Fev: In My Own Words Read online

  Published in 2012 by Hardie Grant Books

  Hardie Grant Books (Australia)

  Ground Floor, Building 1

  658 Church Street

  Richmond, Victoria 3121

  www.hardiegrant.com.au

  Hardie Grant Books (UK)

  Dudley House, North Suite

  34–35 Southampton Street

  London WC2E 7HF

  www.hardiegrant.co.uk

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Copyright © Brendan Fevola 2012

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the catalogue of the National Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au

  eISBN: 9781742738475

  Cover and text design by Peter Daniel

  Cover image by James Braund

  To my beautiful girls, Alex, Mia, Leni and Lulu;

  you are my world and the reason that I live every day.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  1 The blue bus

  2 Sandcastles in the dirt

  3 King of the kids

  4 Player 4144

  5 The last kick of the millennium

  6 Warming the pine

  7 A bit of harmless fun

  8 The role model

  9 A fifty-fifty proposition

  10 The girl with the curl

  11 Rebuilding my reputation

  12 Another false dawn

  13 A bloody freak

  14 Pressure point

  15 On my own

  16 It’s all over

  17 Goodbye speech

  Acknowledgements

  1 THE BLUE BUS

  I was on a blue bus crammed full of crazy people, going over the Story Bridge in the middle of Brisbane, when the true extent of my fall from grace hit home. It was 12 January 2011. A little over a week earlier, I had been admitted to the New Farm Clinic, a hospital for people with mental problems that I soon began referring to as The Nuthouse. I was to undergo rehabilitation for a range of problems, including depression, alcohol abuse and a gambling addiction. The other patients were mostly being treated for mental conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. We were all on the blue bus because the clinic, and much of Brisbane for that matter, had been inundated by the worst flooding to hit south-east Queensland in three decades. As a result, we were being transferred to the Greenslopes Private Hospital, located on higher ground on the northern side of the swollen Brisbane River.

  As we crossed the landmark bridge, the people sitting in the seats around me kept up their gibberish. I felt like I was in a ridiculous dream or a scene in a horror movie. I was one of the highest-paid stars of the most popular football competition in Australia, but I was being driven through the streets of Brisbane with a bunch of mentally ill people. Completely freaked out, I rang Dad. ‘What am I doing on this fucking bus?’ I slurred to him. Dad tried to have a rational conversation with me, but I was on such strong medication that nothing I said made sense. When we arrived at Greenslopes, my mind was all over the place. ‘Where am I?’ I thought to myself. ‘Why am I not at footy training?’ Then, when I remembered what had happened, I thought, ‘What’s Vossy going to think about me being locked up in a nuthouse?’

  Only nine months had passed since I had made a triumphant debut with my new club, the Brisbane Lions. Their coach, Michael Voss, had copped plenty of grief for recruiting me from Carlton and signing me to a multimillion-dollar contract. Many people thought he was crazy because I had a history of off-field problems, the most public of which—an embarrassing drunken performance on Channel 9’s The Footy Show—had ended my eleven-year stint at the Blues. The nay-sayers had quickly changed their tune after I helped the Lions open the 2010 AFL season with four straight wins, which propelled them to the top of the ladder. Now, however, all that goodwill was gone. I had thrown it away by making some terrible decisions, many of them while affected by alcohol. I was knee-deep in gambling debt. I felt friendless.

  * * *

  The lead-up to being admitted to the New Farm Clinic had been a nightmarish blur. My wife, Alex, and our three children, Mia, Leni and Lulu, had moved with me to Brisbane when I was traded to the Lions in October 2009, but they returned to Victoria the following April after my relationship with Alex broke down. I really missed Alex and the kids while I was in Brisbane, and at the end of 2010 I’d gone to Melbourne to celebrate Christmas with them. Given all we’d been through, it was a miracle that Alex allowed me to see her and the kids at all. But she felt that our children needed to have both of their parents playing an active role in their lives.

