Bob Girdwood rates Hamish “Rabbit” Worsley as the finest captain that he has seen in his 40 years to date at Uni Blues. Hamish arrived at the club in 1989 and served it with distinction for eight seasons, winning the senior Best & Fairest in 1992 and assuming the role of captain from 1993 to 1996. During this time, Hamish’s courage and attack on the ball was renowned in the VAFA. However, there was more to Rabbit than hard running and hitting the packs. While captain of the club in 1996, he famously missed four games in the middle of the season because he was touring Germany as a dancer in a cabaret show.
Hamish says that the best players that he saw at Blues were Richard Furphy and Aaron “Duxy” Davis. “Furph stood out when it was physical and was terrific in a man-on-man contest, whether on the ground or in the air. Duxy was seemingly slow and blind (with his sheep dog hair style covering his face) but was a genius in creating opportunity and bagging the unbelievable - the harder the angle, the more likely he'd thread through a major (using banana, dribble, or whatever formulation...).”
Hamish has fond memories of defeating Mazenod at Sandringham in the 1994 B-Grade preliminary final – “a perfect team performance and took us back into A-Grade”. “Another gem was beating Old Xavs at Toorak Park in JK's 300th game in 1995.” The best comeback Hamish was involved in entailed overturning a 6 goal deficit at 3/4 time against Therry in 1993. “We slammed on eight or nine goals in the last quarter to steal the game.”
Justin Jamieson figures prominently in Hamish’s most memorable off-field moments. “I think it was 1991 and the club agreed to distribute the yellow pages in Parkville to raise some money. Jammo and I loaded up my old car (a 72 HG Holden) and set off to deliver a batch to the Melbourne Zoo. After dropping off the phone books in the loading area we looked for a place to turn the car and approached a boom gate, which approvingly went up. We entered to find we were cruising down the walkways of the zoo, dodging people, kiddies and curious zoo attendants and admiring the wildlife ... the adventure finally ended when navigator Jammo guided us into a dead end next to the monkey enclosure - when the chimps started squawking and going crazy on the fence beside the car, I sacked Jammo from navigating, backed up the rig quick time and we got the hell out of there.”
Like so many players from his era, Hamish also makes mention of Spa Pavvy – another event with Justin Jamieson’s fingerprints all over it. “Expectation filled the air when Jammo rolled a giant spa in a trailer outside the Pavvy and the ensuing cocktail of beers and excessive foam suds naturally resulted in loads of nude blokes sliding at high speed across the Pavvy floor.”
Looking back on his time at Blues, Hamish says that the highlights were “playing with a diverse group of players, having fun off the field and generating success”. “Working under Treeo [current President, Grant Williams] as coach while I was captain was a highlight and so was representing supporters like Ted and Norma McNamara who embodied what we were playing for. Norma mended my socks on several occasions and Ted was there before and after every game helping out - I recall I forgot my mouthguard before the 1994 preliminary final and Ted moulded me one out of orange peel. A lot of people stepped up to turn things around from us being a whisker from falling out of B-Grade to getting back into A-Grade and playing regular finals footy across all our teams.”
Hamish can now be found residing in Brighton, on the south coast of the UK. He is married to Cate (“who is English but experienced Melbourne and the Pavvy during her gap year in 1992”) and they have three kids (George (4 yrs) and twins Ruby and Claudia (2 yrs)). Hamish keeps himself busy as a Director of NMG, a small multi-national consulting firm that he has been with since early 1997 (first in Singapore, then South Africa, Japan and the UK since 2002).
