Oh we're from Tigerland
Stories of being Richmond
PAUL 'TOMMO' THOMPSON, 48, DIANI BEACH, KENYA
Favourite all-time player: Francis Bourke
“He was a straight-line player. He was tough as nails, hard at the ball. Who could ever forget when his head was opened up and he just kept playing? He was such a gentleman, too.”
Favourite current player: Dustin Martin
“When he’s on song he can dance. He’s got the ball on a string. He makes football look easy.”
Football and a football club are about more than a game. It is a family – of players, fans, administrators – supportive of each other, through good times and bad. The wins are pleasing, comforting, but it is a game also about loss.
Jack Riewoldt this Sunday twilight may wear black tape around his arm, in remembrance of his cousin, Maddie, who died earlier this year of a rare bone marrow disease called aplastic anaemia. She was 26-years-old. Her life was before her.
Fight like Maddie? Our Jack this Sunday will likely play with a wounded heart, tears in his eyes, on the wings of an angel, with all in crowd wanting to lift him, his family, beyond grief and bereavement. For two hours, for so many, a football match means more than a game.
Watching alone, at 9.40am Sunday, from a laptop at his work office on a mine site in southern Kenya, wearing his team’s colours, will be Paul Thompson. He is a Tiger whose heart is shaped by football and Richmond, and by a cruel fate, and an unanswerable loss.
His sister, Kathryn, his only surviving sibling (his older brother died at a very early age), died when she was 26-years-old. She was a Tiger. In the late 1970s, as a teenager, she was part of Richmond’s cheer squad. She played hockey, was on the women’s committee at Oakleigh Districts FC, and never turned her back on her team.
Family album: Kathryn Thompson (on right), aged about 10, with Paul (licking ice-cream) and St Francis on Punt Road Oval at a Richmond club day.
In 1987, when Richmond finished last in the first season of an expanded competition, and with the club on hard times, Kathryn was 23-years-old, and diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a bone cancer, in her thigh. A week later, her left leg was amputated.
Undeterred, she went to the football with a prosthetic limb, and a walking stick. The cancer returned, then spread. She married her sweetheart. She saw Richmond play Geelong when Gary Ablett kicked 14 goals, and couldn’t have known it was the last game of football she would ever attend.
“Football was everything to us as a family,” says Paul, on a recent return to Melbourne and the pleasures of being at the game. “Like any brother and sister we had our ups and downs. But not with Richmond. It always brought us together.”
The story of ‘Tommo’ and his sister is a story about family and football that begins with their grandfather, one of five brothers “all born and bred in Richmond”, who lived once in Cubitt Street, beneath the malt silos on the Richmond river flats, and barracked always for the local team.
Left to right: A Tiger heirloom: the back of Paul's circa 1981 duffle coat, with prime billing for 'the Flea' (and signed by Tommy Hafey); Name plates: a cuff of Paul's childhood duffle coat, commemorating three Richmond premiership players (Paul Sarah, a former Geelong goal sneak, played 37 games for the Tigers in four seasons from 1980)
“He was a track rider and jumps jockey before he went to the war,” says Paul. “When he got back he took a job as kennel master of the Melbourne Hunt Club in Cranbourne. They moved around a bit, but for 60-odd years he always kept up his Richmond membership.”
Paul’s childhood was mapped by the game’s home-and-away rhythms, visiting all the suburban grounds of mid-1970s football. Of Punt Road Oval, he heard the stories from his father, Eric, who as a boy would stand on loose bluestone blocks trying to glimpse ruckman Roy Wright, or ‘Mopsy’ Fraser and ‘Max’ Oppy, or the great man himself, Jack Dyer.
“Football seemed like our whole existence on Saturdays in winter,” says Paul. “For home games at the MCG, mum would make sandwiches and fill the thermos, and we’d meet my grandfather and his mate ‘Uncle Bill’ from Werribee at the Punt Road car park, and ‘Uncle Bill’ always got us into the social club before the game.”
“I remember eating rissoles and coleslaw and chips, and having lunch with the Richmond players before they walked to the ground,” he says. “After the game, Kath and I would get autographs as they returned, filling up our autograph books.”
For both Paul and Kathryn, two years older than he, football was a way of life, and a belonging that was in the blood. Both were born into the club’s glory years, with a yearly expectation of finals football, and regular premierships, and the joy that comes with on-field success.
But both also rattled tins during the ‘Save our Skins’ campaign, and on Saturday nights visited the nightclub at the old social rooms at Punt Road, doing whatever they could to keep the Richmond dream alive.
Our last hurrah: Paul's 1982 Official Richmond Cheer Squad membership card.
For 11 years now, Paul Thompson has lived and worked abroad – in Papua New Guinea, Laos, China, and now as an occupational health and safety manager at a mine in Kenya – and never relinquished his RFC membership. He’s clocked up 42 consecutive years. His father Eric, who lives in Sale, in Gippsland – and who turns 83 this Friday – will become a 70-year member next season.
“When you’re away from Melbourne the only thing you can do to support your club is buy a membership,” he says. “Wherever I’ve been I’ve always had the Richmond flag up in my office.”
This Sunday morning, as the sun rises on Africa, ‘Tommo’ will prepare for the game as all other Richmond people do wherever they are. But this week is different. It’s Maddie’s Match, a St Kilda home game dedicated to the memory of Maddie Riewoldt – Nick’s younger sister, and Jack’s cousin. For Paul Thompson, this game also has deeper meaning.
“When I’m watching the footy in Kenya I know dad’s watching with mum back home,” he says. “The football connects me to so many friends, and to family, and to Kath.”
“We went to the footy together, it was what we had together,” says Paul.
“May 22, 1990 at 1.10am is when she died. It’s a date and time I’ll never forget.”
For his Tiger family the world shifted, irrevocably, and can never truly be righted. Football has helped with the healing, says ‘Tommo’; it’s helped salve a wound. It’s the football that holds so many of the memories, of all those Saturday afternoons together, sitting on an old army blanket their father unfurled on the timber bench seats, barracking.
“I never truly knew what I had until it was gone.”
Go Tiges!
And go ‘Tommo’ in Kenya and Eric Thompson in Sale, turning 83 on Friday!
To donate to Maddie Riewoldt’s Vision visit www.mrv.org.au or SMS ‘Maddie’ to 0437 371 371
If you would like to nominate a Richmond fan who has a story to tell about their barracking please email Dugald Jellie with details: dugaldjellie@gmail.com
www.tigertigerburningbright.com.au
