Taking shortcuts, trying to dodge the work, you’ve got a bit of a record of not being a hard worker. You want to set it straight now, so that people here believe you are committed, because a little chink like that unfortunately gets into everybody’s heads: selectors’ heads, coaches’ heads, the staff who are looking after you. They start doing that, then they pigeonhole you. Even when you are getting better and you are working hard, they’ve still got this thing in the back of their minds.
It was fair enough, and I certainly trained harder after that chat with him. I wanted to prove to everyone that I was worthy of a spot on the club’s list.
I only trained with Carlton twice a week that first year in the AFL system, which I spent living at home in Narre Warren. I got a lift to some training sessions with Matty Lappin, who had been traded from St Kilda to Carlton a couple of weeks before I was drafted. He lived out in Packenham, and heading into the city with him was like a dream come true. When Matty couldn’t take me to training, Carlton paid for a taxi, a $150 round trip. After I got my licence in early 1999, Mum bought me a red Nissan Bluebird and I began driving the old beast to some training sessions.
Every moment I spent at the Carlton footy club was exciting, although my first skills session was pretty scary. I was so nervous that my first couple of kicks went along the ground—though I tried to blame the footballs for not being pumped up enough or something like that. That initial pre-season was hard going. I was raw and skinny, weighing in at 83 kilograms, so much of my time was spent in the weights room. I was partnered with Aaron ‘Sammy’ Hamill, a star forward who was renowned for being hard at the ball and the man. He became my ‘buddy’ and looked after me in any way he could. Aaron was such a professional when it came to training and preparing his body for the rigours of AFL footy, and he could lift some serious weights. We became mates and remain so today; he lives just around the corner from me, and he’s got a daughter the same age as one of mine. My other good friends at the club in my early years were other young blokes like Murray Vance, Kris Massie, Ian Prendergast and Brett Backwell. Carlton had a pretty old list, with lots of established players, so us young fellas hung out together a fair bit.
At our jumper presentation, held a couple of weeks before the 1999 home-and-away season began, I was shocked to discover I would be wearing number 25, which had been made famous at Carlton by the legendary forward Alex Jesaulenko. ‘Jezza’ was one of the Blues’ favourites. He’d played 256 games, kicked 424 goals and won four premierships, and the screamer he’d taken in the 1970 Grand Final win over Collingwood—immortalised by Mike Williamson’s excited shout of ‘Jesaulenko, you beauty!’—had been named the mark of the century. Talk about pressure!
After playing a couple of games in the pre-season Ansett Cup competition, I began the season proper at full-forward in Carlton’s reserves team, kicking quite a few goals early on. We were coached by Wayne Brittain, who was big on tactics and professionalism. ‘Britts’ expected us to prepare properly for matches, not just on the training track but by avoiding alcohol and junk food at home. He continually told me that I needed to learn how to play in a number of positions, so he sent me into the back line at every opportunity. I wasn’t a big fan of chasing blokes around and Britts knew it, which only made him send me down back more often.
My breakout performance came against North Melbourne in round 13, when I kicked seven to become the leading goal kicker in the reserves. A month later, Parko gave me the news I had been waiting to hear. While I was relaxing after training in the spa, he tapped me on the shoulder and said he was selecting me to play my first senior game. And I wasn’t going to make my debut in any old contest. Rather, it was a game against Carlton’s biggest rival, Collingwood, on a Sunday afternoon at the MCG. I was so excited. My chance had come after fellow forward Brad Pearce had suffered a knee injury, and I was named on the interchange bench alongside Ron De Iulio, Adrian Hickmott and Simon Fletcher.
Parko told me this on a Wednesday night, but I had to keep quiet until the teams were released on Thursday afternoon. It meant I had to endure a whole day at school without telling anyone. It nearly killed me. I was desperate for the pats on the back to start. Nevertheless, everyone found out when my name was read out on The Footy Show, and I was the king of the kids at school on the Friday. Heaps of people congratulated me then promptly asked for tickets. The teachers didn’t even bother trying to make me do any work that day.
