Category Archives: The Sports Bar

Hungs Wide World of Shorts

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Mark, The Sports Bar

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Pic by Warrigal

“Lillie approaches from the Vulture Street End, Boycott pads up, its bowled him, Boycott’s off stump knocked out of the ground, no shot offered, can you believe that……”, the lounge room roars into action, grown men cry, dogs bark, people flood the street tossing hats in the air rejoicing, backs are slapped, beers are poured, babies are conceived, this is summer this is cricket, this is heaven, their best batsman bowled without offering a shot, life doesn’t get any better than this, ah yes, cricket where the only thing better than cricket is more cricket.

Yes cricket, the one true national game. Forget your football codes cricket is life and life is cricket. Understanding cricket is easy. Get more runs then they do, simple. Nothin’ too hard bout that. And yes the culture, the joy, the atmosphere, its quasi-religious and coming from an atheist that’s saying something.

As a kid growing up in Wollongong all my mates played cricket and for me batting, bowling or fielding I couldn’t care less, just playing the game was all I needed. Weekends were cricket in the juniors Saturday morning, Grade in the afternoon. Sunday morning surf then when the nor’easter came in cricket in the park with me mates. Mum had to come and get me for tea as the sun had set ages ago. She’d call out from the street “Mark, get home, it’s as black as, tea’s on the table, how can you see that ball anyhow?”, “But Mum, a century beckons”, I always wondered why mum called me Mark when my name’s Hung, anyway some thing’s are a mystery.

My Dad, an Englishman tolerating us colonials, would get the bus to the bottom of Bulli Pass then from the roadside would hold up a sign “SCG”,

Pic by Warrigal

someone would always pull over and give him a lift. I was too young to go along at first but then my initiation came, the SCG, the hallowed turf, the smell of the freshly cut grass, the crowd, the banter between the Poms and the Aussies, always witty, never violent or abusive and supporters of both sides could sit together and barrack for their team. Mum would pack ham and mustard sandwiches and Dad would shout an ice cream, bliss.

Then as a young man going to the test with my mates, eskies full of beer, pies and hotdogs, hot chips and seagulls. Doug Walters would stride out and the crowd would erupt, “Dougie, Dougie” we’d chant. If he got a boundary the noise was deafening, all of us would rise as one, “You bewdy”. Then tragedy, Dougie caught in the covers, “Poms can’t field, how’d they catch that “.

Then as I aged a bit more and the Hill disappeared and my brother-in-law, Brad, and I would sit in the stands. One birthday, which falls in January, somewhere between the 4th and the 6th, hint hint, we went to the SCG and watched India play, Azzarudin, mate, me and Brad wanted to make him an honorary Aussie, he was brilliant. But it was against the Poms that was best, the old dart, the mother country, those were the days.

Tutu and I moved to Adelaide in the eighties and loved it. 15 minutes to the oval, no rain, 5 days of heaven. Saw the mighty West Indies, Adam Gilchrist, V.V.S Laxman, Wasim Akram and the graceful Brian Lara. In the first few years here, Tutu would bring books to the game to read but it gets hot in summer, 40 plus, so now she drops me at the Oval and goes on a spending spree on my credit card, I mean am I a winner or what.

So for those that don’t understand cricket, don’t worry. Just pretend you like it or compromise like Tutu and read a book, enjoy the fresh air, the sun, the community, being as one with total strangers, the total boredom, applauding your opponent for good play, all of these things are cricket and oh yes check the scoreboard occasionally.

 

Pig’s Arms Bumper Christmas Edition 2012 – Diving on The Flight Deck

25 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by in The Public Bar, The Sports Bar, Warrigal Mirriyuula

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http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/nsw/content/2004/s1156736.htm

Diving on the Flight Deck

Diving on the Flight Deck

Story and Graphic by Warrigal Mirryuula

Benny sat down on the crumbling edge of the warm concrete, the water lapping at his flippered feet.  It was a beautiful sunny day again and visibility below should be fantastic.

He spat into his visor and rubbed the spit around the glass.  Ensuring the strap didn’t twist, he put the visor on and having connected the air supply, took a few deep breaths just to be sure. He checked his watch, 11:30AM, air gauge was hard up on “FULL”, he’d have about two hours.

