PART two of my series, "Travelling with the Ambassador", starts in the pool of a hotel near Darwin airport. "How good is this?" Kevin Sheedy keeps chortling. For a man of 62, the AFL's Ambassador in its 150th year is in good shape, still solid and strong. To see him in bathers is to be reminded of him as a player — how fierce he was, how hard, yet also skilful.
To see myself in bathers is also to see Kevin Sheedy because the bathers I am wearing are his. So are the bathers of everyone at the meeting he has convened. For some reason, Kevin Sheedy travels Australia with a bagful of bathers. Presumably, so he can hold meetings such as this. "The water's exactly the right temperature," he keeps saying, like a connoisseur might say of wine. And so we splash about and talk.
Sheedy is dismissive of the idea of tanking. "I tanked in 1993 — I played all my young players — and I won a premiership."
He's been going since six o'clock in the morning. In the course of the day we have watched and celebrated a grand final. But this is not the day's end. When Sheedy and the others get out of the pool, it's to go to the St Mary's clubhouse, St Mary's being the club of the Long family, where Sheedy is taken into the special circle out the back where a seat is saved for him beside Jack Long, the elder. They sing all night. St Mary's has just won its 26th flag. Sheedy gets home hours after I am in bed. The next day I judge him to be a little less ebullient but then it's an altogether different day.
We fly out to Bathurst Island, landing at Nguiu. This is where the purest form of our game is played. There will not be a single ball-up in the first half of the Tiwi grand final and only two or three thereafter. There will also be cyclonic rain during the second and third quarters but the Tiwis continue to play the ball, always the ball.
Sheedy's arrival on the island is something I am anxious to witness. Last year, when Essendon played the Aboriginal All-Stars in Darwin, I was amazed to see the bulk of the largely black audience of 10,000 barracked, silently or otherwise, for Essendon! That single fact says who and what Kevin Sheedy is in Aboriginal Australia. At the ground where the Tiwi island grand final is to be played several old woman approach him smiling and touch his arm.
Then he disappears, and I can't find him — he's backstage talking to some locals, and I'm reminded of the previous day, when Waratahs got belted by 96 points in the Darwin grand final.
Having awarded the premiership cup to the winning coach and captain, Sheedy left the podium and walked over to the losers who were sitting slumped upon the ground, got them standing and spoke to them for some minutes.
Someone in the grandstand said: "I wonder what he's saying to them." I knew. He was telling them he'd been where they were at that moment. After the '83 grand final when Essendon got belted all over the park by Hawthorn. Back the next year, the Bombers wrought a terrible vengeance.
I don't mind losing him for two quarters because I understand certain things aren't going to happen if I'm standing beside him. I've watched him as he's walked around the boundary on our arrival. When you walk on Aboriginal land it is wise to walk quietly. Sheedy does. He knows how to be among Aboriginal people. You have to be quiet so things come to you like birds come to a tree.
An AFL scout at the Tiwi grand final gives me his assessment of Sheedy relative to the locals. "The only difference is the colour," he says.
I watch the final quarter with Sheedy on the boundary. He's into it. He sees hard play penalised and doesn't like it. There's also a moment when the wet ball goes forward, a pack rises to meet it and he says: "It's going over the back, boys." There is nothing remarkable in the words, but there is in the earliness with which he makes the call. The ball was still metres from the pack. I hadn't anticipated it, hadn't seen it. Maybe a fraction later, I would have — but not then.
Do you remember when you played footy and the other bloke knew better than you where the ball was going? He's got that gift, as well as others. He knows something about people. He has an idea about how to get the best out of them. And if you ask him a serious question — as distinct from a boring routine one which he fielded so often over the years from the press — he'll give you a serious answer.
And he still has his fire. I thought he'd lost it, but, no, at our pool meeting on the second night, to which he summons any lonely people he finds in the bar, the subject arises of cricket and the trouble this summer between India and Australia. He roars his defiance about what he would do. "When someone puts it on you in sport, you put it straight back on them," he shouts, and you see exactly what he brought to the playing field in the old days when footy was a tough, tough game. That meeting is also around 10 o'clock at night after a very long day. At midnight he flies out on a red-eye special to Sydney where he is talking about the game.
