Fev: In My Own Words

by Brendan Fevola

  That night, as I lay in bed, the game played over and over again in my head. I felt terrible. And there was no reason to feel better the following day when the papers focused on me rather than on the team. ‘How do you solve a problem like Fevola?’ was the headline in the Herald Sun, which ran above a story by Mark Robinson.

  Brendan Fevola was the lowlight on one of the lowest days of the season for Carlton yesterday. While Blues coach Denis Pagan canvassed many reasons for the dismal second-half fadeout, Fevola again came under intense scrutiny.

  ‘There just seems to be a cycle in his bio-rhythms that gets him to implode,’ Pagan said. ‘He’s a complete contradiction, Brendan.’

  It was like that every week. If we won, I was a champion; if we lost, I was an undisciplined idiot. ‘What about the other blokes in the team?’ I’d find myself thinking.

  The criticism of my performance against the Saints was made more intense by the fact that, in late June, my manager and Carlton had finally come to an agreement on a new three-year contract. It was worth a touch over $400,000 per season, meaning I had received an annual pay rise of around $170,000. It was a great result, and it had the football world abuzz for a couple of days. The Herald Sun’s Mike Sheahan had declared that by signing me up, Carlton had ‘laid the first brick in the foundation for a better future’. Mike continued: ‘Despite all his foibles, Fevola is to be retained. He is 24 and one of the most capable full-forwards in the AFL.’ Plenty of others, however, decided to tee off at the amount of money I was being paid. Someone submitted his take on the situation to the Herald Sun’s ‘50-50’ column: ‘Brendan Fevola has moved into an executive salary. Maybe he can use his pay rise to get a haircut and look the part.’ Funnily enough, I did get my dreadlocks mown off a couple of weeks after signing my new deal. Denis was over the moon when I rocked up to training with much less hair.

  It was mostly because of my new contract that I kept playing. I didn’t want to let the club down after it had invested so much money in me. However, after my performance against the Saints, just about everyone was gunning for me. Former Carlton captain and coach Robert Walls, who was working for a range of media outlets, had a go at me for taking my focus off the game. He cited my regular appearances on The Footy Show and my attendance of an Anthony Mundine fight as proof that I was more committed to being a celebrity than a consistent footballer. I felt the criticism was unfair. I was having painkilling injections just to get out on the field. Really, I should not have been playing, yet I was putting my long-term health at risk to try and help Denis and the club.

  I kicked only twelve goals in my last seven games of the season. During these dark days, Denis was moved to compare me to ‘the girl with the curl’:

  There was a little girl, who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good, And when she was bad she was horrid.

  The only positive thing that happened during those weeks of woe was playing my 100th game, which was against Port Adelaide at the MCG. Reaching that milestone meant I had my name inscribed on the number 25 locker at Princes Park, just below that of the great Alex Jesaulenko. I was very proud of that.

  We won a couple of games late in the season, beating our old rivals Richmond and Collingwood. But by that stage my groin problem had developed into full-blown osteitis pubis, the same condition I had suffered in 2002. I pretty much played as a decoy forward in those games, dragging my opponent away from the action so Jarrad Waite could get a clean run at the ball.

  The last game I played in that year was our round 21 clash with Essendon at the MCG. It was another horrendous afternoon. We kicked the first three goals but ended up losing by 99 points. I became so uninterested in the game that at one stage I leant on the boundary fence while Waite was having a shot at goal. I didn’t think much of it, but the photographers pounced and pictures of the incident were plastered all over the following day’s newspapers. Mike Sheahan tried to make some sense of the situation in the Herald Sun:

  Those who know say there is an explanation. That he is stricken by a groin problem. If that’s the case, he shouldn’t be playing. His reputation is being trashed in the process. He gives the impression an end to the season can’t come quickly enough.

