Gavan Bourke and Bill Drake reminisce about the good old days at the Pakenham Football Club reunion on Saturday. 83941 Picture: STEWART CHAMBERS
By DAVID NAGEL
BILL Drake’s departure from the Pakenham Football Club at the end of the 1964 season was huge news around the region.
Not only because Drake –whose family moved to Pakenham in 1936 when he was a baby – was leaving his beloved Lions…but he was leaving to go to the mortal enemy at Nar Nar Goon.
The news caused quite a stir, but it was the legend that Drake built at the Lions over the previous decade that made the move so significant.
Drake’s football career has taken the 76-year-old to some wondrous places and began in 1954 with a premiership in Footscray’s third 18.
That same year the senior team, led by the late, great Charlie Sutton, captured the Bulldogs’ one and only VFL/AFL premiership.
Drake tried his luck at the Bulldogs for one more year before he returned to Pakenham in the Olympic year of 1956 and forged a great career at the club.
“It was great to be back,” Drake said at the reunion of the ‘52, ‘62, ‘72, ‘82 and 2002 premiership teams on Saturday.
“My heroes played at Pakenham. One of the highlights of my childhood was helping Norm ‘Widow’ Jackson with his bread run.
“He drove around in a horse and cart and I’d deliver the bread.”
Drake built a reputation as a magnificent rover who had an eye for a goal. He won two Clancy Medals for best player in the league in 1958 and 1962, won the league goal-kicking on two occasions, and led that list at the Lions for five seasons.
A telling statistic is that Drake played in every interleague team that was selected throughout his career.
He took over as Pakenham’s coach in 1960 and led the club to back-to-back premierships in ’61 and ’62. The ’61 team went through undefeated while his team dropped just one game the following season.
“We had no real champions but everyone was a very good player through those years,” he said.
“Paddy Monckton and Hughie Bourke were the standouts. They were terrific players – Paddy would be in the top five players I saw at Pakenham.
“He’d work on a Saturday morning and then ride his motorbike to the footy. That was the best sound when you could hear the ‘put-put’ of Paddy’s bike, it meant he was here to play.
“We’d put him at full-forward when we had the wind and at full-back when we were against it, he’d stay at the same end of the ground for the whole match.”
Drake said he was ‘dedicated to blazes’ about his footy and humbly described himself as “not a bad kick I suppose. I’d just get the ball and kick it forward the best I could”.
The move to the Goon came after the Lions had slipped to fifth place in 1964 and Drake felt he had lost the players.
“Looking back now, I’m still quite upset about the whole thing,” he said.
“I think they’d just had enough of my yelling and roaring but I hope they remember me as very fair, a player who led from the front, and there was no grandstanding.”
Drake took his magical touch to the Goon where he coached for just the one year, winning the 1965 premiership and ending a 28-year drought for the club.
He never returned to his beloved Pakenham, instead moving up to Canberra to coach, but you could tell on Saturday that he felt right at home among his old team mates.
Bill Drake will always be huge news around town.
