Chicken Smallhorn

Wilfred "Chicken" Smallhorn (February 25, 1911—1988) was an [[Australian rules football]er in the Victorian Football League. He played 150 games for the Fitzroy Football Club between 1930 and 1940.

Football career

Standing at just 170 centimetres tall and weighing 62 kg, Chicken (so nicknamed because his mother could never catch him when he was young) was a deceptively quick winger who played 150 games (kicking 31 goals) for Fitzroy between 1930 and 1940, won the Brownlow Medal in 1933 and represented Victoria seven times.

Recruited from Collingwood Technical School and East Brunswick Methodists, where he was coached by former Fitzroy player Arnold Beitzel, Smallhorn later became a long-time panellist on Harry Beitzel's TV show. His early football was played as a rover, but a best-on-ground performance on a wing in his debut with Fitzroy had him permanently shifted to that position,

World War II

After his playing career was over due to a knee injury he enlisted but during WWII he was taken prisoner by the Japanese and was in Changi prison for three years and he was on the Burma railway prior to that. In 1942 Smallhorn was the main organiser of a football competition which consisted of six teams named after VFL clubs. The season lasted nine months and was run under similar lines to the VFL. They had clearances, tribunals and even their own Brownlow Medal known as the 'Changi Brownlow'. The first winner was Peter Chitty, who had played for St. Kilda in the VFL. The climax of the season was the final game between 'Victoria' and the 'Rest of Australia', which attracted 10,000 spectators.

When he left to go to the war his wife had become pregnant with their son, who was named Robert, but Smallhorn didn't get home for five years so he was almost five before he was introduced to him. Tragically Robert was to die at 14 with cancer.

Legacy

Smallhorn later became a media personality. He died in 1988.

In the Bruce Dawe poem 'Life cycle' Smallhorn is mentioned thus:

So that mythology may be perpetually renewed

and Chicken Smallhorn return like the maize-god

in a thousand shapes, the dancers changing

He was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 2006.