PREMIUM

Sport

Sports Hall of Fame - Doug Tuhan

By Max Stainkamph

Jul 12, 2021

This year, 26 district sporting legends are being inducted to the hall of fame, honour roll and junior honour roll categories in the Greater Shepparton Sports Hall of Fame. The News is featuring stories on each of the inductees in the lead-up to the induction ceremony on August 6. Today News reporter Max Stainkamph speaks to Doug Tuhan, who is being inducted to the honour roll.

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Decades ago, before the oval was seeded and when Doug Tuhan was a young man, the boundary line of Murchison Recreation Reserve was a beaten-up dirt track circling a sea of green grass.

Murchison’s answer to the famous Gabba greyhound racing track ringing the field was no more than shoulder-width wide — the width of Tuhan's shoulders.

The dirt track ringing the oval was the work of him and him alone: forged as he ran lap after lap after lap of the boundary line.

When Tuhan was running, he felt alive.

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Tuhan will have his name put on the honour roll of the Greater Shepparton Sports Hall of Fame next month to celebrate a running and football umpiring career which began in the late 1960s and is yet to officially finish, with the septuagenarian still umpiring a game in 2021.

Affectionately and unofficially known as “The Mayor of Murchison” Tuhan ran the Murchison 10km race for 40 years, participated in the Stawell Gift carnival and has become part of the furniture at Murchison-Toolamba home games.

Running wasn't his first choice. After a fumble at football with Stanhope and a crack at cricket at Cooma Tuhan came to a realisation.

“I was no good at any of them,” he said with a laugh.

“My brother put me on to a bloke who trained runners in Kyabram. I ummed and ahhed about it and thought ‘do I or don't I go?’, but I did and I went okay.

“That’s where it started and I’ve enjoyed it ever since.”

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His running career kicked off at 23 and a few years later he moved to Murchison where he literally left his mark on the town.

“When I moved to Murch there was a brown track around the oval from where I was running on it, the whole thing was mine,” he said.

He only put on spikes for races, which early in the piece were eight or 10 times a year in Melbourne. He specialised in five or 10km races and absolutely loved competing.

“I guess because I wasn’t much good at the other sports I wanted to achieve something,” Tuhan said with a laugh.

“When running became a competition I really enjoyed it.”

It was only after a gruelling win at Kangaroo Ground in 1969 other runners began to take notice, with “six or seven” coaches coming up to him following his victory with offers to join their stables.

Noncommittal at the time, Tuhan said he'd think about it. A month later just one contacted him to see if he was still interested.

Fifty-two years later Tuhan and his coach Ray McCreery are still firm friends.

Blown away by McCreery's plans for him Tuhan trained and trained hard — his blood, sweat and tears paying off as he made his way to the Stawell Gift carnival.

While Tuhan never competed in the famed sprint itself, he picked up victory in the 1600m in 1974 and again in 1989 and won the famed “two mile” 3200m backmarkers title in 1978, as well as three seconds and two thirds along the way.

He’s been back since his heydays running, too. He stepped back onto the dais in 2002 after claiming the veteran’s 1500m handicap, and again in 2006 when he was accepted into the Gift’s Hall of Fame in the same year as Cathy Freeman.

By the mid 1970s, Tuhan had enough recognition and connections in the Victorian running community to organise a race of his own at Murchison.

He and wife Marg ran the race for 40 years with the help of fellow runner and Stawell Gift winner Noel Hussey, and it only stopped when the Tuhans moved to Tatura five years ago.

Tuhan — then in his late 60s — came third in the final race, which in its heyday would attract nearly 100 runners.

“People would come up in buses from Bendigo and Melbourne to compete and enjoy the day out in Murchison,” Tuhan said.

He said there was always something to keep people amused, be it releasing a bantam rooster or greasy pig in the middle of the oval and tasking dozens of children to herd it back — “they ended up in the caravan park before they caught it”, while another year a three-lap race of the oval was held between three teams.

Each of the teams would run the first lap in gumboots, then bike the muddy oval on the second lap before carting around a team member in a wheelbarrow in a mad dash for the finish line.

In the process of leaving his mark on the oval, Tuhan was noticed by the football club, and he joked by 1974 the Grasshoppers had “conned” him into running the boundary.

Within 12 months, he was running out the seniors and reserves games along the boundary.

Forty years later he’s still at the club on a Saturday cheering the Grasshoppers on.

“I just love footy. I can’t wait until every weekend for the footy to come on, the AFL or VFL or up here,” he said, gesturing to the green grass Murchison calls home every second Saturday.

“I was up here for the Murchison vs Toolamba charity game in May and it was so good to see people you hadn’t seen in years.

“I spent 40 years here, most as a trainer. It’s just being with people and players that I enjoy.”

Tuhan umpired countless games on the oval, too, either as a boundary umpire or central umpire.

Central umpiring was not something he set out to do when he began — only after he took the role as umpires’ fitness coach in 1993 was he given the call-up.

“They called me up and said can you umpire up at Nathalia tomorrow in the reserves and I thought ‘Christ, I’ve never umpired yet’,” he said.

“I went up there, went to both rooms and said ‘look lads, I’ve only umpired kids down at the school, there’ll probably be a few mistakes’, but I got through and ended up umpiring all the time.”

“All the time” turned into 27 years.

He said he loved the camaraderie between players and umpires as well as the running aspect to it, and in his time in white only ended up at the tribunal referring players four times in nearly three decades.

He said he only felt threatened on the field once, where a player he gave a yellow card to refused to leave the field.

“I said ‘if you don’t go off then I’ll have to give you a red’ and he put his fist up here, near my head, and said ‘go on’, and the trainers couldn’t get him off.”

“I wasn’t going to get my head bashed in. Five minutes later he’s coming back out at me, and I put the red card up. I heard him kick the shed in as he went off.

“(Later, at the tribunal) Ian McDonald was chairman and said ‘what did you think you doing? You had the Mayor of Murchison, Dougy Tuhan, umpiring and you’ve told him you’d knock his f***ing block off’.”

Fortunately for Tuhan, those incidents were few and far between across almost three decades of umpiring, and despite managing a reserves game in white in 2021, a few health complications mean his days with the whistle in hand are likely behind him.

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His only regrets are he didn't start earlier, at 17 or 18, and that he wasn't able to train as many young runners as he would have liked.

The one he trained he remembers most was a young David Teague, who approached Tuhan about adding speed to his game following feedback from AFL recruiters.

He began training with Tuhan who, in his 50s, left the then 18-year-old in the dirt around the Shepparton athletics track.

Only weeks later, Teague was overtaking him on 40ºC evenings around the track before getting on his bike to ride 40km home to Katandra.

Tuhan said he was proud to be added to the honour roll.

However, Tuhan is still getting as much exercise as he can and, while he’s no longer leaving a bare patch of dirt around Murchison Recreation Reserve, the mark he’s left on the town on the river will be there for a long, long time yet.