Fev: In My Own Words Read online

  By the time we played the Dockers we were sitting on the bottom of the ladder, having won only one of our nine matches. Britts was under the pump and the atmosphere around the club was terrible. Carlton had never ‘won’ the wooden spoon, but we moved a step closer to achieving that unwanted milestone when the Dockers beat us by 28 points. I kicked two goals and took six marks, so at least the blame for that loss couldn’t be directed at me. Our malaise continued during the first three quarters of our next game against Geelong at Docklands, and when a Kent Kingsley goal put the Cats up by 38 points at the eight-minute mark of the last term, I thought we were going to lose by ten goals.

  However, sometimes the inexplicable happens in football matches. I’m still not really sure what sparked it, but we suddenly roared into life. Lance Whitnall kicked a goal and then I snapped one through from right up against the boundary; I then ran towards our fans, pumping my fists. We continued to narrow the margin and the Cats became rattled. They started trying to run down the clock, but there were still fifteen minutes left in the game so it wasn’t a good tactic. At the 22-minute mark, with the margin 16 points in Geelong’s favour, a long bomb came into our forward line. I read the flight of the ball perfectly and leapt onto the back of my opponent to grab the Sherrin, then crashed to earth in the goal square, still clutching the ball. I was grinning like it was my birthday and the crowd was going nuts. I kicked a goal and then we were only 10 points down. Adrenaline was pumping through my body—it was so exciting and so much fun. With five minutes left, Darren Milburn was pinged for a deliberate out-of-bounds. The ball was handed to Matty Lappin and he had our fans dancing in the aisles when he slotted a goal from 40 metres out. Then Matty was cleaned up by Max Rooke after taking a mark. The resulting 50-metre penalty put him in the goal square and he slotted that kick, too. We were in front!

  Our runner sprinted out to tell us there were only nine seconds left. We thought we had it in the bag. But the Cats won the ball straight out of the middle and David Clarke’s left-foot pass found Peter Riccardi 50 metres out from Geelong’s goal. As he was preparing to take his shot, the siren sounded. My heart felt like it was going to jump out of my chest. I cannot describe how much I wanted Riccardi’s kick to miss. But when you’re down, shit things happen. His kick never looked like missing and we lost by 4 points. It was shattering. I was named Carlton’s second-best player, having finished the game with four goals, but that was little consolation.

  That performance against Geelong should have set me up for a good second half of the season, but it didn’t. I kept feeling frustrated and unhappy, and as a team we just couldn’t get anything to go our way. We lost to West Coast by 1 point at Princes Park, then a couple of weeks later we were flogged by the Brisbane Lions at the Gabba—my old mate Des Headland torched us that night with six goals. In our round 16 game against the Saints, I infuriated Britts when I accidentally cleaned up Lance Whitnall. The collision put Lance out of the team for a few weeks with a shoulder injury, while I was banished to the reserves and didn’t return to the seniors that year. I put on some below-average displays in the VFL and Ross Lyon sent me to full-back in a few games as punishment. I even got suspended once for whacking an opponent. The only positive to come out of that time was that I managed to keep my drinking exploits, which had become my way of dealing with my frustrations, out of the papers.

  Our nightmare season came to an end when we were flogged by Essendon in round 22. The final score was 5.7 (37) to 12.20 (92). The result confirmed that the club would finish on the bottom of the ladder for the first time in its history, with only three season wins, and Bombers fans celebrated by waving thousands of wooden spoons in the air. For everyone connected with Carlton, it was simply horrible. As I left the ground, having watched the match from the stands, Essendon people gave me no end of grief.