  I still considered Alex to be my best friend. She had been such a great support through all the highs and lows of my footy career, and she was so wise and level-headed when it came to things like sharing our time with the kids.

  A few days after Christmas, I went to visit Alex and the kids down at Blairgowrie on the Mornington Peninsula, where they were staying in a friend’s holiday house. At some point, Alex asked me to mind Lulu for a couple of minutes—our ten-month-old was sitting on a bed—and went off to heat up a bottle of milk. I sat down and immediately started to feel woozy. I had made the mistake of mixing alcohol with the powerful mixture of drugs that I was taking to combat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which I had been diagnosed with earlier that year. Soon, I was asleep. By the time Alex came back, Lulu had rolled off the bed and was on the floor, crying. Alex erupted, screaming at me that I was a disgrace. It was no wonder. She couldn’t even trust me with the kids anymore. Alex packed up the kids’ stuff and loaded them into the car. She offered to drive me back to Melbourne, but I just grabbed my bag and caught a bus to the nearest train station, and then took a train back to Alex’s house. During the trip, people were looking at me, probably thinking, ‘What on earth is Fev doing on public transport?’ I just stared at the floor.

  I walked through the front door of Alex’s house to find that no-one was home. I was feeling angry, embarrassed, ashamed and depressed. I felt like giving up on life right there and then. I grabbed a bottle of wine from her fridge and within fifteen minutes it was empty. I opened another bottle, drank it, then went for another one. Alex eventually arrived, but she quickly realised what a bad state I was in and took the kids to her sister’s place.

  The alcohol, my embarrassment and the drugs were a toxic mix. The more I drank, the worse I felt, but I kept drinking anyway. I was falling off a cliff. How was I ever going to pay off my debts? How was I ever going to reconcile with my family? Killing myself seemed the only answer. I started crying.

  Without really thinking, I rang the Brisbane Lions’ new football manager, Dean Warren. I hardly knew the bloke, as he had only been at the Lions for a couple of months, but I found myself pouring my heart out to him. ‘I’m in trouble mate, and I need help,’ I told him. Dean tried his best to help me. He promised he would ring me back the next morning and try to sort something out. Meanwhile, Alex had let Mum know that I was in a bad way. She came over and found me passed out on the floor, which was very traumatic for her. No mother should ever have to find their child in that type of situation. It wasn’t fair on her; I was being very stupid and immature.

  When Dean rang me in the morning, I was in a terrible state. I had the worst hangover in history, but it wasn’t just the alcohol that made me feel so bad. My mind had melted down. Everything I thought about made me fearful. When was I going to see my
kids again? Was my marriage really over this time? Dean handled the phone call with empathy and class. He and the rest of the Lions’ football department wanted me to go to a rehabilitation centre so I could resolve my problems and get back to being a footy star. ‘Who’s going to pay?’ I asked Dean. He told me not to worry and then explained that the AFL and the Players’ Association made money available to deal with such circumstances. After a couple of calls back and forth, it was agreed that I would be admitted to the New Farm Clinic on 3 January.

  I flew back to Brisbane later that day. It was New Year’s Eve. I caught a cab back to my place, dumped my stuff then called a few of my Lions teammates to see what was going on. My head was still a mess, and the last thing I should’ve been doing was going anywhere near alcohol, but I didn’t want to sit at home by myself. It was New Year’s Eve, for God’s sake! ‘Sweet, I’ll come over,’ I said to one of the boys, after he told me a heap of the blokes were round at his place having a beer. I never really thought too much about what I was doing at the best of times, and it was no different on that night. I have always been an impulsive person, and I find it almost impossible to overcome my impulses. It never crossed my mind that Dean Warren would be furious if he found out that I’d been partying so soon after my desperate call to him. It never occurred to me that going out and drinking that night might damage my million-bucks-per-year AFL career.

