Lou's Lengthy Legacy
The Sunday Age
Sunday February 24, 2008
A mere 67 years after playing his first Collingwood game, the man who did much to spread Australian football's appeal is still doing it.
LOU Richards remains, without question, Australian football's most enduring public servant. All jokes aside - and that increasingly tricky part of his weekly winter repertoire has been removed by Channel Nine - the network's decision to keep his cameo going strong in 2008 belies every rule of both television and football.Both industries dictate the mantra that survival is only for the fittest, and you only need to watch the Sunday Footy Show to know that Lou is not as fit as he used to be. But his weekly appearances serve as a reminder of the massive debt the game owes the octogenarian.Because if football truly can reap a $1 billion payday from its next broadcasting deal, then "Louis the Lip" deserves at least a passing pat on the back. For it was he who truly entwined television and football and turned the game into the showbiz spectacular it has become today.You can debate his humour and his originality and his expertise as a caller but you cannot deny that he pioneered the communication of Australian football through newspapers, radio and television, changing the way the game was discussed and reported forever.He did so without placing at risk our familiarity with the game. Football was born in the village of Melbourne and the game's traditional home remains quite simply a series of much bigger villages.Although Lou, with Peter Landy and Bob Skilton, pioneered the descriptions of the early incarnation of Sydney each Sunday on Channel Seven during the first half of the 1980s, it is difficult to imagine him having the impact upon Sydney that he had here.Theirs is the land of Singo and Gibbo and Lawsy, and although Lou was a publican and always referred to as a loveable larrikin, it is impossible to recall any alcohol-fuelled misdemeanours of significance and there remains an innocence totally devoid of guile to even his most risque jokes. In truth, Lou was always a family man, famous for his devotion to wife Edna, whose struggle with Alzheimer's has broken his heart and for his own football family who - the Richards and the Pannams, that is - have collectively played more games of football than any other.Richards turns 85 next month. In the year Australian football celebrates its 150th anniversary, it is worth noting that he has played a role in the game that made him famous for 67 consecutive years since he first played a senior game for Collingwood in the third year of World War II.But then he has been a part of our psyche for so long that perhaps we are laughing and applauding him as much for our memories of a simpler time as we are for the loveable egotistical showman he remains.A concession to his age at Nine is that the handball segment is now pre-recorded. Only once last season was the crew forced to re-shoot and that was the Mother's Day edition, in which Lou wished his long-gone mother a cheerio. He did it again during the second shooting anyway. And he still bumbles cheerfully through the prizes, nursed by Tony Jones and with respectful affection by Billy Brownless, who by all reports still feels dreadful about the day five seasons ago when he overdid a gag, knocking Lou off-set and accidentally causing broken ribs. Lou still finished that program.That incident happened during the same week as the Thursday Footy Show's Sam Newman-David Schwarz pie stunt, and Eddie McGuire reportedly read the riot act regarding Richards, reminding cast and crew of his status in the game.Many Footy Show fans would have no idea that he once captained a Collingwood premiership team, although of course he became much bigger for two decades than even the Magpies.He still has his moments. Cast and crew of the Sunday program have to help Lou from his dressing room - Brian Taylor helps do up his tie and Danny Frawley denies yet again that he ever played alongside Ian Stewart - but all agree that once the red light comes on, the old stager comes alive.He admitted as much over the summer to his favourite television colleague Jones, telling him that if he no longer had the Sunday Footy Show, the loss would kill him.Lou Richards no longer has the kiss of death, he no longer analyses football in that jokey way that belied his knowledge of the game. Perhaps Channel Seven got the best of him - who can forget the emotion-charged edition of World of Sport when Bob Rose wiped him for mocking the Collingwood theme song or the ridiculous, lazy but infectious humour of League Teams or his vernacular "By golly, what a he-man" when Leigh Matthews broke the behind post?But few would have predicted that his controversial cross to Nine when he was 64 would have lasted into this, his 22nd year?His fee may be nominal now and Lou probably would show up just for the free breakfast but there is a professionalism still in his demeanour that continues to work because it seems so effortless.
© 2008 The Sunday Age
