother opened it and met her at the bus stop when she returned from work. Ron Barassi Jnr was in the country with cousins but was brought back to the city the next day and remembers the devastation among the adults gathered in that dark room. Norm Smith took Elza on his knee and comforted her; somebody must have got news to Norm and his wife Marj who lived nearby. Norm, then a 26-year-old red-headed Melbourne forward, was a star of the competition and a close friend of the dead soldier and his wife. His mate was dead, but now he had to find the right words and gestures to deal with Elza in her grief. The Smiths and Barassis were like family. Elza had attended their October wedding alone. Ron had already gone to Sydney. She and the boy were left with her brother’s family in Footscray.

When the ground opens beneath a child’s feet somebody must catch their hand or they will fall. Elza, Norm and Marj were there, practical and reliable, down-to-earth people, people who could be relied on in circumstances trivial or tragic. They wouldn’t indulge the boy, but they wouldn’t abandon him either.

Elza must have looked at the lad and wondered what would become of them. Norm too would have looked at young Ron, so much his father’s son, so much a Barassi, and determined he would do what he could to see him raised appropriately. Norm Smith was a man with a clear sense of duty, and his duty would be to see the boy and his mother through it all—to stand in as a father figure.

A child may know little about death except that his father was gone but there was an incomprehensible notion that he would never again feel the crush of those strong hands as they lifted him from the floor, or feel the scratch of his stubble, the warmth of his breath. To see the adults of your world weeping and lost must be a frightening experience. These were the people who comforted you and now they were beyond comfort. The situation must have been confusing and alarming.

The grief Ron felt sat dormant inside him for years. At times he would check himself against his father and his achievements, but he was older than his father most of his life, and achieved more than him very quickly. The sadness came more readily with age. Later in life he would sometimes cry for Ron Snr, for the father he never had.

When Ron Jnr and his second wife Cherryl made the journey to Tobruk he stood by his father’s grave and wept. Alone on the hard ground where they had laid the young man to rest, he poured his heart out, but has little or no memory of what was said.

‘Cherryl and I are the only family people who have been there,’ he says. She left him alone at the grave.

He was wearing his mother’s wedding ring around his neck at the time and thought he might leave it, but changed his mind. ‘It was very emotional. I talked to him and I cried and I had to clear my throat and I spat . . . on his grave.’ Ron remembers saying, ‘Sorry Dad.’ It’s a story he tells to try to lift the awful sadness of his situation—a defence mechanism. But there’s also a sense that here in this war cemetery a family reunion took place. Finally Ron felt like a boy in the presence of his father. It is the only conversation he has any memory of between them. He had never been in the habit of speaking to his absent father through life, although it might be argued his whole life was a dialogue with the man. ‘I had thought of bringing his body home, but I changed my mind on that too, because I thought that if he was able to speak he might say that he wants to stay with his mates, you know? So he’s still there.’

Ron has marked 31 July in a quiet way over the years. Sometimes he goes with Cherryl to lunch, sometimes he reads a book about Tobruk. ‘I think about him, but it’s not good for me to go too deeply into it,’ he says with a quiver in his voice. ‘I have, but it is not worthwhile.’ Psychologists would say he sealed the lid on his grief, only too aware how crippling it could be if opened. Ron Barassi knew all his life that with the right physical or emotional effort all situations could be managed or overcome.

Ron Barassi knows that you pick yourself up again and there is nothing to be gained from wallowing. Set yourself a task. Achieve it. Do it again. Never, ever allow the empty moment, lest the earth open again.

Almost 70 years after this terrible day Ron allowed himself to be subjected to complex psychological analysis by two psychologists. They were genuinely stunned by his ability to rise above the psychological trauma of his father’s death and lead an apparently undamaged life, but one made a guess that he has carried it locked up inside for his whole life. ‘There’s a lot of unresolved grief, there’s a lot of this pain, and what he’s done is put it in this little box and tucked it away and he doesn’t open that box for anyone. If he opens it he shuts it very quickly,’ psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg said.

The death of a parent is the most crippling psychological experience a young person can suffer. ‘He shouldn’t be as good as he is. He should be a bloody wreck. He should have insecurities. He should have anxieties. He is one of the most remarkably resilient human beings we have ever encountered,’ Carr-Gregg added.

Ron survived because from this terrible moment on he was surrounded by charismatic, strong and loving adults who nurtured and encouraged him, who told him he was both normal and special. They were people with old-world integrity who never left any doubt about the difference between right and wrong, achieving and underachieving, success and failure. Three of them, Elza and Norm and Marj, were in the room in Footscray that July day.

