The only black-and-whites worth backing this time of year

See, this is just awesome. I've probably already gone on about how much I love retro colourschemes and heritage jerseys and all that backwards-facing nonsense in sport. The domestic footy codes have captured the nostalgic longings of their fanbase very effectively with their Heritage Rounds - particularly the NRL, even though when you're a South Sydney supporter every bloody round is Heritage Round, the 1980s 'Minties' jersey they busted out this year was good times. Throwback jersey round doesn't work as well in the AFL, for the credit-worthy reason that most of the old-school clubs are still playing in recognisably old-school strips. Likewise, when the Kiwi and Aussie cricketers busted out the beige-'n'-brown and canary yellow respectively for the first evaaarrrr Twenty20 international five or so years ago, and topped off the whole package with an ensemble of afros and mos unprecedented since Lillee, Marsh and Chappell retired in 1984, there was no shortage of win. Particularly from the Aussies. Margin was a hundred runs or something. Back when we actually had a cricket team, of course.

However, much as we'd like to, my true chosen sport of motorsport can't do the retro thing like the ball sports can. Because colours are dictated by sponsors, and sponsors change. Apart from the odd perfect storm like NASCAR's Dale Earnhardt Jr turning out in a throwback Mountain Dew colour scheme akin to that which his late old man ran years before, only possible because of the shared sponsors, it just doesn't happen. Likewise, some of the sponsors who contributed to those iconic colours - the iridescent day-glo red of the Marlboro HDT Commodores, the glossy black JPS Lotus F1 cars - aren't allowed to sponsor shit any more.

Which makes this just awesome.


This is defending Bathurst champions, today's Holden Racing Team, paying tribute to their origins 20 years ago - and their underdog win in the 1990 Tooheys 1000 at Bathurst - with a very cool retro colour scheme for next weekend's Bathurst 1000 classic. Short of the factory Fords trying to one-up them by turning up in XC Falcon Cobra stripes again, this is just a big bag of Win. Win Percy, in fact, the British touring car legend who teamed up with nuggety old folk hero Allan Grice to somehow snag the big cheese on offer back in the day. To explainify the story we need to go back, back in time.

1990. Time for the Guru. And not a particularly flash time for Australian motorsport. The premier touring car class was run to international Group A laws, which in theory meant cars related to stuff you could buy off the showroom floor, and in practice meant a palpable demonstration of how global car company resources could comfortably outstrip whatever local manufacturers like Holden could shambles together from fibreglass and big fuck-off intake manifolds. For the last couple of years everything winnable had been won by Ford of Europe's custom-built Sierra RS500, developed by Formula One gurus Cosworth with a turbocharger so large it had its own gravitational pull - which in a lightweight two-door hatchback with a boy-racer double-deck rear wing was probably just about enough to get the job done. Particularly given the prophensity of front-running Fordsters like Dick Johnson to simply dial up more turbo boost whenever the oppo got within a postcode of aforementioned whale-tail arse end. Both the championship and Bathurst, in both 1988 and 1989, had been won in Sierras - which, as a childhood Holden fan, I'd been probably lucky to miss. Bathurst fell during school holidays, which meant one typically found oneself several Bathurst 1000s from home in a bloody pop-top caravan just as the green flag dropped. Mired at the time in a caravan park somewhere in outback WA, I saw as much of the '89 Tooheys 1000 as I did of the legendary extra-time NSWRL grand final between Canberra and Balmain the week before: two fifths of three sixteenths of an eighth of fuck all. Which was probably just as well.

And it wasn't going to get any better. Nissan, who'd run turbo Bluebirds and Skylines in Group A with moderate success, decided to just go a bit stupid. Japanese HQ built a twin-turbo, four-wheel-drive, four-wheel-steer GT-R version of the R32 two-door Skyline which today is a hero car, because yesterday it was a destroyer. It was built to destroy Group A touring racing, and a few years hence, that's pretty much what it did. Wheels magazine nicknamed it Godzilla. It stuck. It had more power, more grip and less weight than anything. It debuted midway through the 1990 Australian Touring Car Championship and wasn't seen for dust. It was going to win Bathurst in 1990. The End. At which point the Sierra teams gritted their teeth and turned the boost on the Sierras up to 11. And the Holden teams... well...