“Hey “Fish”, ya right, tied off?”, Benny shouted over his shoulder, waiting just long enough to hear “Yeah, off ya go.” before slipping into the water, sorting out his line and then with a pike and a kick, set off down the concrete face of the wall.

Like it’s neighbours on this section of Pittwater Road, The Flight Deck too had been demolished down to the fifth floor when the Greenland and West Antarctic ice had let go and sea level rose several metres in just a few years.  Snapped off like old teeth and the rubble dropped over the seaward side to create a breakwater to hold back the worst tidal and storm surges that now came regularly in early spring.

Here on the land side, the lagoon like conditions meant the water was much calmer.  Benny figured he might be able to find a way down into the old foyer.  He’d heard stories about the now demolished and partially submerged tower. He wanted to salvage the great tiled wings that had greeted tenants and their guests in the main lift lobby.

As he’d suspected the water was clear and visibility was almost unlimited.  He could see all the way to the bottom. As he stroked and kicked his way deeper he thought of those lost and wasted years Poppy had told him about.  When people had endlessly argued about climate change but never seemed to do anything about it. “Change is what happens in life.” Benny mused.  Trying to hold anything in place was a waste of energy.  Well it had all changed now and Benny didn’t really mind.  It was all he’d ever known and he loved diving on the old beach side apartment blocks.  Stripped of all their re-useable materials they had become high-rise concrete reefs, home to dazzling darting fish and the little Bronze Reefers.  A pretty little shark that had come in from the open ocean and downsized in response to rising sea temperatures, Benny had tried to befriend a pack on his last dive on the Flight Deck and received a nasty bite for his troubles.  They were smaller than their forebears but no less aggressive.  A few stitches had put that right and today he had his mesh gloves. They weren’t going to get a second bite.

Benny pulled up a few metres from the bottom. All around him in the dappled half-light swam fish of every conceivable colour, various brachiopods where beginning a tenuous tenancy on any clear piece of concrete and the plant life was a riot of forms and functions.  Perhaps this was the beginning of a new speciation as niches were abandoned to those that could make better and more efficient use of the resources they contained.  “Precious”, Benny thought as he swam toward the gloom of the old lobby.  They were the first of the new wave.  It might take another million years before this incipient speciation replaced all the benthic animals and plants that had been lost in the last few decades.  Corals were going gangbusters though, as Benny’s dive on the submerged spine of Long Reef had revealed. The Great Barrier Reef, (Benny had only ever seen pictures), was long gone; a bleached skeleton battered and broken by the cyclones of summer. These southerly little isolated coral colonies basking in the warm shallows promised a big future if they could just hang on and sea level didn’t rise or fall too much for a while.

Benny checked his watch. Ten minutes.

He gave his line the double tug that alerted Fish that he was entering the Flight Deck’s lobby.  He switched on his lamp and immediately everything was thrown into stark relief by the hard blue white light. Brightly coloured fish danced with their black, hard edged shadows, flitting across the walls of the submerged foyer.  Making sure not to snag his line, Benny made his way into the black of the lift lobby, his lamp revealing the chunky sixties ceramic wings he’d come for; a dream of flight, of the freedom of the air, now lost and forgotten to a new watery reality.  In the bright lamp light the blue vitreous surface of the tiles showed little wear or corruption for their years under water.  As no light penetrated here, the wings were also free of pelagic life excepting a pair of ghostly white sea combs.  Benny would leave that tile in place.  “Precious” popped like a bubble in Benny’s consciousness again.

Taking out the mallet and chisel he began to prise the tiles from their wall one by one and place them in the bubble bag. It was slow, hard work and required a certain determination given that underwater everything happens as if in slow motion.  A blow which might fell an ox on land, impacted with little more than a soft thud in twenty metres of water.  Benny soldiered on and, with about ten minutes air left, exited the foyer, fully inflated the bubble bag and watched as it and its cargo ascended through the dancing light to the sparkling surface.  Doing his best dolphin impression Benny followed.