  I had a few drinks at my teammate’s house and then we headed to a bar in Fortitude Valley. The boys had a fair idea that I was in a bad state, they knew I was struggling to cope with the disintegration of my marriage, but I think they believed that taking me with them was a safer option than leaving me alone. Anyway, midnight came and went, and I just kept drinking until I was rolling drunk. By then, most of my teammates had gone home. A couple of them had even seen me get into a cab at one stage, and they had assumed I’d gone home as well. But as the clock ticked past 4 am, I was still out on the town, along with some of the Lions boys. At 4.30 am, a group of us left a bar and wandered across Brunswick Street. Out of nowhere, a couple of serious-looking policemen appeared and asked me to move off the road. I’d been carrying on a bit, I’d had too much to drink, but there were thousands of people on the streets of Brisbane behaving in a similar, if not worse, way that night. So I gave the police a bit of a verbal spray—‘Go and sort out the city’s real problems!’ was more or less what I said. They tried to handcuff me, so I put my hands in my pockets, but the coppers didn’t see the funny side of that. Although my teammates tried to help me, there wasn’t much they could do. I think the police were after a big scalp that night, and they got one. Soon I was bundled into a divvy van, along with a few other pissed blokes, and carted off to the Brisbane watchhouse.

  Around sixty people were locked up in the watchhouse that night, but thankfully the police put me in a cell on my own. After staring at the cell wall for half an hour, I began to sober up. A thumping headache set in, along with a feeling of deep sadness. I put my head in my hands. I knew I had been stupid, but I hadn’t meant to do anything crazy. Sure, I was addicted to being the centre of attention, but I wasn’t consciously putting myself on a path to destruction. Rather, I felt unable to make myself do the right things. My life had gone completely off the rails, but I felt powerless to do anything about it.

  The Lions soon learned what had happened thanks to news reports on the radio. The morning of New Year’s Day, one of the coppers played a joke on me by saying, ‘Hey Fev, your mates are here.’ I thought a couple of my teammates had arrived to get me out. But when I took a peek at the sliding doors fronting the watchhouse, I saw that a huge media pack was waiting for me. I swore, while the copper just laughed. Not long after, one of the other blokes who’d been arrested was released and got bombarded with questions about me. He told the journos, ‘He was looking pretty miserable … He was feeling pretty sorry for himself, mate.’ That was an understatement.

  Eventually, my manager, three-time Brisbane Lions premiership forward Alastair Lynch, and the Lions’ media manager, Dave Donaghy, came to get me. They waited while I signed the relevant documents; I had been charged with public nuisance and obstructing police, and a court date had been set for 18 January. When that was done, Lynchy and Dave went to get their car and had no option but to pull up out the front of the watchhouse, meaning I had no option but to walk into the media scrum. I was in a daze as I plunged through the jungle of cameras, reporters and microphones. Later, various news reports would comment on my unhealthy appearance—I looked skinny and gaunt, and my eyes seemed to have sunk into my head. I finally scrambled into the car and we sped off.

  Lynchy said he’d arranged for me to get indefinite leave from the Lions. He was going to take me to my flat to get some belongings and then we were heading straight to the rehabilitation clinic. I just nodded. I wanted to get into the clinic, away from everyone and everything. On the way there I realised I was starving, so Lynchy stopped at a Chinese restaurant and bought me a big feed of beef and black-bean sauce with fried rice. I wolfed it down and began to feel better.

  When I checked into the New Farm Clinic, it felt like a protective bubble had been placed around me. I knew that I wasn’t in any state to look after myself, so it was a great relief to know that the people in the clinic were going to look after me. One of the first people I saw was Dr Jon Steinberg, a psychologist who had been helping me for almost a year with my gambling addiction. I told him that I never wanted to drink again. He said there was a drug I could take that would make me violently ill if I ever consumed alcohol again. I said, ‘Just put me on it.’

