pasag
RTDAS
Saw this article in today's Australian about one of the founding fathers of AFL and a great cricketer.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24096259-5003900,00.htmlBrilliant sportsman took a tumble in the field of life
Peter Lalor
IT would not be sacrilegious, or a stretch, to suggest that Thomas Wills is, in the manner of L. Ron Hubbard, a man who invented a religion, though he did not get rich as a result.
It could equally be said that Wills was the Shane Warne or Don Bradman of his time, at least in the summer months. He was Australia's first cricketing superstar, a crowd-drawer and a crowd-pleaser. In the fallow months, he pulled on the boots and dominated the indigenous winter game in the same manner as a Ron Barassi or, more appropriately, a Gary Ablett.
A Geelong boy, Wills did not only play and succeed at cricket and football, he moulded the very character of the games. Indeed, he is recognised as the co-author of the rules for the Australian football code, which went on to become a religion for half the country.
Of itself that is enough to make Wills an interesting figure, but he is much more than that.
Wills is compelling. Had he lived today, he would fill the sports, opinion and gossip pages. As it was, his exploits and controversies were substance enough for the letter, news and sports sections of the colonial papers of his day.
He was a man blessed with sporting ability and cursed with a crippling inability to lead an ordinary life. Like many a modern sporting star, his failings off the field were a counterbalance to his achievements on it.
A biographer's dream, Wills also engaged on the frontier with the indigenous people. It is often claimed that he used elements of the native marn grook game to inform the invention of Australian rules football, a fantasy that has fired imaginations since.
Whether or not that is true -- and it most probably is false -- his other engagements with Aborigines are fantastic enough.
Wills coached and played with the first Aboriginal cricket teams in the 1860s; he apparently treated them as equals and moved easily among them. Truly egalitarian, he also scorned the snobbish traditions that raised the amateur gentleman sportsman above his professional colleagues (this caused terrible ructions during a match against Hobart).
What made Wills's easy involvement with the Aboriginal team all the more extraordinary was that a few years earlier, Wills, his father Horatio and a large group of men and women had forged their way into the Queensland bush to establish the family station. While Wills was away getting supplies, his father and the other 18 settlers were slaughtered by a group of Aborigines. The young sportsman returned to a scene of devastation.
Wills will long be associated with the Melbourne Cricket and Football clubs and Eton school, but his drinking, common-law marriage and constant indebtedness ensured he became something of a social outcast as his fame faded.
He was a mess of contradictions: the colony's finest cricketer, he was also a chucker who courted controversy with every shy of his arm and every batsman he felled with his ill-tempered deliveries.
He was once the most famous man in the colony -- his presence drew spectators by the thousands to the fields around Melbourne -- but his funeral was attended by only a handful of family members and one former cricketer. He stabbed himself to death in exile at Heidelberg, outside Melbourne, broke, alcoholic, delirious and forgotten. His mother, when pushed by a journalist to recall her once-celebrated son, denied that such a person existed.
Wills had fallen a long way. Fortunately, 150-odd years later, Greg de Moore was there to pick up the pieces. A Sydney psychiatrist with a decade-long fascination for his subject, de Moore is the rarest of beasts: a tireless researcher and a wonderful writer.
Others have nibbled at Wills's story before, most notably Martin Flanagan in The Call, but while that book is semi-fictional, de Moore's Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall has the greatest historical and literary integrity. The author found Wills's letters in an outhouse on a Queensland cattle station, his medical records in the basement of a Melbourne hospital, his adolescent diary in a dusty box at Rugby School in England, and mentions of his name in newspapers the length of the eastern seaboard.
The story of Wills, William Hammersley, James Thompson and Thomas Smith writing the 10 foundation rules for the indigenous football game at the Parade Hotel in Melbourne in 1859 is well documented, but de Moore's fine comb elicits all sorts of fascinating detail.
An account of a match played at Wynnes Paddock, Ballarat, between the local side and Wills's Geelong even implies that the master tactician employed the flood -- in which forwards and centres clog the forward line of the opposition team -- 120 years before the super coaches of the modern game used the move.
A working psychiatrist, de Moore traces the sad descent of Wills without resort to tawdry retro-analysis but with a sensible eye for his mental state. It's a fascinating path, and one that has been followed by sportsmen for the century and a half since.
The seeds of his demise were planted early. In 1865, Wills was chaired from the MCG after captaining his state to a fabulous victory over NSW: one of many.
"The colony's eyes were upon him," de Moore writes. "But very few in this throng of people could know what had happened to Tom this year. This was the Tom Wills who was married in the eyes of the family but not married at all; who was chased out of Geelong by people for money he owed; who drank and played merrily on the field, and whose family was more distant than ever. Neither Governor (Charles) Darling nor his lady could see that beyond the adulation, Tom Wills was a rubble of imperfections. Sometimes a man who belongs to no one belongs to everyone."
At Wills's funeral, there was no sentimentality, no record of a church service even though the burial was conducted by a clergyman, no funeral procession or celebration of his life. No constellation of sportsmen lined the streets as Wills was taken to his grave.
Wills's story is the story of Australian sport and sportsmen. He invented the games, excelled at them and forged the tragic path that too many sportsmen have followed since.
He is a towering figure and deserves de Moore's brilliantly written and researched book.
