Brisbane Bears players sing the new theme song from a lyric sheet after their first-up win over North Melbourne in 1987.
While with only four games played the current AFL ladder is pretty meaningless, but league officials would nonetheless at least be enjoying the symbolism of Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney sitting in the top two spots after their comfortable wins.
The careful nurturing of the AFL’s two newest clubs over the past dozen or so years has made the Giants consistently competitive, and may now finally see the Suns make good.
Starting a new AFL club in a non-traditional Australian football environment even now is no easy task. Which somehow makes even the very modest achievements of the league’s first “expansion club” seem remarkable.
It was Round One of the 1987 season that saw two new teams enter the competition. They were West Coast, which had the backing of an entire football-mad state in Western Australia behind it. And the Brisbane Bears, from hostile rugby league-mad Queensland, who couldn’t possibly have had things made any more difficult.
Unlike the incoming Tasmanian AFL team which will have had five years to prepare itself, the Brisbane Bears had just six months, their admission for the 1987 season announced in October 1986.
With the Gabba unavailable, the Bears were forced to set up home at the then spartan surrounds of Carrara on the Gold Coast. And so was player acquisition something of a rush.
Desperate for the licence fees which accompanied their admission, the Victorian clubs had grudgingly voted in favour of the new clubs. But that was where the largesse ended.
Required to offer the Bears three listed players each, the other clubs turned the process into a joke, several nominating players who had already retired or, in some cases, moved overseas to live. Of the 36 players nominated, Brisbane took just eight.
Collingwood stalwart Mark Williams was a big-name signing, along with Geoff Raines and Footscray pair Brad Hardie and Jim Edmond. But the Bears’ inaugural list would consist for the best part of either average at best VFL players or untried talent from Western Australia and South Australia, led by an untried coach in former Hawthorn champion Peter Knights.
To top it off, the Brisbane Bears’ historic VFL debut wouldn’t come before a supportive home crowd, but on a Friday night at the MCG against North Melbourne in front of just 14,096 fans.
The Roos, coached by the legendary John Kennedy, had just missed the previous year’s final five and collectively boasted around 400 games more VFL experience.
For the Bears, a trio of Croweaters, Mark Mickan, Mathew Campbell and Neil Hein, would make their debuts. Another four Bears, Mark Roberts, Peter Banfield, Brenton Phillips and Cameron O’Brien, had each played fewer than 20 games.
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But Brisbane was up from the start. Former Fitzroy little man Bernie Harris kicked the new club’s first goal. The Bears led at quarter time, and after six goals in the second term, by 26 points at the long break.
SA speedster Phillips, who’d spent 1986 at Essendon but struggled for a regular spot in the Bombers’ best team, played the game of his life, and his three third-quarter goals, one after the siren, all but put Brisbane out of North’s reach, leading by 34 points at the final change.
The Roos, perhaps sensing the pillorying they’d cop should they lose, suddenly emerged from their slumber, and quick goals to Darren Crocker, Wayne Schimmelbusch, Matthew Larkin and Darren Harris brought them back within just 11 points.
But Brisbane wasn’t about to be denied its historic moment. The Bears responded just as emphatically with four goals of their own, two more to Phillips (who’d finish with five), two more to David O’Keeffe and Brad Hardie, settling the issue once and for all.
There was understandably precious little crowd reaction when the final siren heralded Brisbane’s 33-point win, but the team already dubbed the “bad news Bears” were jubilant, sprinting off the MCG to gather in the rooms for what would become an iconic, if slightly hilarious moment – the sight of the winning team belting out the new club’s theme song whilst reading the words from a set of hastily-produced lyric sheets.
The Bears, for whom the likes of Phil Walsh, Williams, Mickan, Phillips, Campbell and Raines starred, would incredibly make it two from two the following week against Geelong at Kardinia Park, no less, and post three wins from their first five games before it all began to take a toll, just three wins coming in the final 17 games.
The on-going home ground problems, internal politics and the considerable financial issues of part-owner Christopher Skase would all plague the fledgling club for years, the Bears a standing joke pretty much until they finally were able to make the Gabba their permanent home in 1993.
But under the coaching of Robert Walls, the Bears did make the finals by 1995 and reached a preliminary final the following year, before absorbing the remnants of Fitzroy and becoming the Brisbane Lions.
The Brisbane Bears’ chaotic, disorganised birth would serve mainly as a lesson to the league in how not to bring a new club into the national competition, a guidebook fortunately subsequently followed.
But however ridiculous the catalogue of obstacles the Bears would be forced to conquer and the ridiculing they would often receive, nothing could ever detract from the sheer shock of league football’s newest entity beginning its life in such spectacular fashion, surely the greatest upset in first round footy history.
This article first appeared at ESPN.
