No Merger Podcast: How Don Scott ripped apart Hawthorn-Melbourne merger with his famous jumper gesture

Melbourne president Ian Ridley expected the venom from angry supporters against a merger with Hawthorn, but was shocked by the personal attack he copped from a premiership teammate. Already the face of Operation Payback - a campaign to stop the proposed merger between Hawthorn and Melbourne in 1996 – the always sharply dressed and some would say eccentric Hawks great was looking for a prop. Something tangible, and perhaps theatrical, for when he gave a speech to the Hawthorn masses crammed into the Camberwell Civic Centre. Then it happened. “I don’t believe in fate but things were happening for a reason back then and things were falling into place,” Scott told the No Merger podcast. “Why would a man come along to me, ring me up and say ‘I’ve seen the merger jumper’?” “We had a meeting and I asked him if he could go and get it for me, so he went down to a sportswear place down in Braeside. “He got the replica jumper for me and I told him what I wanted with velcro here and whatever else, so we used that.” It led to his famous gesture of tearing a velcro Hawk from a Melbourne guernsey in front of frothing Hawthorn diehards. It became one of the iconic football images of the 1990s, and it’s seen as the moment the merger was literally ripped apart. “To see the emotion in that room is something I’ll never forget where logical men became illogical,” Scott said of the night. “I could see how a dictator takes over a country and whips a crowd up into a frenzy. “People who I thought were quite logical and sane and calm became raving idiots.” Scott was unshackled that night, which followed months of what he claimed were orders from Channel 7 to be “non-emotive” on the bid to save Hawthorn. He was a commentator with the network, which at the time was the host broadcaster and a partner of the AFL. “It was very hard to get media support (for Operation Payback), but you’ve got to understand how life and business works behind the scenes,” he said. “Because these blokes don’t play fair, they play dirty.” Then AFL boss Ross Oakley refuted Scott’s claims. “That’s absolute rubbish, the AFL couldn’t control the media’s message,” Oakley said. “The media say what they want to say. “You imagine going to Mike Sheahan and saying ‘righto Mike, this is what you are going to say.’ “He’d tell you where to get off.” Almost two thirds of Hawthorn’s members voted against the merger to kill the proposal. It was a relief to many, including John Kennedy Sr, who was at the time the AFL Commission chairman as well as a Hawthorn coaching legend. His son and then Hawks board member, John Kennedy Jr, remembers it as a stressful time for his famous father, who passed away earlier this year. “Dad had to keep somewhat at arm’s length because he was a commissioner at the time and I know he had a lot of sleepless nights over that,” Kennedy Jr said. “To help build that footy club to what it was and then have to decide whether or not this merger should go ahead was very debilitating for him.” Former Herald Sun chief football writer Mike Sheahan recalled Kennedy Sr’s torment at the thought of the club he helped make great merging with one he loathed. “Probably the thing that sticks with me in this front was that John Kennedy despised Melbourne, and I heard that from his mouth and not just once,” Sheahan said. “And I thought that this is just not the union that he would support. “But in official duties in the AFL he had to soften that view, but I know as a player he thought that Melbourne bullied and looked down on Hawthorn. “He had to change that view, but his own view was I think he’d rather merge with Afghanistan than Melbourne. “But the commission decided that this was the most commercial proposition and he had to lend his weight to that.” Hawthorn was saved and would go on to win four more flags in the next 20 years, while also significantly boosting its finances. “What happened I would argue was probably the best thing that could have happened to the footy club,” Kennedy Jr said. “It shook the place to its foundations and it was then able to bounce from 15,000 members to 30,000 in the space of one or two years. “Generally people were shocked into action.” THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE DEMONS Then Melbourne president Ian Ridley was under no illusions of what lay before him. He’d played 130 games with the Demons and was a five-time premiership player, but he knew the club’s chaotic meeting at the Dallas Brooks Hall would be “the greatest test of his life”. “The howls that greeted us were positively feral,” Ridley wrote in his 2002 book Urge to Merge. “And the signs – ‘No Merger’, ‘Traitors’, ‘Resign’ were everywhere. “The baying and howling didn’t subside. In fact, it grew in intensity. “It was clear that our presence was only incensing them further, and that’s the understatement of the bloody decade. “I remember thinking: ‘this will be the biggest test of your life, Ridley”.” It quickly