If you don't mind, umpire
By NEIL KEARNEY, 25 Aug 2003
THE midday news came on the car radio, and Jack Dyer was snorting indignation over the headline item.
A shonky detective had gone down for taking kickbacks and - being a former member of the Victorian constabulary - Jack was so irate he started making a continuous tut tut tut sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
"Jeeeez," he fumed. "What's the world comin' to? Can't a copper make a few bob without some bludger knockin' him off?"
A few seconds passed, he slapped one of his monstrous hands on to his right knee and chortled: "If ya don't mind, umpire, please!"
We had left his Frankston unit a few minutes earlier, and I was already blessing myself for bringing a tape recorder.
"If ya don't mind, umpire," was Dyer's mantra.
He hated whistleblowers, as he loathed dobbers and wowsers and those henpeckers who busted some ethically challenged copper just because he was subsidising his modest stipend.
We were due at Punt Rd oval by late afternoon on that April day in 1996 to film Dyer for a television special to mark a centenary of VFL/AFL.
Jack was 82 and had pretty much retreated from the media, only coming out for special occasions, such as every time Richmond needed him.
He had been a legend since Phar Lap's glory years, the 1930s, when boys swapped six cigarette cards to get one Jack Dyer, and footballers became legends on 30 bob a week.
As each generation of fans has came along, each has rediscovered him, because Jack's wit and charm were so innate that he never needed to perform to become a star on radio and television.
He was a comic without knowing it, uncontrived and unrehearsed.
His Dyerisms murdered the language of Shakespeare as effortlessly as he fractured opponents' collar bones.
Boys of my generation acquired our insight into footy from reading Dyer's perceptive analysis in his Truth newspaper column, Dyer 'ere, while we sneaked a glance at Heart Balm on the facing page.
But it was the spoken word where the Captain stood out like two giant testicles, as he famously described one footballer's arms.
No one could assess a passage of play as lyrically as Dyer did when 3KZ was football, even if he always failed to mention the name of the player with the ball, which team he played for, and where he was on the ground.
When he declared he loathed Collingwood so much he wouldn't even watch black and white television, we all nodded.
HE was mocked for calling Peter Bosustow a good, ordinary footballer, but there was nothing ordinary about Captain Blood. He was the football personality of the 20th century, and he had the tie to prove it.
The night before I picked him up, he and a handful of the AFL's honoured legends had been presented with a commemorative tie, which his partner Dorothy had tightened in a windsor knot to wear in our centenary documentary.
The legends reunion had brought old memories to the surface, and I was hardly going to douse the fire within.
He told me about his boyhood at Yarra Junction and how his family was so poor he played barefoot for six years - until he earned the price of a pair of boots from painting a house.
He came to live in Struggletown, as Richmond was then known, at 13 on a football-driven scholarship at St Ignatius - but being a college boy in Richmond in those days was hazardous.
"If you didn't have a record, you didn't belong," he said, admitting he frequently walked many miles to avoid the toughs.
He started work as a packer at 14, playing footy for the Richmond Hill Old Boys in a bruising competition against the other industrial suburbs.
"I did a bit of runnin' in those times," he cackled, recalling a riotous final against the Yarraville Stars. "We won the game, they won the fight.
"They cornered us on the North Melbourne railway station, and blokes were hit over the head with iron bars and anything they could find."
While playing for the Richmond Hill Old Boys, Jack picked up a few extra quid doubling up with the Yellow Cabs team in the Wednesday league.
The competition was so violent the police and fire brigade withdrew, leaving the wharfies to give Richmond Hill Old Boys some merciless thrashings.
When he started with Richmond, each young player was assigned an enforcer.
But money was so scarce in the Depression that, when the spindly lad played in the Richmond seconds, he was more likely to get whacked by his teammates trying to secure their place.
When still just a boy, in his second season, he polled 12 votes in the Brownlow Medal, finishing fifth, and scored four best-on-grounds from only seven games.
I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't heard it with my own ears, but he said his greatest regret was that he didn't win a medal.
"BROWNLOW medallist and Captain Blood -- that would have been a nice double, wouldn't it?" he said.
"But I wasn't the sort. I had lots of rough edges.
"Brownlow medallists don't have edges; they're all smooth - that's what they are.
"I loved testing blokes out. They'd test you out and, if you went all right with the test, they might leave you alone a bit."
The way Jack told it, he ran into players only because his knee was so bad he was unable to shift direction once he mustered speed.
I almost drove off the Nepean Highway when he made that outrageous excuse, and Jack's big puppy dog ears shook up and down as he giggled.
In 1934, he joined the police force for no other reason than the cops paid six shillings a week more than the fire brigade.
He was on the beat in the western suburbs during the most violent era in Melbourne's history and, though he ummed and aaahed about the details, he was involved in one gangland shooting.
Football in Melbourne was just as lawless.
After Captain Blood decimated the Shinboners in a wild game at North Melbourne, angry North supporters milled around outside the change rooms for an hour, baying for Dyer's blood.
Women filled their handbags with rocks and screamed: "We'll kill you, Dyer."
