When Mick was interviewed by Herald Sun reporter Andrew Rule in 2011, he described me as a ‘unique character’ and told a story about how he’d seen me rub mud into another kid’s hair during a training session then run away laughing.
‘Did you do that, Brendan?’ Mick yelled out.
‘No, I did not,’ I said.
‘But I saw you,’ Mick yelled back.
‘Well, then I did!’ I replied with a grin.
I don’t remember that incident, but I have no doubt it happened. I was up to that sort of mischief on every training night. If I wasn’t doing stuff like that, I became really bored.
After Dad had become our coach, my teammates voted me their captain for the season. That was another boost to my self-confidence. I loved leading the team onto the field every Sunday. I felt like the king of the kids. That year, I also won the club’s best-and-fairest award and a trophy for being the best player in the annual South-West Gippsland Junior Football League lightning premiership. Dad, who wore a big gold earring in his left ear in those days, did his best to pull me into line whenever my youthful ego appeared to be getting out of control.
Our other under-9 team, the Magpies, was captained by my best mate, Chris Newman, and coached by his dad. As much as I hated to admit it, their team was better than ours. In fact, three of the players in that side ended up in the AFL—Chris at Richmond, Matthew Boyd at the Western Bulldogs and Adam McPhee at Essendon then Fremantle. And Chris and Matthew later became the captains of their respective AFL teams.
As captain of the Zebras, I had to write a letter—Mum drafted most of it—for my club’s 1990 annual report. It read:
On behalf of the team I would like to thank Mr Krotofil and Mr Ellingworth for their support and effort throughout the season.
I would also like to thank my teammates for their support and effort throughout the season.
My biggest thankyou goes to my dad for coaching us through the season, and he did well for his first year of coaching football.
I would like to thank all the parents for coming every Sunday and supporting the side. Thank you.
BRENDAN FEVOLA
Captain Under-9 Zebras
Next to those words was a small photo of me. I had dead-straight black hair, which had been cut in the ‘spike’ style that was all the rage in the late 1980s.
The following year, my team moved into the first division of the Dandenong & District Junior Football League under-10 competition, which meant playing proper games for the first time. Dad got the job as coach again, and Mum’s partner, David, was our runner. That was seriously weird. David would jog up to me on the field and try to give me advice about how I should play. I usually told him to get stuffed.
Jason ended up having a great relationship with David, who became a father-figure to him. The things David liked, Jason came to like as well, such as riding motorbikes and all that sort of crap. I used to try and sway Jason away from David’s interests, but the tactic rarely worked. Luckily, hanging out with Dad at footy training and on match days eased the tensions that were bubbling away in my mind.
1991: Brendan is directly behind the placard, holding the football.
Dad took his coaching duties a bit more seriously when we graduated to the under-10s, but I was always encouraging him to abandon the skills-based training drills in favour of playing scratch matches. I lost interest when we were doing lane-work kicking or handball exercises. I’d think, ‘Why do a handball drill? Let’s just play a game and handball in that.’ Dad usually listened to me, so on most training nights we finished off with a practice match, and the other boys loved it too.
We made the grand final and played Cranbourne out at Endeavour Hills. Dad let Jason run onto the field with us as our mascot; he thought it was Christmas. It was a great game, with little separating us and them throughout the four quarters. When the siren went, we were a couple of points in front. However, one of their players had marked the ball about 55 metres out. Despite the fact that this kid was only ten years old, he went back to have a shot and try to win the match. He was never going to make it, but it was heart-in-the-mouth stuff for me and my teammates all the same. To our great relief, the kick fell way short and we won the flag. We all started celebrating by jumping on each other and yelling and screaming. The Cranbourne kids were all crying, but I couldn’t stop smiling. I was a premiership captain, Dad was a premiership coach, and I thought life was pretty damn good.
