The Centre Will Not Hold
By Mark Braddock
The View from Seats 15 and 16, Row 8, Section 516: a response to The Rise of The Purple Reign.
WHY AM I crying now?
Because I’m in mourning.
For a possibility.
For the sort of dad I wanted to be.
For the sort of dad I wasn’t.
For the dad my son needed – and I couldn’t be.
Because it’s too late now.
That moment has passed.
He is no longer a child.
This wasn’t meant to be an occasion for tears.
It was going to be a father/son story of a gloriously poignant shared moment.
I’m not sure how you measure these things, but I feel that for a man in his fifties, I’ve done my fair share of crying.
I remember being ten, lying alone in bed at night, crying because I knew one day my pop would be dead. I would never see him again.
I remember standing alone in a hospital corridor, crying in sudden relief when the obstetrician told me my daughter had been born healthy, after an emergency Caesarean.
I remember another hospital corridor, outside the radiology department, where Tanya was getting her first scan to see if the cancer had spread. I cried when the breast cancer care nurse asked me about my children. I couldn’t answer.
I bawled like a baby at the altar on our wedding day in Scotland. Not just from joy, but from the release of it – the hope that, maybe, we were through it. That my little family might now be, fingers crossed, cancer-free.
I cried when my teenage daughter wouldn’t eat, was starving herself, and told me she didn’t want to be in this world anymore.
I cried when my ten-year-old son stood up at a school speech competition and told a room of strangers about his Autistic sister’s pen collection – how she cared for it, sorted it, counted it, and how that meant something.
I cried in the board meeting when it had all gotten too much. When I had decided I was just going to give it all away.
And now I cry here. Quietly. In front of a screen. Trying to write about football.
We think we are telling stories about football. We are not.
We are telling stories about time.
About what changes and what doesn’t. About who we were when we sat in the same place season after season and watched something we couldn’t control.
Fremantle were playing Hawthorn at home. Freo battling to stay in the eight.
It was raining.
Fraser had turned eighteen two weeks earlier.
We sat together – as we had for fifteen seasons – first at Subi, now at Optus: Row 8, Section 516. The seats I had chosen on a tour of the stadium while it was still a construction site. When it was just a theory.
We shared a beer. Our first at the footy. Plastic cup. Flat, cold. Perfect.
At halftime they honoured Michael Walters. Sonny. Son-Son. He had announced his retirement during the week. He didn’t play. He didn’t need to.
Fraser said, “He’s the last of the OG Dockers. Well, Fyfe’s still on the list. But that’s it.”
I corrected him; pointing out that the true OGs of ‘95 had retired long before Sonny debuted.
I shouldn’t have.
He wasn’t talking about the originals from ’95. He meant his originals. The ones on the guernsey he wore as a child. The ones who signed it. The ones who filled his head when his mum was going through chemo. When he had to witness his sister being fed through a tube up her nose.
Of course, as a three-year-old, he didn’t know it then. But the more superheroes and sporting heroes you can fill your head with, the safer you’ll be.
I had designed the logo. The rebrand. 2010. My studio led it. We stripped the red and green. Removed the anchor from around the players’ necks. Three chevrons. One colour. A more ‘manly’ shade of purple.
After the launch, I bought the first junior guernsey from the club shop. Fraser wore it like armour. He wore it to bed. He wore it when he climbed the Morton Bays in Hyde Park. He wore it to every game. He told strangers at the footy that his dad made the logo.
There is a particular pride in making something your child can point to.
A thing. Not a feeling. Not advice. A thing.
And there is, in that symbol – in the way he wore it, in the way he told people – the chance that Fraser may have, even just in those moments, seen me as a hero for having done that.
Maybe he loved me like he loved Superman? Like he loved his Dockers?
Instead of a Superman ‘S’, I gave him a Dockers ‘D’.
And he could wear it, just like his heroes did.
But that may have just been wishful thinking on my part.
Midway through the third quarter, my wife texted me a photo. Fraser at three. Standing on the wooden benches at Subi. Full kit. Waiting to be called up.
He really believed it could happen.
The Dockers won that night. Hayden Young had 33. Amiss kicked three. They looked like a team that remembered who they were.
After the siren, Sonny returned to be carried from the ground.
For Fraser’s eighteenth, I gave him the original sketches. The pages surgically cut from my old sketchbook. The ones where the idea began. Had them framed. They hang on his bedroom wall now. I hope they always will.
But the moment – the childhood, the ritual, the version of me I hoped to be – has gone.
The centre will not hold.
But I did give him something that he’ll always have.
A seat. A symbol. A siren.
Another Dockers game.
