He bounces off the tractor and extends a hand…..I mention to this icon of O & M footy that he appears to have shrunk a tad since I last saw him wearing Benalla’s Red and White in the late nineties.
“Nah, you’re imagining things…… I’m still a touch under five foot four,” says a grinning Johnny Martiniello …….
I’ve tracked down ‘Shorty’, or ‘Short-Man’, as he’s invariably called, at the big tin shed in Arundel Street from which he operates his Fencing Contractor’s business……..
His parents Luigi and Nicolina serviced the folks of Benalla with their Greengrocery requirements from the exact same spot for nigh on thirty years:
“Mum and Dad migrated from Italy in 1953, and moved to Benalla in 1960,” he says. “They had a shop in town, then built this joint…..In the halcyon days before supermarkets took over, they used to do a roaring trade …..”
You can still detect the faded signage above the dilapidated shed: ‘Martiniello’s Fruit and Vegetables’……a relic of a bygone era…..
***
‘Shorty’s’ a Benalla footy institution…..He started with the Thirds in 1975 and finally hung up the boots, aged 48, in 2007.
John Martiniello, with his three boys in tow, leads the Demons out in his 300th O & M game.
In that time, he served under 18 coaches of varying styles, characteristics and quality……The first was a local Catholic priest, Brian ‘Cocky’ Connell, who was handed the job when the O & M Thirds competition first kicked off…..
“They only lost one game in his first two years as coach….. the 1974 Grand Final against Albury……Then the next crop of kids came through……and I was in it……” he recalls.
“We had a fair side and made another Grand Final in ‘76, only to be knocked off by Wangaratta……A lot of those kids became the backbone of Benalla sides for years to come…”
‘Shorty’ had taken out the O & M Thirds Medal and was still eligible for another year in the Under 18s…..But the newly-appointed senior coach, Billy Sammon, had other ideas:
“Everyone was rapt when they lured ‘Trouty’ back from Yarrawonga to coach his home club…..Funny, only a year or so earlier, I’d watched him copping buggery from Benalla fans when he was walking around the Grove Oval boundary nursing a busted shoulder…..Now they were expecting him to be our saviour….”
“Anyway, he put me straight…..He said: ‘You’re ready for Seniors.’ I was 17….”
It was a dream debut season for the youngster. He finished fourth in the Morris Medal (to North Albury’s Rod Page) and took out the 2AY Award, as the O & M’s best Under 21 player.
By now, the Benalla younger brigade was developing nicely; they had a crackerjack side in 1978……
“We were 1-3 after Round 4, then won 15 games straight to go into the Grand Final as red-hot favourites against the Rovers.”
“They smashed us….A bloke called Paul O’Brien, rotund, not the quickest fellah going around, had a day out….We couldn’t lay a hand on him….But they had plenty of other good players, too.”
“We tried to stem the flow by starting a few melees…..It just wasn’t our day, I suppose….
And that was the closest ‘Shorty’ ever came to winning an O & M flag……
***
He had great admiration for Bill Sammon and when the champ announced his retirement at the end of that season, asked if he could inherit his Number 11 guernsey……..The number has remained in the Martiniello family for 45 years as John handed it on to his son James, who still wears it with distinction…..
In the initial stages, despite adapting easily to O & M senior footy, John was still very much the understudy to Jimmy Hooper, the Demons’ first rover…..
“In those days, as the ‘main man’ he’d rove for twenty minutes, then say: ‘Okay ‘Short-Man’, you take over for five……I accepted that but I was envious of a bloke like Terry Burgess who was about my age…..When we played Myrtleford he’d spend all the time on the ball; I’d be down in the pocket!…..”
Feisty and determined, and a veritable ball-magnet, the diminutive ‘Shorty’ soon became a Demon star…..He won the first of his six Club B & Fs in 1982 (the others came in ‘84, ‘88, ‘92, ‘94, ‘97, and he was runner-up four times).
He’d also finished third in the Morris Medal in 1982 but the following year, he admits, he put in a ‘shocker’…….It was all the more embarrassing in hindsight because one of his best mates, Mick Stilo, had taken over the coaching job…..