became clear the now demolished East Melbourne venue was far too small for the large throng. It was full an hour before the scheduled start time, with thousands lining up outside. “I remember saying ‘there’s no bloody way I’m cancelling this meeting, and if we have to wait for everyone to get in, we’ll wait,” Ridley recalled. “I announced to the hall a 30-minute delay and the boos were incredible, but then it was obvious we needed another 30-minute delay to let everyone in. “Like a pack of animals they howled me down, I was anticipating a fair dinkum riot. “We had security guards all around the hall and on stage with us and initially I thought their presence wasn’t necessary. “As the night went on, I was grateful for their proximity by the end of it.” Passionate Demons supporter Gary Marchant, who was in the foyer handling the votes, will never forget what he witnessed that night. “You could just hear this viciousness, this anger, these sort of raw cries coming from the hall,” he said. “We were getting the same type of vibes in the foyer where people were voting. “It was very sad to see fellow Melbourne supporters fighting with each other and getting physical with each other. “We had people trying to cheat at the voting table saying they hadn’t voted and we had to say they had. “You could just hear this viciousness, this anger. “It was a really bad scene, something I don’t want to see again.” On stage, anti-merger figure and former club great Brian Dixon gave an impassioned speech in which he berated Ridley, who he had won five premierships alongside in the 1950s and 60s. “Brian certainly let me had it,” Ridley recalled. “I was surprised at the extremely personal nature of the abuse he levelled at me. “Only a day before I read a quote from him in the paper where he said he had nothing but respect for me and didn’t doubt for a second I was doing what I believed was in the club’s best interests. “I remember looking into his eyes and thinking ‘either you’re a politician (which Dixon had been) or there’s real hatred there’.” Ridley was shocked by the attack from his former premiership teammate, but pushed on. “I explained this was the hardest decision me and my board have ever had to make, and all I received was a chorus of jeers and cries with people yelling out ‘resign’ and ‘no merger’,” he recalled. “One young bloke even ran up to the stage to try and tackle me before a couple of security guards grabbed him and threw him out of the hall.” Despite the passion, the Demons’ members voted to merge. This led to legal threats from Joe Gutnick and the Demons Alternative group, which resulted in a meeting. “Brian Dixon called and said, ‘I want to heal the club’,” Ridley recalled. “They had been threatening court action and that was the very last thing the football club needed. “Neither Brian or Joe should’ve been making those demands, (as) they had lost the vote after all. “But my biggest concern was to try and unite the club as well. “Melbourne’s soul had been torn almost right down the middle.” At the meeting, Ridley proposed he would serve as deputy chairman under Gutnick, which was accepted, and the war was over. “If the merger process taught me anything, it is that supporters would rather see their clubs fight for every last breath and die with dignity, than merge,” Ridley wrote. — Episode 4 of the No Merger podcast is available from Tuesday on iHeartRadio or on your favourite podcast app. CLARKO STUNNED HAWKS WERE ON THE BRINK Alastair Clarkson couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was 1996 and the then Demons player kept hearing his new club was a big chance to merge. He was particularly shocked it was to be with the club he would later go on to coach to four premierships. “Hawthorn being involved in it? How could that happen?” Clarkson told the No Merger podcast. “They’d been the most successful club of the past 30 years and had won flags in every decade. “Then five years later, heaven forbid they’re needing to tin rattle to survive.” Clarkson had been a physical education teacher at Wesley College while playing at North Melbourne, before crossing to Melbourne at the end of 1995. In the No Merger podcast – which explores the narrowly aborted merger between Melbourne and Hawthorn – Clarkson said he’d never tasted success against the Hawks on the field. “I can remember being astonished at the time because everything about my experience playing Hawthorn was having them on this absolute pedestal,” he said. “In 10 years of playing league footy at North Melbourne and Melbourne, I’d never played in a side that had defeated Hawthorn in that time. “They had stars on every line and had won premierships, so to think this absolute juggernaut was right on the brink of extinction just beggar’s belief.” But they were. In July 1996, both Hawthorn and Melbourne’s boards voted to pursue a merger. The plans had been kept under wraps, until the Herald Sun broke the bombshell story of the proposed merger between the two Melbourne clubs. Club supporters were shocked and opposition