Former Carlton half-back flanker Bob Crowe, whose 11-season senior career began and ended against the then VFL club Fitzroy, has died after a long illness at the age of 90.
Crowe joined Carlton in 1954, the year after training with Melbourne under Norm Smith’s watch. Why the move? Put it down to the persistence of the then Carlton captain Ken Hands and a teammate Ron Robertson, who repeatedly and vociferously mounted the Carlton case.
Round 17, 1954 - the match with Fitzroy at Princes Park – coincided with Crowe’s first senior appearance. Curiously, Crowe’s 129th and final game would also involve the Lions – and as Crowe recalled in an interview back in 2018, “I also did my knee against Fitzroy, running down the race at Brunswick Street”.
“The race was like an old suburban dirt road – potholes and everything,” Crowe said of the place where he came to grief before the opening bounce in the 10th round of ’59.
“I played for a quarter with pain killers, but the knee was a bloody mess and in those days a cartilage injury meant a major operation. I remember I was a week in hospital, a week at home and a week at work. I resumed training with the stitches still in and I reckon I played in about seven weeks.”
Crowe was a member of the Ken Hands-coached Carlton team which contested the 1962 Grand Final. A fellow teammate, the Carlton Premiership player, former CEO and President Ian Collins, remembered Crowe as a tall, lean and agile defender – “a good player and a good bloke to go with it”.
“He was one of the seven Cs at the club in 1961 – there was him, Carroll, Comben, Collis, Cox, Cross and myself, and we all played in the one Carlton team together.
“He had great mobility and he also had that capacity to come back within weeks from injury. He got over a cartilage injury in four to six weeks in the days when cartilage damage ended careers.”
Crowe finished up at Carlton in late ’64 at around the time of Ron Barassi’s landmark appointment as senior coach . . . “but that was of my own choosing”.
As he said: “I was living at Dandenong and I ended up playing a year there, but I never played again”.
Crowe last laced a boot for Carlton in 1964. Fifty-four years later, the spritely old defender returned to the old Princes Park ground for the first time, resplendent in his dark navy blue blazer.
That blazer, a Solway standard for players back then, fitted Crowe like the proverbial glove. As he quickly reminded – “I played at 11-stone-four and I now weigh in at 11-five”.
Originally recruited to the Club from Mentone on the sayso of the then Mentone coach and dual Carlton premiership player Jim Baird, Crow’s tenure with Carlton was long – and there were happy times both on and off the field for him.
“Looking around the ground now, I remember where the Robert Heatley Stand once stood. They used to put a dance on underneath and there’d be a barrel on,” Crowe recalled.
“They were good days.”
Crowe found opportunities scarce up front, until a heart to heart with the then Chairman of Selectors turned his on-field fortunes around.
“I remember playing forward and the ball wasn’t coming down much,” Crowe said.
“I eventually said to Jack Wrout ‘Give me a game on the backline’, ‘Handsy’ put me back there and it actually worked out quite well, because it usually follows that if a player has played forward he’s got a fair idea what the backman’s doing.”
Crowe’s 2018 Carlton homecoming was also savoured by his wife Judith, son Simon, his three grandchildren Sarah, Grace and Xavier and his daughter-in-law Jane - who captured wonderful images for posterity on a day in which the Club’s past players were invited to a post-training meet and greet.
Together with the clan, Crowe posed by the No.14 locker into which his name is forever etched. Later, he renewed acquaintance with one of his old Carlton contemporaries Sergio Silvagni. Together they fought the good fight in the losing Grand Final of ’62 (“one game too many” given the drawn preliminary final with Geelong) - the same year Crowe joined John Nicholls in representing the Big V.
For Crowe, ‘Big Nick’ was Carlton’s best, although he often wonders what might have been had a barrel-chested bloke from the Riverina hung around.
“We had a bloke here named Des Lyons, a centre half-forward from Barellan,” said Crowe.
“Now he only played a couple of games and he got homesick, but in my opinion he would have been the best of the best.”
Crowe and his loved ones filed out of the old ground, having completed their sentimental journey. For Crowe, timing was everything, for he wanted to lend the Club his undying support at a time when it was down – and as he said then, “It’ll turn around . . . it always does”.
Robert Bromley Crowe was the 683rd player to represent the Carlton Football Club at senior level since the formation of the VFL in 1897.
Carlton’s AFL players will wear black armbands into Saturday night’s wildcard final with Melbourne; as will its AFLW players into Sunday afternoon’s match with Fremantle (Walyalup) at Perth’s Cockburn ARC Oval in tribute.