As he surfaced he saw Fish hauling the bubble bag in. Two strokes and Benny was against the wall again.  He slipped his flippers and slung them up onto the deck.  Gripping the end of an exposed piece of rebar he pulled himself up onto the slab that had once been the floor of a luxury apartment on the fifth floor of the iconic building; the ghosts of hostesses past and their guests enjoying the sea view.  The floor was now just part of the walk along the top of the breakwater. Getting out of his tanks Benny lay down on the hot concrete, enjoying the sun as it tightened his skin with a thin salt rime.

Having landed the bubble bag and sorted the salvaged tiles out to dry in the sun, Fish came over to Benny with a loaf of rough bread and some cheese for their lunch. Benny was ravenous.

They sat together quietly tearing lumps off the bread and cheese and yaffling it all down with a pull on Fish’s home brewed shine. That ex-military canteen seemed part of Fish and sometimes he resorted to it too often.  Fish was older than Benny by many years but they were the best of friends, almost family since Benny’s dad had died fighting the fires up in the mountains.  Benny remembered Poppy telling Fish and his dad that this world, the one after global warming, would be a world non-one had ever seen before. Benny was just a little boy then.  He didn’t really understand what Poppy meant.  Now that Benny was himself a man, that figure of speech seemed to hold a greater truth.  Kuhn had said something about scientists that used different paradigms literally living in different worlds; and Benny thought, not for the first time, that these older people, the ones still invested in that old past paradigm, they were the ones for whom this new reality was the hardest to accept.  Fish kept faith with that past by collecting examples of all its now pointless, broken and unworkable technologies.

“What for, mate? Benny had asked when Fish had turned up late one afternoon brandishing a disabled leaf blower that had once been the pride of some long gone suburban gardener.  “It’s a petrol one.  Even if you could get it to turn over, where are ya gonna get the petrol?”

“Ya never know mate.  Ya just never know.” was all Fish had said as he rubbed the grime off the Briggs and Stratton logo with something of a wistful and distant smile on his face.

Well Benny wasn’t fussed, and even lent a hand when Fish went out hunting for some piece of early twenty first century kit to add to the huge collection that now filled the rank grass at the rear of Fish’s shack over the back of the lagoon. He had tons of it and he vowed it was to be his retirement project to get it all working again. Benny had to laugh at that. Fish must be sixty if he’s a day.  When was this fabled retirement to be?  What was “retirement” anyway?  People used to retire to do the things that Benny thought of as every day life.  Growing a few veggies, keeping chooks, a few pigs and a cow. Fossicking for bits and pieces of useful salvage. Like the wings, which would look great above the new fireplace he had built over the summer.

“Yep, it’s a different world alright.” thought Benny; but he was certain in his heart that this time, his time, was a better time, or at least, could be a better time than either Fish and his Dad, or even Poppy had lived through.

Benny helped Fish load the tiles and the gear onto their cart and then, having harnessed up, they set of together at a trot for the land end of the breakwater. Tonight they’d feast on the fish that Fish had caught while Benny was diving on The Flight Deck.

Digital mischief also by …..    Warrigal Mirryuula

first published by the Pig’s Arms in July 2009, but cellared for your appreciation.

Real Wallabies

02 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Mark, The Sports Bar

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What we want …. Real Wallabies !

Story by Hung One On and Marsupial Mischief by Warrigal Mirriyuula

Hey, Father O’Way here, you know, good old Sandy. I mean is the Bish, you know Bishop Bishop, a wanker or what? I mean he wakes me up at three in the afternoon, what sort of wanker is that? So I have to interview the Wallabies, lets face it, some pre historic marsupials ain’t gonna have much to say.

“Sandy, get down to HQ and find out what’s going on with the Wallabies?” rants the Bish.

“Well I don’t know this Wal Abbies Bish?” I reply trying to buy some time. I would much rather just go back to sleep.

“The Rugby Union team you twit” says the Bish in a rather exasperated tone.

“Not another football team, I mean why do you never send me to interview those shelia’s that play in lingerie?” I request rather forlornly.

“Just get down there and find out what’s wrong. Oh and by the way, don’t tell anyone to fuck off!” roars the Bish.

Can’t tell anyone to fuck off. You know sometimes I wonder why I bother.

I enter rugby HQ and no one really is standing guard. No one lets me straight in as he is Hung’s cousin and he recognises me as the globe trotting priest that drinks at The Pigsarms. The sign over the door is interesting. It says, “Remember the two qualities needed for Rugby Union are brute strength and bloody ignorance”. I mean what does that tell you.