The Holden teams, not to put too fine a point on it, were fucked. Things had been pretty grim in Lion Land for a solid few years, since Holden hero of decades standing Peter Brock had gone mad, started insisting on bolting boxes of crystals and wank to his HDT Commodores (the road cars which were required to form the basis of the Group A racecars) because it aligned their auras or some batshit new-age loony shite, cracked the shits when Holden said 'We can't actually sign off on the warranties on these cars any more you know' and defected, first to BMW, then to... Ford. Seriously, as misguidedly homophobic as one was as a clueless rural kid, I think I'd have been more comfortable if my dad had come out than when Brock started driving a Ford. It was The End Of The World. Add to that the new factory squad which Brit touring car guru Tom Walkinshaw had rapidly proven to be up to fuck all, given they were running an overweight, underpowered lump based on a Commodore several years out of production, and it was a good time not to be watching Bathurst.

Yet the old 'Walkinshaw' VL Group A Commodore - the 'Batmobile' as it was nicknamed, after the ludicrous wind-tunnel-developed aero package the nascent Holden Special Vehicles had developed for it - did have one small advantage over the field at Bathurst 1990. It went around corners like no fucker out there. That stupendous rear wing and the equally comical front splitter that made the thing look like it was SHOUTING AT EVERY BASTARD, somewhat appropriate given the bellow from its five-litre injected V8, worked around Mount Panorama. Particularly over the top, through the fast sweepers and down through the esses.


Still, noone gave them the remotest shot versus the endlessly-boostable Sierras and the fearsome might of Godzilla. Ancient crusty Allan Grice - the arch-privateer of all time, slightly bemused to have found himself as lead driver for the factory Holden team after spending 20 years pursuing and sledging Brock in the same position - snuck the big old bastard into the back of the Top Ten Shootout, but it was the turbo monsters who dominated qualifying. It wasn't close. And it wasn't going to be close tomorrow.

Except...

Except that wasn't how it worked out. The turbo Sierras fucked off and hid at the start, as per programme. But one by one, they started falling over. Dialling up several hundred horsepower from the hairdryers and sending it through the Sierras' narrow rears suddenly wasn't working as well as it'd done last year, and the year before. What it was doing was breaking driveshafts and blistering tyres. And while Godzilla was fast, it was a long way from sorted. It was getting harried and hassled and monstered over the back of the circuit, over the twisty stuff that sorted men from boys and well-sorted race cars from ones which could use another week or six on the test track. It was getting monstered by... the number 16 Holden Racing Team Commodore of Grice/Percy. Which more than once somehow managed to dive past into the Dipper, the plunging left just over the crest of the hill on the top of the mountain. It was by no means an overtaking place then and it's never been one since, but somehow HRT had managed to make the heavyweight Commodore almost nimble and light on its feet, like Ali in his great years. You couldn't believe that big lumping thing could do that on a racetrack. Yet it did. Just then. In front of you.

And it won the race. Godzilla devoured its own brakes, the Sierras never got over their latent desire for self-harm, and the final racing evolution of the 1986 model VL Commodore finished first, third and fifth in the 1990 Bathurst 1000. As an underdog, comeback sporting tale, it rates with any story you can come up with. It was a victory, to borrow a line from another underdog hero of the age, for the true believers. A victory which formed the basis for HRT's legacy in the past 20 years of six Bathurst wins and six ATCC/V8 Supercar championships in the 20 years that followed. In the immediate aftermath, two things happened: one, CAMS, the governing body of Australian motorsport, reacted to the public disinterest in Group A - and in watching cars race which they couldn't actually buy in shops unless they were in England or Japan - by announcing the 1993 debut of the V8 Supercar formula to replace it. And two, Brocky came back to Holden, where he stayed until he died.

For nostalgic race fans, or just peeps who want to see how it was done back in the day, I can't commend the below-embedded bit of YouTubery enough - Gricey talking Channel Seven's live TV audience around his last couple of laps of Bathurst in 1990, while still turning alarmingly quick 2m18 laps, running low on fuel, dodging oil slicks and being chased by Paul Radisich in Dick Johnson's second-string Sierra only some 15 seconds back - reminds us that not everything that's come with the twenty-year V8 Supercar revolution in Australian motorsport has been positive. Nowadays it's all professional and dour, networks wouldn't dream of bothering race drivers for in-car comment unless it was a yellow flag period (making it unlikely to hear the race leader ask chirplily of the broadcast host 'And how has YOUR afternoon been, Michael?") and the cars are unutterably clonal, deliberately so as to narrow competitive margins and create a closer contest. But the one great strength of Group A, that of competition between cars with different strengths - the corner-monstering downforce of the VL Group A, the rocketship fragility of the Sierras, the nimbleness of the BMW M3s - is lost and gone. Granted, it was killed stone dead and buried in a shallow grave by Godzilla, which was faster than the Sierras, more nimble than the M3s and (eventually) better handling than the Commodores, but that great standby of Australian motorsport, the battle between competing philosophies which went back to the days of lightweight XU1 Toranas battling Hemi Chargers and thundering 351ci GTHO Falcons on the mountain - and well before that even - is something that today's Bathurst certainly lacks. And more the pity.



