The acclaimed writer spent a season watching her grandson play football. The result is a story of love in the face of time’s passing.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Helen Garner’s decision to write a first-person account of her grandson’s junior footy team, its travails and triumphs and her exploration of both the game and his exit from adolescence, was replete with self-doubt. She wondered whether she was up to the task of writing a happy story. Aged 81 when she began following the Flemington Colts, she was unsure whether she was capable of completing the book.
Over the course of this 2023 season, Garner became a participant, which she said was evident when she began calling the Colts “we”.“I just became emotionally involved,” she says. “I mean, I sort of scream and rave at watching the Western Bulldogs on TV, I get really emotionally involved with those matches, and you know things that I see about footy can make me burst into tears of rage like watching people boo Buddy Franklin.
We turn to that passage. “It’s the last grandchild and I’m suddenly thinking I’m not going to be around much longer,” Garner explains. “I reckon I’ve got maybe 10 years, touch wood. I thought my grandmother life is almost over and how can I let this go past without giving it a really good look?” Garner has been living next door to her daughter Alice and her husband and their now three kids, in Flemington for 25 years. “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, bar none,” she says.
Garner excitedly extracts from her phone a poignant photo of Bontempelli with his arm affectionately around injured teammate Josh Bruce. “He’s just done his knee for the second time and Bont is just comforting him. That’s straight out of Virgil and Homer.
Garner had been warned about the ugly parents of local footy. “I’d heard all about the brawls. But to think that’s what it’s all about is so wrong. I’ve watched these fathers, they were exemplary as fathers. They had practical love for their sons ... which had found a pragmatic path to expression and I was moved by that.She says she took “massive” notes - whole pages after training. “Particularly now that I’m getting older and forgetting things a lot.
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