For Boston’s Bill Robert, it started with a single image on ESPN back in 1981: a player launching himself over the back of an opponent to take a spectacular overhead mark. He’d never seen anything like it in America, and that moment hooked him on Australian Rules football for life.
The obsession survived decades of scarce access, and when ESPN dropped the sport, Robert kept tabs on it as best as he could - first through word of mouth, then YouTube clips, and by 2005 through a Fox Sports world highlights package that became a Friday ritual. Robert’s wife Stacy, initially puzzled by what she was watching, was won over within 20 minutes by the players’ athleticism.
When that broadcast eventually disappeared, a 2009 Google search for Aussie Rules TV listings led Robert three pages deep to an unexpected discovery: the Boston Demons, a local club playing the sport in his own backyard, just over the New Hampshire border from his home in Salem. He reached out to the club’s president the following spring with an idea - pairing the niche sport with the public access television station where he worked. That partnership became Stateside Footy, a show Robert produced with Stacy at his side, which has since aired on more than 100 public access stations across the United States.
Carlton has long featured in Robert’s football memory bank. Talking through the great aerial marks that hooked him on the game over the years, he singled out two – Andrew Walker’s over Jake Carlisle at the MCG in July 2011; the other by Nic Naitanui over Carlton’s Zach Tuohy at the Docklands a month earlier. Those exchanges carried into a conversation about club history and identity, including the 1926 reproduction Carlton guernsey - a throwback design with an old-style collar that Robert admired, even suggesting the collar could have stood a little taller to match the crisp, upright look of the originals.
That reverence for tradition extended into the Bostonian’s cameo appearance at IKON Park on Monday, and as he said of his Australian football sojourn “I still can’t believe I’m here”.
Robert’s jam-packed football itinerary included the Carlton-Collingwood contest at the MCG, exclusive access to GMHBA Stadium, an amateur game at West Brunswick’s McAlister Oval, and the Essendon-Gold Coast match at Marvel. The Boston Demons arranged extras for Robert, befitting a pilgrimage two decades in the making: including an invitation to a captain’s run, a place in the guard of honor at the ’G, and a tour of AFL Max.
The trip came to be after Stacy – Robert’s wife of 22 years – recently passed away at the age of 56 – and friends from the football community around the world reached out to support Robert in his quest to head Down Under.
Asked to reflect on the past few days, Robert described a lingering numbness - the sense of a decades-old dream finally matching, and exceeding, his expectations, and a reminder of just how far a single television clip, glimpsed as a teenager, could carry a life.
As he said of his maiden visit: “This trip was all about one thing: Australian Rules football”.
