FRANK DAVIS—RECOLLECTIONS OF MELBOURNE’S LAST PREMIERSHIP
END OF THE DAWN: Jubilant Melbourne players celebrate their last premiership on 19 September 1964.
He can still see it now, just like it was yesterday. But it’s not yesterday. It is, in fact, more than five decades after the event, yet it remains one of football’s most iconic Grand Final moments. Frank Davis, then playing in just his sixth VFL game for Melbourne, remembers a Collingwood player, he’s not sure who (it was Des Tuddenham, his opponent at the time), kick the ball long over his own head, and as he turned to see where it landed his heart skipped a beat. To Davis’ horror, 30 yards in the clear was the Magpies’ 193-centimetre ruckman, Ray Gabelich. As ‘Gabbo’ marked and turned towards goal, Davis and three of his Melbourne teammates gave chase.
“I’m not sure how he [Gabelich] got where he was?” Davis, now 77, explained when recalling the 1964 Grand Final between Melbourne and Collingwood. “In those days you just kicked it long, you weren’t worried about keeping it off the opposition like they do today. As I turned around, there was Gabelich standing on his own some 30 yards away. He bounced it a few times and could have lost it but he didn’t, so I just had my head down while I chased him, hoping that it might bounce back over his head or something.”
Gabelich famously took four bounces as he loped towards the open goal, the fourth bounce taking a right turn and, for a fleeting second, it appeared that Davis’s hopes had come true. However, Gabelich re-gathered in the goal square and slammed home the go-ahead goal—his second in a matter of minutes—to give Collingwood a two-point lead. “I didn’t think we’d lost, but I certainly looked up at the clock on the MCG scoreboard and knew we’d been playing a fair while, so there couldn’t have been much time left. What used to happen when we were down to the last minute or two, was we used to have the trainers on the bench with a towel, and they’d swing the towel like that (gestures a back and forward waving motion). If you looked over and you saw that happening, you knew there was only a minute or so to go.”
Moments later, Davis’ fellow defender, Neil Crompton, breaking team rules by drifting forward, roved a pack and snapped the game-winning goal for the Demons. “He just booted it!” Davis proclaimed. “Once again, it was just a quick kick forward, except that Neil happened to be right up past the centre of the ground and through the goals she went. But there was probably still two minutes left after that. I think it went up the Collingwood end again and Barry Bourke took a mark to save the day, so it could have gone either way. It was nerve-wracking. When we hit the front, you were just thinking: ‘Ring the bloody bell!’”
As history tells us, Melbourne, under the stewardship of future VFL/AFL coach of the century in Norm Smith, won their sixth premiership in 10 years when they defeated their arch-rival, Collingwood, by just four points in the 1964 Grand Final: 8.16 (64) to 8.12 (60). Davis’ captain that day was another future Australian Football Legend in Ron Barassi, whose path to the red and blue of the Demons was chosen for him at a young age when, having lost his father in World War Two, Barassi moved in with family friends Norm and Marj Smith, with Norm grooming Ronald Dale into one of football’s finest competitors. Both men were winners in every sense of the word.
LEGENDARY LEADER: Ron Barassi (pictured with author Dan Eddy) was the biggest name in football during Melbourne’s golden era of the 1950s and early-1960s.
But not all of our paths are laid out for us. Take Davis for example. “I virtually walked in off the street. Melbourne didn’t even know that I existed,” he explained.
Davis, ironically a Collingwood supporter growing up, played his junior football with Oakleigh YCW, which was coached by Richmond recruiter Roy Weston; the club was in the Tigers’ metropolitan recruitment zone at the time. “I was the only kid in the team who didn’t live in Richmond’s zone,” Davis recalled. “I actually lived in Melbourne’s zone, but I didn’t have any communication from Melbourne at that stage. I lived in the south-eastern suburbs near the corner of Warrigal Road and North Road, and the other three corners—the east, north and west—were all Richmond’s zone, but the south side was Melbourne. It was the City of Moorabbin, whereas the other three sides were the City of Oakleigh. If I lived on the other side of North Road, I would have been tied to Richmond.”
In 1962, Davis and friend Peter Woods turned up unannounced to Melbourne’s under-19 training. “We just bowled up there very eager, and we had a run and all the rest of it,” Davis explained. “Then, the next step was trying to get a game with them, because we were nobodies and they didn’t say anything to us. Every Saturday we would turn up to a game just to see whether we were selected or not. I ended up playing the last half of 1962 and all of ’63, and I think I was in the top couple in the best and fairest award.”
At the beginning of the 1964 season, Davis received a letter from Melbourne secretary, Jim Cardwell, telling him he could train with the senior side under Smith. “I remember the night I walked into the dressing rooms for the first time. Norm Smith used to get changed in the property room, which was right opposite the door where everybody used to come in. I walked in and he came over and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and I said, ‘Mr Cardwell rang me and said that I’m now on the senior list and that I should come down and train.’ He said, ‘Oh, okay, I wish they’d tell me what was going on around here!’ I actually got on really well with Norm. That was just his way of talking to you.”