groups were hastily formed, knowing they were well behind the eight ball. Melbourne and Hawthorn working groups had already spent six weeks deliberating before the secret got out. THE HAWK RESPONSE Leon Rice will never forget it. The former Hawks premiership player – who had started Operation Payback with Don Scott - was at Glenferrie Oval to have a look at the club’s books. As Rice recalled, they ‘didn’t do look too good’. After the presentation, they were sitting in the club’s foyer when a familiar face walked up. “One of the financial blokes who had presented the figures came up, patted me on the head and said ‘good on you, Leon, but as you can see there’s no hope’,” Rice said. “I’ve gone ‘you are kidding’.” Operation Payback was created to help raise funds for the club’s survival, and the response was emphatic “They (the club) kept shifting the goal posts,” Scott said. “Initially they wanted us to raise $400,000, then it went up to 700 and then 900. “We finished up raising just over $1 million in six weeks by setting up Operation Payback, which gave people the opportunity to save their club. “If we didn’t succeed, the money would be returned so it was gilt-edged.” MORE AFL: THE DEMONS’ RESPONSE Ian Ridley was “stunned”. The then Melbourne president and five-time premiership star was not counting on the Demons’ Alternative – the opposition group to a merger – coming up with a big whale. Ridley, who passed away in 2008, wrote in his 2002 book ‘Urge to Merge’ of his shock when former premiership teammate and anti-merger Brian Dixon played his “major card” in white knight Joe Gutnick. “I was absolutely stunned when he came up with the goods,” Ridley wrote. “He produced one of Australia’s richest men and I thought ‘why would anyone sink their money into a footy club?’ “But fair play to Dicko. “Although his white knight did say he was a passionate Melbourne supporter, yet he wouldn’t stump up $80 to buy a membership when the sponsorship team called him before the 1996 season. “And I do recall Hassa Mann saying: ‘I’ve been here since 1959 and I’ve never seen or even heard of a Mr. Gutnick.’ “So Joe’s ‘old club’ as he labelled them had never even heard of him.” Passionate fan or not, Gutnick’s money - which came from mining - was significant. He wrote a cheque for $250,000 to the Demons’ Alternative group, which gave it the means to run an aggressive anti-merger campaign. “There was a small view (of people) who had said ‘it’s too late now, we’re gone,” Demons’ Alternative co-founder Mark Jenkins said. “But there were a number who thought very strongly like I did that we should do something to resist. “It started with a small group of us getting 5000 flyers printed on a photocopier. “We created and drafted a letter that essentially said if you’re like us are against the merger, this is a call to arms.” Ridley eventually met with the head honchos of the Demons’ Alternative, and then had a private chat with Gutnick in Mann’s office. “We made a truce that we wouldn’t take aim at each other in the press,” Ridley wrote. “And then I told him if he underwrote the club and took the presidency, I’d step aside. “But he said that was childish, ridiculous and irresponsible, and he refused it.” THE SPITEFUL CLASH It started before the first bounce. In a twist of fate, Melbourne and Hawthorn were fixtured to meet in the final round of the 1996 season. A crowd of 60,000 packed in for what fans thought could have been the Hawks and the Demons’ final game in their current form. The mood was tense and emotions ran high before the match even started. “It started by Todd Viney punching Shane Crawford in the face before the first bounce,” former Demon Andrew Leoncelli said. “He meant business and whacked him a couple of times.” In the crowd, thousands of fans from both clubs held up ‘no merger’ placards. “It was essentially our last chance to get our message across personally to the Melbourne supporters,” Jenkins said “There were certain sections of the AFL that were pushing back against us handing out the ‘no merger’ signs and the other pamphlets. “We stuck to our guns and it was a very clear picture that we had a tremendous amount of support that hadn’t necessarily been factored in by both the AFL and the football club, and also large sections of the media.” The Hawks needed to win to make finals, but even some of its players found themselves caught up in the emotion of the night. “I played on the wing for a period of time and Darren Kappler king hit me from behind,” Leoncelli said. “I had blood coming out my ear and I was concussed. “The runner came out and I said ‘I don’t know where I am’.” Clarkson fondly remembers the night for finally getting the better of the great John Platten. “I’d played on him several times over the journey and had never had the better of ‘The Rat’, but this night I finally got the better of him and actually played alright on this particular occasion,” Clarkson said. “But ‘The Rat’ was nearly buggered because he was on his last legs and I got him when he was at his most