Glory days of the good sport

Andrew Mathieson
THE FRONT door was more than just the entry to Jim Urquhart’s new place way back in 1952.
Now a witty 96-year-old who still calls the address home, little did he know that answering a knock at that door one night in Hamlyn Heights would eventually open his heart to thousands around Geelong over the next five decades, not just to the visitor behind the flywire.
That night a man called Jack Terrill had come looking for the spirited Welshman who had immigrated to Australia earlier the same year and only moved to Geelong weeks earlier.
“Jim Urquhart?” Jack asked, standing in the doorway.
“Yeah, that’s me, why?” Jim inquisitively replied.
“You’re the bloke I want,” Jack demanded.
News of Jim’s generosity to wide-eyed youngsters on the other side of the globe had travelled fast.
The two men hatched a plan that year to pioneer Geelong’s first YMCA.
There, climbing ropes would fall from the ceilings, basketballs would echo off the walls and boys would ritually answer to calls of the Vikings, the Saxons and other primitive team names for their somewhat less-mighty games.
Whether it was running amok inside a dimly lit gym, whacking a hockey ball into the back of a rickety net or the thrill of that first real kick of a footy with teammates, Jim fondly smiles back at the unique personal memories he inadvertently created for so many.
“It was all about fun in those days,” Jim, rocking back, recalls.
“Now things have somehow disappeared.”
The old “Y” in Yarra Street has been sold.
The loss raises a sigh from his recliner. As for Jim, the shift to Newtown Stadium is like paying for bottled water – nice and all but the taste of decadence is too hard to swallow.
A son of a British officer in colonial India, “chasing away monkeys” on the street occupied much of his young years. The rest was spent with Young Men’s Christian Association.
“I am not a holy-holy boy but my father made me go to Sunday School there,” Jim says.
If for nothing else, a legacy of living five years in India was that Jim returned as a good hockey player, although not entirely knowledgeable. It was only after he spotted a bloke on a Melbourne tram wearing a hockey blazer and crest shortly after arriving in Australia that he realised Australians actually played the sport.
Sick of three years travelling up the highway to play for Brunswick, Jim scoured the international Gordon Tech students to form the inaugural Geelong Hockey Club.
“We had me, one Malaysian boy and the rest were Pakistani – no Aussies,” he giggles.
It was a struggle before the days of synthetic grass. They marked the lines with sawdust and a piece of string each week at Eastern Park.
When hockey caught on, Geelong evolved from one to five sides and a Geelong competition was inevitable, Jim says.
“So the Geelong club split up and then they wouldn’t talk to each other,” he nods.
No one would dare ignore Jim, though.
Walk through the million-dollar Stead Park rooms and his name appearing on the door is an enduring reminder of hockey’s Geelong roots.
For years, devotees only had to look to the other side.
“I was still umpiring and playing when I was 60. Of course, I had a heart attack after that,” he smirks.
Jim knew hockey back in his early days as an Australian but the domestic brand of football was totally foreign. His curiosity about the game’s five umpires and eight goal posts got him thinking.
Weeks after watching his first game, Jim was teaching the rules in Geelong’s first-ever Little League.
The word spread among the schools and close to 500 flocked to the initial training run at Hirst Oval in Geelong West.
Harder still was organising a pie night, Jim laughs.
“We could get them all in the door,” he added.
“I don’t know where all those pies came from because we had no committees or anything.”
To raise money for uniforms, Jim organised work raffles at Ford.
Match-day footballs were somehow ushered out of the Kardinia Park, one way or another.
“That’s the only way we got our footballs,” Jim says.
“Most of Geelong footballers then were employed by Ford and they were working in my section.”