Eventually Jack flung open the door and stormed out - wearing his police uniform, with pistol in one hand, and police baton and Gladstone bag in the other.
Captain Blood didn't wield a cutlass, but he might as well have.
The crowd opened up and he passed through a sea of hostile faces, ugly and silent.
When Jack's car wouldn't start, they rained rocks on the roof, and he thanked God when it spluttered into life, enabling him to beat a hasty retreat.
Our trip from Frankston got us to Richmond a couple of hours early, and he suggested we go to one of his old haunts, a pub in Lennox St, near St Ignatius, where he'd been an altar boy.
He reckoned his players got on the grog so much during the war years that, as captain-coach, he had to warn the team during training for the 1943 finals that any player caught drinking was out of the Richmond club for life.
The next morning he walked into a Richmond pub and saw three of his star players - Edwards, Waldron and Broadstock - downing pots of Richmond ale. It was 9am, and Dyer slipped out without them seeing him.
"I couldn't afford to sack them," he said. "We wouldn't have won the premiership without 'em."
The next night at training, without mentioning what he had seen, Dyer flogged the three so mercilessly that Broadstock eventually staggered up to him, dead on his feet, and gasped: "I was drinking beer, not petrol - I'm not a bloody car!"
OVER the next couple of hours Jack's yarns raced from the long ago past (one day he thought he had killed a bloke) to his frustration with the modern era, and how officials have cleaned up his game.
"These fellas sitting at the top now, they're fair dinkum taking all the thrills out of the game and making it basketball," he said.
"There's nothing more exciting than one of those - what do they call 'em now? - a melee. One bloke pushes another and there's a melee, and it's the biggest joke I've ever heard in my life.
"There's hardly one good punch thrown in four melees."
We filmed with Dyer that evening and, as always, he generously gave his time to adoring fans.
When we got back to his unit that night, his lovely friend Dot made us some cheese on toast and a cuppa, and Jack got out a bottle of beer - long-necked, of course.
Football trophies and memorabilia were noticeably absent from his unit.
"All I want is good health. I never a wanted to be a millionaire - you lose a lot of friends, being a millionaire," he said. "Good health will do me."
I asked him which champions he rated, and he said the only champions were the ones who had their pictures on jam tins. As I was leaving, he thrust his hands around his neck, untangled the tie, and slapped it into my hand.
"D'ya wear these things?" he asked, and I said I didn't. "Keep it, in case one day you have to."
They say the years can mellow the most villainous of tyrants, but it's hard to believe he incited riots and was once the most feared man in Melbourne. He was a gentleman, Jack Dyer. He was fit for jam tins.
By NEIL KEARNEY, 25 Aug 2003
THE midday news came on the car radio, and Jack Dyer was snorting indignation over the headline item.
A shonky detective had gone down for taking kickbacks and - being a former member of the Victorian constabulary - Jack was so irate he started making a continuous tut tut tut sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
"Jeeeez," he fumed. "What's the world comin' to? Can't a copper make a few bob without some bludger knockin' him off?"
A few seconds passed, he slapped one of his monstrous hands on to his right knee and chortled: "If ya don't mind, umpire, please!"
We had left his Frankston unit a few minutes earlier, and I was already blessing myself for bringing a tape recorder.
"If ya don't mind, umpire," was Dyer's mantra.
He hated whistleblowers, as he loathed dobbers and wowsers and those henpeckers who busted some ethically challenged copper just because he was subsidising his modest stipend.
We were due at Punt Rd oval by late afternoon on that April day in 1996 to film Dyer for a television special to mark a centenary of VFL/AFL.
Jack was 82 and had pretty much retreated from the media, only coming out for special occasions, such as every time Richmond needed him.
He had been a legend since Phar Lap's glory years, the 1930s, when boys swapped six cigarette cards to get one Jack Dyer, and footballers became legends on 30 bob a week.
As each generation of fans has came along, each has rediscovered him, because Jack's wit and charm were so innate that he never needed to perform to become a star on radio and television.
He was a comic without knowing it, uncontrived and unrehearsed.
His Dyerisms murdered the language of Shakespeare as effortlessly as he fractured opponents' collar bones.
Boys of my generation acquired our insight into footy from reading Dyer's perceptive analysis in his Truth newspaper column, Dyer 'ere, while we sneaked a glance at Heart Balm on the facing page.
But it was the spoken word where the Captain stood out like two giant testicles, as he famously described one footballer's arms.
No one could assess a passage of play as lyrically as Dyer did when 3KZ was football, even if he always failed to mention the name of the player with the ball, which team he played for, and where he was on the ground.
When he declared he loathed Collingwood so much he wouldn't even watch black and white television, we all nodded.
HE was mocked for calling Peter Bosustow a good, ordinary footballer, but there was nothing ordinary about Captain Blood. He was the football personality of the 20th century, and he had the tie to prove it.
The night before I picked him up, he and a handful of the AFL's honoured legends had been presented with a commemorative tie, which his partner Dorothy had tightened in a windsor knot to wear in our centenary documentary.
The legends reunion had brought old memories to the surface, and I was hardly going to douse the fire within.