vulnerable I think.” Hawthorn won by a point, and then Chris Langford took off his jumper and held it above his head to the fans as they walked off the ground. It was the first act of player defiance and a pivotal moment in the battle, but the war was far from over. — Episode 3 of the No Merger podcast is available from Tuesday on iHeartRadio or on your favourite podcast app HAWKS’ SECRET: HOW HAND WAS FORCED IN MERGER MADNESS It was the $6 million dangling carrot that caught cash-strapped Hawthorn’s eye. The year was 1996 and the Hawks were in a diabolical financial situation, despite coming off an era of on-field supremacy that delivered a swag full of premierships. The ‘No Merger’ podcast, which delves into Hawthorn’s narrowly aborted merger with Melbourne in 1996, explores how the AFL offered big money for any clubs willing to marry up. “The AFL Commission made a decision that they would offer $6 million to any club that would consider merging, in order to assist them to overcome their difficulties,” former AFL boss Ross Oakley told the podcast. “That was put on the table for a club to consider. “Indeed, it was the Hawthorn Football Club that came to us and said they were giving this a bit of thought because they’ve got some financial issues. “And that they’ve been talking to the Melbourne Football Club, who are also struggling a bit, and they’d like to see if they could progress it. “We said ‘that’s fine, we’ll give you whatever assistance you need, and the $6 million is on the table.’ “There were many meetings subsequent to them notifying us that they were thinking about it, of which I attended. “I did not run the meetings, I was there in order to offer them any advice from a league perspective if any questions came up that they needed immediate answers to. “That happened on four or five or six occasions when I was asked ‘what about this?’ and I’d give them an answer and they would continue discussing the merger.” MORE AFL: WHEN THE TALKS RAMPED UP John Kennedy Jr was shocked. He was attending a Hawthorn board meeting when talk of a potential merger with Melbourne was raised. It wasn’t merely mentioned but well advanced, and the Hawks’ director and four-time premiership player quickly realised he’d been left out of the loop. “When it first got mentioned at a serious level around the board table, I was quite taken aback,” Kennedy Jr said. “There was sort of scuttlebutt about it, but there wasn’t any serious negotiation going on as far as I was aware. “But it soon came to light there might have been a bit more going on behind the scenes that I wasn’t aware of. “When it started to become more serious, which was about the middle of 1996, I started to become very concerned and took a more active interest in what was going on. “I found it quite stressful to be honest, in terms of where we were going and what was going to happen with the footy club. “All the things they were raising at a board level was quite an eye-opener for me. “I was sitting there quite surprised this had gone so far, and it had obviously progressed down the track a fair way.” Only a small number from the two clubs were in on the secret talks at that stage. Despite his surprise, Kennedy Jr was acutely aware of the club’s perilous financial state. “There was no one on that board that wanted to go down that path we were heading down,” he said. “Not one of us wanted to do that, but the bottom line was at the time the banks were going to come in and take over the football club if we weren’t able to come up and pay off two $400,000 loans. “If we didn’t do that, they were coming in and they were going to take over and they were going to determine what happened with the football club. “I thought that was the worst case scenario and we couldn’t under any circumstances allow that to happen.” WHY THE MERGER CAME CLOSE A marriage between Hawthorn and Melbourne appeared to work. The two supporter bases were seen to be of a similar demographic, and socio-economically there was a feeling the two were aligned. Hawthorn great Don Scott said purely on paper it would have appeared a good match. “I was a life member and I wasn’t given the opportunity as a member of the football club to know, number one, the situation the club was in and also, number two, also put up my hand and say ‘maybe I can do something about the survival of Hawthorn,’” Scott said. “Hawthorn didn’t have the money, it had the facilities. “It was asset rich and cash poor, whereas the proposed merger with Melbourne, they had the money but were facility poor. “It looked like a good marriage as both parties brought something good to the table.” Oakley obviously didn’t need much convincing. “We thought it might actually work, the Melbourne Hawks sounded pretty good to us,” Oakley said, “But we wanted them to sort it out themselves. “There was no point in us walking in there saying ‘this is the way it’s got to be.” “They had to make those decisions themselves. “I was there to answer questions and to make any suggestions that they required to get the deal