The storied career of Scot Palmer

His sign-off from the offices of the Sunday Press was always “keep on punching”—and Scot Palmer is doing just that.

The legendary Melbourne sports editor and reporter says he’s “boxing on” as he recovers from a cancer diagnosis in February that has stripped kilograms off him and forced him to take his food through a tube in his stomach.

“How would you describe it, Lorraine?” he asked his wife of 56 years when quizzed about his health.

“You’re good,” she replied as she pottered in the kitchen of their home at Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula.

“Yeah, I’m good, on the mend,” he said. “Lorraine’s getting me up and around. I tell you what, she’s a dynamo. I wouldn’t have survived this without her.”

It all happened so quickly, Palmer, 80 next March, explained.

One night he was listening to 3AW in bed and felt his mouth filling with what he thought was saliva. It was blood.

When he went to the bathroom it spurted out like water from a tap.

Straight away he said to his wife: “This isn’t good.”

He was right. Tests showed it was cancer at the back of the tongue.

Palmer was treated at the Peter MacCallum Centre, receiving chemotherapy and seven weeks of radiation. Sometimes he came out of it feeling like his tongue was on fire. On other occasions he was badly disoriented.

But his medical specialists think they intervened in time and he’ll make a full recovery.

As he regains his strength, Palmer has been thinking.

“Still having trouble sleeping since my treatment ended, but find my mind racing on what I should have done years ago. Maybe a book,” he tweeted on June 16.

“Write it, Scotty,” one of his followers replied.

Lorraine has been at him about it for at least 10 years.

With his great newspaper mate Greg Hobbs, Palmer penned three books in the 1970s—Today’s 50 Greatest, 100 Great Marks and Football’s 50 Greatest—that sold well.

Palmer’s recollections of his long career as a press man surely would, too.

“I’ve written down a lot of preamble stuff,” he said.

“I know how to start it now. I’ve rewritten the lead in my head 15 times.

“I know I have to get something dramatic up front … can’t just say I worked at it for 58 years … have to hit them with it early.”

Fifty-eight years and it was a thrill a day for him.

He was sold on the newspaper game from the moment he walked in to the old Herald building on Flinders St, looked over the newsroom and took in the sight and clickety-clack sound of reporters typing their stories. “This is for me,” he thought.

Newspaper ink ran in the family. His father, Clyde, was a crime and sports reporter, most notably at The Truth, and his uncle, Howard, wrote the iconic column A place in the Sun for The Sun News-Pictorial.

As a schoolboy, Richmond-born and raised Palmer was a copyboy for The Truth in his spare time, running the racing results.

He said his “big breakthrough” was becoming its film critic. He had to file a couple of paragraphs and sum up the movie using a caricature of a man sitting in a chair: He sat upright if the film was good and snored if it was bad. Howard Palmer told his nephew that The Sun’s copyboy, Ken Burslem, might be moving on and there could be a vacancy.

Palmer, 17, who’d scrambled through Trinity Grammar, made some inquiries and landed the job.

He joined the staff in 1954, running messages, making the tea, “keeping the editor out of trouble”.

“I just loved the joint,” he said. “I used to go home, go to bed, get up and go straight back to work. I’d just sit around and watch the subs work.”

His four-year cadetship completed, he moved into sport, covering the VFA because no one else wanted to.

Soon he had some good contacts that were just as eager as him to give the association a more prominent run in The Sun.

A Moorabbin committeeman tipped him off to the fact St Kilda powerbrokers Graham Huggins and Ian Drake were in a meeting about taking the club to Moorabbin.

Palmer raced to the ground, waited for Huggins and Drake to emerge, asked his questions and filed his story. It appeared on Page 1 the next day.

There were stories of Coburg using a helicopter to dry out the ground, of Oakleigh’s John Coghlan saying he’d received death threats and had to have security men at his house over what opposition supporters thought was his heavy-handed play, and of Port Melbourne’s Tommy Lahiff being handcuffed by police.

“I got more and more space,” Palmer said.

He also began to attend league training and eventually joined Kevin Hogan, Jack Dunn, Barrie Bretland, Rex Pullen and Hobbs on the football reporting staff.

Collingwood great Lou Richards was a regular at The Herald building, and he and Palmer struck up a friendship that endures.

One day Palmer remarked that the panel members on Channel 7’s World of Sport program never asked the right questions.

Richards, a star of the show, told Palmer he was welcome to drop in on Sundays and write a few down.

That was his introduction to television and where he met a young Gordon Bennett, who would go on to be the station’s leading producer.

Years later, when Bennett decided Seven’s Saturday night replays could do with a news edge, he tapped Palmer for the role.

