Bobby Rose |
Swaggering youthfully into the Victoria Golf Club high on confidence and low on expertise, I was greeted, far too many years ago, by the doyen of Melbourne sports writers, the late Don Lawrence. ''Welcome, son,'' Lawrence said gruffly. ''You'll never be rich but you'll have a great time and meet some wonderful people.''
Recently, I joyfully had the company of Peter Rose and his partner, Christopher Menz, over lunch at the MCG. Rose is a Melbourne poet and author, the younger son of the legendary Collingwood player and coach, the late Bob Rose.
Peter told us his mum, Elsie, was moving out of the family home after 40 years, by any measure an onerous and emotional task. It was even more so for Elsie, who had dealt with the human tragedy of her elder son, the late Robert Rose, becoming a quadriplegic in a car accident, and the sporting injustice of her husband Bob's luckless and seemingly jinxed losing grand final record as coach of Collingwood. Naturally one pales into insignificance beside the other but in a sense they complement each other.
Working the midnight to dawn shift on police rounds for The Age as a cub reporter on Valentine's Day 1974, the news crackled through to old police speakers in the press room at Russell Street police headquarters. Car off the road near Bacchus Marsh; passenger not badly hurt; driver to hospital. The driver was Robert Rose, his passenger, young Collingwood footballer Robert Bird. Their car had run off the road as they travelled back to Melbourne from a midweek race meeting at Ballarat.
By the next day it was front page news. Rose, aspiring Test batsman and Collingwood and Footscray footballer, was in the Austin Hospital. His sporting career was over.
A generation later, clearing out the family home, Elsie Rose had come across bag upon bag of letters she had kept from the time of the accident. It was all a bit too much for Elsie to bear and she passed these evocative letters on to Peter. He stopped after about 20 of them, too.
Peter wrote a book, Rose Boys, a family memoir which won the National Biography Award in 2003 (re-issued as a Text Classic last year) about this and all things family and Collingwood. He felt he could not write the book without the imprimatur of his parents. Bob, eager to advance his son's career, agreed immediately. His mother was more circumspect, more private, perhaps still grieving. Write it by all means, she said, but she would not read it.
It was a brave and selfless decision because Peter knew there would be things in the book his mother may not have wanted in the public domain. She didn't read it either, or not until many years later. She began it one night and read it in one sitting. She found it so harrowing she stayed in bed for 24 hours. She told Peter she was glad she had read it but would never read it again.
Bob Rose was a champion footballer recruited from Nyah West. Tough, skilful and uncompromising, there are those at Collingwood who still regard him as the club's best ever player. He was also a good boxer and fought preliminary bouts at Melbourne's Festival Hall. He was a premiership player and multiple winner of the Copeland Trophy awarded to the club's best player.
Yet as a coach, success cruelly eluded him. In 1964 (Melbourne by four points) and 1966 (St Kilda by a point) he was the coach when Collingwood lost grand finals. Then in 1970, arch rival Carlton plunged the dagger into Rose's heart when the Magpies lost to the Blues after Collingwood held a 44-point half-time lead, again in the grand final.
Yet as the Rose family rode the fickle beast that is sporting success, Bob remained constant - a strong loving father and husband.
He was equally proud of his sons - one a gifted sportsman, the other a brilliant writer.
Somewhat poetically, the first man with whom I made eye contact when I joined the Magpie inner sanctum on the MCG after Collingwood had broken its 32-year premiership drought in 1990 was Bob Rose. I grabbed his hand, briefly sharing but a glimpse of the exultation the Rose family must have been feeling.
In an era where money is god, winning is everything - ''whatever it takes'' - Don Lawrence was right. What he should have added was that it's not always about the sport.
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