Ron lived his life with a sense that his father was a good man, a man he would have liked, and hopefully a man who would have been proud of his achievements. It is partly circumstance that saw him play out his early football life in the same colours his father had worn and that the men who trained and showered and played with his father were still there when he did the same thing. It is no coincidence that he wore his father’s 31 for all but one of his 254 games.

Back in 1941, Ron and Elza were catapulted out of their relative comfort zone. They were already buffeted about by Ron Snr’s enlistment, leaving the small home the couple rented and moving in with relatives, but over the next decade mother and son would move from one place to another, not always together, forever on the rebound from the tragedy that had unfolded when the telegram that originated in the dust, din and tragedy of Tobruk arrived at Coral Avenue, Footscray, in the middle of a cold Melbourne winter.

The Barassis weren’t city people. They had moved to town when Ron Jnr was three months old so his father could play for the Melbourne Football Club. Almost a century earlier the disparate strands of their family had travelled in the opposite direction. Ron’s great-grandfather had set up home on an old dirt road outside Guildford, a gold mining settlement between Castlemaine and Daylesford, and the family still lived on the modest farm in much the same way they always had. There was no electricity, no running water and just a few neighbours scattered along the isolated dirt track.

There was grief here too when news from Tobruk made its way to Carlo Barassi, Ron Snr’s father, the boy’s grandfather. He knew this would happen. He had been heavy with the thought his son would be taken for some time. He had dreamed of Ron’s death before the news arrived and hadn’t been able to shake off the feeling of dread.

Carlo had asked his eldest daughter Daisy to accompany him to the station to wave Ron off when he left for the war. She couldn’t do it. Carlo went alone, and when the train started to slowly pull out of the station his son stepped back onto the platform and snatched another moment. Standing in his uniform, he saluted his father before climbing back onto the train and making his way towards the war.

Carlo shuddered.

‘I knew then I would never see him again,’ he told the family as they gathered together in sadness in the old home on Shicer Gully Road.

The grief-stricken old man later planted trees to create an avenue of remembrance on the road into Guildford. Daisy, like Carlo, never moved away from Shicer Gully Road and missed her little brother all her life, and would still weep over his loss when she was in her seventies.

The Barassis were well known in these parts and Ron was something of a local legend. News of his death echoed through the old mining district, and up the road in Castlemaine they flew the flags at half mast in honour of ‘one of the district’s well-known sporting champions’ (Castlemaine Mail).

Football stops for nobody, but the Melbourne Football Club paused and caught a sharp breath when news that the good-natured rover was gone.

Norm Smith, Ron Baggott and Richard Emselle were team-mates of Ron Barassi Snr and his best friends. They shared a love of cricket and tennis and life. Photographs from the time capture them glistening with youth and success. Fit young men in the prime of life, they are masters of the game they love and it has served them well. Ron had been plucked from the Bendigo league. They lived in tight suburbs with little space, but there was electricity and running water and the bright lights of Melbourne. These young men were born during the First World War and raised in the Depression. They knew when times were good and up until now these had been times when a strong-bodied man could get a few bob for kicking a footy on the weekend and through his skill land a job arranged by the football club.

Ron Baggott sits on the edge of his bed in an old people’s home over half a century later and sorts through what is left of the memories of the times he shared with Barassi as young footballers in 1940s Melbourne. The specifics are hard to locate, but there’s a sense there of the men and their relationship that age can’t fade. ‘He was a good bloke, Ron Snr, a very good bloke. He wasn’t a very fiery customer. He was in and out of the side a hell of a lot . . . he wasn’t that big.’

The footballers formed a guard of honour on the MCG after the news came through that No. 31 was gone. ‘There were a few tears shed,’ Baggott told Ben Collins some years earlier. ‘Tough footballers who tried to knock your block off were crying.’

Baggott and Norm Smith stood in the middle of the MCG and cried like men have no right to, then wiped away their tears and played football.

It’s a strange thing to search the newspapers of the time for the death of Ronald James Barassi. While his son can command front page at the age of 73 for shaving off his trademark moustache, mention of the death of the father, a premiership player the year before, is not big news.

It becomes stranger if you accept the common wisdom that he was the first VFL player to die in the war, although there is some quibble about this oft-quoted fact.

Football historian David Allen, co-author of Fallen, The Ultimate Heroes, a book about players who died in various conflicts, argues that Barassi was not the first to die in the Second World War. According to his research eight former VFL players were killed before Barassi died on 31 July. However, only one, Gus (Leo) Young of Hawthorn, could be considered an active player. The other seven had long retired from the game. Young, a promising forward, played 10 games for Hawthorn in the two seasons before his death at sea in the Middle East on 29 May.

