Almanac Life: Peter Maddern’s eulogy for Fred ‘Chocka’ Bloch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maida, Robyn, Suzanne and your families, Peter Malinaukus, premier of South Australia and player number 260, ladies and gentlemen.

 

My first memory of Fred Bloch was of him in a highly animated state as coach of the Uni’s football club’s A1 team jumping up and down on his haunches in the three quarter time huddle of the 1979 preliminary final trying to jeer up his chargers for one final, triumphant effort.

 

As a nineteen year old, I’d never seen anything like it, a happening made perhaps even the more remarkable for the fact it had no impact whatsoever on the outcome of the game. We were down then and finished that way.

 

But in so many other dimensions Fred had a great impact on those twenty young men in his team that day as he did on some thousands more, who like me, came through the Blacks over more than two decades. As clueless teenagers, we would turn out to our first preseason training with what seemed like 500 others, be quickly escorted off to a place Fred would describe as his office – a space where he had found a bench top and a chair – give over our details, have our photo taken – and await, in good time, for a nickname to be assigned to us. If you could survive that initiation, a wonderful and inspiring world awaited.

 

At around that time, Chocka had returned to the club after a number of years of being distracted by such things as getting a family going and lecturing in accounting. He set out by force of purpose to moiuld the club not in his own image – for he was an elite academic and footballer whereas most of us most certainly were not either – but for it to deliver what could be the ultimate university campus life experience.

 

For most of the club’s then 75-year history, it had had three or four teams predominantly made up of St Peter’s and Prince Alfred old collegians. In quick time it grew to five, then seven and eight teams, and finally in its hay day to nine men’s sides. To stop it descending into chaos, playing numbers would have to be the same as registrations requiring the stitching onto jumpers numbers like 340 by more often than not mothers bewildered by the challenge of how to get that much plastic affixed across their scrawny son’s back.

 

This was all great fun in the lower sides but a complete hoot when an A-grader would step out onto beautiful university oval in triple digits. No other club faced this issue because, thanks to Fred, no other club was like us.

 

The Adelaide University football club became like the rest of the campus – a melting pot, albeit of males, from all over the city and the state, from all sorts of backgrounds, and the full spectrum of sporting and academic abilities. This was not done by some subterfuge, for those of us who came from private schools were openly referred to and mocked as spooners – privileged kids born with a spoon in our mouths; silver spooners from Saints, tarnished spooners from Princes. The club became, as one lark put it, a nice mix of western suburb junkies and decent spooner folk.

 

But neither were we allowed by Fred to be separated by our playing ability. Those in the top team were held in no greater esteem or disdain than those in the bottom line up. Said Fred one day, if there were to be, in due course, a Nobel Prize winner from within our ranks, it would most likely not come from the A grade. This was all perhaps made perfectly plain when our club membership had grown to such a size that we required a team in a grade below A10. Rather than refer to it as the A Elevens, it became known as the A Double Ones. That bottom side was not celebrated for its victories but its losses, in this manner, the Scum as they were and remain known, could rise to the top.

 

No players ever got paid and the best players in all sides got the same award – two jugs of beer courtesy of the proprietor of whichever drinking house we retired to – and results were read out according to the order of which team had provided the best match day stories – not usually of excellence but of idiocy on and off the field.

 

It was egalitarian excellence; a club not defined by school or suburb but by one’s ability to embrace the culture. We met and mixed and often formed lifelong friendships with people we would not have otherwise encountered. It was a grounding and a lesson that held us all in great stead and for which, I along with so many others who I am sure are watching or here today, are enormously grateful.

 

This approach was bolstered by his welcoming as followers of the A’s the likes of Ken Lucas, Brian Wilson, the gentleman in the felt hat, and Brian Ockendon, a man who George Bernard Shaw would have confidently identified as a dandy. None had ever graced this building to receive their bachelor’s degree, Ken Lucas was only a known figure on campus because he was the parking inspector next door in the law school car park. But as equal with some intelligence we may have been, it was Fred’s belief that it was clearly in our interests to also see and deal with an equality beyond that.

 

There was of course no greater example of this all than the prominence given to a certain Bob Neil. I am pleased that Bob and Irene are with us here today. For Fred, Bob embraced all we could be; modest, with minimal playing talent upon whom, as people, superstar status could be ascribed, all in a world that, of course, predated by decades influencers and the Kardashians.

 

In his actual life, Bob was employed and had earned no less than a doctorate working at the Defence, Science and Technology Organisation out at the Levels. Bob was, Fred told us, the man who solved the quadratic equations that kept us all safe at night. Whether Bob did ever or indeed could solve a single quadratic equation didn’t matter.