  That was, in fact, the end of my season. I didn’t play in our not-so-bad five-goal loss to the Kangaroos in round 22. When it was all said and done, we had finished on the bottom of the ladder with only four victories and a draw to our name. We had won a premiership and a wooden spoon in the same year. West Coast, the team we had beaten in the Wizard Cup grand final, finished second on the ladder and got to within 4 points of a premiership in the Grand Final, going down to the Sydney Swans. Football isn’t a funny game; it’s a bloody ludicrous one.

  I won my third consecutive club goal-kicking award, having booted forty-nine snaggers, which made me think I hadn’t done too badly. Given we’d been flogged most weeks and I could hardly run during the second half of the season, I thought that was a reasonable return. Yet my tally was universally regarded as a failure.

  When we gathered to drown our sorrows on Mad Monday, it was clear that many of our senior players were deeply unhappy. No-one could see any light at the end of the tunnel. There was a desire to get rid of Denis, but that was impossible because he still had three years to run on his contract and there was no chance that Ian Collins was going to waste money paying him out. I loved Denis, but I was also disillusioned with what was going on at Carlton. And the feeling was apparently mutual. I’d had a meeting with Stephen Kernahan, who was now on the Carlton board, and he’d told me that the club was concerned about my form and attitude. They wanted me to stop going on The Footy Show because they felt my wacky behaviour on television was causing embarrassment. I got the feeling that Sticks, and many others, wanted to get rid of me. If I had been kicking goals in the second half of 2005, no-one would have cared about what I got up to off the field. But my attempt to play through pain, which had been a complete disaster, had come back to haunt me.

  I started thinking that a fresh start would be great, as the Blues were going nowhere on the field. So when trade week rolled around and Tigers coach Terry Wallace called me to gauge my interest in moving to Punt Road, I said I was keen to talk about it. The head of Richmond’s football department, Greg Miller, came over to my house and we had a chat about the possibilities. The Tigers were really keen to get me and I think they offered me a four-year deal. Money wasn’t a big consideration, though. I was always going to get paid well at the Blues, mainly because there were no other full-forwards to pay there. Rather, a key part of my attraction to Richmond was that my best mate Chris Newman played there. That was a big thing. And I just thought it might be the best thing for both clubs. I could free up some room in the salary cap for the Blues, and I could give the Tigers the big forward they were craving to support Matthew Richardson. All that stuff was going through my mind when I decided that joining Richmond was the way to go.

  With one day of trade week remaining, I went to Princes Park to tell Denis my decision.

  ‘I’m going to Richmond,’ I told him.

  Denis glared at me. ‘Son,’ he said. ‘If I have to put up with this shit for three more years, so do you.’

  Denis then began speaking to me in a fatherly way. And because I looked up to him, I listened intently to every word he had to say. ‘You’ve got to earn back the respect of the football world and some of your peers,’ he said, adding that the place at which to do that was Carlton. He told me that running away to another club would only make proving myself that much harder. ‘You don’t want the boys to love you,’ he continued. ‘You just want respect.’

  I nodded my head, looked him in the eye and shook his hand. That was it; the conversation was over. Paul Connors rang the Tigers and told them the negotiations were off. I was staying at Carlton and that was that. To be fair, I’m not sure Richmond had enough room in their salary cap to match my recently minted contract at the Blues, but i
n the end it didn’t matter. My respect for Denis ran deep. I pledged to help him try and drag the club out of the mire.

  11 REBUILDING MY REPUTATION

  On Friday 7 October, the day after I recommitted myself to Carlton, I had something far more important than football to devote my energy to: my wedding. But because it was the final day of the AFL’s player trading period, footy remained a distraction. There was still a small chance that the Blues would get a too-good-to-refuse offer for me, and I had that thought in mind as I prepared for the ceremony. My wedding party and I arrived at St John’s Anglican Church in Toorak for the official proceedings at about 1.30 pm. We’d had a great morning, mucking around and having a couple of quiet drinks. My best man, Chris Newman, was by my side, as were the other groomsmen—my current teammate Ryan Houlihan, my former teammates Simon Fletcher and Simon Beaumont, and my brother Jason. As we took our places near the altar, trade week was reaching its 2 pm deadline. We received the news that Carlton had decided not to trade me just before Alex arrived at the church.

