Almanac Tributes: Vale Ron Reed

 

 

 

 

Last week, in the lead-up to Friday’s Almanac Lunch with Peter Hudson and his biographer Dan Eddy, I exchanged a number of emails with Ron Reed whose wide variety of sports columns we’ve been enjoying on our site. He had booked for lunch, but then had some health issues and thought it best he take things easy. Then I received another email to say he had the blessing of his specialist to come to attend.

 

As the bar bubbled up just after midday on Friday, I was putting out place names on the tables in the dining room. I put Ron Reed’s card next to Perc, in the spot where he has sat for all the years he’s been coming to lunch. Perc and Ron were great mates, having known each other for over fifty years during which time they’d had many a beer and many a laugh and even got themselves into some interesting situations, particularly when they shared a flat together as young bucks. “Hound”, as Perc called Ron, or “The Hound” if you want his full title, was a young sports journalist in those days having arrived in Melbourne from his home town of Warrnambool.

 

I was moving along the table, placing more cards, when one of the lunchers put his head around the corner. “Perc is here.” Then, matter-of-factly, “Ron Reed died half an hour ago.”

 

“Crikey.”

 

Perc has played the role of joker more than capably over the years, always looking for a laugh, always ready to shine a spotlight on human stupidity or rank failure of character. But, when I walked into the front bar, the big man was clearly deeply affected by this terrible news. “The Hound’s gone,” he said. Nodding. “Gone.”

 

The lunch went on, the lunchers saddened, alerted to the human reality, but ready to carpe the fuck out of this diem.

 

It was an outstanding lunch, and one where a few words were said about Ron, and glasses were raised to him.

 

I think I first met Ron at an Odd Friday/Footy Almanac Lunch a few years ago. Of course I knew his byline and I knew that he was an old fashioned sports reporter who seemed to write across many sports in the tightest prose. Uncomplicated. Not a word wasted. Get the news out there for the punter sitting, paper-spread-out, cuppa in hand, at the smoko table. Make it real. Give it colour where there was colour. Tell the story. Over many years.

 

These were the days when sportswriters would be tied up with type-writer ribbon if they even considered using first person.

 

I (there is that dastardly perpendicular pronoun) have never worked in a news room, never been at ‘conference’, never sat with the Ron Reeds of the world. So I had no knowledge of him the way the next couple of generations of sportswriters did – your Baums, your Hinds, your Nialls. You name them: all those who dispatched tributes on Twitter, and will be at his funeral and wake today at Caulfield racecourse.

 

But even at lunch over the years, it wasn’t easy to get to know Ron. He didn’t say much. Just sat there waiting for Perc to get one of his pppppppontifications out. Or mmmmmmemories. Such recollections might trigger a flurry of elaboration from Ron. Some might not. Just a grin.

 

Then, one cold afternoon, winter sun slanting through the western windows at the North Fitzroy Arms, fire crackling away, I found myself at the table with Ron, Dips O’Donnell and P. Flynn. Bottle of Heathcote Shiraz on the table. Ron started to talk about growing up in Warrnambool and the sport he played (senior bush footy) and the cadetship he took on. He had sport in him. He had sports journalism in him. Sometime after he even mentioned that he regretted not taking up an invitation to try out for one of the English counties all those years ago. Perc reckons The Hound was pretty lively when playing for The Plastiks in the Melbourne mid-week cricket competition. The Hound said that about Perc too. The Plastiks I’m told were drawn from Melbourne’s sports fraternity and sports writing fraternity.

 

After leaving the grind of daily news, Ron also started writing memoir. Now, this is not to suggest that his decades of sports reporting lacked anything, indeed they provided an important service as record and comment, it’s more about observing that he was grabbing an opportunity to write more personally. In the tradition of long-serving sportswriters and broadcasters, Ron went to many Olympic Games, which he loved. In early 2020 he told me he was so looking forward to going to the Tokyo Games. For two reasons: the Games themselves, and to return to Nagasaki, where his father, when a prisoner of war with his Warrnambool mate Murray Jobling, survived the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. (Their planned execution was a matter of days away.) Covid prevented him from doing that trip, but he was still able to tell the story in his book War Games.

 

Recently he had written about Ash Barty with a new updated edition coming out after her successes in Grand Slam tournaments. His biography of Pat Cummins is to be published soon.

 

He obviously worked very efficiently, and he loved it. Memories and stories, profiles and opinion pieces appeared on the Almanac site every Friday afternoon, having first been published on his own site sportshounds.com.au

 

It’s very sad that the page is blank today and in its place this small tribute. The Almanac community passes on its deepest sympathy to Ron’s wife Leigh and his son Adam, to his broader family and to his many friends and colleagues.

 

Vale Ron Reed.

 

 

Read Ron Reed’s pieces HERE.

 

 

Read Ken Haley’s review of War Games  HERE

 

 

Return to www.footyalmanac.com.au