The Magarey Medal is awarded each season to the player in the SANFL deemed to be the fairest and most brilliant by the umpires.
After each match, the three field umpires award 3, 2 and 1 vote to the players they regarded as the best, second best and third best on ground respectively. A player becomes ineligible for the Medal if he is suspended for a reportable offence during the season.
The votes are tallied at the end of the minor round to determine the year’s Magarey Medallist.
The Medal has been awarded in every year of South Australian competition since 1898, with the exception of 1900 and 1904 and the World War I and World War II years.
Russell Ebert’s name is synonymous with the Magarey Medal. The Port Adelaide legend remains to this day the only person to ever win the Medal four times. He won in 1971, 1974, 1976 and 1980, and thanks to his family, those medals are on display together in this cabinet.
At the 1980 Medal count, after his fourth success, Russell Ebert was asked by host Ken Cunningham if it was the highlight of his career.
“Individually it would have to be, of course it would be stupid to say anything else, but I believe that it’s a team game and results in finals are the things that we aim for. The most pleasure I’ve ever had in football was the 1977 premiership. It’s a team game. Everyone battles their guts out all year and it’s a premiership that is the ultimate.”
Unlike the current day where each medal looks the same, Ebert’s each have a unique design. Today and since 1991, the medal design features an image of William Magarey – the inaugural chairman of the South Australia Football Association and the man who came up with the idea of awarding a medal to the fairest and most brilliant player each season.
Magarey came up with the idea of presenting a medal to the fairest and most brilliant player as a way to stamp out rough play and help raise the status of umpires.
Port Adelaide has a long and proud history of players winning the highest individual honour in the SANFL with 19 players taking home a total of 24 medals.
Stan Malin collected the second ever medal in 1899 but quit the game and moved to Sydney to study medicine. Unfortunately he contracted typhoid and died in 1903 aged just 25, and the whereabouts of his Magarey medal remain a mystery.
‘Shine’ Hosking was the first Port Adelaide player to win two Magarey Medals (1910 and 1915) with Bob Quinn repeating the feat, remarkably winning one medal either side of military service in World War two. You can see Hosking’s two medals in the bottom of the cabinet, kindly donated to the club by his family.
Hosking’s 1915 Magarey wasn’t awarded until 1998 – well after his death in 1974. Originally, a count back had been used to determine a single winner due to a three-way tie. South Adelaide’s Frank Barry was awarded the medal in 1915 but in 1998 the SANFL issued retrospective Magarey Medals in the ten instances where players received the same number of votes at the end of the season.
Hosking is one of only three players to win multiple Magarey Medals for Port Adelaide with the others being Quinn and Russell Ebert.
Some of the club’s most famous names have also taken home the medal including Davy Boyd, Geof Motley, Trevor Obst, Greg Anderson, Scott Hodges and Nathan Buckley.
The sketch at the top of this cabinet shows the club’s 15 medallists to 1992 and there have been four more. Among them are Ebert’s son Brett Ebert who won the medal in 2003 before a nine-year AFL career.
The club’s most recent winner was Jeremy Clayton in 2005 and you can see his medal at the bottom of the cabinet. Clayton played 125 SANFL games for Port Adelaide and won five best and fairest awards.
The story of his 2005 Magarey Medal win is quite remarkable, he watched the presentation from a hospital bed after injuring his spleen during the finals series that season.
Head along the cabinet to our next stop, where we will take a look at the 1970s, 80s and 90s where the club set the platform for its push onto the national stage.