On the morning of the match, I pretty much leapt out of bed. It was Sunday 25 July 1999. As I donned my Carlton suit and put my pre-knotted tie over my head, I was almost shaking with excitement and nerves. At about 10 am, I jumped in my old Nissan Bluebird and drove up the South Eastern Freeway towards the ’G. Some good tunes were playing on the radio and I was feeling great. But then my car conked out just as I was driving past Waverley Park, where I’d sold pizzas a couple of years earlier. I tried again and again to start it, but it was dead. My worst nightmare had come true. I didn’t have a mobile phone back then, so I didn’t know what to do. There I was, a pimply faced kid wearing a Carlton suit, standing by the side of the road next to an old Bluebird. Nobody knew who I was, so no-one felt obliged to stop and help me. Just as I was starting to panic, Mum drove past on her way to the game. She hit the skids and pulled over about 100 metres in front of me. She bundled me into her car and raced towards the city. I was late for my first team meeting—the only time I turned up late in my entire career—but thankfully, Parko didn’t get too upset.
In terms of the history of Carlton versus Collingwood clashes, the crowd at the MCG that day was pretty small—only 53,560 people were in the stands. The reason was that the Magpies were having a terrible season. They had won only three of sixteen games and were on the bottom of the ladder. Their coach, Tony Shaw, the man who had captained the club to its drought-breaking flag in 1990, would be replaced by Mick Malthouse at the end of the year. Meanwhile, we were tenth on the table with a record of eight wins and eight losses. Still, the crowd didn’t appear that small when I emerged from the players’ race, jogged onto the ground and burst through the banner. I felt like I was floating above the grass as the ‘Da-da, da-da-da’ of the Carlton theme song echoed around the stadium. With my family and a heap of mates watching on, I started on the ground but was sent to the bench after Simon Beaumont began putting on an exhibition in our forward line. By half-time, ‘Beauie’ had eight goals on the board (he wouldn’t add to that total in the second half) and we were 46 points up. I finally got back out on the ground in the final quarter, when we were cruising to a 57-point win. My former Dandenong Stingrays teammate Craig Jacotine, who had played his first AFL match before 90,000 fans three months earlier on Anzac Day, was one of Collingwood’s better players. As for me, one handball was my entire contribution to the proceedings. It wasn’t exactly a debut to remember, and I didn’t have much to brag about at school the following week.
Parko gave me another chance the following weekend against the third-placed Western Bulldogs at Princes Park, after I’d regained some confidence by playing school footy for Eumemmerring College on the Wednesday. It proved to be a great day for the Blues as we survived a last-quarter comeback by the Dogs and held on to win by 5 points. Fraser Brown had a blinder in the midfield, gathering thirty-one possessions, while nineteen-year-old Lance Whitnall was a star up forward, booting three goals and taking nine marks. Lance’s impressive effort saw me relegated to the bench for long periods, and at the end of the game my stats read one handball and one tackle. After two games, I was yet to get a kick. It was a bit embarrassing.
I was dropped for the game against Fremantle at the WACA in round 19, replaced by premiership defender Michael Sexton. The boys thrashed the Dockers by 69 points and claimed a berth in the finals. I played out the rest of the home-and-away campaign in the reserves, winning that competition’s goal-kicking award after booting forty-one for the season. Against Richmond in round 22, I was judged best-on-ground because I took so many marks and set u
p a number of goals for teammates. That win over the Tigers was a rare bright spot for the Carlton reserves in a disappointing season in which we recorded only half-a-dozen victories and finished near the bottom of the table. The Richmond match signalled the end of the football year for many of my teammates, but I was again tapped on the shoulder by Parko and told that I would be training with the senior team throughout its finals campaign. If a couple of forwards got injured, he told me, I was a decent chance to get a game.
True to Parko’s word, I was named as an emergency for the Blues’ first final against the Brisbane Lions at the Gabba. It was the last year of the final-eight system in which first played eighth and second played seventh and so on. We had finished sixth, the reward for which was a trip to Brisbane to take on the third-placed Lions. The Lions had ended the 1998 season on the bottom of the ladder, but had raced up it in 1999 after replacing coach John Northey with all-round legend ‘Lethal’ Leigh Matthews, who’d guided the team to sixteen wins. Lethal’s Lions were far too good for our boys, winning by 73 points, but thankfully, a couple of other results went our way and we stayed in the premiership race.
