Thirty years ago, Dennis Galimberti made arguably the most important cluster of phone calls in Footscray Football Club’s history.
They were calls that ultimately initiated one of the greatest fan uprisings the VFL/AFL has ever seen.
It was the night of the Bulldogs’ Best and Fairest night on October 2, 1989, at the Cadillac Bar in Carlton.
It had been a disappointing season for Footscray, but it was a night of celebration as Terry Wallace won back-to-back Charles Sutton Medals. It was time for a few last drinks before the off-season.
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Behind the scenes, during the couple of weeks prior to the best and fairest, secret plans were being finalised for the Bulldogs to merge with Fitzroy.
While others on the Bulldogs’ board knew of the VFL’s plan and were resigned to accept it, Galimberti, who was the Club’s CEO at the time, was kept in the dark.
Oblivious to what was happening, his focus that night was to get the ball rolling on finding a replacement coach for Mick Malthouse, who had left the Club after accepting a role with the West Coast Eagles.
“As the night was winding down there was a number of us who had converged around the bar,” Galimberti told Bob Murphy on the Inside the Fightback podcast.
“I was handing out these dossiers that I’d prepared on all the leading applicants, to the members of the subcommittee. One of the Directors said ‘look Dennis, tomorrow it’s going to be announced that the Club’s going to merge with Fitzroy. It’s going to be called the Fitzroy Bulldogs, playing out of Prices Park, in a Fitzroy guernsey, with a Fitzroy board and a Fitzroy president’.
“I said ‘look, this isn’t happening. I don’t know what you’re talking about’. He started pleading with me. He said…’you’ve just got to wait, you can’t do anything now. Leave it to the morning and we’ll go into the AFL and we’ll sort this out’. He tried to stop me from leaving, and I left.
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“I went straight back to the Club. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get this out, we’ve got to put a stop to this’. So, I rang 3AW.
Despite the radio news bulletins having already been locked in for the evening, and no sports reporters working that late at night, Galimberti negotiated with one of the station’s producers to break the news on air himself.
“He said, you’ve only got 15 seconds, so just be concise. So, I read the news on 3AW that night. And it sort of got out from there,” he said.
“I next rang Michael Stevens at the Herald Sun, who was a mad Footscray supporter. He was just gobsmacked. He got emotional. It became the front page story.
“The next morning when people woke up, it was all over the news, but it was also on the front page of the Herald Sun. That got us going.”
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By the time VFL Chairman Ross Oakley made the announcement about the merger, the football public was already up in arms.
There was disbelief, frustration, and anger. Footscray fans were subconsciously ready for battle. They weren’t going to let their club die.
History shows what happened over the next three weeks. Had it not been for Galimberti’s swift and defiant actions, who knows what might have been.