Crank it up. Makes a lovely noise.
And remember kids, only 11 more sleeps till Bathurst.

The Doctor is OUT.

More anon

Right, GrogsGamut. Anonymous blogger and twunterer, said a bunch of pretty-much-on-the-money stuff about the recent election, including that News Ltd and the associated meeja scrum were up to fuck all and just there for the beer. In completely unrelated news he was outed as a public servant (including name, rank and serial number) by some B-grade hack from the Australian because unmasking his identity was apparently 'in the public interest'. This is patent bollocks, as the entire inter-google has concurred, apart from the odd other MSM journo who also finds Twunter and Bloggage equally terrifying ref. their own relevance and job prospects as Massola the blabby little git from Unky Rupert's Deathstar. It's such patent bollocks in fact that one finds oneself in disconcerting agreeance with the much and rightly maligned Catherine Deveny. I don't like Deveny. Hated her cretinous Anzac Day smearing of your grandad and mine as racist fucks who only enlisted in order to shoot Japs and Krauts. Even wrote her a pantomime villain cameo in ITWPT, hatin' on the stylez of our dishevelled drunken heroes. But this, her call on the GrogsGamut story, I can't really find fault with.

So yeah, take it as read that James Massola is a petty little gobsite and can fuck right off, and the Rupert-era MSM are a bunch of evil self-serving dog-whistling pricks with a very mistaken view of their own importance ref. gatekeeperdom of news and information in the 21st Century. Moving on. Why did arts bureaucrat Greg 'GrogsGamut' Jericho ever think he was going to get to stay anonymous, given that no bastard who ever plays the Anonymous Public Figure card ever gets to stay that way? There's the obvious, fatuous examples, like the Stig. And the Stig before him. And even crap Aussie Stig from the crap Aussie version. But seriously, you think back and come up with any significant 'anonymous' figure - from political writers to TV show test drivers - who hasn't been outed. Watergate's Deep Throat is probably the one who lasted the longest. It's a particular affliction of writers, particularly girl writers who like to write about a bit of the old rumpy - from the writer of infamous infidelity bible The Bride Stripped Bare to the postdoc researcher whose part-time PhD student job formed the basis of book and TV series Secret Life Of A Call Girl (and no, she wasn't as hot as Billie Piper.) Noone gets to stays anonymous. Market forces, and/or the egos of disgruntled stepped-upon tossers looking to square ledgers or cash in on someone else's notoriety, means there's significant net impetus behind unmasking your Stigs and your Brooke Magnantis. The dream of Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent style double-life untouchable anonymity - the ability to do as you please in your secret life and still carry on as per in your day job - is as much a cornerstone of the cliched superhero fantasy as the actual superpowers. Except the superpowers are probably more feasible in real life.

And yet most people on teh interwebz, in particular the Twuntoblogowankosphere, are still flying stealth missions, to a greater or lesser extent. For most, this is about trying to create distance between real and online lives, given the opinions expressed are not necessarily those of one's friends, families or employers. For some, it's probably an ego thing, all about craving the notoriety that comes with being the man in the faux-anonymous black hat. For me... I've learned that nothing you say on here, just like nothing you say in real life, comes without the risk of it bouncing back in your face in the form of a footlong shitlong sub sandwich to chow down on. Say nothing you wouldn't stand beside in person with a grin on your face and your work uniform on. For me, it's just easier to write from distance, from behind a character. The jokes are funnier. And the points you're making often get listened to more, as Stephen Colbert found in Washington recently. And writing personal stuff on here always felt self-indulgent - basically, Dr Yobbo was never meant to be the story of Dr Yobbo's World of Bollocks.