  A few days later, Britts began his post-season reviews. Every player on the list was in the gun. When my turn came, I walked into the meeting room and sat down with Britts, Ross Lyon and assistant coach John Worsfold, who had been a star player with the West Coast Eagles. Britts said, ‘How do you think your year has gone?’ I replied, ‘Oh, you know, it went all right,’ knowing full well that it had been terrible. Britts looked me in the eye and told me it was very unlikely that I was going to be at the Carlton footy club in 2002. He was going to try and trade me, and if there were no takers then the club was prepared to delist me even though I still had a year to run on my contract. I was stunned. I walked out of the room, looked out at the oval and yelled, ‘Shit!’ My career was probably over. ‘Well, I’ve really fucked this up,’ I said to myself. My dream of being an AFL star was done with, and it was all my fault. I had all the talent in the world, but I hadn’t worked hard enough. What was I going to do now? I had little education and no skills other than the ability to mark and kick a Sherrin.

  I rang Mum, who was very upset. ‘I told you this would happen if you kept playing up,’ she said angrily. I couldn’t deal with her telling me off, so I hung up, got in my car and drove to Beauie’s house.

  ‘How was your day?’ I asked him.

  ‘Real good,’ Beauie replied. ‘The coaches gave me a great review. What about you?’

  I stared at the floor. ‘I’ve been sacked.’

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  ‘No, I’m done.’

  We sat on the couch, opened up a bottle of bourbon and started drinking. Mum called at about 11.30 pm. Because I’d had a few drinks, I thought I was in a decent state to put up with another lecture, so I answered her call. She told me that Channel 10’s Sports Tonight show had just announced that Wayne Brittain was going to be sacked. I leapt off the couch and yelled, ‘You fucking beauty!’ Maybe, just maybe, the new boss might hand me another chance.

  8 THE ROLE MODEL

  Denis Pagan, the man who had led North Melbourne to the 1996 and 1999 premierships, became Carlton’s new coach on 11 September 2002, having been given a lucrative three-year deal by our president, John Elliott. I had first met Denis when I’d sat next to him in the AFL members at that year’s Anzac Day game. I’d chatted to him about tactics and match-ups and who was playing well, and I think he was surprised to find that I wasn’t the idiot that the public thought I was. Rather, I thought a lot about the game and I clearly loved footy.

  A day or so after Denis was unveiled as our new boss, I got a call from the footy club: the coach wanted me to come in for a chat. My heart was racing as I drove to Princes Park for the make-or-break chat, but as soon as I walked into Denis’ office, I could tell the meeting was going to go well. He shook my hand, then said, ‘Son, I’m backing you in all the way. I think you can be a very good player for us, and I think I can get the best out of you as long as you tell me now that you’re in 100 per cent.’

  ‘I’m in,’ I replied straightaway.

  ‘A line has been drawn in the sand,’ Denis continued. ‘I’m not going to judge you on what has happened in previous years. It’s a clean slate. I’m looking forward to working with you, son.’ Denis shook my hand again. ‘I want you to play every game next year. Don’t let me down.’

  According to Denis’ version of that story, apparently I’d leapt in the air in his office, kicking my feet out like I was in a Toyota commercial, and had then shouted, ‘Yeeeees!’ I was pretty damn happy but I don’t recall doing that. Still, it makes for a good anecdote.

  When I walked out of Denis’ office, Lance Whitnall was sitting there. ‘How was Denis?’ he asked. ‘Maaate,’ I said, with a broad grin. ‘The coach loves me. I’ve got him covered already.’ Little did I know, but Denis had followed me into the corridor and was standing right behind me. ‘It’s not going to be that easy, son,’ he murmured. I turned around, looking sheepish. I hoped like hell that I hadn’t ruined my relationship with Denis straightaway. As it turned out, I hadn’t. He really did back me in all the way, and in the process he became a really strong fatherly figure for me. He was a great man. I wouldn’t have achieved half the things
I did in footy if it wasn’t for him.

  Denis has often been asked why he threw me a lifeline when I had a reputation for being such a troublemaker off the field. In 2011, he told the Herald Sun:

  There’s one thing you need if you’re going to be successful and build a football team and that’s talent. There wasn’t a lot of talent at Carlton. We never had anyone [else] who could kick nine goals in a game or kick 90 for the year. We had to [keep Brendan]. We had nothing else.

