Raising the sport bar

Andrew Mathieson
Lindsay Toulmin, in one respect, was stuck in a bygone era.
In another, he was ahead of his time.
“When I was young, Lord have mercy,” Lindsay sighs.
“I was running a pub when I had a sports store, writing for a newspaper and having a football show on the radio.”
The watering hole was the Argyle Hotel in Geelong West, steeped in more than 150 years of tradition that, as the last owner, Lindsay lived and breathed.
But in sports apparel, he proved himself an innovator.
Nearing his 62nd birthday this month, selling stock once stacked high on shelves has now been replaced by clicking on the internet.
“I’m an old feet-and-inches man who has had to embrace technology,” Lindsay says.
Between phone calls he reveals he’s still busily securing a new line of football boots never seen on Australian fields.
Before the advent of online sales and his Drumcondra shopfront that ran from 1974 until 1998, Lindsay’s pastime was “dabbling” in the sale of lace-up footy guernseys, coloured shorts and revolutionary boots from his mum and dad’s Norlane lounge.
“I supplied the first club to wear colour shorts in the Geelong district,” Lindsay declares.
“For North Shore I supplied the royal blue for a final against Bell Park at West oval.
“Everybody had (previously) worn black at home and white away.”
Around the time, the then-Cats footballer even designed for his team a better sock that stayed up and had consistent blue and white hoops.
After a couple of years battling away in the club’s reserves, Lindsay joined the exodus of Cats cross town to Geelong West under the VFA’s highest profile coach, Billy Goggin.
“But Billy would immediately drop you to the seconds,” Lindsay laments, “and I was not going to go from the seconds at Geelong to the seconds at Geelong West when Sunshine guaranteed me a game in the firsts every week.”
The move to Sunshine indirectly proved a blessing in disguise. Lindsay was invited to a Mulgrave Adidas office of Bruce Neish, a former Essendon player, who was playing at Sunshine to get the latest pair of new boots.
“When I got out there I said a person could open up a sports store with all his boots, so he said ‘Why don’t you’,” Lindsay remembers.
Later, in 1981, Lindsay visited a UK company that made traditional English test cricket pullovers. He was already supplying five leading Melbourne district clubs with top-quality imported jumpers from the home of cricket.
“God, it would be nice to have one of those English test jumpers,” Lindsay winked to owner Luke Ayres.
“Oh, you could never have one of them,” Luke responded, “I’d be in trouble with the English MCC club.”
But when Lindsay returned to Australia a special parcel had already arrived at his store.
“There was one (jumper) with the little crowns in the middle and I’ve still got it,” he grins.
Then in 1983 the Argyle came up for sale. Lindsay had been cleaning toilets on the side at Norlane Hotel for $120 a week but thought owning his own pub would be more fun.
“I had the Argyle for 12 years and I always divided it up into three periods,” he reflects.
“The first three years was ‘Why did I ever buy this?’ the middle six years was ‘How good is this?’ and the last three years ‘Will someone please buy it’.
“It’s like owning shares – it goes up and down.”
The Aberdeen Street pub, now Irish Murphy’s, also survived a fire bomb attack when criminals discovered that plain clothes police were waiting inside for them, Lindsay recalls.
Reflecting on the meeting place that formed Geelong Football Club back in 1858, he admits to being ignorant of the hotel’s past, even the fact it had more than 30 past owners.
“The very first thing I was going to do was change the name and people said you can’t change the name,” Lindsay says.
“Well, you only needed a $7 fee to change the name but I decided to keep the name when I realised how much history it had attached to the football club.”