Along the path beside the newly green grass– revived by a few days of reasonable rain– that stretches down to the lighthouse, the grass on which the local council wants to built a skate park, before dawn, the sky suffused with the soft white light of a full moon, there in the distance, perhaps 100 metres away, Tommy Hafey is preparing for his early morning swim. Tommy is standing on the sand in his alarmingly brief bathers looking out at the water, still and contemplative, as if in these moments before he immerses himself in the bay, he is conquering time.
We see Tommy many mornings, there on the sand beside the path leading to the St Kilda boardwalk and every morning, Tommy greets us both Rocky and me as if we are, like him, in the words of Dylan Thomas, raging against the dying of the light. It may be of course that Rocky does not see it that way for Rocky lives his life as if it will never end, in the moment, and that neitrher does Tommy, for at 78, Tommy Hafey, dressed only in his speedos, looks like a man holding time at bay.
We do not talk of these things, this question of time passing, but there is nevertheless something about Tommy’s early morning regularity–much like mine I suppose– that suggests that each morning must be lived knowing that the time of endless time stretching, without end, into the future, is long past.
Rocky likes Tommy very much. He dashes towards him along the path and when he reaches him, he is overcome with excitement, leaping in the air with joy, before rolling over at Tommy’s feet, waiting for Tommy to reach down and pat him and call out his name. By the time I get to Tommy, Rocky has left for the shore, waiting there for Tommy to come down and immerse himself in the water, slowly, methodically, as if in this ritual lies the secret of longevity, at which point Rocky stands in the shallows watching Tommy swim out into the darkness.
Tommy and I hardly ever speak more than a few sentences to each other, mainly about the weather and the tides and the state of the sand–whether or not it has been rolled flat by those council bulldozers that are meant to clear the beach of garbage but it seems to me, are mostly driven up and down the sand to render it flat and lifeless. We never talk about football, despite the fact that Tommy Hafey, back in the 60s and 70s, coached Richmond to four premierships and built the Tigers into the most feared football side imaginable.
In my previous life, I wrote several stories about Tommy Hafey. One I remember was about Kevin Sheedy, who Tommy brought to Richmond in the mid-1960s and who Tommy took under his wing. He taught the young Sheedy, a tough working-class boy from Prahran, back then an inner city working class suburb, not just about football, but about the importance of curiosity and being open to new ideas and about self-renewal and re-invention. Even when Sheedy went on to coach Essendon for more than a quarter of a century, winning four premierships with the Bombers and transforming what had been a conservative, suburban football club run by dour Presbyterians, into a football club of national prominence with a national following and the first club to recognise and celebrate the role of indigenous footballers in the code, Tommy Hafey remained Sheedy’s mentor and the bond between them, the love between them, made all the more poignant by their veneer of gruff masculinity, was never broken.
We do not talk of these things, Tommy Hafey and I, on these winter mornings, though I suspect Tommy remembers those times because though he mostly calls me mate, there have been times when he has called me Michael. I have thought about talking to Tommy about his past and mine but have not done so because it does not feel right, not there, on the sand, in mid winter, with me dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and Bomber cap and Tommy in his speedos getting ready, with Rocky waiting for him at the shore, to take his time-defying swim.
This morning, Rocky has gone through his ritual of surrender, but for some reason has stayed by Tommy’s side, looking up at Tommy with what I think is more urgent affection than usual. When I reach them, Tommy calls out Rocky’s name several times, quietly, gently, and tells me that he once had dog he called Rocky, after the boxer Rocky Marciano. Tommy says this as if I would surely know all about Rocky Marciano, assuming I think, that I too named Rocky after the American heavyweight who was the world champ in the early 1950s.
What I remember about Rocky Marciano is that in a simulated fight against Mohammed Ali in the mid 1970s, staged by feeding their respective records and strengths and weaknesses into a computer, Marciano won in a 13th round knock-out. I was outraged, for I considered Ali the greatest boxer of all time. I vaguely recall my father talking about Marciano but the Italian-American boxer I most vividly remember from my childhood is Rocky Graziano, an average middle-weight slugger really, who became a boxing legend when Paul Newman played him in the movie Somebody Up There Likes Me.
I saw the film with my two eldest sisters one Saturday night and I remember how enthralled I was by this story of the Italian street kid who goes on to become a boxing hero and who wins the love of the gorgeous Pier Angeli who stood by him even when he seemed destined to never win the big one, the world title, and is there with him later, when he finally, against all odds, wins the title and is afforded a ticker-tape parade on the streets of New York, Newman and Angeli together waving to the multitudes out to greet them and salute their new champ.
I do not remember whether my sisters were much enamored of this movie, for in the main, their regular Saturday night movie outings, just the two of them and sometimes, with me in tow, were to films of a more straightforwardly romantic nature. I recall, for instance, how much they adored Love is a Many Splendid Thing with William Holden and Jennifer Jones, both of them in tears beside me when the course of love did not, inevitably, run smooth. I think I may have slept through much of this film, for all I remember of it is the tears and the rapture of my sisters and of their animated conversation about it on the tram on the way home, me sitting beside my eldest sister Hinda, comforted and happy in her closeness.
My sisters, unlike their husbands and my father, had no interest in boxing. On many Friday nights–this must have been after my mother had died, for she would never have allowed my father to act with such contempt for the Sabbath– my father and my two brothers-in-law went to Festival Hall for the fights and every now and then, they took me with them. I loved these nights. We mostly sat pretty close to the action which meant that every punch thrown whistled like a missile and landed with a dull thud. When punches landed, the head of the recipient jerked back or sideways, sending a stream of sweat flying like raindrops through the rays of the lights that were concentrated on the ring.