done.” At this point, the Melbourne Hawks appeared all but certain. The battle, however, was not yet over. In fact, it had not yet begun. Episode 2 of the No Merger podcast is available from Tuesday on iHeartRadio or on your favourite podcast app. DARK DAYS: MERGERS, BANKRUPTCY, DISAPPEARING FANS Ross Oakley was stunned. It was 1986, he’d just taken over as the VFL’s new boss and “footy was broke.” After going through the books he quickly learned the competition wasn’t just in trouble, it was on life support. AFL NEWS In the new ‘No Merger’ podcast, which explores Hawthorn’s narrowly aborted merger with Melbourne in 1996, Oakley declared the then VFL was on the brink of collapse. “Football was in dire straits,” Oakley told the podcast. “It hadn’t changed the way it did business for some time. “If things didn’t change then the VFL, as it was then, was likely to disappear from the landscape.” Oakley said many of the then 11 Victorian-based clubs were close to shutting their doors. “There at least six clubs that were technically bankrupt and the league had debts of something like $20 million,” he said. “In today’s terms, that’s probably more like $50 or $60 million. “Crowds had been decreasing, memberships had not grown and in fact they’d decreased. “Player payments were going up at an exponential rate and the competition could just not sustain the developments that were occurring.” The league needed more eyeballs for the product, and quickly. Oakley was eyeing a national competition, but he knew the VFL couldn’t go it alone. “Footy was broke,” he said. “We had to expand it into the other states in order to have a national profile that would be more attractive to sponsors and television networks. “But we didn’t have any money to do it, and that’s why we got private enterprise organisations involved. “Various individuals and various corporations put quite a bit of money into football to get the clubs up and running. “And that was the only way we could have done it, we couldn’t have done it off our own bat. “We had debt coming out of ears, so if expansion is what was going to make the league successful in the future then we had to attract people who were close to football and that enjoyed it to provide millions of dollars in order to get the new clubs up and running.” And it was not just the struggling clubs, of which there were many at the time, that were in the gun. It was also the suburban grounds such as Victoria Park, Windy Hill and Moorabbin. Loved by many, but in Oakley’s eyes not up scratch when trying to appeal to a wider audience. “We had so many grounds that had to be kept up to standard, and in fact they weren’t and people used to stand in the mud to watch the footy,” Oakley recalled. “Quite often they didn’t mind too much because they loved their footy, but we had to do something to make the experience of going to football more enjoyable.” THE FIRST NEAR MERGER It was the late in the piece deal-breaker that derailed one of the first proposed mergers of the 1980s. From a business sense, it made sense to merge a number of Victorian clubs together. Emotionally, however, it was a very different story with club members and supporters often fighting tooth and nail in the 1980s and early 1990s to keep their clubs alive. One of the first near mergers happened in 1986 when Demons officials met with then Fitzroy president Leon Wiegard. At first, the talks between Melbourne and the Lions progressed fairly well and he two clubs went close to merging. Public records from the time show Melbourne pulled out of the deal, but Wiegard has a different version of events. “One of those major issues was the makeup of the board,” he told the podcast. “We’d agreed to (a) five and five (split), and we went to a meeting in (former VFL-AFL commissioner) Peter Scanlon’s office almost to sign the deal to say now we can go to our committees and then to our members. “When we got to that meeting they (the Demons officials) said: “yes, five and five plus the two Melbourne Cricket Club members.’ “Hang on, that had never been mentioned before. “Melbourne insisted they would have five plus two, (to which I said) ‘well I don’t think our members would wear that’. “That’s where it fell part.” There would be other close calls in the late 1980s and 90s. A super three-way trade between Melbourne, Richmond and North Melbourne was flouted but a deal could not be reached. In 1990, when the VFL officially became the AFL, Richmond was almost broke when it launched its Save Our Skins campaign, which saved the club from extinction. Fitzroy remained in the league’s sights, and it very nearly merged with first Footscray in 1989 and then North Melbourne in 1996. The deal with the Kangaroos was scuppered when 14 of the 16 clubs voted against the merger. Oakley then moved quickly to merge the Lions with the Brisbane Bears, which was achieved with little resistance. The AFL had got its wish, and it wasn’t done yet. — Episode I of the No Merger podcast is available from Tuesday on iHeartRadio or on your favourite podcast app.