KEVIN Sheedy is Australian football's ambassador in this, its 150th year. I spent last weekend with him in Darwin, going with him to Bathurst Island for the Tiwi Islands grand final. I don't know how well I knew Kevin Sheedy beforehand. I don't know how well I know him now. But I do know that he excites me in some way. There's something alive about him in a way that in the rest of us, if not dead, is in semi-permanent retirement from an early age.
Walking with him through Darwin, it seems as if he engages the whole street. It's like the opening scene in a movie in which Sheedy is played by Robin Williams. An old woman stops him and asks him if he's "off the ship". That gets his imagination going about the ship. Later, he and I will have to go and find the ship. By then, another woman will have approached who is also off the ship. Her name is Vera, she's Welsh (this causes him to digress about Celtic culture) and she lives in Queensland. Vera says she won $50 on Sheedy in 1984 when the Bombers won the flag.
This happens in the pub where we have lunch. All the time he's engaged with Vera, he's also talking to blokes at the next table. When he entered the pub, he picked up a glass ashtray and ran it under their noses, saying, "Tips, please". He's also watching the races and having bets and telling me stories I should write, like one on former umpire Harry Beitzel who went to prison when a business in which he was involved was held to have taken money fraudulently.
"Harry did something wrong," Sheedy says. "But what about all the good things he did?" I say I'm not sure the newspaper will pay for me to go to Sydney to write about Harry. "I'll pay," he says, one eye on the screen, watching the horses.
When he leaves the pub, we're going to the Northern Territory Football League grand final in Darwin but first we detour and look for the ship. We drive up and down the Darwin waterfront but in the end, he goes, "Look". He says it with some pride, like the father of a new baby. The search has been worth it. He's found what he was looking for. A white ocean liner. We look at the ship as he muses aloud. "How many people on that boat? Two thousand? Imagine if someone told them there was a game of Australian football on in town with Aboriginal players?"
And he's right. Of course, it would interest people from other places. They're here to see what's special about Australia. This is an example of how Kevin Sheedy thinks.
He gets out and takes a photo of the ship. He takes photos of everything, like he writes everything down. In the pub, he kept writing out instructions for me on betting slips. "Harry," reads the first (that is, do the story on Harry Beitzel). "Look up Bel Esprit," says the next. That's the name of a horse in which he has an interest. The third betting slips lists three games I should see this year — Dreamtime at the 'G, the Eureka game and the International Cup.
He is involved in each of them. Dreamtime at the 'G is a consequence of him making Essendon a club at which Aboriginal people feel welcome. The Eureka game between Richmond and North Melbourne honours "working people" and he is conscious of his working-class origins. And the International Cup — well, Sheedy says, "we have to keep talking about this great game of ours".
Briefly, the subject of the recent international series in Ireland arises, the one in which he coached and the Irish complained of Australian violence. "I'd like to coach Ireland," he says. Once you've agreed on a set of rules, he tells me, you do what you can within those rules. To his mind, I gather, the Irish are too classical in their approach.
We go to the grand final in Darwin. The last one of these I saw, between Buffaloes and St Mary's, was as good a game as I had seen in a very long time. I put it up with some of the Cats' performances in 2007. This one, alas, was disappointing. The great regret is that the newly formed Tiwi Bombers didn't make the final. Having won eight straight, the islanders fell away, but the big news from the Top End is that next year the Tiwis are doing something they've never done before. A pre-season.
I'm 10 years younger than Kevin Sheedy but I can't go at his pace. He's flown up the night before, given a speech, got up early, given another speech. The time in the pub is his first time off in days. We go to the footy, meet AFL and NTFL people, are joined by the Longs — Michael, his wife, his son, two of his brothers, since the Longs seldom go anywhere alone, that not being the Aboriginal way. And there is this lively interaction going on, lots of talk and laughter and, yes, some alcohol is being consumed, and after a day and half a night of this, I am nearly gone when Sheedy suggests a group of us, including two AFL officials, leave for a meeting. In the pool at his hotel.
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys did this — held meetings in pools — and people say he was a genius.
Part two of "Travels with the ambassador" will appear next Saturday. Martin Flanagan flew as a guest of the AFL.
