I GOT the call to go to Hobart at 5.45 in the morning. Mum had had her second stroke in two days. The doctor said I should come soon. So I rang North Melbourne director of football Tim Harrington and said I'd have to forgo my interview appointment with Dean Laidley.

I told Tim that Mum barracks for North Melbourne. He said they'd have her in their minds that weekend. Some people dismiss that sort of statement as sentiment. It depends if there's sincerity behind it. Those expressions can be vehicles for deep feeling and regard that otherwise have no outlet.

Mum's 89, but she's a fighter. It was like she'd taken a punch that had knocked her to the floor and she wouldn't be getting up for a while, maybe ever. Her vision was affected and her left side had gone.

Dad said: "Mart's here", and she put up her left hand, the one that's no good, and tried to feel for my face. "Where are you, boy?" she said.

I sat beside her most of that day and the next. By Friday afternoon, I knew I had to make a decision. I had an appointment to speak at a Tom Wills night at Moyston on Monday.

I didn't want to leave but my eldest brother, Big Paddy, told me he thought I should. He said: "It's what Mum'd say", and that was true. I have four siblings in Hobart. They could handle matters and ring me if I was needed.

So I drove to Moyston, via Marian College in Ararat, where I met some kids and talked about Tom Wills. I was pleased to do so because it's their story, a great Ararat story and a great Australian story. Why? Because it still speaks to us 128 years after his death. It's just that for most of that time his story was buried like the root of a tree.

The president of the Moyston Willaura Football and Netball Club, Ruth Brain, is a mother of four. That's why she took the job. "I've got three footballers and one netballer," she said. The first time I rang her, she was laying concrete for a new netball court. The second time I rang her, she said: "Hold on, I've got to write your number down. Wait while I get a stick". She was in the middle of a paddock.

I said to her: "You're going to be disappointed when you meet me. I'm not up to men's work." We still laugh about that.

Before the Tom Wills night got going, I was shown two things about Moyston I am unlikely to forget. Courtesy of the present owners, Peter and Elizabeth Crawford, I was given a tour of Lexington, the Wills family home built in the 1840s.

Then a local land valuer, Robert McAlpine took me to the waterhole where, as he understands the story, five or six different clans used to traditionally meet and the adjoining flat area, now a paddock, where he says Aboriginal football was played. This is about 500 metres down the hill from the window Tom Wills would have looked out of as a boy.

McAlpine kept muttering: "Imagine if we were in America," and I knew what he meant. The Americans are not frightened of lauding greatness in their midst — even if, as in this case, it is a totally flawed sort of greatness. McAlpine kept saying: "Like George Custer."

Back at the Moyston oval, Kevin Sheedy was taking the kids' training. I reckon the AFL's performance in its 150th year has been less-than-impressive. But Sheedy being appointed the game's ambassador was the one thing it got right. Who else could do training with the kids, some of whom were tiny, and have them bouncing out of the ground like spring lambs, then take the young men who have made the finals this year for the first time in ages, and then talk on and on like a barrel rolling down a hill at the function that followed.

In an extraordinary coincidence, the coach of the Moyston Willaura Football Club, Wilf Dickeson, is the player Richmond swapped to old VFA club Prahran to recruit the young Kevin Sheedy. In Moyston, Wilf is referred to as the local champion. He is also a retired primary school teacher.

In 2006, the club nearly folded. At the age of 62, Wilf was talked into returning and, so far, he has had to pull on the boots six times.

When I met Wilf, I thought immediately of the first verse of Neil Murray's song Tom Wills Would. "Ours is a small club, it's not well known/ But news of us is growing among the young and old,/ A more loyal bunch of players, you'd never find./ Who'd be their coach? Tom Wills would."

An excellent short film has been made about the Moyston Willaura Football and Netball Club, called King Wilf and the Pumas, by brothers Damian and Brendan McAloon. Every shot is like an old photo that has coloured with time.

The McAloons were at the club on Monday night. So was Graeme Homburg, son of Barry from the Bush, the bard who sang up Moyston and Tom Wills every chance he got on talk-back radio. There was also a clip of Neil Murray, who comes from nearby Lake Bolac, singing Tom Wills Would, made by another local filmmaker David Nicholson.

If they make a film about Tom Wills, as surely they will, I hope they include the scene where Tommy, referred to in his lifetime as the Grace of Australian cricket, met the real W.G. Grace on a pebbly wicket at Kadina in South Australia in 1874.

Grace was 26, entering his prime. Tommy was 39. His body was gone; he'd been on the grog for 20 years. Grace later wrote sneeringly of Tommy, saying the locals thought him a big fellow until he got a pair of ducks. He didn't say Tommy got him in the second innings for 54.

This is also from the Neil Murray song:

"And if you're thinking to drop me from the team/ I'll not go quiet, I'll go mean,/Bugger me age and me cranky ways/I'll send my bones to the contest today/ As Tom Wills would… When shadows draw long on my final day of play/ Don't drag me to a cold room/ Don't send me off that way/ Let me run on, burning bright with dance and song/ And stun the opposition/ As Tom Wills would."