  If Denis had known how much trouble the footy club was in financially, and how much more strife it would soon be in, I’m tipping he wouldn’t have left the Kangaroos. But when he was hired, John Elliott kept him completely in the dark about the two bombs that were about to go off at Princes Park. The first of them blew up a month or so after Denis’ appointment. For some time, the AFL had been investigating alleged ‘under-the-table’ payments to four players: Stephen Silvagni, Craig Bradley, Fraser Brown and Stephen O’Reilly. On the eve of the national draft, it announced that it had found Carlton guilty of making payments outside the salary cap, and as a result the club was to be fined almost a million dollars and stripped of four draft picks, including the priority selection it had been given due to its poor performance in 2002. It was also banned from the 2003 pre-season draft and lost its first- and second-round picks in the 2003 national draft. The AFL’s 2002 annual report summed up Carlton’s rorting of the system as ‘a deliberate and complex scheme designed and implemented to hide payments and deceive the AFL via the use of trusts, confidentiality agreements and payments to third parties’.

  The salary-cap scandal caused a meltdown at all levels of the club. A board election was held and John Elliott and his gang were thrown out in disgrace, with the club’s former chief executive, Ian Collins, taking over the presidency. Although he’d served for twenty years as club president, during which time the Blues had won two premierships, Elliott’s name was later scrubbed off the grandstand at Princes Park that he had named after himself.

  Being kicked out of the early rounds of the draft was a disaster for the club, but ‘Big Jack’ had left another legacy that would soon threaten the club’s very survival. Despite receiving plenty of advice that it was a bad idea, Elliott had invested millions of dollars in a new grandstand at Princes Park in the mid-1990s. The development had left the club carrying a huge debt, and even before the AFL hit it with a record-breaking salary-cap fine, Carlton’s financial situation was precarious, to say the least. The simple fact was that the club could not afford to pay the fine, and within days of the punishment being handed down, the AFL was forced to loan the club $1.5 million to save it from going bankrupt. A couple of weeks after ‘Collo’ and the new board had taken over, the players were filled in on the club’s predicament. Our captain, Brett Ratten, told us that the club needed all of us to take a pay cut. I wasn’t on very much, so I was pretty pissed off to hear that. But then the boss of the AFL Players’ Association told us that if we didn’t take the pay cuts, the club was going to fold. All the players looked at each other, wondering how it had gotten to this.

  The club was a serious chance to go under. It was unbelievable. ‘How could there be no Carlton footy club?’ we all wondered. The Blues had won the most premierships in the history of the league, yet my teammates and I were faced with being the last people to play for the footy club. I agreed to drop my wage by 15 per cent, while the senior players accepted bigger cuts, as Anthony Koutoufides detailed in his book Kouta: ‘Collo didn’t mince words. “This is how much we’re in debt and this is how much we’re paying you blokes,” he told us. “So you’re all taking a 25 per cent cut to enable the club to exist.”’

  It was just a shit time. When training started, we even had to buy our own footballs. They were really dark days. I remember thinking, ‘What has happened to this club?’ The year I arrived, we had played in a grand final, but now we were a bankrupt rabble with a wooden spoon. A year later, Heath Scotland came to the club from Collingwood and the players were still paying for their Sherrins. I remember him saying, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’

  For Denis, it all added up to a gigantic headache. Having believed he was taking on a plum job at an AFL powerhouse, he soon found himself fronting a fundraising appeal to keep the club alive. But that was only part of the problem. To be a success, Denis needed Carlton to win games of footy. And for Carlton to win games, the club needed some decent players. But the draft-related salary-cap penalties made it almost impossible for us to bolster our list. We should’ve had the first two selections in the pre-season draft, but instead, Denis and our recruiters had to watch on as St Kilda nabbed Brendon Goddard with pick 1 and North Melbourne took Daniel Wells with pick 2. In hindsight, at least we can say that a couple of things went Carlton’s way in that draft. The two players taken with the other picks we lost—Luke Shackleton, taken by Collingwood, and Joel Perry, taken by North Melbourne—did not end up being stars, while the first player we were allowed to draft—Kade Simpson, whom we took with pick 45—went on to become a gun midfielder.