At first it was pre-recorded and Palmer went off the cuff. Production staff used to joke about “Scotty Lotto”, taking bets on how many takes he would need to get the segment right. “I think I got up to 17 once,” Palmer said. Eventually it was recorded live as Palmer made the transition to another media sphere, rare then, common now.

He’s still remembered for his sign-off. People who encounter him on the peninsula bunch a fist and say, “Keep on punching, Scotty.”

There were also stints on breakfast radio and gigs on football panels.

Keeping company with the likes of Ted Whitten and Ron Barassi, Palmer assumed a high profile in football-mad Melbourne.

When the makers of the movie The Club needed someone to play the role of reporter, they got Palmer to play himself.

He received two modest royalty cheques for his star turn.

“Laurie, we’re getting persistent rumours, mate, from within the club over Geoff Hayward. Would you care to comment?” he asked coach Laurie Holden, played by Jack Thompson, in one scene.

“No, Scotty,” Holden replied. The Age’s Ron Carter also had a cameo.

By that stage Palmer was entrenched as sports editor of the Sunday Press. He’d replaced his pal Ian McDonald, who had gone off to work for the VFL as media manager.

Before he’d been appointed he’d been anointed—at a VFL Grand Final lunch in the early 1970s.

“We’d like to congratulate Scotty Palmer, the new sports editor of the Sunday Press,” league boss Dr Allen Aylett said at the lunch.

Newspaper high-ups who were at the function knew nothing about it.

“You embarrassed them in front of all those dignitaries,” Palmer was told by an editor when he returned to work.

“I didn’t do a bloody thing. I was sitting down having a damn good meal,” Palmer shot back. “I don’t care one way or the other.” But they went with him.

Palmer introduced the Punchlines column to the Sunday Press and it was wildly popular. Up to 20 juicy tidbits from the sporting world were played around a photograph of a pretty girl, a so-called “Punchliner”.

“I always felt we didn’t have enough women in the paper,” he said.

“It was a man’s paper. When I put Punchlines together I started finding footballers’ wives and girlfriends and I’d slip them in.

“As long as they had a connection to football or sport I was in business.

“They weren’t models. They weren’t household names or anything like that. They were average people.”

But Palmer interviewed more than his share of household names.

Spending time in the London bureau after receiving a Rupert Murdoch scholarship, he was sent to interview Cassius Clay at Chalk Farm and stepped forward to weigh him on a sliding scale at the gymnasium.

Clay asked about Australia’s indigenous population and told Palmer: “Your mob should be doing more for them.”

Later that night, Palmer was walking through Soho when a large car pulled up.

Clay wound down the window and boomed: “Hey, what are you doing out at this hour?” He asked Palmer if he needed a lift. He regrets that he declined the ride.

“Should have jumped in,” he said. “Got the shock of my life. I could tell you the spot where I was. Near the Ritz Hotel.”

At the Barcelona Games (one of eight Olympics he covered either for the wire services or Seven) he tracked down Nelson Mandela, who was in quiet discussion in a room with South African athletes.

When Mandela broke away from them, Palmer, cameraman in tow, asked for a few words.

The interview lasted five minutes, but was too late for Australian evening news services. NBC snapped it up for US viewers.

There were plenty of other notables with whom he rubbed shoulders: Palmer has photographs of himself with US runner Florence Griffith Joyner, former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, boxer Jeff “Hit Man” Harding and tennis great John Newcombe.

He even has a cheque for 20 cents sent from Sir Billy Snedden, for payment of a bet they’d made about their harness horses.

In between his newspaper, radio and TV commitments he found time to run the Cherry Tree Hotel in Richmond, in partnership with Barassi and Adrian Gallagher.

It was badly run down and a haunt for drug dealers when they moved in, but thriving when they sold it five years later.

He credits Lorraine for its success. Much earlier, he’d also picked up work as one of the Eric Beecher-edited Inside Football’s earliest contributors. And yes, his nom de plume really was Hamish McLachlan.

Palmer stayed at the Sunday Press until the 1989 Melbourne newspaper shake-up, when he crossed over to The Sunday Sun.

The Age made a play for him and he agreed to an interview. During it he noticed the editors looked out the window more than they looked at him. He decided he couldn’t work for people who couldn’t look him in the eye and so chose to keeping break his news on the News Ltd payroll.

Palmer retired from Sunday Herald Sun in 2008, which in newspaper terms is almost an age ago.

The industry has changed irrevocably. Eyes that once scanned newsprint are now going to screens, tablets and phones, and advertising dollars have made the same migration.

Palmer is saddened the business model that sustained newspapers for years has fractured. But he isn’t ready to write them off, so to speak.

What he is ready to do is to set down some of the many stories he tells so well.

A book? It would be aptly titled Deadlines, Headlines and Punchlines. Or, shorter and sharper, Keep on Punching.