PERFECT TIMING: Frank Davis arrived at Melbourne at precisely the right time, playing in a premiership in just his sixth VFL game.
Smith would make the then 19-year-old work for his VFL debut, which eventually came in round 13. “They got a couple of injuries, including Brian ‘Wrecker’ Leahy who did a hamstring, and so I was named on the bench for my first senior game, at the MCG against North Melbourne. I came onto the ground halfway through the last quarter, had a couple of kicks and even kicked a goal”—with his first kick, no less!
Davis played again the following week, then was left out of the team until round 17, before returning and holding his place for the final two home and away games, plus the 89-point second semi-final thumping of Collingwood and, of course, the Grand Final two weeks later. “It was a combination of playing okay and there being a few injuries to senior players; I just happened to be there at the right time. My endeavour was a strength I suppose, to go in and get the footy. I can never remember being frightened of going in and getting the football. My ability to tackle and chase was a strength, plus I could kick both feet pretty well. I was never a star footballer and never proclaimed to be anybody special, I just had a go all the time. I trained pretty hard, because I didn’t have the ability just to bludge my way through. I had to put in, and so that’s what I did. I can say that I had a red-hot crack.”
Davis would go on to play a total of 168 games in red and blue (1964-73). He captained the club (1970-72), won the 1970 best and fairest, and also represented Victoria in 1971. Remarkably, however, those two finals in 1964 would be his only taste of September action. Three months after leading the Demons to premiership glory, favourite son Barassi left the club to become captain-coach at Carlton, thus beginning one of the greatest coaching careers the game has ever seen. Then, on the eve of Melbourne’s round 13 game of 1965—and despite the Demons sitting equal-first on the ladder—Smith, in one of football’s most sensational controversies, was sacked; an event that has hung over the club like a curse ever since.
Davis still remembers the shock of Smith’s sacking. “The first phone call I got was from Jim Cardwell, who said that Norm had been sacked. He said, ‘I don’t want you to talk to the press, and I want you to come to a meeting at the club.’ Then, about 10 minutes later, Hassa Mann—who had taken over from Barassi as captain—rang me and said: ‘You probably heard that Norm got the sack. The players are having a meeting and I want you there.’ I said, ‘What about the club?’ But he said, ‘Don’t worry about the club, I want you there at the players’ meeting.’ We had the meeting and then we had to play North Melbourne at Coburg, of all places, and [four-time Melbourne premiership coach] ‘Checker’ Hughes coached us. The ground was a mud heap and we got done [by 21 points], so it wasn’t a real good day. Then, the next week, Norm was reinstated and went on to coach until 1967, but the club never recovered from that.” Indeed, to this day, Melbourne have yet to win another premiership since that famous 1964 victory.
“The Smithy episode took a toll on the club,” Davis said. “That and the lack of being able to get quality players into the footy club because, due to the amateur beliefs of the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC), they were reluctant to pay what other clubs were willing to pay for the top players. So, they fell from the wayside and they still haven’t fully recovered from it. As an ex-premiership player, it’s frustrating to see.”
Davis later worked part-time in recruiting at Hawthorn and was at the club during its halcyon days of the 1980s and early-1990s, working under another legendary coach in Allan Jeans. “I learnt so much from Smithy and Jeansy,” he added. “Melbourne through the 1950s and early ‘60s was just a great group of players, and so were Hawthorn in the 1980s. I’ve been very lucky. Football has given me a job, for a start. Also, it has given me the chance to meet some really nice, good people, who have taught me a lot of things about life in general and how to handle things. No matter where I go in footy nowadays I’m going to run into someone I know. When we won in ’64, we never thought it would be the last one that the club would win. You don’t think of those sorts of things. You just think that there’ll be another one somewhere down the track. But, having said that, a club like Hawthorn have proven that it can be done, when you see how they came out of the whole merger period of 1996 (when they, ironically, almost merged with Melbourne) to be where they are now. It’s all about loyalty in your footy club, I reckon. Get good people to work for you and look after them.”
The 2021 version of the Melbourne Football Club appears to be ticking those boxes, much to the delight of Davis and his fellow 1964 survivors. Should Simon Goodwin join Smith as a premiership coach of the Demons, one can only imagine the type of party that will take place for the club’s success-starved supporters.
DEMONIC ART: Between 1955-1964, cartoonist William Ellis Green (AKA ‘WEG’) got used to producing a Demon mascot on his annual premiership poster. Melbourne won six Grand Finals in 10 years.
Just how did the Melbourne players celebrate that last premiership? Davis smiled as he recalled: “After the game we went in the rooms and sang the song, then there were the photographers and all the people celebrating with us. After showering and getting dressed we went down to the MCC Members, where we all climbed onto the Members’ bar and walked along as we were introduced to all the members there. I saw a bloke a couple of years ago who told me, ‘The last time I saw you, Frank, you were walking along the bar in the MCC Members!’”