Kevin Murray is the heartbeat of the Brisbane-Fitzroy merger. No person could possibly have given more to a football union than the now 81-year-old Fitzroy games record-holder, AFL Team of the Century member and AFL Hall of Fame legend.
Every waking hour of every day, with his 1969 Brownlow Medal proudly around his neck, he is a walking, talking advocate of what he calls “my club” and “our club”, depending on the context of his conversation.
So, in a week in which the 2020 Brisbane Lions were scheduled to play Geelong at Kardinia Park prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, we will turn the club back 46 years to Round 11 1973 when Fitzroy played Geelong at the same venue.
It was a magnificent day. In the 77th year, of what was originally an eight-team Melbourne suburban competition that became the 18-team national competition, Murray was just the sixth 300-gamer.
As much as Brisbane-based Lions fans have taken the man known as ‘Bulldog’ to heart, he is a man known best by many northerners by reputation alone. The old bloke who is always there. Always smiling and always with time for anyone. A Fitzroy champion because everyone says he was.
But it is the detail in Murray’s career that underlines why he was so good, and why he was named on the half back line in the AFL Team of the Century in 1996, why he is an official AFL Legend, and why he was captain of the Fitzroy Team of the Century.
Murray, recognised each year via the presentation of the Merrett/Murray Medal to the Brisbane Best & Fairest, won the Fitzroy B&F nine times. South Melbourne triple Brownlow Medallist Bob Skilton also won nine B&Fs but nobody else in 12,761 AFL players has won more. Even Leigh Matthews won ‘only’ eight.
Murray polled 178 Brownlow Medal votes. Only 12 players have polled more, and when he retired in 1974 only Skilton was ahead of him. And only by two.
Indeed, the 300-game Murray milestone would have come two years earlier had he not taken a two-year break from the VFL to be captain-coach of East Perth in the WAFL in 1965-66.
He was 26, had played 10 seasons and 166 games with Fitzroy, won the B&F seven times, including five in a row from 1960-64, and finished top 10 in the Brownlow Medal five years in a row.
It was already a career that would exceed most for statistical achievement, but Murray decided he needed a break. A new challenge. A little freshen up in Perth.
Whatever it was, it worked. In 1965 he won the Simpson Medal for WA against the VFA and the East Perth Best & Fairest. In 1966 he captained WA at the 1966 Australian Carnival in Hobart and took East Perth to the WAFL grand final.
Little did he know that at the time he was not even halfway through his VFL career.
There were plenty of clubs keen on the tough, unrelenting defender but it was not something he would even entertain. So loyal was he that his nickname really should have been not “Bulldog” but “Lion”.
Returning to Fitzroy in 1967, still only 28, he was refreshed to such an extent that he would play another eight seasons and 167 games. One game more than he had played before his Perth ‘sabbatical’.
The lead-up to Murray’s 300th game in Round 11 1973 was massive. Fitzroy were 10th on the 12-team ladder at Round 10 with a 3-7 record, effectively out of finals contention, and it was all about the great man. Players were desperately keen to play in the milestone game.
Murray, two days short of his 35th birthday, was easily the oldest member of his 300th game side. Life-time good mate Norm Brown, playing his 173rd game, was next oldest at 29. John Murphy, in his 133rd game, was the only other 100-gamer.
It was a side which included seven players later to be chosen in the Fitzroy Team of the Century. Murray, Brown, Murphy, 23-year Harvey Merrigan, 21-year-olds Warwick Irwin and David McMahon and a 19-year-old Garry Wilson.
It was a scrappy affair which Geelong won 16-8 (104) to Fitzroy’s 11-15 (81). Murphy, on his way to a fourth B&F, led the Fitzroy possession count with 37 and kicked one goal.
Looking back, the loss was largely irrelevant. Not so much at the time, but definitely now. It was all about Murray.
Just as it was all about Murray when Mike Sheahan, hugely-renowned journalist of press, radio and TV fame, paid tribute to the Fitzroy champion in The Herald Sun on 4 June 2010 after he’d been elevated to Legend status at the AFL Hall of Fame dinner the night before.
Under the heading “Mighty, Mighty Kevin Murray, the proudest Roy”, Sheahan painted a wonderful picture of a man who just loved football.
He recounted the story about the moment Murray suspected it was time to give the away. When he found himself scrapping with a bloke chasing bragging rights for roughing up a Brownlow medallist.
"It was the last game of the year in Super Rules," Murray said at the time. "This bloke came to mind me at half-forward and said, 'I'll give you effing Brownlow, I'll knock your effing teeth out'.
"I said, 'Listen mate, I haven't got any, but let's get on with it'. As we were rolling around on the ground, I thought to myself, 'That's enough'. I'd had enough."
Murray was 52.
Yes, it was time. Having made his AFL debut at 16 he finished in open competition at 48 with Maribyrnong Park in B grade of the Essendon District league before moving to the 35-and-overs in Super Rules.
Surely his on-field contribution to football is unrivalled, wrote Sheahan. He played 407 games for Fitzroy, Victoria, East Perth and Western Australia in 20 seasons, and won countless honours.
Yet, as Murray told Sheahan, it was his selection as captain of Fitzroy's Team of the Century - ahead of Haydn Bunton - that sits as his proudest achievement.
"That stood out above everything," he said. "There was Bunton, (Alan) Ruthven, 'Butch' Gale, Garry Wilson, (John) Murphy, (Paul) Roos. It was the highest honour you could ever wish to have.
"I'm really proud of the Brownlow, too, but it's an individual thing."
He lives a spartan life in Arcadia, near Shepparton, in the original town hall built in 1926. It's been a dance hall, an election booth, a concert hall and a Catholic church.
It has been home to Murray since 1992, when there was neither electricity nor running water, and he bathed daily in the nearby Goulburn River.
Sheahan recounted how Murray's love affair with footy started from the cradle. His father Dan was the reserve in Fitzroy's last premiership side in 1944 and a 66-game player.
Though the Murray family lived in Collingwood territory, young Kevin got to the Lions under the then 50-game father-son rule, trained with their under-19 team at 13 and made his senior debut at 16.
"As a kid of 14 with the a--- out of your pants living in a tough neighbourhood, it gave me the opportunity to make something of my life," Murray said.
"There was no doubt about it, the way we were going (at 14), you could have finished in the clink. You knocked around with certain people, with some of them finishing up that way.
"It was a very tough upbringing, but it was a good upbringing. Dad used to get 30 bob ($3) a game, which helped pay the rent and feed the kids."
Perhaps the most amazing of Murray's many achievements was the spread of his nine best-and-fairests, the first at 18, the last at 31. His two All-Australian selections, too, were eight years apart in 1958 and 1966.
Oddly, like his 300th game, Murray’s debut had also been against Geelong in Round 4 1955 at Brunswick Street Oval under captain-coach Bill Stephen. He started on the bench in the days of a 19th and 20th man who could only be used as a replacement.
Oddly, too, his last game would also be against Geelong, this time at Junction Oval. Eleven members of his 300th game were still there. Austin, Irwin, McCulloch, Merrigan, Murphy, Padley, Serafini, Wall and Wilson, plus fellow last-games Booth and Richards.
From 1959-64, Murray played 110 games in a row. Then followed 44 with East Perth and 168 in a row back at Fitzroy. He carried a chronic back problem from his late teens and played most of one season with a broken shoulder yet played almost whenever his legs carried him on to the field.
Typically of Murray and the warriors of his era.
The extended Fitzroy and Brisbane family will never forget Kevin Joseph ‘Bulldog’ Murray MBE. Or his 300th game.