He told me about his boyhood at Yarra Junction and how his family was so poor he played barefoot for six years - until he earned the price of a pair of boots from painting a house.
He came to live in Struggletown, as Richmond was then known, at 13 on a football-driven scholarship at St Ignatius - but being a college boy in Richmond in those days was hazardous.
"If you didn't have a record, you didn't belong," he said, admitting he frequently walked many miles to avoid the toughs.
He started work as a packer at 14, playing footy for the Richmond Hill Old Boys in a bruising competition against the other industrial suburbs.
"I did a bit of runnin' in those times," he cackled, recalling a riotous final against the Yarraville Stars. "We won the game, they won the fight.
"They cornered us on the North Melbourne railway station, and blokes were hit over the head with iron bars and anything they could find."
While playing for the Richmond Hill Old Boys, Jack picked up a few extra quid doubling up with the Yellow Cabs team in the Wednesday league.
The competition was so violent the police and fire brigade withdrew, leaving the wharfies to give Richmond Hill Old Boys some merciless thrashings.
When he started with Richmond, each young player was assigned an enforcer.
But money was so scarce in the Depression that, when the spindly lad played in the Richmond seconds, he was more likely to get whacked by his teammates trying to secure their place.
When still just a boy, in his second season, he polled 12 votes in the Brownlow Medal, finishing fifth, and scored four best-on-grounds from only seven games.
I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't heard it with my own ears, but he said his greatest regret was that he didn't win a medal.
"BROWNLOW medallist and Captain Blood -- that would have been a nice double, wouldn't it?" he said.
"But I wasn't the sort. I had lots of rough edges.
"Brownlow medallists don't have edges; they're all smooth - that's what they are.
"I loved testing blokes out. They'd test you out and, if you went all right with the test, they might leave you alone a bit."
The way Jack told it, he ran into players only because his knee was so bad he was unable to shift direction once he mustered speed.
I almost drove off the Nepean Highway when he made that outrageous excuse, and Jack's big puppy dog ears shook up and down as he giggled.
In 1934, he joined the police force for no other reason than the cops paid six shillings a week more than the fire brigade.
He was on the beat in the western suburbs during the most violent era in Melbourne's history and, though he ummed and aaahed about the details, he was involved in one gangland shooting.
Football in Melbourne was just as lawless.
After Captain Blood decimated the Shinboners in a wild game at North Melbourne, angry North supporters milled around outside the change rooms for an hour, baying for Dyer's blood.
Women filled their handbags with rocks and screamed: "We'll kill you, Dyer."
Eventually Jack flung open the door and stormed out - wearing his police uniform, with pistol in one hand, and police baton and Gladstone bag in the other.
Captain Blood didn't wield a cutlass, but he might as well have.
The crowd opened up and he passed through a sea of hostile faces, ugly and silent.
When Jack's car wouldn't start, they rained rocks on the roof, and he thanked God when it spluttered into life, enabling him to beat a hasty retreat.
Our trip from Frankston got us to Richmond a couple of hours early, and he suggested we go to one of his old haunts, a pub in Lennox St, near St Ignatius, where he'd been an altar boy.
He reckoned his players got on the grog so much during the war years that, as captain-coach, he had to warn the team during training for the 1943 finals that any player caught drinking was out of the Richmond club for life.
The next morning he walked into a Richmond pub and saw three of his star players - Edwards, Waldron and Broadstock - downing pots of Richmond ale. It was 9am, and Dyer slipped out without them seeing him.
"I couldn't afford to sack them," he said. "We wouldn't have won the premiership without 'em."
The next night at training, without mentioning what he had seen, Dyer flogged the three so mercilessly that Broadstock eventually staggered up to him, dead on his feet, and gasped: "I was drinking beer, not petrol - I'm not a bloody car!"
OVER the next couple of hours Jack's yarns raced from the long ago past (one day he thought he had killed a bloke) to his frustration with the modern era, and how officials have cleaned up his game.
"These fellas sitting at the top now, they're fair dinkum taking all the thrills out of the game and making it basketball," he said.
"There's nothing more exciting than one of those - what do they call 'em now? - a melee. One bloke pushes another and there's a melee, and it's the biggest joke I've ever heard in my life.
"There's hardly one good punch thrown in four melees."
We filmed with Dyer that evening and, as always, he generously gave his time to adoring fans.
When we got back to his unit that night, his lovely friend Dot made us some cheese on toast and a cuppa, and Jack got out a bottle of beer - long-necked, of course.
Football trophies and memorabilia were noticeably absent from his unit.
"All I want is good health. I never a wanted to be a millionaire - you lose a lot of friends, being a millionaire," he said. "Good health will do me."
I asked him which champions he rated, and he said the only champions were the ones who had their pictures on jam tins. As I was leaving, he thrust his hands around his neck, untangled the tie, and slapped it into my hand.
"D'ya wear these things?" he asked, and I said I didn't. "Keep it, in case one day you have to."
They say the years can mellow the most villainous of tyrants, but it's hard to believe he incited riots and was once the most feared man in Melbourne. He was a gentleman, Jack Dyer. He was fit for jam tins.