And certainly Dr Yobbo's bollocks were never meant to be the story of Dr Yobbo's World of Bollocks. Might have to make a minor exception though. As some of you will be aware I've been diagnosed with a case of the Lance Armstrongs and will shortly have to go in for some strategic lightening. Sort of like a Dr Yobbo Superleggera. On the plus side I'm a shoe-in for the Tour de France in a couple of years, if not running some form of dodgy Fourth Reich with a bunch of equally gonadally challenged cronies. Your Correspondent drops this casually into conversation not to be a sympathy whore, or to excuse some fucking terrible jokes (and there will be more, I pledge), but with one clear underlying point: lads, check your boys. NOW. Well, OK, wait until you get home, the number 412 bus to Toowong might not be the most appropriate location for self-examination... but soon. Cancer of the bollocks is a young man's disease. And it is stupidly survivable, something like 98% if you don't fuck about and make sure you get it sorted early, so there's no excuses. It really is trivial to sort, compared to serious fuck-off-scary Capital-Fucking-C Cancer that needs chemo and radiation and invasive surgery to deal with. So much so it's almost embarrassing to self-identify as a 'cancer sufferer' when superhuman types like Big Bad Al, Mayhem and my old mate Matt had to take the bastard on and kick it in the teeth (and in some cases are still required to put the boot in at press time.) Me, I'm stupidly healthy, I'm covered by health insurance I didn't have until I took my current job six months ago, excellent people have my back from family to friends to workmates, and I stand less chance of dying from this than by being crushed and electrocuted crash-tackling the TV trying to make Phil Phucking Gould shut the fuck up about the fucking Rooters on Nine's Grand Final coverage.

Much as I like 'em, I've still got the Dragons pencilled in for self-inflicted tracheal constriction, for the record. But just watch the Baby Bunnies go in the under 20s. Sidestepping everything except the irony of a minor premiership winning Souths team, precisely none of whom were born the last time the first-grade team did likewise.

The Doctor is OUT. (But is happy to hang around with his pseudo-dodgy-medical-hat on and field questions about ball cancer if anyone has. And remember, as the Fun Lovin' Criminals might have put it: Check 'em. Check 'em. Check 'em if you got 'em. If you ain't got 'em... then it's possibly a statement of limited relevance other than with respect to the males of significance in your life, in which case... check 'em.)

Saints preserve

My team Souths missed the NRL finals this year. That's OK. Rabbitohs fans are generally pretty zen about that sort of stuff. Been through everything from winning more titles in history to Manly strip-mining all our players, and Rupert boning us from the comp. Not to mention Russell Crowe owning the team. We're still just happy to have a side. One which doesn't embarrass itself in public like the Bulldogs or the Sharks. The last Souths player to end up on the wrong end of a media scrum, about 150 years ago in NRL time, was the Poo In The Shoe Man, Julian O'Neill - who, after all, was born and bred a Brisbane Bronco, whose form in toilet-related embarrassments is well established.

Souths fans know that too much success makes you obnoxious and cretinous. The sports team or fan that expects success as a birthright learns and gains nothing from the challenge of the contest. If you are so bloated by winning that you throw a petulant tanty at the faintest whiff of sustained losses, good fucking luck dealing with reality outside football. There is one, for the record. Yet the Broncos miss the finals, eject toys from pram, and seek to fire their coach in a fit of pique; while the Rabbitohs miss the finals and there's a shrug, a faraway smile because we had a crack, and thoughts turn to next year, or to the young blokes in the under-20s who won the minor premiership and are still out there having a crack, or just rememberances of the good times of the season just past. Like the ludicrous 34-30 extra-time win over the semi-finalist Tigers in August, with a try in the last second of the last period of extra time to a kid from the youth side who was making his first grade debut, after both sides had missed eight field goal attempts in extra time. That try gave him a hat-trick on debut. Souths had been down 28-12 with half an hour to play, had lost half their regular first graders to injury, and were playing for their season. Which still should have been over after the game, having lost key playmaker John Sutton with a busted shoulder (in the act of scoring the try which locked up the scores). Somehow the Bunnies made it to the last week of the season still with a crack at the finals. Didn't come off. Got a bit of a touchup from our mates from St George. But they had a crack.

The rivalry with St George is an interesting one, because it's almost a friendship these days. In the 50s and 60s no teams hated each other more, as they decided almost every premiership between them. But neither side has won a premiership in 30 years, and like old rivals who've forgotten exactly what it was that started the feud in the first place, we've probably got more in common with them than in conflict. And even from the northern side of Botany Bay it's hard not to feel sorry for the Dragons and their long-suffering supporters. In the 30 years since their last comp win they've made the grand final five times, and lost every last fucking one of them. 1985 by a point to the Dogs. 1992 and '93, run over by the Queensland Origin team in their 'away' strip. 1996, rorted by Manly and some fucking dodgy decisions by ARL ref Charlie Manson. 1999, That Fucking Penalty Try. And you can even throw in 2005, when the media had already awarded them the comp, only for them to get mugged by Benji Marshall and the Tiges in the semi and never actually get a date to the big dance.

And here we go again. St George are minor premiers, smashed Manly flat in their opening finals fixture and are again being talked up as morals for the Big Cheese On Offer. I think I've seen this one before somewhere. As I said to a mate on Arsebook (who supports Manly, because it's one of the more socially acceptable forms of mental illness) - Saints have one hand on the trophy. Unfortunately their other hand is around their own throats, and as of right now it's evens as regards which hand is going to win the day.

