Remember the Club (Hammerheads)?

[TheGreatBambino]

Hutchy has a good chat about the Hammerheads in his latest sounding board podcast with Damien Barrett

https://omny.fm/shows/the-sounding-board/s2-ep18-saga-coverage

 

[craffles]

I tweeted hutchy to ask him if there is any footage. See what he says

 

[Sum_5]

Thegreatbambino / fitzy. If you guys were successful in getting the fotage i would love to get it off you. My brother was in the show and unfortunately we dont have much footage. He would love to get his hands on the fotage. Cheers.

 

[Sum_5]

Thegreatbambino / fitzy. If you guys were successful in getting the fotage i would love to get it off you. My brother was in the show and unfortunately we dont have much footage. He would love to get his hands on the fotage. Cheers.

Will float some cash your way. If it helps

 

[Sum_5]

Hey Bambino, I'd love to see what footage you put on Youtube.

I have all the shows on tape....but I have a couple of extra's and outake tapes note seen in public. I might see if I can find them.

Sad that 7 didnt follow on with the show, but I guess thats big business for you....and to do the live shows was a big hit on their wallets.

regards

Thegreatbambino / fitzy. If you guys were successful in getting the fotage i would love to get it off you. My brother was in the show and unfortunately we dont have much footage. He would love to get his hands on the fotage. Cheers. Will float some cash your way if it helps.

 

[TheGreatBambino]

Thegreatbambino / fitzy. If you guys were successful in getting the fotage i would love to get it off you. My brother was in the show and unfortunately we dont have much footage. He would love to get his hands on the fotage. Cheers.

Hi mate, I never got that footage of him, he hasn't logged onto bigfooty since 2009 and have no way of contacting him. I only have what's on YouTube. It's just too hard to get footage

 

[Aurra]

Hi mate, I never got that footage of him, he hasn't logged onto bigfooty since 2009 and have no way of contacting him. I only have what's on YouTube. It's just too hard to get footage

Hey boys **** I would love to get some footage my uncle quonny was on the show and would like to be able to see it

 

[TheGreatBambino]

Dont spose anyone has any footage lying around ?

 

[craffles]

Hammerheads2002

The Club was an Australian reality television show about an Australian rules football sporting side, the Hammerheads, which was screened on the Seven Network...

www.youtube.com

Three new videos uploaded 4 months ago

 

[TheGreatBambino]

Hammerheads2002

The Club was an Australian reality television show about an Australian rules football sporting side, the Hammerheads, which was screened on the Seven Network...

www.youtube.com

Three new videos uploaded 4 months ago

Yea pretty much all I have is on YouTube now

 

[craffles]

Yea pretty much all I have is on YouTube now

Gentleman and a scholar

 

[TheGreatBambino]

Man it’s almost impossible to find footage of this damn show. Been trying for ten years now.

 

[Kezza86]

Congrats to Debbie on her Hof honour. Who would have thought she nearly became the first female to play in men’s senior competition.

 

[TheGreatBambino]

Hard to believe it’s been 20 years

 

[aussiefox84]

hi everyone

Ive managed to get my hands on some hammerheads merch if anyone is interested.

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Vintage RARE Hammerheads Football Scarf AFL (2002 Ch.7 The Club TV Series) NEW | eBay

LOOK WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN is a single person operation based in Geelong, Victoria.

www.ebay.com.au

 

[craffles]

hi everyone

Ive managed to get my hands on some hammerheads merch if anyone is interested.

Log into Facebook

Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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Vintage RARE Hammerheads Football Scarf AFL (2002 Ch.7 The Club TV Series) NEW | eBay

LOOK WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN is a single person operation based in Geelong, Victoria.

www.ebay.com.au

I have a stiffy

 

[Brown Bottle]

I have a stiffy

You've always been easily aroused

 

[craffles]

You've always been easily aroused

This is very true

 

[RG16]

Hammerheads2002

The Club was an Australian reality television show about an Australian rules football sporting side, the Hammerheads, which was screened on the Seven Network...

www.youtube.com

Three new videos uploaded 4 months ago

Wow this brought back some memories. I was only 8 when this aired by remember watching it.