The AFL’s policy on interstate finals then conspired to deliver us another early Christmas present. In those days, due to some contractual arrangements between the league and the MCG, only the highest-ranked interstate team had the right to host a home final. As a result, the Lions were scheduled to play the Western Bulldogs at the Gabba in week two. But the West Coast Eagles, who had beaten the Bulldogs in week one, were told they had to play Carlton at the MCG. That was despite the Eagles having finished higher on the ladder than us. It was a bit of a debacle really, and the people over in Western Australia were in uproar. They were even angrier when the Blues cantered to a 54-point win. Once again I cheered the boys on from the stands, dreaming all the while that I would soon be out there myself.
Next up was a Preliminary Final clash with Essendon on a Saturday afternoon at the MCG. The winner would take on North Melbourne, which had beaten the Lions the night before, in the biggest match of the year. I trained my heart out during the lead-up to the game and I again made it onto the team-sheet as an emergency. Carlton was given no hope of beating the Bombers, which was hardly a surprise: they had finished on top of the ladder, winning six more games than us, and had enjoyed a week off after pulverising the Swans in the first final. But the game proved to be one of the finest in the Blues’ history. I jumped around in the stands, high-fiving my teammates and generally going troppo as our boys pulled off an extraordinary upset and won by a single point. It suddenly hit home that Carlton was in the Grand Final in my first year at the club. It was unbelievable. All of us lads who hadn’t played in the match bolted down to the rooms after the final siren and crowded around the players to sing the club song. We all took turns patting Anthony Koutoufides on the back, for he had been the hero. His effort in the last quarter, in which he gathered twelve possessions, took six marks and kicked two goals, was simply extraordinary. Fraser Brown was another star—his game-saving tackle on Dean Wallis with thirty-eight seconds remaining became the stuff of legend.
The atmosphere around the club was amazing as we started preparing for the Grand Final, although some of the gloss was taken off things when Aaron Hamill was suspended for two weeks for kneeing Wallis, ruling him out of the big game. I was shattered for him, as he had helped me so much during the year and his form had been really good. But his suspension opened the door for me. As the only forward who had regularly been named an emergency through the finals, I was now a big chance to play in a Grand Final in my first AFL season. The club decided to appeal the verdict on Hamill, but Parko told me that if it failed, I was in the team. It was the most incredible feeling.
Thousands of Carlton supporters crammed into Princes Park to watch us train on the Thursday evening before the game. I tried to soak up every minute of it, while also trying to make sure that every kick hit its target and every mark was cleanly taken. When the Grand Final team was announced, Aaron was named in the forward pocket and I was the first emergency. Club president John Elliott put a stack of resources into the appeal, and after hearing from motion experts and character witnesses, the tribunal cleared Aaron. I was happy for him but gutted at the same time. Still, when I thought about it, Carlton regularly played in grand finals, so it seemed perfectly rational to believe that the club would contest another one in the near future.
I was able to secure Grand Final tickets for my family and a few mates, but none of us enjoyed the afternoon much. North Melbourne was way too good, notching up its second premiership under Denis Pagan with a 35-point win. My good mate Aaron Hamill kicked only one goal, and as I had a beer in the rooms after the game, I joked to Dad that the Blues might have won if I’d played. Being the ever-supportive dad, he agreed.
Funnily enough, in an interview with the Herald Sun in 2011, Aaron actually admitted that he had kneed Wallis in the head:
There were a few [tricks]. We had a kinesiologist with his video and each action he slowed down frame by frame. It was a tactic to bore the hell out of the appeals board. He said the muscle movements weren’t angled in a downward direction, so hence it was an accident. I was fortunate not only to play in a Grand Final, but get there.
Once the buzz of Grand Final week had died down, it was time to think about one of the year’s most important events: the end-of-season footy trip. Most of the boys headed to the American gambling and drinking capital of Las Vegas. Because you can’t drink in the United States until you’re twenty-one, us youngsters stayed home. The older players had promised to arrange fake IDs for us, but I didn’t really want to go to Vegas that year. Instead, a half-dozen teenagers on the Blues’ list, myself included, ended up going to Queensland for a few days on a club-funded piss-up. We had a damn good time up there, drinking and generally making mischief.