I go to the Head Coaches office, Bobbie Bean, and ask for an interview.

“Fuck off” yells Bobbie.

Hmm, how come it’s okay for him but not for me. Is this a classic case of discrimination or what.

“So is it okay to call you Bobbie” I ask.

“Well all my friends call me Bobbie but you can call me Mr. Bean”

Hey, that’s the problem, Mr Bean is in charge of the team.

“Hey Bobbie, everyone is saying your lot are a bunch of pansies, that you were all dizzy at half time and the trainer had to point to the try line?” I barb. No f off’s for me, grumble, grumble.

“Grrr” says Bobbie, if grrr is really a word.

I can see I got off on the wrong foot here so I decide to dazzle Bobbie with my rugby knowledge.

“So Bobbie, did Mark Ella have a good game?” I dazzle.

“Arragh” replies Bobbie.

“Isn’t the object of the game to get the ball over the try line?” I amaze.

“Well, that’s the first I’ve ever heard of that, how about you come on board as an assistant?” quips Bobbie.

Hmm, yes, the ignorance is showing.

“How are you going to go against the Springsooks, you know, the South Ifrician team?” I probe.

“Once we get all our stars back like Virgo, Aquarius and Capricorn we will kill em unless they play Tony Grieg and Kevin Petersen” states Bobbie rather assertively.

Well they are cricketers but never let the truth get in the road of a good story.

“So Bobbie, what do you need to win, how about some ring ins?” I state with not a lot of confidence.

Bobbie leaps over the desk and grabs me by the throat knocking me to the ground. Gee, I hope my packet of Winnies are okay, can’t afford anymore.

“No Father, what we need is some real wallabies, real wallabies” Bobbie cries.

So there you are folks. The problem is Mr Bean is in charge of the team, they don’t understand the objective of the game and they can’t find the try line.  Next.

And it’s GOLD – for Bad Sportsmanship

30 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by in Emmjay, The Sports Bar

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Eddie the Eagle – a good bad sportsman represented England in the Giant Whoosh – came last but lived to tell the tale, sorry, to sell the Ale.

Look at it this way; in a couple of weeks it’ll all be over for another four years.

I have nothing against elite athletes.  If a person wants to spend her every waking minutes swimming in unison with a bunch of other mad smiling people, far be it from me to trivialise it and say unkind things like “get a life” or “shave off that mo!”

No, seriously, the multi-media have gone wild, not so much about the triumphs of the athletes (ours and theirs) as they have about dropping HUGE buckets of sh1t on superb athletes who were supposed to win, but didn’t.

How embarrassing was it that our non-favoured girls won gold and pipped the Dutch and Seppos.  I mean, it’s such an affront that the Yanks will more than likely pull their marines out of the Northern Territory in protest.

And the American uber-fish Phelps.  What a nerve !  Not even a podium finish.  Cripes we’d better race out and buy Sportsbet shares on the strength of that.

Wasn’t it uncomfortable that Australians beat someone at table tennis and sailing women found they had accidentally eclipsed the Ruskis and the Spaniards – not surprising the latter, I guess since the Germans repossessed their wind.

Maybe the saddest thing of all was the British cyclists who not only didn’t win, but complained that the Aussies rode a spoiling race!  Well, yes, the Aussies didn’t win either and the fact that the Brits didn’t bother splitting from the peloton and chasing the lead group – who oddly failed to slow down to let them catch up and win, is surely bad sportsmanship and a real fucker for the sponsors of the British team.  Calls for Brad and Cav to “Go Home” were silenced when the normally astute and renowned sports nation of Great Britain remembered that their bikers were in fact already home, if not exactly hosed.

Aussie tennis stars didn’t.  Who beat them to a pulp ?  A Japanese chap and, er, I dunno, I don’t think it was mentioned who pulped Sam – just that she – incredibly – lost.

Did I mention the unbeatable Hockeyroos ? Or the Boomers ?  Lost.  Lost.  The greatest Australian shame; losing at any sport to any other national team. Unforgiveable.

Horsey types ?  Lame.  Lame.  But oddly looking good for silver at getting dressed or something stylish in the saddle.

