Oh we're from Tigerland
Stories of being Richmond
JD, 50, Prague (Czech Republic)
Favourite all-time Richmond player
Dale Weightman – “The ‘Flea’, number three. He was zippy. I was at the 1980 Grand Final and I loved the way he played.”
Favourite current player
Brett Deledio – “He’s a superstar, and again number three. I like ‘Dusty’ because of his toughness, Riewoldt because of his passion, but ‘Lids’ is just a star. Without him we’re on the back foot.”
Statistical maestro Tony Corke (on Twitter see @MatterOfStats) crunched the numbers and published the hard news Monday morning. It is ‘mathematically possible’, but his data puts our beloved Tigers with only a 0.048% chance of squeaking into the finals.
For ‘JD’, a Richmond fan based in the Czech Republic, it means it’s a long shot he’ll be making a long-haul flight this year to visit Melbourne in a first week of spring.
Not that he necessarily wants it this way.
“Being Richmond goes in the blood,” he says. “You’re born a Tiger and you die a Tiger. You want to see us win. The last one was at the Grand Final when I was selling pies. I’d travel to the end of the world to see them do it again.”
September last year and I met JD at Punt Road Oval a few days after Richmond’s finals loss to North Melbourne and he told a complex story about passion, competitiveness, cultural displacement, longing, and the long-distance travel that for him comes with the territory.
“It’s hard being away from the children, but I would have flown back if we made the Grand Final,” he said.
For the past three seasons, JD has made the 16,000 kilometre flight from Prague to both Melbourne and Adelaide to see Richmond play in three Elimination Finals. Door-to-door, it’s a 24-hour trip, for two hours of football that each time has ended only in heartbreak.
“My partner understands,” he said. “She knows I’m insane, everyone knows I’m insane about football.”
Smiling Tiger: Final round of the 2013 AFL season, the win against Essendon and the Tigers return to the Promised Land of finals football.
This is the larger-than-life Richmond story of JD (“I used to do TV in Japan, and my name got cut back to two letters because people kept misspelling it”), an inveterate showman for whom the highs-and-lows of football are all part of life’s great drama.
Born in Prague, into post-war Soviet-era Czechoslovakia, his family migrated to New Zealand after the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, and subsequent invasion by Russian troops and tanks. Two years later, they moved to Melbourne, renting a small flat in St Kilda, sharing a room with his two younger sisters and a brother, and soon after learning about this strange game of Australian Rules football in the yard at Ripponlea Primary School.
He went to his first game with a school friend, watching St Kilda at Moorabbin Oval, wearing a beanie his mother had knitted and at once hooked on the spectacle.
At Oakleigh High (Warwick Capper was a classmate), he had a weekend job at the football selling hot pies in the aisles, learning much about the game’s culture and the power of the crowd. “I was the number one pie salesman at the MCG in 1980, and a friend called ‘Snowy’ was number two,” he says. “We earned the most money.”
“I sacrificed a lot of money on Grand Final day because I just wanted to watch the game. I was obligated to sell the pies, and you were allowed to quit at three-quarter time, but I quit at half-time because I wanted to watch the game.”
Like many other Richmond fans of a certain age, JD has a fond memory of the day and an era when the Tigers were feared and our black jumper with a yellow sash was commonplace on the green baize of the MCG in late September. He carries a memento of the match in his wallet, a small square of Richmond’s crepe paper run-through banner, souvenired as an heirloom, kept as his lucky charm.
“I’ve also got grass from the game in a plastic bag,” he says.
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Paper Tiger: By the walls of Punt Road Oval, with his treasured remnant of the 1980 Grand Final run-through banner.
Entrepreneurial and ambitious, and with a desire for sporting success, Jay Dee moved to Japan in the mid-80s to train as a table tennis player. The sport had been newly-inducted into the Olympic movement for the 1988 Seoul summer games, and he wanted a shot qualifying for the Australian squad.
“I wanted to make the top four at the nationals,” he says. “I was training more than the Japanese. I was like a robot, practising hours every day, building up agility, speed, good eye movement, fast reflexes.”
In the end, he missed-out on the team (Australia sent three players, South Korea and China won most of the medals), but made a name for himself in Japan as a TV presenter. Based in Tokyo, he hosted a travel show called JDs Famous Japan, playing a charismatic outsider looking at local cultural traditions with fresh eyes. Between gigs, he returned to Melbourne to commentate the 1989 VFL Grand Final for a Japanese broadcaster, the first live telecast of the code in a foreign language.
Then in 1996 he went to Prague for a holiday, returning to his birthplace, and saw opportunity. He established a media and marketing business, and began hosting an English-language travel show called JDs EZ English. “I became a hit and I stayed,” he says. “I came back to my roots.”
Talking (Japanese) Tigers: A younger JD in his football calling (and translating) days.
But throughout the wanderlust, he’s always held a longing for Richmond, returning often for the football. For him, perhaps, there’s an unfinished business.
When we spoke last September, JD was bullish about Richmond’s chances this season, even in the let-down of our first week finals loss. Maybe it was the jetlag. Or maybe it’s the eternal hope of so many Tiger fans. He expected to be flying to Melbourne again this September. “But a little later because we’ll finish top-four and have the guaranteed double chance,” he said. “And we should win to make the Grand Final. Whatever happens there is up to us.”
But between dreams and reality there’s an emotion most football fans experience, and mostly it has to do with loss.
As with many passionate Richmond supporters, in JD’s mind, football is a simple business about success. It is black and white (or yellow and black) and there is no room for failure.
“We shouldn’t be focused on making the finals and winning the first final,” he said last September. “Forget that. Focus totally on winning the Grand Final, and then winning the first final becomes a given.”
“We need to take a step further with only a premiership in mind. Seriously, the potential is there. The mindset is important. The right psychology is important, especially when the competition is so close.”
Now on the cusp of playing Hawthorn – perennial grand finalists, the competition’s gold standard – this season’s hopes have fallen short of everyone’s expectations. The body of work that was the past three seasons – the consecutive finals – has been replaced by new questions. Richmond is again on the outside, looking in.
As with JD, watching from afar, in central Europe, wanting and yearning for his Tigers to find a way to turn this around.
Not a happy Tiger: Three-quarter time at Adelaide Oval in the 2014 Elimination Final, alone in the crowd and a long way from Prague.
He emailed this week: “Until we dig deep to ask ‘why’ we won’t truly learn and our problems will not be solved. We need true Tiger toughness for four quarters and play like a Tiger with killer instinct! I don’t want to die before we win another Grand Final!”
At the very least, all of us want to be roused with pride this week.
Go Tiges!
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