I hope for good things for them. For my old mate Dr Craigos who's backed the Big Red V for as long as I can remember. For Yamba's own Nathan Brown, run out of town as the scapegoat for their 2005 semifinal capitulation (nowhere near as heinous as their collapse under Wayne Bennett last year.) For the players of those hapless '90s sides who were never quite good enough to win - for the Cough Drop, Mary Macgregor, the Man, the Two Dollar Coyte and Rod Wishart, who's probably still back on the bus where Roy and HG sent him in Origin '96.

Yeah, I hope for good things for them. But I've seen how this one turns out before.

The Doctor is OUT.

My city of Sydney

I fly to Sydney on Monday. In an unfortunate subsequent development, I have to come home at some point. I love Sydney. It's mad, stupid and corrupt. It's loud and obnoxious and costs too much to get drunk in. It's not even a city, really. It's a thousand little villages with their own distinct cultures, languages, cuisines. It's fucking mental. And I love it. There are 4.5 million stories in the naked city of Sydney, and this is mine.

Sydney taught me to do all the important shit. Taught me to drink, for one. She took me on as a wet-behind-the very-wet-bit-behind-the-ears 17 year old first-year student, and sent me on my way with first class honours in pisshoundery (and some other stuff, but that's not relevant to the discussion at hand.) Thursday nights at the Uni bar on $2.50 vodkas or Tooheys Pils. Friday drinks up at the Royal or the Coach and Horses, tipping back a few Reschs Smooths. Share house parties as messy and drunken as they came (handy hint: never trust punch made in a bin liner). Sydney taught me to drive, too. Not the boring, fundamental shit - mirror, signal, manoeuvre. I mean the proper stuff. The knowledge. Rat-running. Divebomb-merging. Traffic snarl avoidance. Parking by Braille. Knowing what lane to be in at any given moment on Cleveland St so as not to get pinned behind a parked car on the left or some gumby fucktard making a right turn for no apparent fucking reason. All those sixth sense predictive-awareness things that differentiate decent drivers from the peons and the sheep.

That was my Sydney - the inner east and west. No further west than Dulwich Hill, where the old man grew up; not much further south than Eastgardens; east to the beaches and north to the CBD (didn't meet the dress code for venturing further north than Bondi.) My Sydney: The dodgy Vietnamese bakery in Randwick that did the awesomest bread in history right up to the day the kitchen burned down. Chicken hero rolls and Powerades from the 24 hour servo at the bottom of our street, the venerable 'last round of drinks' en route home from the uni bar. Stinking hot summer afternoons punctuated by a mission over the hill to Coogee and a plunge into the Pacific, probably followed by beers. Fuck-off-cheap movies at the Ritz followed by fuck-off-awesome Thai or Arthur's Pizza washed down by longnecks of comeback-special Reschs DA from the local bottle-o. One-day cricket games on the box at the Coogee Bay or the Clovelly Hotel, or just at the Hovel over a $22 case or two of New - likewise Bathurst 1000s and Australia Day Hottest 100s as memorable as they are unable-to-be-remembered. Cocktail parties at that one wannabe-trendy thirty-something lecturer's place overlooking the beach on Arden Street. $5 student tickets to Sydney City Roosters games at the SFS - turn up and back whoever they're playing, it's only five bucks for fuck's sake. Honours graduation beers in that fucking cool Thai beer garden underneath the Bank Hotel in Newtown. Kmart Bondi Junction's annual clearance sale on expired-date AC Cola that somehow always resulted in pallets of the shite stacked in our kitchen.

That was my Sydney. Which I left, brusquely, like you'd ditch a cheating lover, in order to take up with the more laconic, rustic charms of Brisbane, the overgrown country town. Less stress. Less angst. Cheaper beer. It suited me better, cos I'm rural, ay. My Sydney became Homebake roadtrips and New Years missions. My old man's old neighbourhood in Dulwich Hill got gentrified, from tyre dumps and stolen cars in council parks to awesome street-corner cafes in what had been old abandoned corner shops - all for the better, IMHFO. Every time I go back to my Sydney, I can't shake that insistent feeling: I could live here. Really, I could. Proper coffee. Proper Italian food. Proper public transport. Bands playing. Cafes. Restaurants. Local sporting teams that aren't the fucking Highlanders. I could live here, seriously. And I could. Except for the whole having-a-family-hence-only-being-able-to-live-in-fucking-Blacktown part of the equation.

Anyway, I'm back next week. For a few days at least. Who's up for a beer?

The Doctor is OUT.