You always remember your first time. Mine? I was eight-years-old and surrounded by 56,716 spectators. And it ended in tears.
I can still point to the exact spot. But not for much longer: the place of my first time at a footy grand final will soon be torn down.
Then, it was known as Football Park. Now, in commercial tones of the times, it’s rebadged as AAMI Stadium.
The ground built on reclaimed swampland in Adelaide’s west hosts its last AFL game this Saturday – and many South Australians are getting a touch sentimental.
From next year, AFL games will shift to Adelaide Oval – but not the Adelaide Oval you know as the prettiest cricket ground in the world.
The new Adelaide Oval will be barely recognisable. A $530 million redevelopment will turn the grand old lady into a modern-day wench. But that is another story.
This one is about Footy Park, a place where dreams were made and dashed – as I learnt, aged eight, when my team lost the 1977 SANFL grand final.
Football Park was opened three years earlier and came about because of a bitter schism between footy and cricket in South Australia.
Football had been played at Adelaide Oval but cricket kept control of the ground, and kept much of the money that footy generated – to the increasing frustration of football hierarchy.
So football split – from the oval, and from cricket. To mix metaphors, footy took its bat and ball and went to West Lakes, a suburb created by property developers, who built a man-made lake surrounded by reclaimed land.
The split didn’t go down well with cricket powerbrokers, notably Sir Donald Bradman, who was moved to write to an Adelaide newspaper protesting “the grandiose and unnecessary Football Park”.
Football and cricket officials then engaged in a cold war, refusing to speak to the other for nigh on 40 years.
The stand-off lasted until about five years ago, when AFL chief Andrew Demetriou got involved.
Demetriou acted as a peacemaker, ostensibly for the good of SA sport.
But, just perhaps, he could foresee getting a brand-spanking city stadium to host AFL games – for next to nothing. (The AFL has yet to publicly say exactly how much money it will kick in, but it’s likely to be several million dollars, not tens of millions).
Demetriou and the AFL’s considerable influence brought cricket and football together to the same table. And the cold war thawed.
“It’s a day that many people didn’t believe, or wouldn’t believe, would happen,” Demetriou said when the Adelaide Oval redevelopment was announced in 2009.
Since then, Football Park has been in gradual decline.
Sure, the facilities are out-dated. And yes, there is no rail link which makes car parking a day-or-nightmare. And when winter winds blow, it’s so cold politicians are forced to put their hands in their own pockets.
But when the AFL close the gates on Saturday after Port Adelaide play Carlton, they’ll shut a chapter in the lives of people like myself and Port’s AFL games record-holder Kane Cornes.
“As a kid growing up in South Australia, it has been such a big part of my life,” Cornes says.
“It’s going to be a little bit sad. I love the stadium.”
Next year, another love affair awaits. But you always remember your first time.