Almanac Footy (History): The story behind the iconic Roy Cazaly image

 

 

 

After consulting John Harms about transforming my Footy Almanac stories into book form, my biggest job was obtaining permission to reproduce images that may be in copyright (which I should have done in the first place) as well as to caption them correctly. I knew the image of the famous Roy Cazaly one-hander would be pre-1954 so out of copyright, but I didn’t know where it first appeared. The Sydney Swans were able to supply me with a high resolution image of it, but didn’t know where it first appeared. They suggested I try Newspix, where my contact Jamie said they didn’t know where it first appeared, and they only had a very low resolution image which I was welcome to use without a fee. So in a quick post, I threw myself on the mercy of the aficionados on the Footy Scrapbook: Australian Rules football heritage Facebook Group moderated by Peter Vasic. Sure enough, some 20 comments later I knew the source of the image and a revealing re-incarnation of it some 22 years later. It’s an interesting story.

 

The Sporting Globe was established in 1922 by Herald and Weekly Times boss Keith Murdoch. Starting small with six pages, printed on distinctive pink paper, the Sporting Globe was put together at breakneck speed on a Saturday so that match results and reports of the day’s football games would appear in the paper which hit the streets at 6.00 pm, or no later than 6.30 pm, to catch the post-football crowds keen to read about the day’s play. In the days before television, it played an important part in Melbourne’s football culture. A Wednesday edition soon followed. The paper covered other sport with a particular interest in the horses.

 

On 12 July 1924 the match of the day was a top four clash between South Melbourne and Essendon. The Sporting Globe report on page 2 showed the team line-ups with South’s Roy Cazaly at centre half-forward against Essendon’s centre half-back Tom Fitzmaurice. South’s ruck was named as Alexander, Fleiter and Tandy against Essendon’s ruck of Beckton, Rawle and Maher. We learn that Cazaly also rucked: ‘Cazaly and Tandy were performing dashingly in the ruck’. South won by 13 points with Cazaly named third best for South Melbourne and Fitzmaurice best for Essendon: ‘Fitzmaurice again distinguished himself by marking over Cazaly’, and ‘Fitzmaurice burst into the limelight once more. He was doing wonders, and had no superior on the ground’. So we know that Fitzmaurice was outmarking Cazaly at centre half-forward but that Cazaly was brilliant in the ruck. There is no mention of Cazaly taking a spectacular one-handed mark.

 

 

 

Page 5 of that issue is headed ‘The busy camera man obtains snaps of today’s sporting events’ and includes a photograph from this game captioned ‘A leap for the ball by Beckton (E), Cazaly (SM), Alexander (SM) and Fitzmaurice (E) at Sth Melb’, so this appears to be a marking contest between the opposing ruckmen Beckton and Alexander and the opposing centre half-forward/back Cazaly and Fitzmaurice.

 

Looking at other reports of the game (so easy to find via Trove), there is no mention of Cazaly taking a spectacular mark, but they confirm the narrative:

The Age of Monday the 14^th  ‘Fitzmaurice’s high marking was fine’

The Argus of the 14^th  ‘Cazaly was skilful and brainy’

The Australasian of the 19^th  ‘In Fitzmaurice they had the finest player on the ground. His marking was sublime and withal so graceful’

The Labor Call of the 17^th  ‘The followers Cazaly, Fleiter and Tandy did great work’

The Record (Emerald Hill) of the 12^th  ‘In the centre half-forward position Roy Cazaly was grand and carried his brilliance wherever he went. He dominated the rucking’ but also ‘Long Tom Fitzmaurice laid further claims to the boss high marksman by putting it over Cazaly where these two were together’.

The Sun News Pictorial of the 14^th  ‘The game itself was always close and full of incidents, but there was little of that sparkling, open play which was confidently expected by a big majority of the 40,000 people present’.

 

Four days later the Wednesday edition of the Sporting Globe of 16 July, on page 12, ran our photograph with the caption ‘Cazaly (Sth Melb) pulled down this wonderful one-hand mark against Essendon last week. Beckton (No 2 Essendon) was quite nonplussed’.

 

 

This is the first appearance of this image and, sadly, the photographer is uncredited, as usually happened. It is curious that this image didn’t appear on match day, but maybe the photographer had to get his photographs to the newspaper by half-time in order to meet the deadline for that night’s edition. Maybe this image was taken after half-time.

 

Fast forward to the Sporting Globe Football Book which was published in 1929, 1930, 1946 and 1948, or at least these are the editions held in the State Library of Victoria. (It is not held in the State Library of South Australia, which does hold the Sporting Globe Cricket Book for 1932/36 and 1936/37.) The 1946 edition of the Sporting Globe Football Book is subtitled Instructive, informative, pictorial : a record of Australian football compiled by Hec de Lacy. Amazingly the State Library of Victoria has digitised the 1946 edition which is viewable online.

 

 

 

 

Lo and behold, on page 40 we see an uncropped version of the image that first appeared in the Sporting Globe of 16 July 1924. Number 7 in the image is Cazaly’s ruck rover Fred ‘Skeeter’ Fleiter. The caption is ‘Perfect hit-out to rover — “Cazzer” Roy Cazaly, now of Hobart, uses his fingers to push the ball to his rover Mark Tandy. The Cazaly, Fletcher, Tando trio stood out for ruck combination. Cazaly, left-handed, was an adept at feeding a rover. (See opposite page)’.

 

Cazaly, Fleiter and Tandy were known as ‘The terrible trio’, but sadly, rover ‘Napper’ Tandy is out of the image. It is not clear whether this ruck contest was at a bounce or a boundary throw-in, but we know that Cazaly’s famous leap was actually from a standing position in the ruck, hence his ruck rover’s call of “up there Cazzer”. That vertical leap in the ruck was honed from leaping for a ball suspended from the roof of a shed at his home.

 

An explanation for why the image was cropped and captioned in the first place, is probably that the job of the sub-editor was to crop photographs in the most eye-catching way and caption appropriately.

 

Interestingly the image did not appear in the 1929 edition of the Sporting Globe Football Book, as I discovered from a helpful research librarian at the State Library of Victoria.

 

The cropped image has appeared in many places, but significantly in the book 100 great marks by Scot Palmer and Greg Hobbs (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1974 and 1976) held in the State Library of South Australia. Significantly because Greg Hobbs was the editor of the Sporting Globe in the 1970s and 1980s, but obviously didn’t know about the uncropped image in their publication from 1946.

 

 

Palmer and Hobbs’ caption to the page 9 image is ‘League football’s best loved catch-cry is “Up there Cazaly”, so how can you compile a marking gallery without the legendary Roy Cazaly. Cazaly’s contribution to the game was enormous, as he was associated with three League teams – St Kilda as a boy of 16, South Melbourne and later with Hawthorn as non-playing coach. He also plied his football wares in Tasmania. But it was the famous Cazaly phrase associated with his high marking that is best remembered. South teammate of the 1920s Fred Fleiter started crying “up there Cazza” every time the champion flew. It caught on with Victorian crowds, and then with troops in World War II. Herald picture.’

 

As a postscript, the Saturday edition of the Sporting Globe ceased publication in 1979 but the Wednesday afternoon edition lasted until 1996. An online Herald-Sun story in 2016 gives more background. Sporting Globe a pioneer of footy coverage | Herald Sun. No doubt there are Almanac readers with strong memories of the newspaper in its heyday.

 

 

To read more by Carolyn Spooner click HERE.

 

 

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