When Gordon Barton closed the Sunday Observer newspaper in 1971, Maxwell Newton was quick to replace it with the Melbourne Observer newspaper within a fortnight.

Newton enlisted Victorian Football League identity Harry Beitzel to build the sports section of the newspaper for a sports-mad Melbourne readership.

This was still an era of all VFL matches being played on a Saturday afternoon, and trots (harness racing) being staged at the Melbourne Showgrounds on a Saturday night.

Henry John Beitzel was born on April 6, 1927, coming to prominence umpiring 182 VFL matches between 1948–1960.

After an operation on his achilles tendon, Beitzel regained fitness and intended to continue umpiring, but instead took up a role in the media for the 1961 season.

He joined radio station 3KZ as a replacement for Jack Mueller.

Beitzel later covered football for 3AW, 3AK and the ABC radio stations, as well as writing for the Herald Sun, Truth, The Sunday Telegraph and The Australian.

His early work on television was on the ABC, pioneering broadcasting with innovations included the introduction of statistics during broadcasts of matches, as well as comprehensive previews and reviews of games, a format which is still popular today.

He drew inspiration from watching the 1966 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship Final on television, and in 1967 sent an Australian side – ‘The Galahs’ – to play the game against an Irish side.

Beitzel followed this up the next year with the Australian Football World Tour, a six-match series with games played against Irish teams in Ireland, the UK and United States. The 1968 Galahs also played exhibition matches of Australian Rules throughout the tour, including a game in Bucharest, Romania.

Beitzel had started a newspaper, Footy Week, published weekly during the football season from about 1965.

For some of its life, Footy Week was available free from businesses such as Spotless Dry Cleaners and Caltex service stations.

Geoff Slattery’s The Stats Revolution acknowledges Beitzel and his business partner Ray Young as pioneering the use of match statistics including kicks, marks, tackles, frees for, and scores for each player and game.

Early, Footy Week was available midweek through the retail outlets, then Beitzel upped the ante by producing the newspaper on a Saturday night, with the publication available to readers first thing on Sundays.

The Long family was involved with the weekly distribution of Barton’s Sunday Observer from 1969, and later the Sunday Review from October 1970.

The Review (later named Nation Review) used an independent network of milk bars across Melbourne, and Beitzel engaged the distributors to deliver the papers on a Sunday morning, first with Footy Week to Caltex service stations.

The Victorian edition of Footy Week was like the around-the-grounds coverage that Beitzel and his colleagues pioneered on Melbourne radio.
Not long after their ‘partnership’ commenced in March 1971, Newton and Beitzel fell out.

With the help of Sir Frank Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press, the Observer was delivered to newsagency sub-agents for the first time.
Until that time the sub-agents had only sold Sydney Sunday papers, trucked overnight from New South Wales to Victoria.

The local Melbourne weekend newspaper diet included the Saturday night edition of The Herald, and the Saturday night edition of the Sporting Globe.

Beitzel recognised Melbourne people’s insatiable appetite for all things sport.
He announced in the July 18, 1971, edition of Footy Week that his newspaper would carry a new name and identity the following week.

“Now called Sunday Sport, it is a bigger and better paper, combining all the Footy Week features with a host of other information, pictures and highlights.”

Beitzel announced a new turf section with “furlong and finish pictures of each Melbourne race, all the de-tails of Saturday night’s Show-grounds trotting with bell-lap and finish pictures of each event”.

The new Sunday Sport included a guide for Monday’s country trotting.
The final edition of the newspaper using the Footy Week name was 20 pages “published by Harry Beitzel & Associates Pty Ltd, P.R. Consultants, 183 Clarendon St, South Melbourne, phone 699 1033, and printed by Stockland Press Pty Ltd, cnr Queensberry St and Peel St, North Melbourne”.

Writers included Tom Lahiff, Arthur Oliver, Roy Wright, Doug Bigelow, Jack Currie, Jonathon Isle; with soccer coverage from Len Stone; racing by ‘Peeping Pete’ (Harry Beitzel’s brother, Vic), Frank O’Brien; greyhounds with Peter Pearson; and trotting with Peter Wharton.

Much of the typesetting was completed by Shirley Forbes on an IBM golfball machine. I later worked with Shirley on the Farrago newspaper at the University of Melbourne in 1975-77.

Advertisements appeared for radio stations 3UZ, 3XY (Jack Dyer) and 3KZ; and the ABV-2 football show hosted by Harry Beitzel.

Sunday Sport continued until the 1971 VFL Grand Final, to be superseded by a weekly 32-page newspaper, Sunday News.

Priced at 12 cents, the mono (black-and-white) newspaper included reports by Maureen Gilchrist, Colin Talbot, Michael Cahill. Michael Foulkes, Basil Silcove, Peter Janson and a soccer writer ‘Martin Aston’.

In edition number two, Harry Beitzel appealed for newsboys aged over 12: “I can personally assure all parents, and the boys themselves, that they will be given an honest deal and will be helping to build a decent family newspaper for Melbourne.”

Sunday News only lasted 26 editions, and losses for Beitzel totalled more than $200,000. Many creditors were left unpaid.

Fairly early in its life, Beitzel sacked the Nation Review distributors from distributing Sunday News.

The newspaper did not come up to the standard set by Newton’s Mel-bourne Observer. Its distribution arrangements meant poor retail sales, and advertising revenue was meagre.

Footy Week, Sunday Sport and Sunday News were pioneers of VFL media. Harry Beitzel’s contribution was recognised with his entry into the Australian Football League’s hall of fame in 2006.

• Harry Beitzel left unpaid debts to the Long family. Many years later, I gently reminded Harry of us, and some number of years he contributed his Footy Week column to my Melbourne Observer newspaper. Harry Beitzel died on August 13, 2017.