  My room was small, with a bed in the middle and a little table beside it. It was nice enough, like a room in a private hospital. There was no television, but thankfully I had my iPhone to keep me company. I sat on the bed and posted a message on Twitter: ‘Goodbye 2010 thank god! Bring on 2011 lions will roar again.’ Despite all that had happened, I believed Vossy and the Lions would stick by me. They needed ‘The Fevolution’ in the goal square if they were going to be any good that year. However, it soon became clear that the Lions were hedging their bets. They released this statement not long after I checked into rehab:

  The Brisbane Lions AFC has this afternoon granted Brendan Fevola indefinite leave from the club in order to receive professional assistance for a number of personal issues. While the Brisbane Lions AFC places the well-being of all its staff as a primary focus, the club will hold talks next week regarding what action may be required as a direct result of this morning’s incident.

  As the football world went into meltdown over my latest indiscretion, with media commentators lining up to deliver my footballing eulogy, I lay on my bed and chatted to some nice nurses as they laid out a series of tablets on the table. I washed them down with a glass of water and they had an almost instant effect. I became woozy. Playing footy at the MCG, as thousands of people roared their approval, now seemed like a dream. The medication was so powerful that, for two weeks, it felt like I was asleep. I would wake briefly during the day, eat some food then nod off again. Before I knew it, floods had engulfed Brisbane and I was on that blue bus.

  * * *

  A week after arriving at my temporary accommodation at Greenslopes, I celebrated my thirtieth birthday, surrounded by nurses and drugged up to my eyeballs. It was a strange occasion, but I remember it kind of fondly. No-one from my family was there because I didn’t want them seeing me in that state. But Nat Ireland, who worked for my management group, Velocity Sports, brought me a birthday cake. Some of the patients even bought me presents from the hospital’s little shop. And they all stood around me and sang ‘Happy birthday’. It was bizarre, but at the same time it was nice.

  A few hours later as I lay in my room, my head heavy from another dose of medication, I contemplated my fate. Everything that my God-given talent for football had provided—the status, the fame, the money, the adulation—was either going or gone. As I drifted off to sleep, one word slowly rolled around my mind: Why? />
  2 SANDCASTLES IN THE DIRT

  I never wanted to play footy until I started school. Before then, I dreamed about being a tough, rugged lacrosse player like my father, Angelo. Dad began playing lacrosse when a teacher introduced it at his school in Melbourne. He says he chose it over any form of football because he didn’t want to be like the other kids; he wanted to be different. A backline player in his early days, then a goalkeeper after he started running out of puff, he played for the Malvern Lacrosse Club for around thirty years. The highlights of his career were being selected to represent Victoria at the under-19 and senior levels. He also turned his hand to box lacrosse, an indoor version of the sport that’s often played on an ice-hockey rink.

  Dad’s brother, Carlo, and his sister, Rita, also played lacrosse. By the time Rita was made a life member of the Malvern Lacrosse Club, she had played in more than 500 junior, division 1 and state league matches. However, the most talented lacrosse player in our extended family is Rita’s son, Jeff Joy, a goalkeeper who has been selected in numerous Australian teams.

  Watching Dad play lacrosse was pretty crazy. He’s usually a placid guy, very quiet and laid-back. But on the lacrosse field he was an animal. ‘I was good at throwing people over the fence,’ he once told Herald Sun journalist Andrew Rule. He was always in the middle of any fight and could often be seen hitting opponents with his stick—as a defender, Dad carried a ‘long stick’ measuring 1.5 metres, as opposed to the 1-metre sticks used by the forwards. The crowds were feral at those games and sometimes spectators would end up in the on-field fights.

  This is one of Dad’s favourite lacrosse stories:

  At the start of the game, the two centres would look down at the ball and face off to win the first possession. Then you’d have your two midfielders coming in from the wings. We had a rule that if the midfielder could get to the centre while he was still looking down, then he could shirt-front them, wipe them straight out. I was good at that because I was pretty fast over the first 20 metres.