THEY call Caramut’s oldest player “Gilesy”. He jokes that most locals aren’t sure about his first name because they weren’t born when he went to school there in the 1960s.
Gilesy, “Stephen” to his mum, is 57. He played his first game for Caramut Swans in 1966. He hasn’t played his last game yet.
“Going to keep going until I lose form,” deadpans the farm boy turned city lawyer who has played football for nearly 50 years and reckons he has a few more seasons yet. As long as he can face the 400-kilometre round trip from Melbourne every other Saturday and being sore Sunday to Thursday.
He makes a joke of it all, especially of himself, but the truth is as touching as it is funny.
He wonders if he stops coming back to wear the red and white jumper with “the boys” then the club he loves — and his father and grandfather loved — might die. Not because he’s huge value on the field any more, but while he can push himself to play then others do, too.
He’s part mascot, part patron, part inspiration and several parts perspiration. The “sponsorship” he slips the club isn’t the sort of investment he handles in corporate board rooms but he jokes that “it means I get to speak first at club functions”. But even he was embarrassed when the club built a new tin shed and called it the Stephen Giles Stand.
In his last game this season, he lined up on a youngster from Tatyoon. As they shook hands the kid said he wasn’t a regular player: he had come home for his 18th birthday that weekend and the footy club had nabbed him.
“So you’re 18,” Gilesy said. The teenager said: “Yeah. How old are you?”
“More than three times your age,” he replied. So old, he’d made a comeback around the time the Tatyoon kid was born. It was April, 1998. His father Tom Giles, life member of the club, had died and Gilesy, then 40, and his younger brothers came home — one from Western Australia, the other from London — to bury him.
In honour of their father, the Giles brothers played for Caramut seconds the next day. After all, Tom had been a club stalwart since returning from a Japanese prison camp, missing an eye, to take up a soldier-settler farm in the 1940s. His “funeral” game was a fitting farewell for Caramut’s famously one-eyed supporter.
Younger brothers Tim and Jon had to return to their far-off worlds but Stephen couldn’t shake the feeling footy gave him. Melbourne, after all, is only a three-hour drive, each way, interrupted by four quarters of footy. Hard work for a middle-aged body, even one fit enough to have played more than 200 games for Monash Blues before taking on coaching the under-19s.
Gilesy once kicked seven goals in a winning grand final for Monash. That was in 1978. A showy centre half-forward called Costello kicked a bag that day, too. He gave up football and went on to become Federal Treasurer. Gilesy became a commercial lawyer but kept playing until a knee injury slowed him down in 1987.
Then he coached Monash under-19s for years. That led to a unique record of playing under-19s in three decades. In the 1970s, he was genuinely under-19. In the late 1980s and in 1990, as a coach, he occasionally played (with his opponents’ blessing) rather than call off a game due to a shortage of players.
Coaching ended in 1990. But he missed the camaraderie of the game. After his father’s funeral, bush footy beckoned like an old flame. So any time the Swans were desperate — which is often — he jumped in the BMW and headed down the highway into the past.
His car might be flash compared with the utes around the fence, but he’s still a local.
His grandfather Sid arrived from England early last century to work on a local property, knowing nothing of Aussie rules. When workmates talked Sid into playing the colonial game, he guessed it must be like rugby. He tucked the ball under his arm, dodged opposition players all the way down the wing and threw himself on the grass between the goalposts.
“Scored Caramut’s only try,” says his grandson contentedly, delivering the punchline maybe for the thousandth time.
There are other stories. About that first game, for instance. It was 1966. He was eight, a little kid itching to play in the under-13s. He had no boots or jumper. His dad took his school boots and nailed some old stops into the soles. They borrowed a jumper from “Tim O’Connor’s dad” that came down to his knees.
In the last quarter, they let him on in a back pocket. The ball came his way. He took a chest mark: “It knocked me over.”
There was a big kid on the mark “too tall to kick over”, so he ran around him to kick, which some onlookers mistook for flair. After the siren, the local football hero, Ronnie Harders, ruffled his hair and growled: “Well played, son.”
“That was like the Brownlow to me,” says the senior law firm partner half a century on, reliving one of the finest moments of a fortunate life.
The rest of the yarn is that when he pulled his boots off, he realised why he was so sore: the nails from the stops had gone right through the sole and into his feet.
He got some real boots and played every year, jumping from under-13s to under-17s.
He played his first senior game 40 years ago, while still a schoolboy. Last month, he played against Glenthompson on the 40th anniversary of that senior debut.
“This time I was in the seconds,” he explains. “I played my last senior game when I was 47 ... we didn’t field a seconds team that season.”
There is a secret to his longevity. It’s not a James Hird supplements regimen or Lance Armstrong injections.
It’s more the classic Tom Hafey approach.
Every summer, when the youngsters get on pizzas and beer, Gilesy trains like a candidate for the veteran Olympics. Some days he sneaks to the park and runs dozens of 50m sprints. Then eight 200m.
One game this year he wore a GPS tracker and found he’d run 14km. It’s about fear, he says. If he can’t run all day, he can’t play midfield. If he can’t play midfield he’ll be forced to the forward line and get smashed by big, young blokes a third his age.
The only way to survive is train more rigorously off-season than maybe any other seconds player going around in the bush. But when he runs out in the No.4 guernsey on game day, he enjoys himself.
He doesn’t take it too seriously — unlike one opposition coach renowned for yelling a barrage of instructions at players. “One day I ran up next to him on the boundary and yelled at his players, ‘And pick up No.4 — he’s killing us!’ They all cracked up laughing.”
That’s country footy, he says.
After 50 years he’s realised that playing matters a lot more than winning.
“It’s still a team. Still a reason to get together. Still a community.”
And next season?
“Why wouldn’t I play? Just as long as we don’t get in the finals. That would kill me.”
By Andrew Rule