Tom Wills
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Thomas Wentworth Wills was an Australian sportsman who is credited along with Henry Harrison as one of the inventors of Australian rules football.
Wills was born on August 19, 1835 in Parramatta and his family moved to western Victoria when he was four years of age. As a boy, Wills played Marn Grook, an Aboriginal game similar to modern football codes with members of a nearby tribe. At the age of fourteen he was sent to England to attend the famous Rugby School. Upon his return to Melbourne in 1856, he became one of Victoria's best cricketers and was a high-ranking member of the Melbourne Cricket Club, despite his convict heritage.
During July 1858, Wills wrote a letter to Bell's Life, a Melbourne-based sporting publication, inviting anyone who might be interested to participate in a football match on the 31st of that month in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne. The following week, Wills umpired the first ever organised Australian rules match between Scotch College and Melbourne Grammar on the land which is now home to the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
On May 17 1859, Wills chaired the meeting which agreed upon the sport's rules, making the Australian game the first code of football to possess codified laws. During that year, he was also heavily involved in the formation of both the Melbourne and Geelong clubs, both of which he played for and both of which are still in existence today, playing in the Australian Football League.
Wills continued to be involved in football, both as a player and administrator, well into the 1860s. His time at Rugby had given him a liking for that school's particular brand of football, and in 1865 he was still trying to introduce a rugby-style cross-bar into the sport.
In his later years, Wills became an alcoholic and in May 1880 at the age of 44 he stabbed himself to death with a pair of scissors.
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