My father bet twice a year: the Melbourne Cup, because everyone did, and the AFL Grand Final, because he believed — against decades of accumulated evidence — that he understood football.
He taught me to read a form guide the way other fathers taught their sons to fish. Patiently, seriously, and with a quiet understanding that the activity was mostly an excuse for the conversation.
The lesson
The bet I remember was not a win. It was a September afternoon, a team he'd followed for forty years, and a wager that was — by any sensible measure — twice as big as it should have been. Hope does that. It moves the decimal point.
They lost by a kick. He folded the ticket in half, put it in his shirt pocket, and watched the presentation to the end, clapping the winners. 'You clap,' he said, when I asked why. 'The bet's got nothing to do with the football.'