  Denis did try to entice some experienced players to Carlton. However, our financial position was so dire that he could only offer them $40,000 per year. It was a joke. Probably Denis’ strangest recruiting move was bringing in two-time premiership full-back Mick Martyn, one of his favourite North Melbourne players, with pick 84 in the national draft. The move was not a popular one among the playing group. Denis was a bit deluded in thinking that Mick was still capable of playing on gorillas like Jonathan Brown. In fact, mighty Mick’s best football was long behind him, as he was thirty-four years old and had a chronic knee problem. Mick played only thirteen games for us in 2003, the last of which was his 300th AFL match, and I have no doubt that Denis carried Mick to that milestone to thank him for all the hard work he’d done at the Kangaroos.

  Still, by the time the trading period and the draft were done, Denis had changed a lot of things. Adamant that our list needed an overhaul, he had sacked about fifteen players. Also, during pre-season training there was a constant focus on our skinfolds, which were tested every week. And when he got us together for the first time, he was really positive. He thought we could make the finals in 2003 if we backed him. Mind you, a lot of the senior players, blokes like Kouta and Brett Ratten, were pissed off because they’d been able to run the show under Britts, helping him pick the team and that sort of thing. It was something that went back to David Parkin’s tenure. But Denis had insisted that everyone was equal at the club, no matter their reputation. I thought that was a good thing, but some blokes didn’t like it at all. Also, some players were shitty with Denis because he had delisted a heap of their mates. And then there was Corey McKernan. The big fella had been a premiership player under Denis at North Melbourne, but he had joined Carlton to try and escape the coach’s tirades, which had shattered his confidence. Then, just when Corey had reignited his career by winning Carlton’s 2002 best-and-fairest, Denis returned to haunt him. Corey’s form would go so far downhill in 2003 that he’d be traded back to the Kangaroos at the end of the season.

  Although I had some reservations about Denis’ methods, especially his old-school style of people management, he inspired me … eventually. In our training block before Christmas, I was my usual self: loafing, cutting corners and generally trying anything to avoid getting myself properly fit. Denis had tried to fire me up using encouragement, but he finally gave me a spray when I returned from my Christmas break a couple of kilos overweight. He glared at me and said, ‘Are you having a lend of me?’ It was then that I truly realised the situation I was in. I was in the last year of my contract, and many of the people at Carlton thought I should already have been given the boot. My one and only supporter was Denis Pagan. I had to stop letting him down. I certainly didn’t want to experience that glare again.

  I promptly ditched my junk food habit—pizzas had previously made up the bulk of my diet—and started eating steamed vegetables and lean meat. I didn’t give up drinking alt
ogether, but I made a pact with Hoops that our big nights out on the town were behind us. A couple of quiet beers here and there were all we allowed ourselves. I soon recorded my best-ever skinfold results. I also began training really hard. Luke Livingston and I started running a ‘park’ (a lap of the 3.2-kilometre track that ran around the outside of Princes Park) before just about every training session, and I did a lot of other running sessions with our fitness guru Peter Mulkearns. When we did our endurance time trials in February, I finished near the back of the field rather than at the very back, as I had a year earlier.

  I spent hours pumping iron with our weights coach, Tony Doherty. Our weights room was a shitty little area under one of the grandstands, and the weights themselves all looked ancient. But the club had no money to buy us anything better. I think the leg press was the same one that John Nicholls had last used in the 1970s. It was all rusty and you thought it was going to break. However, I lifted those weights day after day. It might seem amazing given I was approaching my fifth season in the AFL, but I hadn’t really done weights properly before. I had given it a crack in my first pre-season, when I’d tried to follow the example set by Aaron Hamill, but until now I’d been too lazy to work hard enough to actually change my body for the better. I’d always had a bit of flab hanging off me and never much muscle tone. But after a summer with Tony Doherty, I was a new man. I had a huge upper body and I was super-strong. None of the league’s big defenders were going to push me out of the way anymore.