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Victorian Gridiron League which plays the game by U.S. college rules. This year, he was the outside linebacker for the Doncaster Devils, league champions.
“Pound for pound, he was without a doubt the best player in the league. That’s what the coaches all said,” reported Jim McCullough, who was Colin’s teammate on the Devils.
“He was always intense, always fearless. Colin’s a little guy, yet he would never hesitate to go after the big guys twice his size. And he was always interested in the theory behind the moves and plays. He wanted to do more than just get out on the field and knock heads. But he never missed an opportunity to bang heads, either!” Jim added, chuckling.
In 1984 Colin caught Redskin Fever, and he uses the possessive pronouns — albeit with an Aussie accent — that distinguish the true and proprietory fan. “It was the playoffs, when we beat the 49ers before the Raiders stomped us,” he recalled, remembering the game that started it for him. What caught Colin’s fancy was the Joe Theisman-John Riggins combination: “They were the power!”
Plus, he added, there was the burgundy and gold, the colors of his hometown Melbourne team in the local Australian rules football league.
Back in Australia, he follows the National Football League in the international edition of USA Today. “I pour through it. But there’s not enough Redskins,” Colin complained.
And that paper costs $2.50 a copy and carries only a paragraph or two about NFL football, period, added Jim, who was accustomed to the Washington Post and therefore required periodic supplements of sports pages from home during his year in Australia.
Colin established his credentials as a semi-rabid fan two years ago. For that championship season of 1988, he paid $500 for VCR tapes of all 19 Redskins games. Since then, he’s had to settle for traveling the road to the Super Bowl again and again. “The company with the foreign license (to sell the videotapes of NFL games) has been holding out, they say on behalf of their customers. They say they’re being charged too much and that it makes the tapes too expensive for us, so they’re waiting until the prices come down. That means for two years, we’ve had nothing.”
So what does a mate do when television coverage of the NFL is cut back to an hour and a half of the top game and “about 60 seconds of snippets from the rest” and video tapes are no longer avialable at any price? For Colin Buckle, the answer was simple: “I decided to come to America to see them play. ”
It’s been worth every penny, the Aussie fan said. “I wanted to find out more about the game, to increase my knowledge of football, and I’ve certainly done that. It’s been great! Hey, we won in Pheonix.” And in RFK, he had a seat on the 50-yard line for another win. “Wonderful, just wonderful. The stadium moved. It really moved!”
But the Monday morning after, brought a letdown when he read that the Los Aqgeles Rams had to lose three — “Lose to the Jets^LNDthe Patriots? No way!” — in order for the Keels kins to get a wild card berth. “We won’t make it this year. I’ve resigned myself. We have a great team, but we just didn’t get the breaks,” Colifi proclaimed over the sports page at the breakfast table. “Besides, the Redskins always lose out on the tie breaker. Have you ever noticed that?”
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