THE SEASON: A Fan’s Story, by Helen Garner
Let’s not sweeten this. In “The Season,” a doting grandmother provides an account of her teenage grandson’s football season. Despite a longstanding familial loyalty to the local professional club, she has only a basic knowledge of the sport, its rules and tactics and customs, and the football in question is Australian Rules football, or “footy” as it’s known. In other words, this is a book about a sport you probably haven’t seen and in which you almost certainly have no interest, written by someone who doesn’t know much about it. And it’s beautiful.
When Helen Garner tells men that she is writing it, they are full of advice: “You should talk to so-and-so! Have you read this, or that?” The books “would be full of facts and stats and names and memories. They have been formed by footy. I can’t do it their way.” Her only response? “It’ll be a nanna’s book about footy.” And that is precisely where the beauty is: the result is inclusive and universal, curious and tender, perceptive and wise. Sports fans — maybe even Aussie Rules fans — can live without yet another book about facts and stats and names.
Garner is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, but — and she would not object to that conjunction, I suspect — she is in her early 80s. “Now that I’ve reached the age at which my mother died demented, now that my hearing and my eyesight are packing up and I can feel my memory starting to lose its grip, I need a reason to be near him,” she writes of her grandson, Amby, “in the last years of his childhood,” she writes. “The Season” is joyful, but there is a carefully woven thread of melancholy running through it, and it is this that gives the book its lovely, old-gold sunset hue.
A book about Aussie Rules may not be the first place you’d look for this kind of tone. It’s a seemingly chaotic, violent game: 18 players on each side who kick and throw an oval ball toward massive goals, and who clatter into one another with such force that injuries are frequent and serious. They fly at their opponents with knees and elbows at head-height, and concussion is often the outcome, sometimes accompanied by terrifying amounts of blood. (Just search “Aussie Rules Big Hits.” You won’t want to watch, and you won’t be able to stop watching.)
Most of the players don’t wear protective clothing. That’s not the Aussie way. Garner notes wryly that a player who chose to try and avoid brain injury was teased on live TV. “What’s with the helmet? Keeping Mum happy?” the pitch-side interviewer asked. And it’s a sport that gets brutal early. Some of Garner’s pre-match anxiety has a faint echo of a family member waving a young soldier off to fight in the First World War trenches.
One of the things that Garner wants to think about here is masculinity, especially in its nascent form. She is fascinated by the energy of boys: their savagery, their vulnerability, their noise and their silences. “All my life I’ve fought men,” she says, “lived under their regimes, been limited and frustrated by their power.” This is her chance, then, to look for something different, something less oppressive, and in Amby, she finds it.
Amby, with his new mullet (a hairstyle much favored by Aussie Rules players) and his new, bulkier physique, seems — at least in the eyes of his loving grandmother — to exemplify what can be great about teenage boys. Yes, he likes to put in a tackle, and yes, he shrugs off some of the savage beatings he takes during a game, but he is also thoughtful, aware of the storm raging inside young men. “It’s the stage we’re at,” he says ruefully after an in-game brawl. “We’re full of hormones.”
(Ironically, a woman is responsible for one of the most violent incidents in the book. She is a spectator, a fan and possible relative of one of Amby’s opponents, and she runs onto the pitch to aim punches at a player on Amby’s team, the Flemington Colts.)
Garner attends nearly every training session, and nearly every match. Perhaps uniquely among die-hard fans of the Colts, one of her absences is brought about by a commitment to see the whole of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Of course, she also follows the fortunes of the Western Bulldogs, the professional squad from suburban Melbourne that her family roots for. They suffer a humiliating defeat on the same day as a spectacular Colts win, and Garner realizes with a jolt that she doesn’t much care about the pros: “Can these boys be usurping the place in my heart held for 20 years by the mighty Western Bulldogs?”
Amby’s dad, however, is heartbroken and furious over the Bulldogs’ loss, although he doesn’t let rip until his son’s jubilation has been given full expression. Then there is “a tirade of anger and sorrow.”
Why do we do this to ourselves, those of us who care about sports teams? “How deep it goes in men, this bond, this loyalty,” Garner notes. “I would never mock it.”
It may be because even great days contain the seeds of the bad ones to come. The title just won will not be retained; the great player will move on to a rival club, or retire. Talk to any fan of my English football club about their greatest-ever season, in 2003-4, and within three sentences the fan will lament our failure to become champions of Europe that year. And maybe that’s the point: Sports fans know perhaps better than anyone the brevity of a glorious moment, the futility of all human endeavor.
“The Season,” you come to realize, is a great title, because there are many seasons in this slender, mighty book. There’s Garner’s late autumn, her grandson’s spring, the June winter of an Antipodean year, the contrasting seasons of the Bulldogs and the Colts.
And, to our delight and to Garner’s infectious, thrilled disbelief, it is a season to remember for the junior side. The unexpected availability of Boof, one of their best players, who has traveled from Darwin, more than 2,000 miles away, for the second game running after a GoFundMe campaign organized by supporters, tells you all you need to know about the importance of the Colts to the community, and the nature of that community. The gesture feels like something from a “Friday Night Lights” script — but the people of East Dillon were fictional, and would have done it because the scriptwriters made them.
The characters in “The Season” are real, but every bit as lovable and colorful as any network TV show could have imagined. Thanks to Boof and Amby and their teammates, this enchanting, perceptive book about so many things ends with a triumph it richly deserves.
THE SEASON: A Fan’s Story | By Helen Garner | Pantheon | 208 pp. | $26
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