Clubs lost a lot of players to the armed services. In fact on 6 August the sports pages of the Argus ran an account of the number of absent men. ‘Camps were responsible for the absence from Melbourne of McGrath, Dullard, Lock, Lenne, Fischer, and Hingston, who will, however, be available. Players on active service who were reported to be well are Maher, Ball, Furniss (Darwin), Truscott, Atkins, and Ron Barassi.’ Similar accounts were given from other clubs in much the same way modern papers run injury lists.

Of course Barassi was already dead a week when the Argus ran its report. News of his death appears to have taken time to filter through to the family and the public. It was not unusual for a time lag before a family was notified.

Round 18 of the 1941 season was played on Saturday 3 August with everybody apparently ignorant of Ron’s fate. His mate Norm Smith kicked five for Melbourne in its win over Geelong in front of a crowd of 6,669, in a game that was reportedly ‘below premiership class’.

Football in 1941 was low on the list of media and fans’ priorities, as was demonstrated by the small amount of column space dedicated to the game and the small attendances. The VFL was struggling, and Geelong had just announced it would stop paying its players after previously cutting their remuneration from £2 a week to £1 for matches in Melbourne and 30 shillings for home games. Other clubs followed suit or had already done so.

Attendances at matches dropped significantly during the war, with 18,000 fewer spectators at the 1940 grand final than the previous year.

In subsequent years three other Melbourne players from the 1940 grand final would die during the war: Syd Anderson, Harold Ball and Keith ‘Bluey’ Truscott. Some 56 VFL players died in the conflict that took over 40,000 Australian lives.

The death of Ron Barassi Snr should be seen in this context. Death was a depressingly common occurrence. One man’s death, even a league footballer’s, was a small pebble falling into a large body of water.

On 8 August the Age ran the news on page five in a single paragraph under the heading ‘Rover Killed in Action’ with the subheading ‘Barassi of Melb’. The story was brief and erroneous. ‘When Mr P Kennedy announced that he had received news that the popular young rover Ron Barassi had been killed in action at Tobruk, everyone in the rooms at the MCG was silent. The gallant young footballer leaves a young wife and two children. The thousands of spectators who witnessed his dashing play in last year’s finals will mourn his passing. Players in to-morrow’s game will wear black arm bands.’ Ron Barassi only left one child behind.

Melbourne captain Alan La Fontaine spoke to the press: ‘He was a grand little fellow,’ he said, ‘full of good humour. He liked nothing better than to be ragged by his mates, and he always had a ready reply for anyone who chaffed him. We are all terribly sorry to think we shall not see him again . . . He was employed by Melbourne City Council.’

Melbourne played St Kilda the weekend after the news broke, and won. The following Saturday at the MCG the side took on Collingwood and both teams formed a guard of honour in the middle before the game. Both teams, umpires and officials gathered around the empty centre circle, the winter sun casting a long shadow.

The Football Record observed: ‘Not one of the vast 31,000 crowd who attended the Melbourne–Collingwood match at the MCG last Saturday will forget the deep and simple impressiveness of the tribute paid to a great and gallant gentleman-footballer, Ron Barassi, who gave his life at Tobruk. Players, trainers and officials of both teams lined up in the centre of the ground, and as the notes of the Last Post sounded from the bugler the crowd all round the ground rose and bowed their heads. When the last notes of the bugle died away all stood silently for a minute homage to the memory of a grand soldier who had played his last game’.

The Sporting Globe noted that ‘when 30,000 people stood bareheaded at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Saturday while the wafting notes of the Last Post echoed and re-echoed around the circle of huge grandstands, not only was a fine tribute paid to the memory of a splendid fellow and sportsman, Ron Barassi, but something brave and noble was impressed more deeply on the heart and mind of the individual. Ron Barassi came from the country an unheralded country lad, and made a name in our national game for his sportsmanship as well as his ability. He departs a man honoured by his peers and those who cheer. In dying at Tobruk, he perpetuated his memory in a way that years of brilliant service with Melbourne could not have done. The memorial service at the Melbourne ground on Saturday was very sincere. The teams with trainers and officials formed a hollow square in the centre of the ground. The Last Post broke the stillness. The bugle’s notes wafted to their final echo—a minute’s silence, and a greater thing had been done in this simplicity than with pomp and majesty.’

There was derision from some voices in society that men should waste their time and energy chasing a ball when there was fighting to be done. Perhaps this is why Ron Barassi Snr was one who left the club, his family and his job to enlist.

Frank ‘Ticka’ Roberts had played with Barassi at Sandhurst in Bendigo and the pair had gone to Melbourne at the same time. He says there was another reason his mate signed up.

‘He was a terrific bloke—they don’t come much better,’ he remembered. ‘He was a rover in our side. We were great mates. He called me ‘Hitler’ because of my German ancestry—so I called him ‘Mussolini’. Because of the Italian background. A lot made it hard for him. One day he said ‘I’ve had this!’—and we went down to the city hall to enlist in the AIF—they took Ron, but knocked me back because of my occupation as an electrical linesman.’