Pretty sure they filmed in that EJ Whitten Bar room on the 2nd floor of Marvel Stadium. Not sure if it's still there or called that

 

[Gibbsy]

There's a heap of interesting info on the concept in the Western Region Football League history publication circa 2007. Read on below for more!

---

The year 2002 was a year to buckle in and get set for the ride of your life; it was the year the WRFL went showbiz with the introduction of the Hammerheads. The League also designated it as the Year of the Woman to pay due acknowledgement to the women who had, and continue to, contribute in various roles to the League.

...

Undoubtedly, though, the focus of 2002 was firmly on the reality television show The Club on Channel Seven, which followed the fortunes of the Kensington Hill Football Club or, as it became universally known, The Hammerheads. Mark Penaluna was the general manager of the league at the time:

The Hammerheads was a concept that was initially born through a conversation between Craig Hutchison, Tim Watson and myself, back in a little cafe around the corner from the Channel Seven studios in July of 2001. I was told that it was meant to be very secret. At the time the president was Rex Swann, and Rex’s son was CEO of the Collingwood Football Club so he was obviously very close with Eddie McGuire (Collingwood President and Channel 9 personality). I had to keep it very secret, which I did. I had to sit on that for five or six months without telling our president. I think Rex understood. In between time we’d had to put together some ideas on colours, location, talk to the local council, talk through things to make sure we had everything in place for the club to begin. So from there they decided on the name... the coaches, the players and all those sorts of things through the TV show The Club.

Ian Hamm was about to become President, in the highest profile year of the competition:

At the beginning, at the very first meeting we had with them, it was a good concept, it was a good idea, and that was when Rex was still President. There’s a difference in the people you see on television and the people who run television. I think Channel Seven had a few preconceived ideas about the western suburbs of Melbourne and about our Football League. I think they tried another couple of leagues who said no. I think they also thought that perhaps we would have the most unsophisticated approach to football, particularly on the field. There were a number of things that led them to our doorstep. The negotiations around setting the deal up were particularly hard… that was just commercial business from their perspective and, I have to admit, from ours too. One of the first things I wanted to make sure of, as President, was that we ran this as a business. We took a commercial approach to it.

Ian Hamm and Mark Penaluna started the negotiations but soon decided on a different tactic, as Ian remembers:

We were there to work amicably with each other, but we weren’t there as a vehicle for Channel Seven and we also weren’t there to let opportunities slip. Which is why I guess we did something, which Channel Seven didn’t particularly like, but it was in our own interests to do it. You have to bear in mind that this was the year after they lost the AFL rights. So they’re not particularly keen on the AFL or, more specifically, its chief negotiator around the media, Jeff Browne. Mark (Penaluna) rings up and says, “I’ve just had a phone call”, and I ask who from, and he says Jeff Browne. He’s been talking to Football Victoria, Ken Gannon who’s aware of Channel Seven, and he suggested that Jeff give us a ring…he might want to help us out negotiating with Channel Seven. So we engaged him at mates rates, which was still 400 bucks an hour, but I have to say worth every penny we paid for it. Jeff did an extraordinarily good job negotiating on our behalf, because really we didn’t know the commercial possibilities. We also knew the reality that television is a business, and a fairly blunt instrument type of business.

Look, to be honest, Mark and I were out of our depth doing that, so we engaged Browne & Co to do that on our behalf, and they negotiated a good agreement. Which, at the end of the day, I think actually made the program better than what Channel Seven were originally lining up. We put some limitations around what they had to focus on in the League; it made it better than what it would have been. It was a good idea but I think it suffered a little bit from being driven from Sydney. I believe the Melbourne people had more of a focus on the football than the Sydney people did, who were more concerned about the drama and the very… how can I put it… a Sydney type culture which is around, not as sophisticated as Melbourne.

