The Ian McKay mark: Sixty years on

 

 

Sixty years ago a magical sporting moment was captured.

If asked to nominate South Australia’s greatest sporting photograph I would say the Ian McKay mark which occurred in the dying minutes of the grand final between North Adelaide and Norwood at Adelaide Oval on 4 October 1952.

Taken by The Mail photographer Bill Teubner, it was prominently positioned on the front page of that day’s newspaper – then published on a Saturday – and generously headed and captioned.

The heading is ‘Picture of the Season – And Captain of the Year’ and the lengthy caption begins ‘The No. 1 mark of the year taken by No. 1 of the No. 1 team – North’s Ian McKay’ before going on to credit Teubner’s spectacular picture of McKay soaring high above Norwood ruckman Pat Hall.

The magnificence of the photo is its composition. While the key figures are central, Hall is descending earthwards, and McKay on the way up, propelling himself from Hall’s back and shoulders, his waist level with the bottom of the roof line of the old Mostyn Evan grandstand, and his hands about to take the ball alongside the cupola on the roof top, adding to the drama. It’s as though he is going to keep on flying up, up and out of the ground. Like Superman!

However, the photo on its first publication in The Mail was tightly cropped down the right-hand edge of the cupola. While the essential elements of the spring were retained the aesthetic balance was diminished: the figures seated at ground level inside the boundary which humanise the crowd were absent; and the flag flying at full stretch indicating the force and direction of the wind was also missing.

Journalistic descriptions of the mark in the paper by that year’s Magarey Medallist Len Fitzgerald and former Port Adelaide captain Vic Johnson were matter-of-fact.

In Fitzgerald’s report of the last-quarter ‘a high spot occurred when McKay pulled down one of the most spectacular marks I have ever seen. He finished it off with a long screw punt for a goal’.

According to Johnson: ‘The highlight of the last term was Ian McKay’s brilliant mark and goal – the last of the 1952 season.’

North’s captain McKay had moved from full-back onto the ball to get into the play when the game was well and truly won and took his mark at full-forward.

North annihilated the Redlegs 23.15 to 6.9 in front of 50,105 people, the third-highest football attendance in the oval’s history to that time. No doubt many of those thousands were disappointed by the one-sided contest although not the North supporters who displayed ‘unprecedented enthusiasm’ in collecting £150 to be shared by the players.

As a historian, as a photographer I would have liked the pictorial editor of The Mail to have reproduced the picture of the McKay mark in full but recognise that it had to fight for space with other news stories.

In the Cold War era the tabloid Mail’s leading article on 4 October 1952 was ‘Aust. Awaiting Data About UK Bomb’, and ‘Frigate helped in test’ was a subsidiary story about atomic weapon testing as part of Operation Hurricane on the Monte Bello islands off the Western Australian coast the day before. ‘North’s title by 18 goals’ shared the bottom half of the page with ‘Unionists for Russia’ and a Sydney offer of £20,000 made for the champion New Zealand racehorse, Dalray.

When there were widespread fears about the annihilation of the human race it is not surprising that football annihilation might have been a lesser consideration and a football photograph trimmed as a result.

Fellow photographers at Adelaide Oval reported that Teubner knew he had got the shot although it cannot have been easy to be confident of that given the equipment he was using.

A camera commonly used by sports photographers in the early 1950s was the Graflex RB (Revolving Back) Series which incorporated a couple of main elements: a reflex viewing-focusing optical system that showed on a ground-glass an exact, erect image of the scene to be photographed and a multiple-speed focal-plane shutter which gave a wide range of exposures to one thousandth of a second.

One of the main difficulties using such a camera for sports photography was the reflex focusing which meant that light entered the camera through the lens, was reflected upwards by the mirror to the ground glass screen, but that visibility of the image required the photographer to look down through a light-excluding focusing hood.

Attempting to photograph any subject with a Graflex camera meant holding the camera at chest-height. While the camera had the shutter speed to deal with fast action, photographing a sport like Australian football at close range would have been difficult because the players would move rapidly in and out of the viewing screen as the photographer peered down into it. In order to take a picture of a high mark the photographer would need to tilt the camera.

I photographed South Australian league football every week for five years from 1979 to 1983 using Minolta and Pentax 35mm SLR (Single Lens Reflex) cameras with a range of zoom and telephoto lenses. Most of my shots were taken from a position sitting on my aluminium camera case or from around knee-height when moving around. Viewing the action was easy at eye-height and manual focusing a relatively simple procedure.

When taking pictures at Adelaide Oval one day I found myself in a similar position to where Bill Teubner would have been and realised I would not have been able to duplicate the shot if someone had taken a similar high mark.

Teubner’s Graflex forced him to shoot from a lower angle and to capture the McKay mark he would have composed the picture near ankle height and tilted the camera as McKay rose. The extra angle of elevation enabled McKay to fly through the top of the stand.

For photographers in the 1980s, or even the present-day, to take the same picture, they would have to be shooting from a ditch!

Thirty years ago I purchased a Graflex RB Series camera from an Advertiser photographer who had owned it for several years. Before that it had been lying around the newspaper photographers’ room for a long time gathering dust.

The Advertiser and The News combined resources to publish the Sunday Mail in the mid-1950s so I wondered whether this might have been a camera used by Teubner. Could it even be the camera which took the McKay mark?

That is a fancy; it doesn’t matter except that it led me to appreciate important facts. Technological improvements can sometimes involve losses – in this example, the loss of a viewpoint. The Graflex camera is a quaint old piece of equipment when cradled now but in the hands of an ingenious craftsman it could yield superb results. However, the main benefit is that lovers of sport, grace, art and craft can take pleasure from a photograph which remains with us to this day.