The Carlton Museum area of IKON Park offers Members and supporters the opportunity to further connect with their football club – or in the cases of Nicole Morgan and her son James to reflect with pride on the contributions of their forefathers.
The Morgans’ kindred links can be sourced to Nicole’s great grandfather and James’ great great grandfather Mick Grace, whose name they found on the two Premiership Cup plinths of 1906 and ’07.
By way of background, Michael John Grace was born in the inner-city Melbourne suburb of Burnley in 1874. At 19 he followed his older brother Jim to then VFA outfit Fitzroy and experienced immediate success both individually and collectively – taking out the club’s goalkicking honours in 1895 and being part of Premiership success in that same season.
Grace would also feature in the Maroons’ back-to-back Grand Final triumphs of the early VFL years of 1898 (in which he was declared Club Champion) and 1899 . When his team lowered its colours to Melbourne in the 1900 Grand Final, Grace hung up his boots - but retirement would only be temporary.
On the eve of the 1903 season, Grace, then 28, was coaxed into a comeback by the former Fitzroy Captain turned Carlton Secretary/Coach Jack Worrall. As an integral member of an emerging powerhouse at Princes Park, Grace featured in Carlton’s 1906 and 1907 Grand Final victories under Worrall’s watch, and in 1906 made history as the game’s first player to boot 50 goals in a season.
By the time the old dark Navy Blues completed the Premiership hat trick in 1908, Grace had already moved on – first to St Kilda as playing coach, and later in the same capacity with University - before ending his playing days in late 1910.
For an all too brief period, Grace furthered the game in New South Wales – a football pioneer of sorts. But by 1912, with the onset of tuberculosis, his health began to deteriorate.
The Football Record reported: "Mick Grace, who was a great player in the land when with Fitzroy, Carlton and St. Kilda, is very ill in the Broadmeadows Sanatorium. The secretary of the League (Mr. E. L. Wilson), and Messrs. A. A. Manzie and E. W. Copeland, have been deputed to inquire into the circumstances of his wife and family, with the view to assisting them if necessary. The New South Wales League has intimated that it will cooperate in any movement for the assistance of Grace, who was coaching players in Sydney last season.”
Grace died at just 37 in May 1912, leaving behind a wife and three sons.
Twenty years after Grace’s passing, his old mentor Jack Worrall felt compelled to acknowledge the player’s greatness in an article for The Australasian. Wrote Worrall: "Mick Grace was a real champion, and what enhanced his usefulness from an onlookers point of view was that his every movement was so graceful. He was a beautiful high mark, and a splendid spiral punt kick, a really dangerous man in the vicinity of the goal posts, and he used his head as well as his feet”.
Today, Grace’s legacy lives on through his descendants, who reverently turned out in Dark Navy for the sentimental journey back to the place where Mick once chased the leather.
“After all these years the connection runs deep. It’s in the blood,” Nicole said.
“I knew about Mick and what he did at Fitzroy and Carlton from a very young age, and I followed Carlton through Mum’s admiration for him. I used to come here to watch all the games, wearing my duffle coat with ‘Jezza’s’ (Alex Jesaulenko’s) number on the back. I remember bringing James down here to have a kick of the footy, and it’s our first time back in about three years.”
Nicole and James stood proudly by the Hall of Fame wall upon which Mick Grace is featured – and were photographed pointing to his name on the plinths supporting the 1906 and ’07 Premiership Cups hard won and dear by his and their football club.