One of the major controversies surrounding the show was the inclusion of Debbie Lee in The Hammerheads squad. Debbie was a star in the Women’s League, but playing against men was a different proposition and one that was not in the rules of the competition. Debbie has fond memories of The Hammerheads:

It was an interesting time, a very exciting time. Obviously with being on television… I’ve never been involved with anything like that, so that was quite exciting. It was also tough because I’ve never been in an environment like that, and the whole atmosphere and the momentum of the Hammerheads with regard to we never knew what was going to happen next. There were a lot of good people I met from within the Hammerheads.

I guess I have to be honest, I had my own agenda and that was to actually get women’s football out there. I never thought and I never had the intention of playing against the guys or being in the competition. My theory was to stay in the show as long as I could to promote and lift the awareness of women’s football. I think, probably a couple of years afterwards, the show had had some good long-term effects on women’s football and so that was my whole intention of getting involved in the show.

Eventually Football Victoria ruled that Debbie could not play in accordance with the rules of the game but the league did push the case to the limit, according to Mark Penaluna:

Greg Miller (Hammerheads General Manager) raised a good point at the time, he said, “Obviously Debbie Lee hasn’t got the physical aspects to play, but neither do a lot of people and we let them run out. It might be a guy who’s seven stone dripping wet type playing, it might be a guy who’s twenty five stone playing. Do we test him out, he might have a heart attack out on the ground.” So it is a bit of a hard one.

Ian Hamm was totally involved in the controversy:

The difficult bit at the beginning was around Debbie Lee. Not because of Debbie herself, but because Channel Seven saw this as a way of promoting and playing it up. Which it quite rightly was; they needed to get some sort of exposure for it before the season started, so they played up the Debbie Lee angle. I have to admit that Debbie is one of the most skilled footballers I have ever seen, she’s fantastic. But there was no way a woman was going to play senior football. Channel Seven played that for what it was worth to get some exposure and it did; it was on page three of the Herald Sun, it had Caroline Wilson writing an article on it. When she writes an article all about you in The Age you know you’ve hit the big time. So I was a bit pleased about that. Yes, it did provide me a bit of grief personally, because I was seen as, and am still known in some quarters as, the man who won’t let women play football.

Though Debbie never got to play in the competition, she did have a run in one of the practice games against Braybrook:

That was really the only time that I was actually able to play against the guys. I must say Braybrook Football Club was great. I knew a few of the players on the ground, and one of my friends I actually played against. They were really good in regards to not actually trying to take me out, but I must say I was a little bit worried at the start as to how I would go and how the guys would actually treat me on the ground. But I would have to say that it was an experience that not many women would ever have.

The Hammerheads certainly did one thing for the Division Two competition, and that was to bring media exposure, crowds and money. In fact, it probably saved a few clubs, according to Mark Penaluna:

I haven’t had anyone say that overall it was bad for the league. The clubs that played the Hammerheads at home benefited. Deer Park on the first day took $20,000; the sponsors would have been rapt, the players were rapt because they’re on TV. So everyone had a real good feel good out of the day. Brooklyn made money—they actually played them twice, once in Bendigo, and then they got Greg Miller to put the game on at Flemington rather than playing at Brooklyn because they wouldn’t be able to cater for it. They made another $10,000 themselves, and that really kept the club afloat for another three or four years (Brooklyn left the WRFL at the end of 2002).

The League reaped the benefit of being seen on TV, and in the financial aspect as well. Also, getting sponsors on board like Dunlop who gave $30,000 dollars in that year. We made probably the biggest profit the League has ever made in that year.

At first, many of the WRFL clubs were skeptical but that soon changed, according to Ian Hamm:

A lot of the clubs saw it as a threat, or didn’t see what they were going to get out of it. They saw it perhaps as a bit of a threat, to their stability or their existence, which is why one of the prime things we did was that the Hammerheads couldn’t take players from the WRFL clubs.

