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http://www.news.com....r-1225929168599
Black and white and hated all over: Collingwood supporters
* By Kate Legge
* From: The Australian
* September 25, 2010 12:00AM
COLLINGWOOD tragic Steve Fahey defies the folklore.
He's got all his teeth, his arms are not coloured in like midfielder Dane Swan's sleeve of tattoos, he's a salaried professional, not a Centrelink client, he doesn't smoke Winfield Blues, his garage isn't stashed with stolen goods, and he doesn't drop the "g" when he's talkin' about the football club he couldn't live without.
Not only is he literate, but he's a founding member of the Floreat Pica Society - Latin for Prosper The Magpie - a small sub-culture that exists within the hydra-headed monster threatening to consume Melbourne on AFL grand final weekend.
Such whimsy is proof enough that Fahey is at least as mad, perhaps slightly crazier, than the typical Collingwood zealot. As a boy he learned to recite the club's honour boards backwards while he waited for his Collingwood-besotted father to emerge from the social rooms at the team's old home ground of Victoria Park.
Fahey has handed down this tribal worship to teenage daughter Holly, leavened by a tongue-in-cheek perspective that sometimes escaped his old man. Yesterday they joined a sea of black and white, tinged with St Kilda's red, to watch both teams parade through the city.
Ignoring the jibe - "What do you call a Collingwood supporter in a suit? The defendant" - Fahey wore his tuxedo, just as he did when Collingwood last won a premiership in 1990. And he'll don it again for today's blockbuster against the Saints because superstition matters.
If the prospect of victory thrills the one-eyed Pies army - a mob feared for its size and ferocity - it fills an even bigger legion of Collingwood haters with nightmarish dread.
Just as a common hatred of the Manly Sea Eagles unifies other rugby league clubs and their fans, rival AFL clubs find common ground in antipathy towards a foe lampooned as the "trailer trash" of the league in jokes such as these. You know you're a Pies supporter when you let your 12-year-old daughter smoke at the dinner table in front of her kids, you wonder how service stations keep their restrooms so clean, or you've been married three times and still have the same in-laws.
Don't think humour lances the foreboding. "I live in constant fear of Collingwood winning a premiership," Essendon fan Ged McMahon worried months ago as the Pies began to swagger.
"It would be armageddon for the city of Melbourne. Bogans would run loose. Bottle shops would run out of stock. The celebrations would last for weeks . . . probably even years. Hell, they're still talking non-stop about 1990 and that was 20 bloody years ago."
Twenty years ago, author Don Watson lived in Turner Street, Collingwood, opposite Victoria Park. The club had applied for a six-day 24-hour liquor licence in expectation of its first flag since 1958. Without wishing to be wowsers, Watson and several neighbours thought 48 hours of solid drinking should be sufficient. The local council agreed.
On game day, Watson hurried home from the MCG after the final siren to guard his property.
"It was like being a chateau owner when the Bastille fell," he chuckles. "You could hear the roar as waves of delirious fans approached. During the night, because the bedroom was on the street side, you'd hear blokes pissing through the fence, on the door step, and the sound of broken glass. They literally drank the place dry. One of the local publicans told of handing over the last dust-covered bottle of creme de menthe from his shelves at around 6pm that Sunday."
Watson now lives in the bush, and the Magpies have left Victoria Park for shiny new premises where naming rights revolve with the seasons: first the Lexus Centre now the Westpac Centre. Behind the corporate glitz, Collingwood's love of enmity remains its true badge of honour. Magpies fans will tell you we hate them (yes, me too) because of their "success". Success? Of 40 grand finals in 117 years, the club has won 14.
Prosperity flourished briefly during periods of back-to-back premierships between 1927 and 1930, and 1935-36. Boasting seeds the antagonism; sheer strength of membership stokes envy. Average attendance at games this year was 63,000, a figure that rockets Collingwood into the top nine international football clubs, close behind Manchester United (69,000).
Historian Richard Stremski, who wrote Kill for Collingwood, says hackles were raised from the club's beginnings in 1892 because of its working-class roots in the low-lying flats of Melbourne where the city's sewage once settled and the stench from tanneries sharpened the locals' hunger for something to make them proud. A winning team evened the score.
Benefactors such as John Wren, a notorious character made rich by the profits of illegal gambling, and gangster Squizzy Taylor kindled distrust of the club's affairs in the 1930s, but it's the supporters who speak loudest.
Riotous celebrations followed the 1935 flag. Delirious brethren lugged an old piano into the centre of Victoria Park, where the honky-tonk continued into Sunday. Rolling homewards, club legend Harry Collier drove his car through Catholic Archbishop Mannix's fence. Mannix was a Pies man.
In the post-war years, Victoria Park enhanced its reputation. Opposition teams endured cold showers and unsavoury conditions. Coaches were spat on.
Phil Dimitriadis, who grew up in Turner Street, was one of them. "I wouldn't take my daughter to the Victoria Park of 20 years ago. It was too dangerous. You'd always see fights, blood and muck, and eskies filled with alcohol."
He wrote a university thesis on the club's primordial passions.
"I used the model of Cyclops, the metaphor of being one-eyed. No other club comes close to this blind allegiance. It's more than a football club. It's an idea, a concept, a symbol for overcoming adversity. That's where the hatred stems from."
Poet and novelist Peter Rose belongs to a Collingwood dynasty. Son of the late Bob Rose, player and coach, his memories of Saturday games are vivid. "Great massings of people and really very drunk men. Insults would fly and there'd be big brawls."
Anti-Collingwood sentiment reminds him of Sydney and Melbourne rivalry.
Watson, best known as Paul Keating's speechwriter, once traced his ill-will towards the Pies from the cradle.
"As I was born with football in my brain, I was born with an immovable loathing of the Magpies. They did nothing to harm my family. I cannot name the feelings they offend. Absolutely nothing fuels this evil sentiment, but it burns like the eternal flame."
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I urge all right-thinking (plus Apt and Rodeo) to send positive vibes towards the St Kilda Saints for the next 12 hours. It's no exaggeration to say the fate of civilisation may hang on your good will!
Late, LATE EDIT:
HOLY CRAP A DRAW!!!!!
I normally don't having anything good to say about Collingwood, but Nick Maxwell's comments to Matthew Richardson straight after the siren were very incisive.
Back again next week. On the good side we get 2 Grand Finals on the same weekend once again, like it used to be. Like it SHOULD be.
Later EDIT: .... aaaaaand the changing rooms have apparently been flooded (both teams) so they have to go across with their stuff to the other side of the ground to alternate arrangements.
This is fucking surreal.
This post has been edited by Sombra: 25 September 2010 - 07:24 AM
