JOIN THE CLUB?

One of the most famous, or notorious, quotes from comedian Grouch Marx was: Any club that will have me as a member I don’t want to join.

I am told that at an eponymous club called Groucho’s in London the quote is chiselled above the entrance.

Recently I resigned from a club with which I had been associated for 24 years. To steal from Marx, and tip the quote on its head, I suspect there are club members who would say – after my public spray and resignation – that any club that took Hinch back as a member they would not want to be involved with.

Not that that is going to happen. Judging from some of the insulting, crude, almost paranoid and chauvinistic, e-mails I have received lately that will be welcome news to a lot of people.

The club is the Melbourne Football Club. I quit publicly during Grand Final Week. I quit on principle. I quit over the treatment of a woman whom I don’t even really know.

I severed all relations with the MFC – and cancelled a planned guest speaker appearance at the club’s Grand Final Breakfast – because of the Neanderthal treatment of the club’s vice-president and one of the club’s longest-serving directors.

Her name is Beverly O’Connor. In the bitter, internecine warfare to oust the multi-million dollar cheque-signing club president, Joe Gutnick, I derided her. She once described the Brownlow Medal in an interview as the Brownlow Cup.

But in Grand Final Week I supported her. (Even though in an interview with me on 3AW from Collingwood’s final training session at Victoria Park she hardly supported herself.)

Club Vice-president O’Connor was invited to the official farewell party for the Demons’ historic dressing rooms which are being demolished as part of the supposedly whiz-bang $400 million upgrade of the MCG.

The rooms disappear. The Long Room disappears. Obviously the nostalgic goodbye in Grand Final Week would be a huge occasion. The Governor, John Landy, was invited and Melbourne heroes like Ronald Dale Barassi.

O’Connor accepted – as a director and club vice-president would and should. And was then uninvited.

Uninvited because she was a woman.

The word out of the club was that her invitation was withdrawn because the blokes wanted it to be a stag night.

When I heard about this I thought: This stinks. And, I’ll concede I used some colourful language when I attacked the club on radio in a deliberate, public resignation.

I said something like: What a bunch of yobbos. Are they going to have laptop dancers amidst the party pies? Naked women jumping out of cakes?

Would a woman inhibit them from reminiscing about end-of-season trips when even the married players got their rocks off with hookers in Asia?

The invitation to the “blokey-blokey” affair said the function would be a “good old-fashioned pie night just like the ones we used to have”.

So somebody, for old time’s sake, I presume, urinated in a pot plant and a dozen blokes threw up in the car park.

To be fair, the club did re-invite O’Connor after the proverbial hit the fan and at the AFL Grand Final Breakfast Barass assured me there had been no naked ladies jumping out of cakes.

But it doesn’t dilute the issue. Women are huge supporters of the AFL. Girls are just as passionate supporters as boys. I suspect female cheer squad members spend more time working on the run-through banners than males do.

And think of what players’ mothers and wives do for them?

For some misogynists to try to stop a club vice-president from going to an important, symbolic club function purely on the grounds that she didn’t have an appendage is, I believe, Stone Age rubbish.

A club that can’t get past that has no future.

I leave with regrets. Obviously. I have never claimed to have as much red and blue blood in my veins as some players and supporters.

But I am a former No.2 ticket holder. I personally organised a BBB

(Bring Back Barassi) and “31 in 81” fundraiser at Leonda and with Peter Sullivan wrote – and paid for – a cassette of an anthemic “ It’s Melbourne’s Game.”

Even made a cameo appearance on the track with an echoing reminder.

“Fooootball. We invented it.”

And I stayed in my seat at Waverley when we lost to Fitzroy(!) by the biggest margin still in VFL/AFL history.

I leave this club with some words of wisdom, not from me, but from a letter I received from a disillusioned mother whose young son idolised the Ds. He went against his family and started supporting Melbourne at the age of four. Even went to training when they worked out at Caulfield Grammar.

She sent me a lengthy and searing critique of the club and the players…seen through the eyes of a mother of a passionate young fan

In part, she wrote:

The seemingly “nonchalant” and “impervious” attitude shown by most of the players at a Monday “recovery session”, after a particular bad thumping, absolutely shocked me. The losses did not seem to provide the impetus or motivation to strive or try harder.

On one occasion, here was I with my young son, who was absolutely ashen, gutted and devastated and really feeling the loss, whereas the players didn’t really seem to care. Case in point – a 100-point slaughter by Hawthorn a couple of years ago which occurred on my son’s birthday. We took him to the game as a treat for him and he came away shattered.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not expecting the players to dwell on negatives and adopt a funereal attitude, but quite honestly, half the time it appears that the “4th quarter losses” are simply ‘too bad, there’s always next week’.

Not for Hinch there’s not. Not any more.

.©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2003