Oh we're from Tigerland: Jamie Mason

Oh we're from Tigerland
Stories of being Richmond

Jamie Mason, 54, Newport (via Glenelg, Adelaide)

Favourite all-time player
Geoff Raines – “Loved the way he covered the ground, he was just so smooth. He was a beautiful kick, an all-round package.”

Favourite current player
Bachar Houli – “I like what he represents, the diversity of footy, that it can be a place for everyone. Whenever I hear him speak, he handles himself with such grace.”

We meet by the boundary at Punt Road Oval, three-quarter time at a VFL match, the home boys up, and first impressions are he is an organised man: measured, thoughtful, generous. Jamie Mason was a footballer, with a deep tap root in the sport in Adelaide: two reserves flags and 12 senior games as an on-baller at Glenelg, then 40-odd games for North Adelaide before tearing his medial ligament.

He returned to the field with the Broadview Tigers in the A1 amateurs, winning a premiership in 1989 and the Pfitzner Medal, the competition’s highest honour, along with selection in the all-Australian amateur side. Playing days over, among other part-time jobs, he coached Adelaide University FC for two seasons, and helped out at Norwood as football operations manager.

“In the words of Captain Blood, I was a good ordinary footballer,” he says, modest about his on-field feats.

Staking a claim: a picket at Glenelg Oval commemorating the former Glenelg Tiger, Jamie Mason, sponsored by his dear Adelaide friends, the Kilpatricks.

Now he’s a barracker – seeing the game through another prism – and from the perspective of a South Australian transplanted recently to the game’s heartland. “It’s been surreal these past few years to be able to watch Richmond play almost every week,” he says, on the grass at Punt Road Oval with his youngest son, 8-year-old Edward. “For supporters like me who’ve grown up elsewhere, you don’t appreciate how good it is until you’re in Melbourne.”

The football story of Jamie Mason is one of perseverance, tradition, and sense of place.

He was born in Glenelg, a beachside Adelaide suburb, and in the early 80s as a young man played at the fabled ‘Bays’ alongside the likes of Stephen Kernahan, Chris McDermott and Paul Weston. “Glenelg were perennial grand finalists in the 70s and 80s, but I watched as they lost most of them to Sturt, Port Adelaide and Norwood.”

“My earliest memory watching them in a grand final was 1969 when Royce Hart played,” he says. “He was doing national service in Adelaide. He got knocked out very early in the game.”

For many older Glenelg fans, growing up with a team who wear black with a yellow sash, transferring allegiance across state lines to Richmond was once a logical step. Jamie was no exception, keeping abreast of the VFL from afar. But it wasn’t as though he opted to back a winner.

“To be honest, I really got interested in them in the early 90s when they weren’t particularly successful, when they had a habit of finishing ninth.”

His catalyst, in part, was the Adelaide Football Club, a footballing confection that for many South Australians fractured allegiances. “For people of my age who had played in the SANFL there was probably a bit of petty jealousy,” he says. “The Crows became the main game in town, and SANFL clubs and the league suffered because of that.”

Football traditions, they run deep in Australia wherever the game is a way of life.

“Many supporters like me probably have a greater appreciation for Port Adelaide because they were a real club and you can’t deny their success,” says Jamie. “But having played against them in the SANFL there’s no way I could possibly barrack for them.”

So Richmond it is, and Richmond it has been and probably always will be.