“I hadn’t long moved out of home; probably wasn’t eating the right stuff and got on the drink a bit….John Brunner also played 8 or 9 senior games that year as an 18 -ear-old, and won the Reserves B & F……I’ve apologised to Stilo over the years, for us letting him down….”
“ ‘Yeah’, Mick always says….’You two bastards gave me nothin’ ‘…..We were probably the ruination of his coaching career….He only lasted one season.”
Former Essendon rover Wayne Primmer succeeded Stilo…..He and ‘Shorty’ got on like wildfire….
“He sort of fell into the job….The bloke (Brendan Mason) whom they’d originally appointed had to pull out and ‘Prim’ put his hand up……We were the same age……He was a great player…… good for 2-3 goals a game…..a really good leader.”
The Primmer-Martiniello roving combination certainly brought out the best in ‘Shorty’….He scored another podium finish in the Morris Medal – pipped by one vote in an exciting finish by another rover, Rudi Yonson of North Albury.
He thought destiny would decree that he and John Brunner would become long-term team-mates. But it wasn’t to be……
“I can still vividly remember him walking off the Showgrounds after a practice match against Yarrawonga……..Here he is, in his Benalla gear, suddenly veering left …… a couple of Yarra blokes have nabbed him and are yapping to him under the old plane trees….What a player he turned out to be.”
“I did eventually get to play alongside Johnny again when Glenn Carroll, who was appointed coach in the mid-nineties, brought him over from Berrigan with him for a couple of seasons.”
***
‘Shorty’ admits that he was also tempted to cross to Yarrawonga at one stage……..
“It was the season after ‘Prim’ and I had co-coached in 1987…..The club appointed Phil Carman….I’d been there for 10 years or so and Brunner had kept at me to join him over there…..”
“I trained there and signed a contract but backed out at the last minute…..I couldn’t see myself playing against Benalla…….The next year, of course, the Pigeons go on and win the flag…….”
He says one of his great thrills was representing the O & M ……it took until halfway through his 10th senior season before he finally wore the Black and Gold …
“I remember the Benalla coach, Peter Mangels, getting on my case…..He said: ‘If anyone deserves a game it’s you….It’s almost as hard to get an O & M guernsey as it is to get into the Australian Test team.”
“Anyway, once I was selected I felt really comfortable, and achieved one of my great footy thrills…….playing in the Championship win over Sunraysia in 1987. It was terrific to form a relationship with fellahs from other clubs by playing in those games.”
Benalla’s fluctuating fortunes were best illustrated when, after several struggling seasons, they snuck into successive finals in the early nineties. To their utter disappointment, Corowa-Rutherglen staged a late comeback in the ‘92 Elimination Final at Yarrawonga to pinch victory by 5 points.
‘Shorty’ was lured to All Blacks the following season…..
“ ‘Prim’ had taken the coaching job at ‘Blacks’, and we went awful close…..got knocked off by Congupna, coached by Xavier Tanner, in the Tungamah League Grand Final; another five-point result….”
He won the League Medal and says it was a hugely enjoyable season…..
”There was wonderful camaraderie among the players…..I don’t quite understand why there’s always this underlying antipathy between Benalla and Blacks….Both clubs should be able to co-exist but some people take it a bit deeper than that….”
Upon his return to the Demons, the club began the downhill spiral that would see them ultimately leave the Ovens and Murray League……A total of eight wins in four seasons tipped them over the edge…..
John Martiniello leads Benalla off the Showgrounds Oval – their final game in the Ovens and Murray.
He had mixed feelings about the move to the Goulburn Valley League….
“I’d played 300-odd games (316 in fact) and loved the O & M…..But I could see where people were coming from……They’d say: ‘Oh, we’re at the arse end of the league….We cop the rough end of the stick all the time’…”
“The Club believed they’d get more media exposure and be able to compete with the Euroas, the Mansfields and the Shepp teams……They were sick of trying to keep up with the Alburys and Lavingtons…”
“But we won the Thirds flag in our last O & M year (and made it two in a row in our GV debut) so there was plenty of talent coming through…..I think of kids like Daniel Maher, Casey Robinson, Rick Symes and Mark McKenzie, who were the nucleus of those sides…..Maybe we could have hung on…”
***
‘Shorty’ was entering his fifth decade when Wang Rovers star Anthony Pasquali succeeded Steve Hickey as coach in 1999….He was still ‘earning his keep’ as one of the side’s key on-ballers…..
