Below is an excerpt from 'The Shinboners - The Complete Story of the North Melbourne Football Club'.
The book will be released on Friday, July 28 and available to order on The Roo Shop online.
The book will be on sale in store early next week.
Spirit overcomes all - By Glenn Archer
It’s not fantasy to suggest that the North Melbourne Football Club changed my life, not just in a sporting sense, but in a whole of life package. And it all could have been so different. I quit the Kangaroos after just two weeks of training with the Under-19s under Denis Pagan. Strange the way the mind works at that age.
My mates had warned me that Denis was a hard taskmaster, and they weren’t wrong. I hated training and in that pre-season (late 1990), we started with stacks of running—a 2 km run, then heaps of 100s, 200s, 400s.
I wasn’t ready for it, and it nearly killed me.
After two weeks, when it was time for ball work, Denis told us to swap runners for footy boots. The ground was like concrete and I refused. Denis was blunt: “Put your boots on our you can piss off!” I walked out, never to return.
Imagine what may have been had I stuck with that plan.
I did go back to Noble Park and played a handful of games for the seniors, but North football manager Greg Miller and Denis kept at me.
Finally, I agreed. Denis had softened a little and told me I didn’t have to train. “Just come and play one game. If you don’t like it you can leave.” I did, and ended up at North for 16 years.
It’s safe to say that North formed me, and so many of those who came before me, who played with me, and have followed me to Arden Street. I know this is true of all footy clubs, the bonding you form between teammates and coaches and all those who make the club is a super glue - but North was different. During my time at the club it’s safe to say that we lived on the edge; our facilities were poor, there was a constant financial threat, and several times there were talks of mergers. In 1996, we were favourites to merge with Fitzroy, we ditched North Melbourne and became the Kangaroos, we ended up playing “home” games in Sydney in the middle of my career, and then, in my final year we were odds on to move to the Gold Coast. It took great character for everybody in the royal blue and white to not only carry this load, but have one of the club’s finest eras.
What a credit it is to our administration, and to our loyal members, that we not only resisted the big bucks on offer from the AFL to move, but we were able to rebuild ourselves to not only create a state of the art facility at Arden Street - no more portables, rembrace the community of North Melbourne, build our membership to unheard of levels, and continue to compete at the highest level.
All that has so much to do with that Shinboner Spirit — a strange term in this era, as it relates to local abbatoir workers in the 19th century, but one I am proud to wear. A true Shinboner is one who will do all he can to commit to the best outcome, just as our motto says: Victory demands dedication.
I learned that, the hard way, back on that “concrete” oval in the pre-season of 1990, as did the whole of club in those dicey years through the ’90s leading into the momentous decision to be truly North Melbourne in 2007.
You can’t achieve anything in sport, or life, without those hard yards, without total dedication, and I am forever grateful for the North club for giving me that second chance, and teaching me such spirit and purpose.