And the boys’ 4 X 100 Dream Team.  Beaten by the French – of all people !  And the Seppos and The Tierra del Fuegans.  Oh, the shame, the unrelenting shame.

But the winning piece of bad sportsmanship surely goes to the media gurus who think it’s hilarious to bag out the oarsman from some desert-bound African claypan for being really crap at sculling – comparing him to their other loser-darlings “Eric the Eel” and “Eddie the Eagle” who are, one gathers notorious for their singular lack of skill in their chosen sport to represent their respective “non-sporting, just struggling to survive while western countries plunder our natural resources” countries.

And to cap off the emerging whingeing Olympics, let’s not forget the Chinese domination of the gold (and the bronze and the silver) medal tallies.  We all know that you can’t beat people three times your own size on a diet of boiled rice and fried crickets.  It’s steroids, surely, isn’t it ?  OK, for table tennis, it’s speed AND steroids.

So, keep your eyes peeled and your ears tuned to the commentary and report in your own favourite Gold medal excuse for getting beaten when the so called experts said it could never happen.

Let’s hope the Australian arrow shooters can stay on their feet, otherwise we’ll have to lament Australia’s fallen archers.

I know, it’s not over yet until we see another monster cheese-fest closing ceremony.

When I say “we”, I mean you, I’m out in the shed practising whingeing and saying disparaging things – I’m shooting for a fourth place in the turd-throwing at the 2016 Olympics.  My best effort so far goes along the lines of “No, losing is character-building and I’m sure that <insert Australian athlete or team here> will come back from this stronger than ever” (unlike the foreign devil winners, whose stories will encase tomorrow’s fish and chips before they fade from the annals of history because , well, they never carried the green and gold, did they ?)

Or thankfully a microphone, TV camera, smart phone or laptop.

Baggy Green Blues

31 Friday Dec 2010

Posted by in Emmjay, The Sports Bar

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“Now there are blues that you get from happiness

There are blues you get from pain

There’re blues when you are pining for your team to be shining

Blues that are hard to explain”[1]

“And there are blues you get from cricket

When you hear your top order snick it and they fill up your thoughts with darkest dread

Yes, these blues become a bummer when they wreck half of your summer

And your steel reserves must harden to take the tranny out in the garden

For there are blues you get from hearin’ your team’s chances disappearin’

When your cricket gear’s at home, out in the shed.

But the meanest blues, the meanest blues there be

Are the kind that I got on my mind

The blues the Baggy Greensters give to me.

There are blues you get in snatches when they drop dead sitter catches

And complainin’ to the umpire “He waz out !”

There are blues you get in cricket when the ball misses the wicket and the keeper fakes a half-convincing shout.

There are blues when you find wanting the captaincy of Ponting

Ain’t no point to linger or to blame his busted finger

‘Coz a punter’s just a punter and a Pup is just a pup

With two lost Ashes in a row, the time is surely up

And the Poms are on a millionteen for none

Yes there are blues when their top batters hit everything that matters

And the Poms are on two millionteen for one

But the baddest blues’s my insistence

When the Greens have less resistance

Than the skin on day old custard and the ponces show no mustard

And take a dive before the oldest foe.

Yes, there are blues when you’re in the thicket

And you blame a grassy wicket that didn’t seam to trouble Poms at all

Or there are blues when selector sinners leave out all the spinners

And there’s no-one who can turn a bloody ball.

You could say that it ain’t fair of me and the Poms were just too good

And selection’s such a tricky thing few mortals understood

I’m blue becoz we’ll all have to wait

For the gifted sons of the golden greats

But by that time, I have a hunch, we’ll all be out there takin’ lunch

Through fattish straws – with our toothless mates.

But the bluest thing, the saddest thing – I’ll remember till I die

Was Pup hangin’ on the final Ashes test, prayin’ for a series tie.

[1] From “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” – bent, with apologies

Aardvark Me Dead, Damn those Frogs

26 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by in Emmjay, The Sports Bar

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Holy Shit !

I was shocked yesterday to see  in one of those newspapers that they give away at railway stations a photograph of a member of a precious protected species – the Wallabies – with one eye staring at the camera and the other eye having a little holiday somewhere in the back of the chap’s head.

