Something about Maryborough: Learning about Delly’s hometown

If you think Delly fever is running wild in Cleveland, consider Matthew Dellavedova’s hometown of Maryborough, Australia (pop. 7,630). If your Australian geography isn’t what it used to be, Maryborough is in Victoria province in southeast Australia, just about 100 miles northwest of Melbourne, in Central Goldfields Shire.

People in Maryborough who have scarcely heard of the NBA are suddenly learning all about a team called Cavaliers from a place called Cleveland, cheering their boy on from some 10,000 miles away. The games start at 10 or 11 a.m. Australian time, and kids are allegedly skipping school to watch. They’ve gone mad for Matthew in Maryborough.

The excitement came to a head when it was reported that Maryborough would rename its basketball stadium after Dellavedova, with “Dellavedova Dome” a possibility. Both stadium and dome are something of a stretch, as the building currently known as the Maryborough Indoor Sports and Recreation Centre has just two courts, and there are bureaucratic steps that need to be taken before the structure is actually renamed, but the point has been made: the kid’s a star, at home and abroad.

Basketball is somewhat popular in Australia, but it’s miles behind Australian Rules football and rugby, as well as cricket and soccer. They think it odd there that the NBA plays up to seven games to crown its champion instead of just one, as all of the major Aussie leagues decide their champs in one final game.

The Australian Football League Grand Final is traditionally held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the last Saturday in September. The A-League (soccer) Grand Final is preceded by a three-week sudden death tournament — not a multi-leg setup like the UEFA Champions League. The National Rugby League Grand Final is held in Sydney, and better yet, there is a Grand Final Breakfast event held a week before the game that is attended by both teams and broadcast on TV.

Here’s a slice of Australian Twitter discussing this foreign seven-game series idea (Note the little dig at Golden State).

@toukeyross I guess it's a real US thing though, still at least the team actually with an actual city name won today plus #boroughbacksdelly

— Long sleeves forever (@Strauchanside) June 8, 2015

I don’t, for the record, spend my free time perusing the timelines of strangers in other countries; not all of my free time, anyway. I happened upon this exchange between Damo PendleBerry — Twitter bio: “Writes about Aussie Rules for @Bound4GloryNews and @SupercoachPaige. Just a gay, lefty train driver, road and stats nerd, soon to be owner of a new right hip,” 1,373 followers — and the more succinctly-named Cam — Twitter bio: “Long suffering @richmond_fc, @melbournecity member and @eagles man,” 382 followers — by searching the #boroughbacksdelly hashtag.

The Maryborough Advertiser came up with the hashtag and dedicated the front page of its June 2 edition to Dellavedova, printing a GO DELLY headline and a photo of area children sporting Cavs gear. Established in 1854 and one of Victoria’s oldest newspapers, the Advertiser has been covering the Cavs’ playoff run as well as any daily in the province, having printed stories about the team defeating the Chicago Bulls (DELLY ON A HIGH) and the Atlanta Hawks (EAST CHAMPS), as well as their Game 2 victory over the Warriors in the Finals (GAME SAVER).

Back — Zac Polinelli, Mollie Akers, Kya Lanfranchi, Edward Akers, Charlie Fenton, Coby Polinelli; Front — Keynan Lanfranchi and Krystal Parker. Thanks for the support, lads and lasses.

An excerpt from the Delly-centric front page from June 2, which Dellavedova posted on Instagram.

With the NBA Finals set to start on Friday, The Maryborough Advertiser’s front page today has turned wine and gold in support of our own Matthew Dellavedova.

And we’re hoping it’s not just The Addy that turns wine and gold, as we’re asking the Central Goldfields community to get behind Dellavedova with our #BoroughbacksDelly campaign.

Fans were encouraged to post pictures of themselves in Cavs gear and/or holding up the GO DELLY paper on social media, and to add the hashtag to make it clear who they support.

Maryborough has wholeheartedly dived into the NBA in the name of supporting the local boy made good, and in truth, it sounds like they’re ready for a new sporting hero to cheer on. In an interview with Australia’s 3AW 693 — which you can find at the end of this article and which I strongly recommend listening to, particularly if you enjoy accents — Central Goldfields Shire CEO Mark Johnston¹ said that two of Maryborough’s greatest sporting heroes are John Nicholls and Jack Worrall.

Nicholls, an Aussie rules footballer, was voted the greatest player in Carlton Football Club’s 150-year history. He played ruckman, which is sort of akin to a center in basketball; most are tall, lithe leapers, though some are more stout and physical. Today’s ruckmen are often over 6-foot-6, but Nicholls was an innovator in his time. Based on the club’s description, he sounds like a proper hard bloke:

Nicholls stood just 189cm [Ed’s note: that’s 6-foot-2 to Yanks] – 22cm shorter than the tallest ruckman in the game today, Fremantle’s Aaron Sandilands – but his enormous strength and immovable tree-trunk legs made up for his lack of height.

His rivalry with Geelong ruckman Graham ‘Polly’ Farmer took ruckwork to new heights in the 1960s, while Nicholls was also a natural leader, someone who could pull a teammate or opponent into line simply with an ice-cold stare.

Worrall, meanwhile, was basically the Australian Bo Jackson at the end of the century — the nineteenth century. Born in 1861, Worrall was both a footballer and a cricketer, and he went on to coach both sports and become a sports journalist. He was inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame, and is most noted for coaching Carlton to three championships.

He is described (albeit by Wikipedia) as “a small, nuggety man with broad shoulders, pink complexion and intense brown eyes,” and perhaps a prickly one: “He was no stranger to conflict, and his forthright manner embroiled him in a number of sporting controversies throughout his lifetime.”

Both sound like fine athletes and important figures, but it’s time for Maryborough to branch out, to go beyond the familiar pitches of football and cricket and dive onto the hardwood. Matthew Dellavedova is ready to be that new hero, and he would do Maryborough proud by building upon the tough legacies of Nicholls and Worrall, being no stranger to conflict himself.

In the meantime, Delly will have to settle for his picture all over ESPN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal — and most importantly, on the front page of his hometown paper.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Isn’t this what sport is about? We like to think that every athlete playing for Cleveland is representing Cleveland, and to some extent that’s true, but they’re really representing their hometowns, where they came from. It’s about pride. It’s about putting your city on the map. LeBron has done it with Akron, but that was easy. Plenty of folks knew Akron before LeBron, even those beyond Northeast Ohio: Rubber Capital of the World, baby.

Now Delly is doing it for Maryborough, a far taller order. I had never heard of the place, and were it not for Delly, I doubt I ever would have. Now, it’s my favorite sub-10,000 person town in Australia. Sometimes one person is all it takes; the only reason I know that Slab Fork, West Virginia, exists is because Bill Withers grew up there.

Now I’ve heard of Maryborough, I’ve read a bit about it, and it is a town that I truly hope to visit one day. It sounds lovely. I want to disembark at the historic Maryborough Railway Station and have a stroll through McLandress Square. I want to bicycle down Inkerman Street and eat at Pipes Bistro. I want to buy a copy of the Advertiser and read about the football while I eat Vegemite on toast.

Perhaps more than anything, I want to lace up my sneakers and step inside the Dellavedova Dome, to pay homage to the man who put the city on the map in the first place.

1. Important note: Johnston’s name has been erroneously spelled Johnson, most egregiously by the website of the very radio station that interviewed him. A great many American news outlets picked up the story from 3AW, and the error has been perpetuated across hemispheres. Visit his biography page on the Central Goldfields Shire Council website, and you will see that it is Mark Johnston we’re talking about. The man is a shire CEO; hasn’t he earned the right to have his name spelled correctly? [↩]