Once it got going and the momentum was with it, the clubs loved it. They thought it was great. I know Deer Park was one club that had some financial difficulties… they made $15,000 profit the day they hosted the Hammerheads. Macca (Deer Park Administrator John McLeod) was saying to me that they made more money in one day than they had made for the previous two years. He was just over the moon, he said it’s really helped us. To see somebody like Macca, who puts his heart and soul into the club, to do something that can support him and keep that club going and take the pressure off him for a while, that makes it all worthwhile.

Amazingly, a team that started the season in a 51-point loss provided the fairytale ending to a remarkable season; it won the flag in front of a crowd in excess of 10,000 at Whitten Oval.

The result was a surprise to many and expected by others; Debbie Lee was in the latter category:

It wasn’t a surprise. The show took a different spin. Originally the idea was to get grassroots players to the game in the area, and then it snowballed and we had players that were quite talented came from every single club in Victoria. Obviously, having a great more to pick from, the standard took off. The end result was us winning a flag, and in the last three or four weeks we had 42 top players playing the game, whereas when we started… we had the Quonnies and the like. They were there to have some fun and then it turned into serious football… all in all, I think it was a benefit to the West.

Mark Penaluna wasn’t sure that Channel Seven even wanted The Hammerheads to win in the end:

They always said they wanted to go close but not win it, and not have the focus on the Hammerheads, but more on another club. But Australians are very competitive, certainly the coach was in David Rhys-Jones, he wanted to win. It was a terrific day at Whitten Oval, it rained early but we still got a really good crowd.

It was an eventful first year as President for Ian Hamm, and the end of The Hammerheads didn’t finish as he had hoped:

They could have been even bigger. We tossed around a couple of ideas, and one of them was to hold a Grand Final Day at the Telstra Dome (then Colonial Stadium). Bearing in mind, this was at the time when Telstra Dome was unloved, nobody liked Telstra Dome. Ian Collins was trying to rent it out, you know, for anybody. So Mark spoke to him about the cost of playing all our Grand Finals, all the senior ones, so it would be the (Under) 18s, the seniors in reserve Division Two and the seniors in reserve Division One, Grand Final Day at Telstra Dome. And we got a quote of around 10-to-15,000 bucks. And we would do the catering. We reasoned that if they’re pulling big figures for home and away games, they get to (do) the Grand Final.

Telstra Dome is easily accessible by public transport and everyone knows where it is; you’d only need to fill that bottom deck there, or not even that, to actually break even. We could have done that. We actually were talking to Channel Seven and it meant putting the Grand Final off for a week. They said, “No, we’re moving to summer programming, we’re not delaying it for a week”. What had happened was they’d done their programming around the Hammerheads not making the finals… but when they got all the way to the Grand Final it screwed up their programming, but because of the contract we had with them they had to follow it all the way through. So they were a bit narky about that.

In the end, holding the final at the Western Oval was fantastic. It was the biggest crowd that we’ve had for a Grand Final, certainly the biggest crowd at that ground since the last VFL match was there. It was just really good and I have to admit that I did stand in the window, because we held the luncheon upstairs, and at about three quarter time, because North Footscray weren’t out of it. I noticed all these people around talking and there was this huge crowd hanging around downstairs, I did have a smile on my face thinking that some days it is good to be the President.

For Greg Miller, who had come from AFL level at North Melbourne, it was a culture shock and a rollercoaster ride at times:

We had a thousand at the first training session; it was madness and we shared the change rooms with an El Salvador soccer team… I don’t know what they did in those rooms but it was pretty bad. The players weren’t very impressed when they rolled up to find out they had to help clean the rooms. Then I told them they had to pay fees they weren’t impressed, they thought they were rock stars. We moulded a team and the team aspect took over; you saw the change in human nature. It was a very interesting season.

 

[Gibbsy]