Fingers and the pies
Brian Matthews locks in the long arm of Eddie McGuire.
What with one thing and another, it's probably been quite a while since you perused the Honour Roll of the Battle of Agincourt. I've been pretty slack in that regard myself recently, but a strange, even eerie, experience at Melbourne Airport a few days ago moved me to wonder about Henry V's gallant and outnumbered troops. Who were they that faced the French on a saturated foreign paddock on 25 October 1415?
The eerie experience went like this: I was heading for the check-in queue when an announcement had me faltering, disorientated, to a halt. It was not what was said - something about a late flight - but the voice. Those articulate, confident tones, the engagingly Aussie lack of pretension - it had to be Eddie McGuire. I would have doubted my own judgment had it not been for the reaction of all the other would-be passengers, or customers as they are called these days. Everyone had stopped. Some tilted their heads as if to hear the voice more clearly; others looked up towards the ceiling seeking confirmation of something they could not easily credit.
And then the voice came again and there was no doubting it: the ubiquitous Eddie McGuire - known to Victorians as the Collingwood Football Club president and face of Channel Nine footy and to people everywhere as the genial, cheque-signing compere of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? - was calling the planes at Tullamarine Airport.
'Qantas flight 725 to Sydney,' announced Eddie, and everyone hung on his words, 'will be delayed owing to the late arrival of the connecting aircraft. The new boarding time will be - we'll take a break and be back with more in just a moment.'
Everyone relaxed. Who cared if the plane was late! Eddie had it all under control just as he had Channel Nine, the AFL, the Collingwood Football Club and numerous other enterprises, small and large, at his dancing fingertips and twinkling toes, or rather the other way round, though not necessarily, as either way will work and that's the McGuire touch. Everything works.
In a state of confused excitement and baseless euphoria, as if I had made it on to the podium of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? then couldn't remember for $100 that it was Ned Kelly not Ben Hall, Mad Dog Morgan or Chopper who wore armour, I hurried to the departure gate expecting every moment Eddie's next announcement. It came soon enough.
'Qantas flight 942 will depart from gate lounge 11 for (a) Cairns (b) Sydney (c) Darwin (d) Townsville.'
'Lock in (d) Eddie!' someone shouted and doubtless flight 942 duly set off for Townsville.
As I sat there waiting for Eddie to announce my flight, hoping to lock in (b) Sydney since, by and large, that was where I wanted to end up, it suddenly struck me that there was no limit to Eddie McGuire's reach and influence. Here we were at Tullamarine marvelling that his voice should be directing us to our aircraft but failing to realise that somewhere else, mere hours ago, he was calling the footy in the box at Colonial having just arrived, not breathless, from speaking to a luncheon of the 'Save Struggling Victorian Football Clubs so Long as Collingwood is Not Disadvantaged Society', and before that he'd been at Crown Casino with the high-rolling Sheik Ali Ahrami Faqutu, Grand Bludgeon Extraordinary to the Sultan of Ouazarzat, workshopping a plan to recruit from the Tuareg and Berber Arabs of the Sahara, who would more easily withstand the northern heat when playing the Brisbane Lions.
But it's useless trying to keep up with genuine, 21st-century ubiquity. Eddie McGuire's capacity to live inside his many compartmentalised heads (on each of which, as he often notes, is a different hat) was nowhere better demonstrated than at half-time during the Essendon-Carlton game a few Friday nights ago. Fronting the camera with that prince of malaprop prolixity, Sam Newman, a sombre Eddie explained that he was about to wear his Collingwood president's hat to deal with a serious allegation and therefore Sam would have to chair the segment. If you're inclined to ask what other club president would have access to such a forum to defend his team and break or embellish sensational news, don't bother. The answer is: lock in (q) shut your face or (z) what conflict of interest?
Such confident yet breathtakingly uncomplicated omniscience, I reasoned, must have originated way back in Eddie's lineage. Don't bother testing this by seeing if the McGuires were in the First Fleet. Of course they were. But what about proving grounds more distant in space and time? Was there a McGuire at Agincourt?
Well, Shakespeare's Henry V was surely previewing one of Eddie's most recent presidential exhortations when he said, 'he which hath no stomach to this fight / Let him depart.' Not to mention the unmistakable reference to Sam Newman in '[who] sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile.'
More to the point, though, Eddie Macwilliam and Tom Magson, Agincourt soldiers both, had names at least reminiscent of our man's. But Edward McWhyre sounds like the best shot - especially as he had to abandon the muddy chaos of the battlefield temporarily to nick into Calais 'for purposes of ye busyness and ye trade'. Conflict of interest? Lock in (a) not ye bloodie chance, my coz.
Brian Matthews is a writer and academic.
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