At our club’s presentation day a week or so later, I won the team’s best-and-fairest. I had already won the league’s goal-kicking award, having booted thirty-five for the season, and had finished third in its best-and-fairest. Dad received a pat on the back in the club’s annual report. ‘Angelo is someone whom I consider the quiet achiever in the club,’ wrote the president, Jim Camilleri. ‘He has coached a group of boys who have a great football future.’
Brendan accepting an award.
With his Narre Warren teammates; Brendan is to the right of the boy with the towel.
I graduated to the under-11s in 1992 and Dad coached us again. Maybe we had a bit of a premiership hangover after all the Maccas we’d eaten following our grand final win the year before, because our team slipped down the ladder a bit. We made the top four but were knocked out in the first semi-final. However, not winning another premiership didn’t really concern me. Footy, and life in general, was just about having fun.
Our games were always held on Sunday, and if you played well you won a voucher for McDonald’s or KFC. Most of us wanted Maccas, so if we won a KFC voucher we would try and swap it. It was never very hard, though, as there were always a few boys who loved their chicken salt. I was often among the best players, so to Mum’s chagrin, I was usually leading the junk food charge. While the boys were eating, the parents would stay at the clubhouse and have a few drinks. We’d return with bellies full of burgers and fries and start kicking the footy out on the oval. The Newman boys were always in the thick of the action, as were Jason and I. We’d kick the footy for hours, even if we’d just played two games—sometimes I would play in the under-11s and then fill in for the under-12s if they were a bit short on numbers. There was a gym behind the footy club, and when it got dark we would turn the lights off in there and play. A lot of kids suffered broken bones falling off things, but it was still so much fun.
Dad decided to end his short-lived coaching career after the 1992 season, although the next year he ran the Narre Warren JFC’s Wednesday night bingo competition, the club’s major source of funding, and generated an impressive $14,000 profit. Some years later, at the ripe old age of thirty-six, he took up playing footy for Narre Warren and retired four years later after making a bit of a name for himself in the reserves. Dad’s kicking was terrible because he’d never learned how to do it, but he used to have a real go when he was out on the field. Toughened up by all those fights during his lacrosse career, he would look after the young blokes if any scuffles broke out. In his own words, he ‘didn’t mind a biff’ on the footy field.
In the under-12s in 1993, I was coached by my dad’s friend Steve Hamilton. He was a tough and talented footballer who scared me as a coach. When he spoke, you listened. I frustrated Steve at times because I was a bit temperamental on the field. If I kicked an early goal, my confidence would soar and I’d have a great game. But if things went against me early—if I missed an easy shot, dropped an easy mark or was caught holding the ball—I tended to get down on myself and lose interest in the match. I’d just stand in the goal square, hands on my hips, staring at the ground. Steve hated those displays of bad body language. He would give me a good talking to at the quarter breaks, sometimes firing me back up, sometimes not. Looking back, I think Steve’s approach was a good one. He was trying to point me in the right direction, keep me on the right track. He knew I had talent and he wanted to make sure I didn’t waste it.
Thanks to a growth spurt, I was able to dominate games in the under-12s—when I was switched on—and Steve m
oved me between the ruck and the key forward positions. As I racked up best-on-ground awards, some of the parents watching on became convinced that I was good just because I was big. They thought the other kids would overtake me when they grew themselves. But I had no such doubts. I started to believe I could make it all the way to the AFL. I was runner-up in our best-and-fairest that year as well as being our leading goal kicker. As a team, though, we had a slightly disappointing year, failing to make it past the preliminary final.
In 1994, seven of us headed a few kilometres down the Princes Highway to the Berwick JFC because we wanted to play in a stronger competition. I was sad to leave Narre Warren. The club had been like a second home for me, and despite the fact that I was only thirteen, I had played almost 150 games for it. The other downside was that I was no longer hanging around the same footy ground as Chris Newman, who remained my closest mate. But the Berwick people welcomed us with open arms, and it was there, in the under-14s, that I started to show that I had some serious talent.
