Oh we're from Tigerland
Stories of being Richmond
LEE SKAFTOUROS, 60, PARKDALE
Favourite all-time player:
Kevin Bartlett - “Look at the number of games he played, and how many times wasn’t he in the best players? It’d only be half a dozen. He was consistently good.”
Favourite current player: Alex Rance:
“He’s got the courage of Francis Bourke, he’s got the skills of an Ian Stewart. He’s the best full-back we’ve ever had, the best I’ve ever seen at Richmond.”
In the pantheon of a football club, it’s a hero image that is all Richmond: coach Tommy Hafey carried on the shoulders of fans in the middle of the MCG, before a record crowd of 119,165, in the euphoric afterglow of the 1969 Grand Final win. It’s an unscripted snapshot of celebration and joy, with Hafey perched like a statue – like Washington hoisted by his troops – all flinty gaze; a loosened neck tie his only concession to public adulation.
Mike Perry, Richmond’s 1967 premiership-winning centre-half-back, is on the far left of the frame, holding his camera, having been rubbed-out of the finals’ series with a four-week tribunal suspension. Otherwise, in the centre of the MCG, after an upset win over arch-rivals Carlton, it’s a scene only of a coach and the spontaneous joy of unknown barrackers.
That is, until Lee Skaftouros emailed the other week.
“I’m the blonde kid next to the bloke holding Tommy’s leg, to his right,” he wrote. And so begins a story from another era, when Richmond with players like Royce Hart, Francis Bourke, Kevin Bartlett, Dick Clay, Billy Barrot and Kevin Sheedy would be the lords of football in Melbourne for seasons to come.
Lee Skaftouros was 14-years-old in 1969, the second-born son in a Collingwood family from Brunswick East; his mum with Scottish blood, his father the proprietor of one of Melbourne’s earliest Greek restaurants, the Piraeus Café in Russell Street. But in his allegiance, Lee was swayed by an uncle, who took him often to Punt Road Oval where he raised him on his shoulders.
Glory days: Lee last week, high in the stands above Punt Road Oval where an uncle would once bring him on his shoulders.
He was in the crowd at Richmond’s break-through 1967 flag, sitting beside Olivia Newton-John and Ian Turpie, but two years later went one better and became part of the day’s spectacle.
“When the siren went, the plan was to run out and join the celebrations,” says Lee, recalling the afternoon. “We wanted to get Tommy. There was no discussion about players, it was just Tommy.”
Seated in Richmond’s cheer squad on the MCG’s outer wing, Lee recalls about 20 fans scaling the pickets. These were the days, he recounts, of sleeping overnight in a queue for tickets; and when football passions were displayed overtly on duffle coats, flags, banners, badges, streamers and in the flamboyance of barracking.
“We jumped the fence and there was a line of policemen,” he says. “A lot got caught and sent back, but in those days if you got through and got onto the ground they left you alone. We just went directly to Tommy to lift him up.”
And so an immortal image was made: about a dozen young men, all in the colours of their team, raising their beloved coach into the sky, framed by a wall of faces in the stands of the MCG. It is a portrait of Melbourne from another time; when football was still essentially about suburban rivalries, and in sharp afternoon sun the emotional response to winning was not yet stage-managed for commercial means.
In essence, it is a picture of a coach and a group of fans, and raw-boned insouciance.
Left to right: Like father like... Lee's daughter, Jessie, and son Michael, wearing their colours; A Tiger cub: Lee in his colours on St Kilda Beach, circa late 1950s.
“We were hugging players, we stayed on the ground for as long as we wanted,” says Lee. “They were great memories.”
All these years later, and Lee says his passion for the Tigers burns just as bright. Both his children are avid Richmond supporters and he still goes to the game almost every week, and travels often interstate. In 1990 for the Save our Skins campaign, he went to the rally laden with his 24 Richmond scrap books, filled with WEG posters, Football Records, badges and memorabilia from all his years of barracking, and from the seven Richmond grand finals he attended.
He put his collection on a street corner and fielded offers. “A guy gave me a thousand dollars and said he’d donate it all to the club,” says Lee. For his part, Lee gave his windfall to the campaign. “The least I could do was to give them back something they’d given me.”
Lee says one of his fondest football memories came about five years ago, when a friend took him to Tommy Hafey’s house with the 1969 photograph, hoping for an autograph. “We went for a cuppa at Tommy’s and three hours later we were still there talking about Richmond,” he says. “He kept making cups of tea, drinking them out of these Tiger china tea cups. We were in there forever.”
A member of the Tommy Hafey Club, Lee says he’s still wistful about the Hafey legacy instilled in the Tigers in the late 1960s that carried them through a golden age. “Every day after he left I wished he’d come back,” he says. “We all loved Tommy, we still do.”
Last Friday morning at a public training session on Punt Road Oval, before the last gasp heartbreak of Saturday’s game, I caught up with Lee and we talked about the game and the team and the players and our chances. Lee says he’s mindful of how the competition has changed; how football is now a business, and with more teams and money the successes of yesteryear are so much harder to reproduce. 
The sky is the limit: Richmond coach Damien Hardwick in the middle of Punt Road Oval last week, with Lee Skaftouros, who hopes one day to be in a crowd that raises him as a premiership-winning coach, into the heavens.
“It’s not just the premierships, now it’s just the wins,” he says. “It’s so hard just to string wins together. A premiership is still a dream. If we win one I don’t think Victoria will ever recover. People will just go nuts.”
It’s a thought both of us savour. If Damien Hardwick were to lead us into football’s Promised Land, if he were to break Richmond’s premiership drought and become our new messiah, how would us Richmond fans with so much longing respond?
There is little doubt. The Richmond crowd would carry him on their shoulders, from the MCG and through Yarra Park to Punt Road Oval, high in the air, an idol in the sky, and for forty days and forty nights none would ever let Dimma’s feet touch the ground.
Go Tigers! Go slay the Hawks this Friday night at the G, go make a story under a night sky for the whole city to read!
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