Then it was back to school. My second pre-season at Carlton was to be delayed because Parko insisted that I had to finish year 12 first. Fortunately, my teachers had already carried me through to the point where I had done enough work to pass my VCE, which meant that when the exams started in early November, I paid no regard to them whatsoever. All my mates were dumb as dog shit. As soon as one bloke walked out of the exam room, about twenty of us got up and followed. We’d all go down to Listerfield Lake and go swimming. I thought school was great because even if you didn’t give a stuff about it, there didn’t seem to be any repercussions. So what if I didn’t do my exams? What did it matter? I think I finished with a Tertiary Entrance Score of about 40. If not for subjects like phys ed and outdoor ed, I probably wouldn’t have passed at all.
By the time I joined in pre-season training in mid-November, I had a new manager, Paul Connors. I chose Paul after receiving a recommendation from my former Stingrays teammate Trent Croad, who was now at Hawthorn. I got along really well with Paul straightaway, and Mum was impressed by him as well, so that made it an easy choice.
From my first training session, I had less than two months to try and prove my fitness for our opening game of the new season. The reason was that the AFL, in its wisdom, had decided to commemorate the arrival of the year 2000 by scheduling a game between Carlton and Collingwood at the MCG on New Year’s Eve. Marketed as the Millennium Match, the contest was officially classified as the opening game of that year’s Ansett Cup—the rest of that competition would not start until a month later. Because of the timing, most of the boys were shattered when the league announced the game. In fact, they were absolutely filthy; none of them wanted to play. But my reaction was, ‘How good is this?’ It was a chance to play against Collingwood at the MCG. As a young footballer trying to make a name for yourself, you can’t ask for more than that.
In the lead-up to the Millennium Match, I trained harder than I ever had before, overseen by Wayne Brittain. Britts, who was also our match-day coach during the Ansett Cup, told me that to be selected, I had to be able to run five 1-kilometre time trials in an average time of less than
three minutes and thirty seconds. Britts loved being hard on me because he thought I was lazy, an opinion shared by others at Carlton. ‘I mean, he can run, but I think sometimes he gets a bit tired more in the head, rather than really being tired,’ Shane O’Sullivan told Klaus Toft in The Draft. I ran those time trials every Monday morning leading up to Christmas, but I could not get my average time under the target. The boys would cheer me on, trying to get me through, and I’d go all right in the first three runs, but I’d blow up in the last two. I hated Britts for putting me through such torture. It used to kill me. But when I felt like giving up, Matty Lappin and some of the other boys would put their arms around me and say, ‘He’s only doing it to get you fit. And look at you. You’re getting seriously fit.’ To Wayne’s credit, I nailed the trials in our last training session before Christmas, finishing with an average time of three minutes and seventeen seconds. Afterwards, I just lay down on the ground. I was so crook I couldn’t move. It amazed me that I’d achieved my goal, and I think it amazed Britts as well, as he responded by naming me at full-forward. However, those runs haunted me after that, making me dread every pre-season. I still loathe the thought of pre-season training now, even though my AFL career is finished. That’s how much I came to hate it.
On the day of the game, my mate Shane Horan was having a massive New Year’s Eve party at his house in Narre Warren, and most of my friends from school were going. I went to Shane’s house around noon and everyone was starting to get stuck into the beers and the bourbons. In contrast, I was sitting there in my Carlton suit, sober, thinking, ‘This is not right. I’m an eighteen-year-old. I should be on the gas with my mates.’ I handed out a few tickets, in case people wanted to come to the game, but I didn’t expect anyone to make it. Then I walked out the door. Everyone at the party had been eating pies and chips and other junk food, but even though I’d been hungry, I hadn’t wanted to eat that kind of stuff before the game, so I’d planned to pick something up on my way to the MCG. But I couldn’t find anything decent that was open, so I ducked into a McDonald’s and grabbed some chicken burgers. They were delicious, although I did feel a bit guilty afterwards.
Fev: In My Own Words Page 6