‘The most scared I’ve been’: The future AFL stars caught up in a football ‘bloodbath’

Forty years ago this September, Colac-Coragulac and South Warrnambool met in the Hampden league decider. The game is a window on a time football had to outgrow, when the whiff of a premiership could be so intoxicating that all notions of propriety would disappear.

Like other infamous playoffs of the era, the 1985 HFL grand final is remembered simply as “The Bloodbath”.

In the context of football’s elephant in the room – how to respond to mounting evidence connecting repeated concussions with later-life brain damage – it makes a fascinating study. For many who played, this was just one of multiple days when they absorbed blows that human brains are not supposed to endure.

Post-mortem diagnosis of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in AFL greats such as Danny Frawley and Polly Farmer has shaken the game. But that is only the peak of the pyramid; big hits fair and foul have always happened at all levels of football.

For every Frawley and Farmer, there are thousands who endured multiple concussions in the suburbs and the bush who endured multiple concussions who are pondering a frightening thought: what if that’s me?

The cast was intriguing. South’s full-forward was Geoff Clark, who over the next two decades would become the most powerful Indigenous person in Australia, and then the most infamous. He is currently serving time for fraud. Three of his young teammates – Wayne Schwass, Richard Umbers and Stephen Anderson – would play in the AFL.

Colac-Coragulac was led by Brian Brown, formerly of Fitzroy and Essendon. Its starting bench was a veteran, Stephen Theodore, who played 132 games for St Kilda, and a kid, 17-year-old Paul McKenzie, a future Olympic and world champion sailor.

Mascot-like in full Tigers’ gear was Brown’s son Jonathan, three years old and already a precocious force of nature.

The Hampden league grand final had been played at Mortlake for several years and returned to Warrnambool’s Reid Oval to much fanfare, including a pre-game brass band. A record crowd filed in; to the east multiple decks of Commodores and Falcons lined the fence and dotted the hill, the western change rooms wing was packed from goal to goal.

The bar opened at midday, and the early punters tucked into a rugged entrée as Colac-Coragulac defeated Koroit by three points in a reserves grand final that featured five reports. Ten minutes into the main game, the place was fizzing.

Kevin McVilly was South’s captain-coach, and by his own estimation “the bloke in the middle of it too”. He says what happened “doesn’t sit that special with me, wasn’t one of my better moments in footy”. In a 20-year career, he regards this as the day that got away from him. “And I’ve never worked out the bloody reason why.”

As a teammate took possession at the back of a throw-in on the wing, McVilly hesitated thinking another South player was better-placed to lead, then realised he had to go. “By the time I’d done that, the bloke I was on had got his elbow in front of my body, and I went about six steps and couldn’t get round him.”

That bloke was Mark “Butch” Robinson, a 20-year-old apprentice gardener with the Colac council, quiet yet already respected for his skill, calm and courage. “I remember getting in front of him and thinking, ‘I’m younger than this bloke, I’m gunna mark the ball’,” Robinson says. “Then there was like a shadow came in from the side.”

McVilly felt Robinson’s elbow at his hip as they moved in lock-step. “I was running, and I just threw a punch in front of my own nose. I didn’t think I hit him that hard, and next thing he was gone. I thought, ‘Jesus, where’d he go?’”

His next thought was, “Shit, she’s gunna be on here.”

The next minute was outrageously violent. Recalling the game years later, the Warrnambool Standard’s Barry Ward told of people in the crowd vowing it would be the last game they’d attend. Robinson’s dad, Jim, usually spent Saturdays cutting wood in the Otways, but he and Margaret were at the grand final to watch their boy. “He said afterwards, ‘I don’t think this is the right way for things to go,’” Butch says. “He didn’t watch too many more.”

At 16, Schwass was the youngest player on the ground. Sublimely talented and only months away from moving to the big smoke to embark on a 282-game AFL career with North Melbourne and Sydney, on this day he was a skinny kid with a mullet wearing a lace-up No.54 jumper and a bicycle helmet. His mother insisted on the latter. Even wearing it, Schwass was knocked out in his first three games of senior football earlier that season, and played the next week each time.

“There were no concussion tests, no concussion protocol,” he says. “I don’t even recall being asked if I was OK, I just played.”

As blows landed all around him, fracturing faces and blackening eyes, Schwass was petrified. “I was a lightly-built, reasonably talented, quiet kid. I wasn’t aggressive, I didn’t play aggressive football. I was a bit confused, I didn’t understand why it happened, didn’t want anything to do with it.

“It’s probably the most scared I’ve been because I didn’t know what to do. And I didn’t want to do anything because that was so foreign to me.”

South’s Leigh McCluskey, who would teach and coach Jonathan Brown a decade later, remembers the brawl happening right in front of the packed bar. “And I couldn’t hear anyone in the crowd, all I could hear was, ‘Crunch! Crunch!’”

