The news, last Monday, of John Clarke's death has clearly had an immense impact. Fred Dagg, The Gillies Report, the sport of farnarkeling, The Games, various favourite "Clarke and Dawe" cameos and other chapters of a brilliant career have been recalled on social media and within newspaper articles and reader contributions.
I was prompted to reach for a book from the shelf and flick to a remembered vignette. A few years ago, John had kindly lent me (well, I thought it was a loan: when I sought to return it he told me he had other copies and insisted I keep it) a volume of essays written by the legendary American sportswriter, the late Red Smith.
The book is a collection of his tributes to those who had marched into their final sunset. John, in his familiar deadpan way, described a personal favourite among them: "Big Jim Stopped Rotating".
That alone, spoken down the phone in his mischievous nasal twang – common to the man and the performer – was enough to make me laugh. You could tell he admired its comic quality: a bit like "The Front Fell Off" (google it if you haven't seen it).
John then explained in general terms what it was about. "Big Jim" was Jim Farley, an Irish Catholic American kingmaker of the first half of the 20th century, noted for having guided Franklin D. Roosevelt's run to the White House. Earlier, in the 1920s, Farley had been appointed to the New York State Athletic Commission which, since its inception, had been chaired by a powerful figure named Bill Muldoon.
Muldoon had considered his chairmanship – bestowed by the state governor – to be permanent. But Big Jim didn't quite see it that way. He told Muldoon he'd spoken with the third member of the commission, Bill Brown, and they'd agreed the chairmanship be rotated annually. According to Smith's account: "Muldoon grumbled, but he knew he was outvoted, two to one, so he put up no active resistance and Farley became chairman."
When Farley was still in the chair a bit over a year later, Muldoon said to him: "I thought we were rotating the chairmanship." Farley replied: "We've stopped rotating it." It could have been the punchline of another Clarke and Dawe interview.
As for popular sport, while Clarke satirised it – along with those of us who talk and write so seriously about it – via farnarkeling, he was an interested observer. The genuineness of his presentation of the three-part Sporting Nation series is testament to that. He possibly shared the specifics of Smith's assessment: "Sports is not really a play world. I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving, and trying to make their way through life just as the bricklayers and politicians are."
Coincidentally, upon his late-1970s arrival at the ABC in Melbourne, Clarke somehow found his way to a workstation adjacent to the radio sport section. Fred Dagg thus became involved in games of office cricket – upturned metal waste-paper bin as the wicket, and roughly spherical Sellotape missile as the ball – and general chit-chat about various sports.
Occasional exchanges with him were notable for his knowledge and appreciation of New Zealand sporting achievement, particularly in rugby union and on the athletics track. He knew all about Arthur Lydiard's coaching and the early-1960s Olympic triumphs of Peter Snell and Murray Halberg. His interest in cricket, too, extended beyond the trans-Tasman contests of the office.
The noted cricket writer Gideon Haigh invited Clarke to pen an introduction to one of his early books. Titled One Summer, Every Summer, it attempted to revive the old-style, print account of a Test series, so popular in the days before television. The form didn't, and never will, return, but John gave it a flying start.
That book also came off my shelf this week for another chuckle at how the introduction began: Clarke describing his first-ever visit to the MCG. It was the opening morning of the Centenary Test in 1977, a young bloke just landed from across the ditch, on a momentous sporting occasion in Melbourne. One can imagine the theatre of his mind.
As he travelled along Wellington Parade on an old tram, he spotted a familiar face: "The man sitting opposite me was Bert Sutcliffe, the greatest left-hand batsman New Zealand ever produced ... he noticed me looking and nodded politely. He looked like an elder version of the elegant young man I'd seen in photographs."
John then described the perplexing moment the pair alighted from the tram: he (Clarke) wandered down through Yarra Park to the MCG, and Bert headed off in the opposite direction. "He may have been going to meet someone else and then come back to the ground," he pondered. "He may have forgotten something and was going back to get it. He may have known of a secret entrance to the arena via an underground passage from up near the Mercy Hospital. The only alternative was that he quite possibly wasn't Bert Sutcliffe."
John's death has caused deep sadness across the city, state, and nation. He was a man brilliant at his craft who made people feel good. Knowing he won't be around to do that any more has brought a rare sense of loss. As an unknown in a towelling hat, calling himself Fred Dagg, taking a chance, he blew into town 40 years ago. Now he's departed as a much-loved national figure.
Oh, and for those of you interested in picking up a copy of the Smith book, the title is To Absent Friends.