I played mostly as a key forward and kicked some huge bags of goals. Kicking eight or ten in a game was nothing that year. On one occasion I booted twenty-four goals! That was a crazy experience, kicking a goal every three minutes for an entire game. My teammates helped me bag a few easy ones late in the piece, but I earned most of them, don’t worry about that. My greatest strengths at that stage were my marking, my kicking and my speed over 20 metres. If my teammates put the ball up in the air, I could mark it regardless of what my opponent did. If they put it out in front of me, I could burn off my opponent. And I could already kick the ball 50 metres.
We made the Dandenong & District Junior Football League grand final that year, and it was a great day because I kicked my 100th goal and we won the game. No-one ran onto the field when I brought up my century, but my teammates jumped all over me and I became a bit of a hero among the Berwick kids. Scouts from local TAC Cup club the Dandenong Stingrays, whose job it was to identify the best young players in the region and point them towards the AFL, also took notice. I was selected in the Stingrays’ under-16 squad, which meant I would play in a carnival against some of the best fifteen- and sixteen-year-old kids in the state. Mum was a bit nervous about this, as she felt I was too young to be getting sucked into what she called ‘the system’. She just wanted me to keep having fun playing footy and to not feel pressured to impress the scouts.
During my time in the Stingrays, I met two boys who would share much of my football journey with me. The first was Adam Ramanauskas, a skinny kid from Hallam, just down the road from Narre Warren. ‘Rama’ was the twenty-fifth, and last, player picked for that squad, but there was no doubting his athletic ability. He could leap amazingly high off just one step. Rama, who was still deciding whether he wanted to try and be an elite footballer or a basketballer, was smart and sensible—the opposite of me, I suppose. Unlike most other teenagers in the south-eastern suburbs, Rama never smoked and rarely drank alcohol. Yet we both had a love of mucking around and playing silly games at the footy club, so we got along well.
The other kid I met in the under-16 squad was a little forward pocket by the name of Stephen Milne. ‘Stevie’, who was from the rough and ready suburb of Hampton Park, was a ripper, a constant ball of energy who never appeared down or unhappy. Stevie was the smallest kid in the squad and there were doubts about his endurance and pace, but he had an uncanny knack for kicking goals. Over and over again, he would work out where the ball was going to land, whether it was kicked into open space or falling to ground from a marking contest. He was also a deadly accurate kick at goal. The closer he was to the boundary, the more confident I’d be that he’d slot it straight through. Even as a fifteen-year-old, Stevie’s post-goal celebrations were his trademark. Every time he put one through, he’d charge around punching the air with his fists and generally carrying on. He was able to lift the whole team with his attitude.
Back at the local level, I again dominated the DDJFL under-15 competition in the early rounds of the 1995 season. Although I would crack the sads on the field every now and then, I rarely felt nervous. I just knew that if I played to the best of my ability, I could do whatever I wanted on the footy field. However, my charge was halted when I broke my ankle and had to watch from the sidelines for a couple of months, which was very frustrating—I was never a good spectator. I sat by the interchange bench, annoying people and trying to make them laugh. I returned just in time for the preliminary final and I kicked a few goals as we set up a grand final date with Noble Park, which had gone through the season undefeated. That grand final, which took place at Shepley Oval in Dandenong, is one of my favourite footy memories. We were seven goals down at half-time but came back and won by 1 point. The jubilation after the game was amazing. Even though I wasn’t among the best players on that afternoon, it was a really special thing to be a part of.
In 1996 I graduated to the Berwick under-16s, where my golden run continued. We won another flag and I was invited, along with eighty others, to do pre-season training with the Stingrays’ under-18 team, which played in the TAC Cup. This was a big deal. Make their squad and play well in the TAC Cup and you were on your way to the AFL. Now I was more confident than ever that I was going to make it to the big time.