Ron Jnr says a hint of this remained when he played, and that the seconds coach Jack Mueller, his dad’s team-mate, was called ‘Hun’. ‘I can imagine if Dad was getting teased he might be touchy. In fact when I played I used to get that name [Mussolini] early in the piece. I didn’t like it. It was early and I had to concentrate on the ball just to get a kick, not worry about those things, but I did hear them used occasionally, but it was in the early 50s and just a few years after the war.’

Ron Snr may not have played regularly because of Melbourne’s surfeit of similar-sized players, but he was respected and won the ‘most unselfish’ player award at the end of the 1938 season, an award his son says proves his popularity.

The Melbourne Football Club was an establishment organisation and one that showed admirable care for the young men who served it. There was a strong sense of community and family among its members. On 18 September 1941 the Melbourne Football Club Coterie drafted a document in a script almost as elaborate as its prose.

Let it be known that we the undersigned Members of the Melbourne Football Club desire to place on the record their appreciation of the sterling worth on and off the field of your late husband Ron, who died of wounds at Tobruk, in North Africa, on July 31st 1941, while serving his Country.

His passing has been a great grief to his fellow players in the Club, to Officials, to the Coterie, and to onlookers alike, who enjoyed his brilliant and fair play, which to a considerable degree helped our Club to win two successive Premierships. They were also attached to him by reason of his happy nature and extreme loyalty.

Be it known that the Melbourne Football Club Coterie is a body whose sole object is the material and social welfare of all players of our Club, who by their actions have shown themselves worthy of our assistance.

Your late husband, Ron, comes within this category, and in his unfortunate loss, we now declare ourselves the life-long friends of yourself and your son, Ron, and we advise you that at all times we shall regard the material welfare of yourself and Ron as our sacred duty.

It was signed by 24 members of the club coterie.

The promise was displayed in the Melbourne dressing rooms before the 1941 grand final. If Smith, Baggott, Emselle and the other players needed any further resolve on that day you can be sure that this would have provided it. Their grief was still raw. Even with 12 players unavailable because of the war, the Demons piled on 11 goals to two in the first half. The Bombers came back late, but lost by 29 points.

Later the VFL voted to strike a posthumous premiership medal for Barassi and presented it to Elza. Young Ron was given a commemorative football.

Ronald James Barassi played 58 games with Melbourne, roving and changing into the forward pocket. He kicked a respectable 84 goals. It wasn’t a spectacular career and he had to battle for a spot. He played just four games in his first year and never more than 14 in subsequent seasons. He was picked as 19th man in the 1940 grand final, and came on early in the first quarter when Ray Wartman was injured.

He was, however, the first Barassi to wear the 31.

Little was known of the exact details of the death of Corporal Ronald James Barassi. Ron Jnr had been told that his father had volunteered to take the place of a sick colleague in a supply convoy and came under attack. Some stories had the truck struck by a bomb, while others had Ron Snr taking cover behind a wall when a torpedo meant for the harbour struck nearby.

Tobruk was a long way from Melbourne. War demanded subterfuge and had time for rudimentary account keeping, but none for inquest or external inquiry. Fortunately Ron Snr was a prolific letter writer during his brief tour of duty and his letters build up a picture of his service. Letters arrived regularly at the Coral Avenue house where Ron and Elza were staying with Elza’s brother and his family. Elza’s letters haven’t survived, but those addressed to the in-laws, Alan and Pearl Ray and their children, provide a detailed picture of his travels and an insight into the character of Ron’s father.

Pictures suggest a happy, handsome and cheeky man. The letters confirm some of that. They are self-deprecating and, at least when addressed to Alan, concerned with the usual masculine things such as beer, cigarettes, gambling and sport.

On 23 October 1940, ‘Ron Barassi of the 7 Division Supply Column, 2 AIF’ wrote, giving his address as ‘abroad’. He shipped out on the Queen Mary, a luxury ocean liner stripped of refinement and converted to a troop ship. It was, he reported, ‘a magnificent ship and the size of it is tremendous. There are canteens on board but to get a drink is just like Young & Jacksons at five minutes to six.’ Four days later he attaches a postscript to the letter noting that it is his birthday, ‘but I do not feel any older or happier because during the last couple of days I have lost just on twenty pounds at two-up and I am stony until pay day’. He is 27 and signs off ‘from your loving brother in law Ron’.

Ron wrote on 28 November that he had arrived in Palestine and was ‘glad to set foot on land again’. He was full of news about a five-day stop at ‘one port’. While a lot of the troops had to travel to camp, he got to stay in a city to transfer the baggage from the Queen Mary to another vessel. He doesn’t mention