There were, I recall, three boxers my father and my brothers-in-law, Henyek and John, always went to see. They fought each other in a sort of round robin that went on for months if not years. George Bracken was an Aboriginal boxer, tall and powerfully built for a lightweight, with a killer right, but George was not a great ring tactician. Maxy Carlos was courageous and skillful, a counter puncher, but his punches lacked potency and his big weakness was a glass jaw that against Bracken, almost always brought him undone.
David Oved was the stylist of the three. Oved, Israeli born, wore white trunks embroidered with a blue Star of David and though Bracken knocked him out a few times, if he could remain standing, he could beat Bracken on points. He mostly lost to Maxy Carlos on points, basically because Maxy was able to stay out of Oved’s reach and jab away with his left, punches that hardly left a mark on Oved’s face but left Oved dancing around the ring, forlorn and frustrated, unable to find a way to get to Maxy’s glass jaw. At these times, my father, Henyek and John, would shout encouragement to Oved in Yiddish, as if Oved, if he heard that out there were Jews for whose honor he was fighting, would push Maxy into the ropes and give the goy a boxing lesson.
Of the three men who took me to Festival Hall on Friday nights, it was John whose judgement of boxers I considered most consequential. This was because John, my sister Cesia’s husband, the young man who played soccer for Hakoah in the Victorian Premier League, and who Cesia referred to, when it came to his soccer skills as the kalike– the cripple– was a young man who, when I was a child, thrilled and frightened me with his fearlessness and his willingness to fight anyone who was foolish enough to insult him or any member of his family, especially if the insults were racially based. John sometimes took me to the banks of the Yarra River on Sunday afternoons which in the 1950s, was a sort of speakers corner where all manner of people stood on chairs and wooden crates to deliver their solutions to the world’s problems. Hundreds of people gathered on the river bank near the city to listen and if they were so inclined–and they often were–to heckle the speakers.
John was there each Sunday afternoon. His mission was to make sure the small group of neo-Nazis were not able to exercise their right to free speech. He managed to do this mostly by threatening to beat them to a pulp if they did not immediately leave the area. John delivered his threats in English though he did add a few Yiddish curses for extra emphasis and though I doubt that the neo-Nazis were Yiddish speakers, the ferocity of his delivery meant that they quickly managed to understand the gist of what he was saying.
There were a few occasions–though I do not recall being an eye witness to this–when John had to make good on these threats and apparently he did so with alacrity. I do recall him coming to our place one late Sunday afternoon looking dishevelled but triumphant and adrenalin-filled, my sisters, all three of them, having spent the afternooon in animated discussion of the state of their lives, hovering around him, Cesia examining his hands, white-faced and grim looking, silent, as John reassured her that he was alright. He looked at me and smiled and winked and at that moment, I was filled with awe and pride. Even now, a half a century on,I sometimes look at John, 83 years old but still full of adrenalin, straight-backed, less angry, yes, but still possessed of that fearlessness– or is it something else, a recklessness born of childhood suffering and survival against the odds– and I find myself still in awe of him.
One of the most vivid memories I have of my childhood in Fitzroy, in that milk bar and mixed business in which my parents worked 12 hours a day seven days a week, is the pickled onion incident and its immediate aftermath. Some nights, I served in the shop while my parents had a short break, a chore I performed with some reluctance, for it meant that I was unable to join my friends on Smith Street for an hour or so outside Foys department store where we would press up against the plate glass window to watch Teenage Mailbag on the small television set mounted on the wooden cabinet a few metres from the window.
There was a jar of pickled onions that stood on the stainless steel-topped glass counter in the milk bar area of the shop and on this particular night, two young men who were not regulars in the shop–indeed I had not seen them before– came in and asked for a packet of Turf cigarettes. By the time I turned back to the counter with the cigarettes, they were heading out the door, with one of them carrying the large jar of pickled onions. I am not sure how it was that my father came running into the shop, for I know that I was so shocked by this that I was unable to say anything at all.
My father rushed outside, his grey dustcoat trailing behind him. The two young men were standing by the small tree outside the shop. I think they were rather surprised by my father’s swiftness of approach. I reached the front door of the shop in time to see my father deliver a headbutt to the forehead of the young man who had raised his arms as if he thought he was Maxy Carlos or something. My father then turned to the young man holding the jar of pickles. The young man put down the jar and helped his mate up from the ground beside the tree. He turned to my father, but made no move towards him. My father picked up the jar of pickles and walked past me into the shop and placed the jar back on the stainless steel counter top. The young men could be heard swearing rather loudly outside, but it was clear even to me, that they had been defeated –if not humiliated –by this middle-aged dust-coat wearing refo shop keeper.
My father and I never spoke about the pickled onion incident. I never again saw him so angry and I certainly never again saw him–unlike John– fight anyone. Indeed, in my memory, my father was rather disapproving of John’s brawling though I cannot now recall any specifics of that disapproval. He certainly never went with John to the Yarra Banks to take on the neo-Nazis. But he did take me to the boxing and he did point out to me the strengths and weaknesses of the boxers and especially when David Oved was fighting, he was a rather animated ringside observer.
As I walk away from Tommy Hafey, I wonder what these memories of boxers and of John’s fights and of the pickled onion incident and my father’s perfectly executed head butt mean? Rocky is running ahead of me, down the path. He is fearless, not because he is brave like John but rather because Rocky’s world is essentially benign. I wonder what sort of dog was Tommy’s Rocky, named after the undefeated Italian American world heavyweight champ, Rocky Marciano. I must ask him one morning.
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