  Alex made a grand entrance. Along with her father and Mia, she pulled up outside the church—fashionably late—in a magnificent horse-drawn carriage. Mia, who was five years old, was beaming. She thought the whole thing was awesome. There were plenty of sighs in the crowd when Alex stepped out of the carriage in her amazing wedding dress. She looked seriously beautiful, seriously hot. My heart was racing as she and Mia walked up the aisle towards me. I was that nervous that I was shaking. We whipped through the ceremony then had some great photos taken on the steps of the church. Mum looked so proud as I cradled Mia in my arms and posed next to Alex for the camera. Dad was also wearing a big smile. For my parents, Mum especially, my marriage gave them confidence that I had found a partner to not only care for me and love me, but to keep me on the right track.

  7 October 2005: Brendan marries Alex Cheatham at St John’s Toorak. (Newspix/Craig Borrow)

  Mia, Alex and I jumped into the carriage and had a horse-drawn trip to the reception venue, which overlooked the Yarra River. The reception was a massive party. Alex had organised fireworks, and they went off straight after we cut the cake. I absolutely shit myself! We did our bridal waltz to the Robbie Williams song ‘Angels’, but instead of singing ‘I’m loving angels’, our musician sang ‘I’m loving Alex’. Alex was rapt that I’d organised that. She thought it was a really nice touch. Mia and I then did our own dance to ‘Brown eyed girl’. We just danced by ourselves. That’s a great memory.

  Most people make a big deal of leaving their wedding before the end of the reception, but we were the last to leave ours. Crown Casino had given us a room for our wedding night, and so we went to the casino for an afterparty with a heap of our mates. That wound up as the sun was coming up. I remember walking across the gaming floor at about 6 am on our way up to our room. Alex still had her wedding dress on and I was still in my suit, so we turned a few heads. Our room—it was a luxury suite—was amazing. We could’ve had the whole wedding in there. After sleeping for most of the following day, Alex and I flew away for our honeymoon. We spent the first week in Las Vegas and then went to Hawaii for a week. After flying back to Melbourne to pick up Mia, we then headed to Hamilton Island for a week before wrapping things up with another week at Noosa. It was a brilliant month and I hardly thought about footy at all. As it turned out, our second child, Leni, was conceived during our time away, which was a very exciting development.

  In late November, not long after returning from my honeymoon, I headed off to hospital to fix the groin problem that had ruined my 2005 season. Sydney-based surgeon Neil Halpin, a guru when it comes to sports injuries, did the operation. Neil estimated that he had performed around 3500 groin operations before he did mine, yet he was shocked by what he saw. He said the injury was one of the worst he had seen—it was clear that I should not have played during the latter rounds of the 2005 season. Neil ordered me to rest for at least a month, but said he was very confident that I would be fully fit for the start of Carlton’s 2006 home-and-away campaign. That was a relief, as I was desperate to prove my many critics wrong. I pledged then and there to never again play with a serious injury. Battling on as I had that year had done nothing to enhance my reputation.

  There were plenty of new boys in the Carlton squad when we headed to Mt Buller in the Victorian high country in December for a pre-season camp. Two of the new kids were tipped to be potential superstars. The first was Marc Murphy, a silky-skilled midfielder and the son of former Fitzroy gun John Murphy, whom we had taken with the first pick in the national draft. The second was Josh Kennedy, a key forward whom we had nabbed with pick 4. Even though Carlton was still $7 million in debt, and there was still a lot of hatred between Anthony Koutoufides and the club’s administration—the handing over of the presidency to Graham Smorgon had not improved things—those teenage draftees represented the light at the end of the tunnel for us. If they turned out to be as good as we expected, we were finally going to climb back up the ladder.

  Because I was still recovering from the groin surgery, I was able to kick back and watch the boys run up and down the mountain. I did a few interviews with the media, telling reporters I was ultra-keen to clean up my image. I filled them in on a meeting I’d had with Denis at the start of the pre-season, during which he’d told me to fix my terrible body language once and for all or I would be spending time in the VFL.