McCluskey wasn’t interested in fighting, but being closest to the initial blow he had little choice. Before the game, someone told him in the South rooms that Theodore was going to get him. It was nonsense, but disconcerting. “I thought, ‘What’d you tell me that for?’”

With players from both teams piling in, McCluskey jumped on the nearest back. “I ended up on the ground and someone lifted me up by the collar. I thought, ‘Oh, here’s Theodore …’.”

Actually, it was John “Bomber” McVilly, Kevin’s younger brother and star Colac-Coragulac centreman. There were 15 McVillys; playing against kin wasn’t uncommon. McCluskey had tagged Bomber successfully earlier in the season. Their exchange amid the madness is remarkable.

“Bomber said, ‘Come on mate, this is not for us, let’s get out of here.’ He walked me over to the side and pretended we were pushing and shoving.”

Alistair Lang was one of several Colac players who sought vengeance upon Kevin McVilly. They were two of only four players reported in what today would be a trial-by-video smorgasbord. Given the number of punches thrown – and landed – the umpires had no hope.

Somehow the game restarted, but it soon kicked off again.

Lang remembers running to a teammate’s aid, then coming to with grass in his mouth. At quarter-time he walked, zombie-like, to the South Warrnambool huddle, thinking it was Colac’s. He shook with shock on a rubdown table waiting for an ambulance that took him to Warrnambool Base Hospital, and doesn’t know if he was back at the ground before the end.

The curtain came down on the carnage in the second quarter when Theodore, released from the shackles of the bench, met South’s Nazaro Cammarano coming the other way in the middle of the ground. “I knew my shoulders were wrecked, I couldn’t tackle him or bump him,” Theodore, now 74, recalls. “So I put my foot up and got him in the chest. I didn’t kick him. I shirt-fronted him with my foot.”

Al Lang’s brother Phil was metres away, and has never forgotten the gasp from the crowd. “This collective intake of breath, then almost silence. And the look on Cammarano’s face, like, ‘WTF?’” Lang says this was the moment the fighting – and the contest – ended. “It was almost like ‘Grub’ [Theodore] was saying, ‘Whatever you blokes do, I’ll do worse.’”

Colac led by 43 points at half-time and won by 56. The dot points of the game include Clark kicking six for South and being reported for striking. Phil Lang was one of several Tigers who might have been best afield, including Butch Robinson, who played out the game with a broken jaw and three dislodged teeth and had 22 cool touches across half-back.

“I kept looking across and calling out, ‘You right Butch?’,” says Brian Brown, who was among the Tigers’ best. “And there’d be a nod of the head and a wave without even looking at me.” Brown would tell son Jonathan that Butch’s performance that day is the bravest thing he saw in football.

Butch was even quieter than usual on the bus back to Colac, a journey that included a pit-stop at the Panmure pub, where local drinkers were briefly joined by footballers still wearing their Tigers’ jumpers, and an array of black eyes and dented or swollen faces. After they’d been presented to a rapturous crowd (with accompanying brass band) on the back of a flat-bed truck in Colac’s Memorial Square, celebrations moved to the clubrooms.

“We got back and Butch said to me, ‘Can you just have a look in my mouth?’,” Brown recalls. “There was a half-inch gap in his jaw. I said, ‘There’s an issue there, mate.’”

It was wired the next day in Geelong (“Straw for a jaw” was the headline of a Colac Herald story detailing his diet of the next six weeks – mostly minced two-fruits consumed through a straw). “I had to carry a pair of pliers around – if I started spewing I’d have to cut the wires to let everything out.”

Robinson’s battered face, still smiling, is one of many unforgettable images from the day. The photograph on the front of Monday’s Warrnambool Standard powerfully depicted the brawl at its height, arms flailing with force, bodies flying. It’s a Batman cartoon fight scene come to life.

The last phone call journalist Nick Tromph made for the story was to local police, who said they would not be investigating the violence in the game. It’s a pertinent detail – three months earlier, Hawthorn’s Leigh Matthews had been criminally charged (and initially convicted before being overturned on appeal) with assault after felling Geelong’s Neville Bruns off the ball at Princes Park.

The most arresting photograph of 1985 grand final day was taken after the siren, and features three-year-old Jonathan Brown on the dais, beaming fit to burst, holding the premiership cup as high as his little arms will allow.

The little boy who would play his earliest football with South Warrnambool after the family moved back to his mother’s roots. Who would grow up to become a giant of the game. Whose bravery transcended into recklessness. And whose gladatorial career would be ended by a 12th concussion.

Tomorrow: The harrowing question facing AFL and country footballers

Keep up to date with the best AFL coverage in the country. Sign up for the Real Footy newsletter.