He had some interesting facial embroidery accompanying his wandering orbit.

The story (sorry, I’m too slack to go find it – you can dig it out and I’ll post it) went on to say that THIS French rugby squad was terrifically well behaved and had almost weaned themselves off using the Christmas hold (a handful of nuts) as a primary part of their normative tactics.

But it is clear that they are certainly clinging to their other old chestnut – the digital eye massage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of these has got to be Os

I think that this is one part of the Australian defence sorely lacking  – the reprisal – and I am hoping that the Wallabies can enlist the services of my favourite game play persuader Os du Randt,  (through sheer force of personality) to persuade the French (who,  after all, have a chicken as their mascot) to cease and desist in playing with our boys’ wedding tackle and encouraging the Frogs to leave their opponents eyes comfortably ensconced in their sockets.

I’d like to send a personal thank you to Voice for the Aardvark joke.   Killed me.

If you missed it, you’ve either got a long search mission or you can send me an Email stapled to a tenner and I’ll explain it…..

The problem with the renos, Voice,  is stopping the car to change the flat tyre – or just putting up with the flapping until we get to the party.

Lapping it up in Camperdown

25 Monday Oct 2010

Posted by in Emmjay, The Sports Bar

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Mallett Street Camperdown, June 2010

Emmjay had grown tired of trying to re-thread the string in his Speedos.  The paper clip shuttle was a mistake and he recalled that a bobby pin was the weapon of choice for a lap around the waistband.

But ever since O’Hoo had been hauled over the coals for the Lambrettista incident, Emmjay had thought better of associating with bobbies – and their pins.  Resigned to a long afternoon amongst the gentlemens’ smalls repair fraternity, he poured himself another “Smith’s” Single malt, giving another tiny Aussie battler distiller a chance at fame in the taste-off at the Pig’s Arms.

A couple of sniffs told him that his old favourite Limeburners was a short half head in front anyway.

It had been a bastard of a week.  He’d been completely unable to avoid work the whole time and had sought solace by ducking out at lunchtime and swimming a couple of dozen laps of the sweetly-heated pool down the back of Petersham oval.

Emmjay was pleased with his new “Nero” cut.  It reminded him of Derek Jacoby playing in “I, Claudius”, or as Tim the Cabin Boy preferred to call him, “Clavdivs”.  It was a swimming-tolerant coif and offered a style statement that was more tolerable than the tragics who had (in epidemic proportions) begun to shave their heads to disguise male pattern baldness.

Baldness was not Emmjay’s problem, but he had grown to despise the kids playing in the back of the Pig’s Arms car park who referred to him by the epithet “Snowy”.  Particularly the little bastard who used to strike the pose and burst into “There was movement at the station” every time Emmjay parked the blue Zephyr and went into the Pig’s for a cleansing Trotter’s – after his swim and before returning to the Wardrobe department at the ABC.

Emmjay was relieved that he had been able to change shifts and avoid the curdling density of the morning news crews, but it was not like the old days.  He felt a profound sense of sad whimsy for the old timers and missed the challenge of picking a tie to go with Jim Dibble’s spectacles – or finding an open neck shirt with a collar big enough to get over Bill Peach’s head without exposing too many acres of chest carpet.

Nowadays there was a new generation of talking heads and the make-up department had set itself a challenge of creating 365 different ‘do’s for Juanita Phillips – without bothering to let Wardrobe in on the joke.  And the ABC seemed to find it more economical to switch newsreaders than it was to buy Juanita a third dress.  Which Juanita overcame, with the assistance of the Brotherhood of St Laurence.  Emmjay was never sure whether he was supposed to press the garment, fumigate it, or nuke it in the department’s microwave.

But the foreign correspondents were even harder to please.  Emmjay recalled the time when Miss Muffett, the tea lady ran off screaming when she miss-heard Darryn Lockyer – on his way to the middle east proclaim that he had “an Iraq need”.

The Smith’s was evaporating fast and Emmjay wondered whether anyone would care if his togs fell down.  Reading his thoughts, Merv smiled.  “You spend most of your life bare-arsed, sport”.  And poured him two fingers more.

“Reckon this rain’s gunna stop soon” ?

“What rain ?”

“Come in from the beer garden, sport.  There’s a good boy”.