Amazing moments in Tigerland!
Once in a while something so cool happens that it's worth
remembering forever. That's what this page is about. As I come
across interesting stories and club tidbits, I'll post them here.
Feel free to help by dropping me mail with something we shouldn't miss!
Mentors: Past to the present
In the Way Cool department, Richmond set up club mentors in 2005 to assist current players -- former Richmond players paired up with current Richmond players! How cool is that?!
I do not know if it's still done, but this is how it went in 2005.
Frankie Dimattina (1968) - Jay Schulz
Brendon Gale (2001) - Daniel Jackson
John Nix (1956) - Nathan Brown
Michael Green (1975) - Joel Bowden
Dick Clay (1976) - Brett Deledio
Nick Daffy (1997) - Andrew Raines
Peter Welsh (1984) - Trent Knobel
Graeme Bond (1977) - Mark Coughlan
Francis Bourke (1981) - Danny Meyer
Phil Egan (1987) - Richard Tambling
Cameron Clayton (1977) - Tom Roach
Tony Free (1996) - Mark Chaffey
Mike Perry (1969) - Kane Johnson
Bruce Dawe: Life Cycle
When children are born in Victoria they are wrapped in the club-colours, laid in beribboned cots, having already begun a lifetime's barracking.
Carn, they cry, Carn ... feebly at first while parents playfully tussle with them for possession of a rusk: Ah, he's a little Tiger! (And they are...)
Hoisted shoulder-high at their first League game they are like innocent monsters who have been years swimming towards the daylight's roaring empyrean
Until, now, hearts shrapnelled with rapture, they break surface and are forever lost, their minds rippling out like streamers
In the pure flood of sound, they are scarfed with light, a voice like the voice of God booms from the stands Oooohh you bludger and the covenant is sealed.
Hot pies and potato-crisps they will eat, they will forswear the Demons, cling to the Saints and behold their team going up the ladder into Heaven,
And the tides of life will be the tides of the home-team's fortunes - the reckless proposal after the one-point win, the wedding and honeymoon after the grand-final ...
They will not grow old as those from more northern States grow old, for them it will always be three-quarter-time with the scores level and the wind advantage in the final term,
That passion persisting, like a race-memory, through the welter of seasons, enabling old-timers by boundary-fences to dream of resurgent lions and centaur-figures from the past to replenish continually the present,
So that mythology may be perpetually renewed and Chicken Smallhorn return like the maize-god in a thousand shapes, the dancers changing
But the dance forever the same - the elderly still loyally crying Carn ... Carn ... (if feebly) unto the very end, having seen in the six-foot recruit from Eaglehawk their hope of salvation.
[Note: Thanks to my dear Aussie friend for sending me this years ago. What's not to love about a country that produces footy poetry and prose! LOVE IT!]
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