 

While the Bob Neil thing went way too far and on way too long it tapped into something. With all this, we proudly bragged we were the world’s greatest football club, which numerically was probably right but we believed it in every dimension and, what may be described as the Chocka era, was a period of great success at all levels with plenty of premierships and very many medallists. This was no happy coincidence.

 

If some young player complained about having the boys sing about them, they needed to be comforted by noting that this would in all likelihood be the only time in their lives anybody would sing a song celebrating them.

 

The Saturday night get together was known as Holdyabolles, a word Fred had heard a toothless spruiker once yell out at some sideshow alley to encourage passers-by to come lose their money and it was a mix of results, singalong and improv comedy show. Occasionally the Blacks Blues Band would play – an outfit it must be said no record label executive would ever have to consider ‘the one that got away.’ Scheduled to start at 6.30 it rarely did before 7, meant to last 30 minutes, with Chocka, bandanna on and in both his leather jacket and full flight, it could go for a couple of hours and still we could not wait for the following week.

 

All this didn’t exactly endear ourselves to purists. On storming out of the club, one senior coach who saw SANFL roles before him, condemned us as just a social club only loosely based around football. A badge of honour really.

 

Throughout all these years, it is perhaps curious to note that as a professor of accounting and dean of the Commerce faculty, Fred had not the slightest interest in whether as a club we were financially solvent. Certainly, those who had to focus on such mundane matters were always extremely grateful that vice chancellors over the years, starting as far back as Don Stranks, would employ Fred to run the club at no cost to its members.

 

It should be noted that Fred was also a great contributor to the Adelaide University Cricket club, particularly as manager of the lowest team. It did not need a big crowd for Chocka to present his trademark, penetrating humour. One such team contained a group of players who became known as the Gang of Four, none of whom it must be said when it came to talent was blessed with much more than enthusiasm for the game. With the usual Christmas exodus, numbers available necessitated one of the Gang to play in a higher grade. When asked by the captain of the team above who would be the best player amongst them, Fred immediately responded that that was not the question he needed to answer. That question, he said, who was least likely to get hurt.

 

All this would be easy to pass off as good times for undergrads that couldn’t last. But what’s matters here today is that it did. Across this period, like no period before for the club in the last century, a great many members and volunteers stayed on, to continue playing, to coach, to help out on the committee or on Saturdays. Homewrecker Howie, the Jerk, Hancock’s Half Hour, Jo the Physio, Dirty Darien to the very current day with the likes of Mums and Dads. If I knew any of their real names I would state them for you. For those who can’t quite place me, I was the Silver Bullet.

 

They, we, did not, as my parents often suggested to me, look to avoid growing up, but in essence to give back what we had received and to do what we could to perpetuate Chocka’s life lessons for the new generations arriving.

 

As Fred had given to us, so we had been trained or wanted to give to others, not just on Tuesday and Thursday nights but also away from the club. Many a Black was able to get employment, a start in the real world, by virtue of one past player employing a current one. Stories abounded of job interviews for even specialist positions being little more than a 30 minute exchange between two strangers of rich football club stories spawned in Fred’s time in charge, and a subsequent letter of offer. It was very much easier to get treated in Emergency at the RAH if the presenting intern or specialist had also worn the black with the white V.

 

In my own case, I approached Fred to write a reference for my application to get into one of the best business schools in the US. When I had approached the Dean of the Law School for the same, I was called in to be told in no uncertain terms that with my academic results not even Mandrake would be likely to get me an invitation. Fred never posed such dilemmas and get in I did.

 

I mention this not to note myself but because I, like no doubt so many observing here today, am just one of tens, more likely hundreds, who Fred helped in such ways without the knowledge of others, fanfare or expectation of recognition. As my B school experiences attest, his help, at all stages, changed the course of our lives and for the better. If you embraced his view of what university life could do for you, then he was always there to assist.

 

Maida, family, thank you for supporting Fred while all this was going on, and with the same patience and, I suggest courage, for your support of him in his unfortunate, long years of decline. I know he leaves an enormous imprint on your lives and with his passing a huge hole in your hearts. Our best wishes are with you.

 

But, like you, we were all uniquely gifted his influence. What was said and done in his hey day could not happen today; campus life of those likes is long gone, the woke would worry about something said, some snowflake might sook about a song. I’ll leave it to others whether any of that is justified.

 

He was magnificent not only in our times but all times and we are all so grateful for his view of the world, of what he believed all of us were capable of, his enduring legacy at the cricket and football clubs and indeed the whole university – the impression he made on our lives.

 

Thank you for this opportunity.