My success meant that footy consumed me throughout my teenage years. When I wasn’t playing or training, I was often involved in the game in some other capacity. For instance, my first paid job was as a pizza boy at Waverley Park, the home of the mighty Saints. I used to love working at the AFL footy; I thought it was the most amazing thing. I would walk up and down the aisles dressed in a bright red shirt, yelling out ‘Hot pizza!’ It was the best-tasting pizza, too, especially when you pinched one straight out of the oven. I used to try and sell as many pizzas as I could before the footy started, then go and watch the game with the Saints’ cheer squad. My mates and I knew where all our best customers (the ‘bigger’ people) regularly sat, and we’d race each other to get to them. You’d fill up your box with pizzas in the kitchen then bolt up the steps. As soon as you sold those, you’d sprint back to get more.
The kitchen was downstairs near the change rooms and we used to dash in there when the bloke on the door was distracted. I’d be in awe of Stewie Loewe, ‘Plugger’ Lockett and Robert Harvey, whom I idolised. I hated running but Harvey could run all day—I still don’t know how he pushed himself so hard. I’d laugh when I saw little Matty Lappin in his number 22 long-sleeved jumper because he was a midget compared to the others.
Mum worked at Waverley Park as well, but she was in the AFL members area whereas I was always in the outer. To go and see her, I had to get past the dreaded ‘blue coats’, those over-officious blokes who ringed the field at the end of the game to ensure no rogue spectators got out there before the players had left. They were a nightmare. Dad loved watching St Kilda play, so he was often at the games as well.
I think I made about $50 per shift from my pizza job, and I usually spent a fair bit of it at the school canteen the following week. The boys in Birch Court lived on those pizzas for a few years because Mum used to bring heaps of the unsold ones home and put them in our freezer. Chris Newman and I would often heat up a Hawaiian and a supreme after school, though they never tasted as good as when they were fresh out of the oven at Waverley Park.
Doing well at school was not a priority for me during those years. Other than physical and outdoor education, I wasn’t interested, although I did OK at maths when I put my mind to it. My best efforts at school came during recess and lunchtime, when I took screamers on other kids’ heads. My attitude was, why worry about study when I was going to be an AFL star. Also, I had started my secondary education at St Francis Xavier College in Beaconsfield and I hated the place, especially the religious education classes. I lasted there until halfway through year 8, when the expensive fees and my aptitude for getting into trouble all got too much and I was transferred to the Fountain Gate campus of Eumemmerring College, just up the road from our hou
se.
I was much happier at Fountain Gate because all of my old primary school mates were there, but the schoolwork still didn’t interest me in the slightest. Instead, I was always off with the fairies, thinking about something else, usually footy. I figured that I’d need a good signature if I was going to be an autograph-signing AFL star, so one of my best mates at the time, Jacqui Hatch, came up with a really good one for me. Jacqui was just a mate, never a girlfriend, and we often sat together in classes. She did a lot of my homework for me and she also carried my books around when I broke my leg playing footy. The signature that she came up with is still the one I use today.
In my final year at Fountain Gate, which only went up to year 10, I took even less interest in my studies because I’d made the Dandenong Stingrays squad for the 1997 season. In the wake of that, my excitement and energy made me quite demanding. I lived my life as a sixteen-year-old at 100 miles an hour. I couldn’t wait for anything. If I had footy training, even if it was half an hour away in Frankston, I just had to be there now. I’d be on edge in the car—‘Get to training, get to training!’ And as soon I got there, bang, I’d be out on the ground, running around like mad.
Mum wanted to give me the best possible chance of making it to the AFL. So to free up enough time to drive me all over the place, she gave up her cushy office job in the city and took a job cleaning toilets and things like that for a company owned by Mick Morland. She pretty much gave up everything that was good in her own life to help me make the highest level in footy. And I never really showed her that I appreciated what she had done. I never really showed any affection towards her. I suppose I just took all her efforts for granted.
Fev: In My Own Words Page 3