  I’ve got to … try not to wear my heart on my sleeve too much and just encourage [people]. I do show it too much and it’s just something I’ve got to stop doing. It does look bad on the field and I know that and we’ve addressed that as a team. I’ll be doing my best not to do that.

  Denis had also told me to pull my head in on The Footy Show, but that was never going to happen. I loved being the class clown on that show too much.

  I started running again in January, and because I was two months behind the other boys in terms of fitness work, I had to work really hard for the next two months to rebuild my aerobic capacity. I trained harder than I ever had before. My mindset had changed completely since the end of 2005. I thought to myself, ‘Last year, I did everything wrong and still kicked forty-nine goals. What would happen if I made all the sacrifices that I should make, if I did everything right?’

  The fitness staff designed a training program for me that included not just sprints but lots of football-based exercises, to keep me interested in the work. I did heaps of drills in which I would have to flatten a tackle bag then jump up and grab the ball, dish it off then do it all again. I was regarded as a one-effort man, and the training was all about making me fit enough to put in second and third efforts. The first couple of weeks of the program nearly killed me. It was brutal. But every time I felt like giving up, I thought about Alex and Mia and our unborn child. I had to support them now, so I needed footy more than ever. Alex had reminded me that I might only have a few years left in the game and I needed to make sure I made the most of it. Her words echoed in my head while the fitness staff were flogging me on the track. The other thing that popped into my mind during those times was the thought that if I stuffed up my career now, I would not get the opportunity to play in finals when the gun draft picks finally dragged Carlton up the ladder. I used to say to Alex, ‘Imagine if we win the flag in five or six years, considering where we’ve come from.’ I had to keep my career going as long as I could if I was going to be there when the good times returned.

  Denis was very encouraging throughout the pre-season. He got immense pride out of the fact that I had responded so well since the heart-to-heart with him in trade week. He told the press: ‘Brendan wants to repay everybody. For his teammates’ sake and for his own sake, he wants to get it right and have a good year. I can’t see any reason why he won’t. He’s certainly an elite talent. We’re pleased with his commitment to the club.’ Along with patting me on the back, Denis also provided a few reality checks along the way. He often bailed me up and said, ‘Son, you don’t want to go back to where
you were.’

  My renewed sense of commitment to Carlton was highlighted by my decision to swear off alcohol for the entire footy season. I’ve got Alex to thank for that initiative. Alex had to stop drinking once she became pregnant, so she told me that it was only fair if I did the same. I went cold turkey after New Year’s Eve, which was tough, but I felt great about supporting her in that way. We went to a few engagement parties and weddings during January and I looked like a bit of a goose drinking lemonade while everyone else was chugging down the beers and red wine. But I felt so much better the morning after. I literally bounced out of bed. Mia thought it was great. Rather than lying in bed moaning and groaning, I was able to muck around with her.

  By not drinking, I was able to regain full fitness much sooner than would otherwise have been the case. I missed our brief involvement in the pre-season competition, now known as the NAB Cup—we lost to Geelong in the first round—but I was right to go by the time we played West Coast in a practice match at Alice Springs. With a big crowd of locals watching on, I kicked five goals as we scored an upset 26-point win.

  Two weeks later, I lined up at full-forward in our first premiership season game against Melbourne at Telstra Dome. We went into the match as rank outsiders, but we led from the outset and won by 21 points. I felt great when I ran out that night. I was fitter than I’d ever been. Bursting with energy, I chased and harassed and tackled the Demons’ backmen, in the process causing a few turnovers and some big grins to break out in the coaches’ box. My chase and tackle on Byron Pickett in the last quarter, which resulted in a free kick for holding the ball, was the best of those efforts. I went down with cramp afterwards and as I jogged from the field, the Blues supporters gave me a standing ovation. Along with those one-percenters, I also gathered seventeen possessions, took nine marks and kicked five goals. It was a great start to the season all round.