I asked ‘Pas’ for his recollections of the little fellah:
“Well, he was nudging 41 when I was in my second year as coach…..He said to me: ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing playing me.’….I said: ‘Look, if you’re good enough to win the footy, age is no barrier…..I used to isolate him on the forward-line, and he’d still beat his man….He was a marvel….”
‘Shorty‘ the Saint, disposes of the pill against Lemnos.
Champion goal-kicker Brenton Cooper was in charge of the re-branded GV Saints when they began to peak again in 2002…..’Shorty’ had spent a fair portion of the season in the ‘Twos’ after sustaining a ‘hammy’, but starred when he was recalled for the Elimination Final.
The Saints were 26 points up heading into the last quarter of the Preliminary Final against Echuca, but were over-run by the Bombers in the dying minutes…….That was his 389th – and final – senior game for his beloved Benalla.
After spending a season and a half with Violet Town, he returned to play out his career with the Reserves. It provided him with the rare opportunity to play alongside his two sons, James and Will, before hanging up the boots, aged 48…..
‘Shorty’ strapped himself in and began to ‘enjoy the ride’ as Will and James began to establish themselves as GV stars. He also became one of the Club’s designated Umpires for Reserves games…..
***
He fulfilled this role for seven years until one fateful day at Rochester brought his days as a ‘Man in White’ to an abrupt end.
I’ll let the ‘Short-Man’ explain the circumstances:
“It was bitterly cold, and I really didn’t want to be there….When the siren blew for half-time in the Reserves, I went into the rooms to gee up the two boys, who were getting stripped for the Senior game….”
“Half-way through the third quarter of the ‘twos’ I blew the whistle and asked for the ball……I thought this kid was being half-smart, because he made me stretch for it….I realised I wasn’t stretching …..I was falling….That’s when I had my ‘episode’…..I’m gone….clinically dead….”
“I’ve spoken to other people who’ve had the experience of near death….There’s one common denominator…..They reckon you see a white line….I saw that white-line….”
Luckily, there were a couple of ladies sitting in a car nearby who could see I was convulsing, and a local bloke called Athol Hann who’d returned after a stint at the Royal Perth Hospital….He called for a defibrillator and did the old ‘Electric Shock’ trick…..That’s what brought me back…”
“They were attempting to pin my shoulders so that they could keep me stable…..I thought it was the Devil trying to push me down !………They called an Ambulance, got a Helicopter….straight to the Alfred Hospital, and inserted a couple of stents….That was the end of my umpiring career…”
Recovering after his near-death experience, with wife Vicky, and kids Richard, James, Will and Hayley.
***
The Martiniellos are part of the furniture at the Benalla Showgrounds…..
‘Shorty’ helps operate the barbecue at home games whilst his wife Vicky and the four kids have been vitally involved.
Richard had a handful of Senior games whilst Hayley played in a successful Netball era…..
Will, a landscaper who resides in Melbourne, won the GV’s Morrison Medal in 2014, and Benalla’s B & F (the John Martiniello Medal) in 2014, ‘15 and ‘19.
Presenting the John Martiniello Medal to his son Will in 2015 – the year of Benalla’s last premiership.
He represented the Vic Country U18s, and played in the Murray Bushrangers’ most recent flag in 1999. He has also had stints with VFL club Werribee and Maribyrnong Park where he won the EDFL’s Reynolds Medal in 2018.
A concussion incident halted Will’s career earlier this season.
James, alLinesman, has chalked up 212 games with Benalla, coached the Club in 2019, and was captain for five years…..”He’s a staunch bugger…..Probably end up as President one day,” ‘Shorty’ says.
It was a huge thrill for the family when the brothers figured in Benalla’s most recent premiership in 2015 – their first since 1973.
“Thank God I was alive to see it,” quips their old man…..
This story appeared first on KB Hill’s website On Reflection and is used here with permission.
All photos sourced from KB Hill’s resources unless otherwise acknowledged.
To read more of KB Hill’s great stories on the Almanac, click HERE.
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