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Bear with me, this story has a point.
I didn’t watch the last quarter of Sunday’s game because I was performing in an afternoon fund-raiser concert in Fremantle that started at 3pm and I had to be at the venue by 2.30.
A good thing, probably, as watching it would have sent me into a slump. As it was I heard a bit of what was happening on the car radio, and when I rang home just before show-time for the result I wasn’t overly shocked … but nor did I have the just-driven-over-by-road-train feeling I would have had if I had seen it through.
And I had other things to attend to: a fund-raiser for a good cause and a commitment I had made to playing some beautiful and quite challenging music for a paying audience. Having had time to think about it in the car I resolved at that moment that life was short and there was no way I was going to let the outcome of this game affect my performance as a musician that afternoon.
But somehow it did, in the opposite way to what I expected. As football argot would put it, I played a blinder. My colleagues and I were completely in the zone and, unlike the boys, we maintained a high quality of performance right to the end of the show.
In the audience I spotted an old friend and fellow Freo tragic I hadn’t seen in a long while and I caught up with her afterwards. We mused about why we get so emotionally tied up in this stuff, why we feel these losses so deeply, why it’s so much more than ‘just a game’ and indeed affects the way we go about our business, even if it’s playing a musical instrument.
We didn’t come up with any answers but she did say that there had been a number of bad times over 14 years when she had walked to Fremantle Oval and stood pondering the whys and wherefores of the ever-unfolding tragi-comedy of our club’s fortunes… and she sometimes can’t help thinking that maybe, in all the misery and oppression of convict labour that went into building Fremantle Prison and the Pensioner Guard houses, there is just too much bad karma in the mix. (And we both confessed to having harboured a private, selfish hope that Freo would go well in 2008 if only to give our children an emotional boost in their TEE year.) Anyway, we were able to take some solace from the way that music that afternoon had transported us and connected us to something even bigger than our football woes.
I thought about all this on my way home to feed and commiserate with my long-suffering family, and in the evening, instead of sitting down and poring over the Dockerland message-board, I retired to bed with a book someone gave me a few months ago, a colourful and stylish tome on the lives of the great composers… and found myself reading about that most down-trodden, oppressed of creative geniuses (genii?) Dmitri Shostakovich.
I was stunned to read that in addition to his exploits as a rebel composer constantly browbeaten by the Soviet culture police, Shostakovich was a passionate football fan, and frequently umpired at matches.
This would be the round-ball game, of course, but nevertheless it got me onto a train of thought I now can’t get off. There is a connection! Everything fell into place. Shostakovich’s music was used as the setting of a piece of dance theatre I saw a few years ago, based on a short story by Gogol called ‘The Overcoat’. Basically it’s one of those dark, tragic Slavic stories about a guy who’s a complete loser, bottom of the food chain at work and life generally, constantly abused and belittled by higher-ups, your basic schlep, until he spends all his money having a fancy overcoat made. The splendid coat turns him into the toast of the town, suddenly he’s popular and invited to all the stylish parties, he’s overjoyed, gets carried away, goes on a bender, and while he’s in a drunken stupor he gets beaten up and his precious coat is stolen, sending him back to loser-land. (Any of this resonate yet?) He ends up in a lunatic asylum … and when they put the strait-jacket on him he’s happy because he has a coat again.
Being a Freo supporter feels a lot like that sometimes… and from our club song being based on the Volga Boatmen – a Russian folk tune that made its way into the works of Shostakovich’s predecessor Tchaikowski – to the Slavic name of our captain and the communist roots of the dockside workers who gave us our proud name, our story is a dark brooding Russian epic of oppression and defiance.
I love that. It gives our team depth and character and meaning beyond any other.
And I’d rather have Shostakovich as the soundtrack to our story any day than the Rodgers and Hammerstein or Andrew Lloyd Webber-style insipid carp that fits certain other clubs.
(Better still ACDC mind you.)
And we will get there, I know it.
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