Edward "Carji" Greeves, Jr. (1 November 1903 - 15 April 1963) was the winner of the inaugural Brownlow Medal in 1924, Greeves played with the Geelong Football Club from 1923-31 and wore jumper number 20.
He was given the nickname as a baby by a friend of the family, the New South Wales golfer Michael Scott, after he had seen Carjillo, the Rajah of Bong, a popular play of the day.
Greeves was honoured with having the Geelong Football Club's Best and Fairest award named after him, the Carji Greeves Medal. In 1996 Greeves was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame.
Greeves represented Victoria seven times.
We are honoured to have the Carji name for our club and grateful to the Carji Greeves family for their permission. Also thanks go to the Geelong Football Club via its historian Russell Stephens for their support.
History of the Carji Club
In 2002 three friends (Tim McNeil, Dean Martinelli and Chris Reardon) started a competition to see who could select the highest Brownlow Medal vote getters from each AFL team. The person with the highest total brownlow votes received a free lunch courtesy of the other two participants.
Having enjoyed the format, the three friends deemed it appropriate to each invite one friend to participate in the next year’s competition but with two key stipulations: the first, that the invitees must follow a football club and be passionate about football and, the invitees must not be from the same company/organisation which the founding members represented.
Without knowing at the time, the second stipulation which is now more a guideline than a rule, has helped produce a membership covering a diverse range of organisation types and sizes.
Soon after its formation, the competition became affectionately known as The Big Brownlow Comp and thanks to the invite a friend rule membership grew exponentially to 24. Each year as the number of competition participants grew, so too did the ideas for improving the club which were discussed at the luncheon. Traditions developed such as “Dean’s Footy Trivia”, the announcing of new members and the “Ideas Session” at which each person was allowed, and encouraged, to stand up and provide new ideas to help improve the competition.
At the 2005 luncheon it was suggested and agreed that the competition should be named after the very first Brownlow Medal winner “Carji” Greeves – hence the current name The Carji Club was adopted.
