Fev: In My Own Words Read online

  When I rocked up at the ground, most of the boys were talking about what they were going to do that night. But once we had our footy gear on, things became a bit more serious. No-one wants to go half-cocked into a game that’s going to be televised around the nation. Some of our veterans didn’t play, blokes like Silvagni, Bradley and Ratten, but we still had a reasonably strong team. ‘Kouta’ pulled the boots on, as did Sammy Hamill, star defender Andrew McKay and dashing wingman Scott Camporeale. Collingwood, which was under the guidance of new coach Mick Malthouse for the first time, had been training for six weeks longer than us because they hadn’t made the 1999 finals, but they selected an inexperienced side. Nathan Buckley, Anthony Rocca, Gavin Brown and Paul Williams were among the few big names on the Magpies’ list who suited up.

  When we ran out onto the MCG, we noticed there weren’t many people in the stands—the final crowd tallied less then 15,000. Still, I was amazed that anyone was there. Surely the people watching us run around had better things to do. Why weren’t they on the sauce? For some reason, Dad’s ticket put him in the middle of thousands of Collingwood supporters. When I walked down to full-forward, they gave me heaps, so Dad started giving a bit back. Some of the Magpie fans asked him why he was telling them to shut up and he told them he was my father, but they wouldn’t believe him. As I stood in the goal square with my opponent, Mal Michael, I felt supremely fit. I hardly had an ounce of fat on my body and I weighed seven more kilos than when I’d arrived at the club. That fitness and strength made me feel confident that I could put on a decent show.

  As the umpire held the yellow Sherrin aloft in the middle of the ground and the opening siren sounded, I cracked a big grin. I’d decided to treat the game as a bit of fun. My smile grew even broader after I took a mark on the lead and kicked the opening goal. By quarter time we led by 33 points and I had three majors to my name, including a freakish soccer-goal that had my old man jumping out of his seat and punching the air. The second quarter was like a dream. I started it by taking a mark 50 metres out in the right pocket, but rather than pass, I had a shot and the ball sailed straight through the uprights. For the rest of the quarter, the ball just kept coming to me, and I kept grabbing it cleanly and kicking goals. Mal Michael was replaced by Gavin Crosisca (he later became our defensive coach and I used to give him heaps of grief about how many goals I kicked on him that night), yet I kept putting the pill through the big sticks. By half-time I had eight and we were 66 points up. I could do no wrong. I felt like I was back in the Narre Warren juniors again.

  Up in the stands, the Collingwood supporters had started shaking Dad’s hand and patting him on the back. He was smiling like a Cheshire cat. Mum was sitting in another part of the ground and she couldn’t believe what she was seeing either. In the second half, thanks to some great passes from the likes of Camporeale, Lappin and fellow youngster Adam Chatfield, and the fact I was now being manned up by a couple of Collingwood rookies, I kicked four more goals, taking my tally for the night to twelve. My last goal was also the last kick of the game, which meant it was the last kick of the millennium! It was a record haul for the night series/ pre-season competition, eclipsing several previous ten-goal hauls. I’d had fifteen shots in all—three went through for behinds—and our final winning margin was 88 points. ‘I’m eating McDonald’s before every game from now on,’ I said to one of the boys as we celebrated our big win.

  31 December 1999: Brendan kicks one of his twelve goals during the Millennium Match between Carlton and Collingwood at the MCG. (Newspix/Colleen Petch)

  When we got back into the rooms, people queued up to ruffle my hair and tell me how good I was. I was on such a high. Shane O’Sullivan wore a big grin, as he now looked like a genius who had pulled off one of the great recruiting coups. He later told the press:

  People will say that it’s easy to say it now, but that’s why we picked him—because he is a goal kicker. One of my theories is that if you’ve got goal kickers, like Whitnall and these kids, well, you can’t go wrong. Somewhere along the line they are going to be terrific players for you. [Brendan] could be anything. He could become a real drawcard.

  Amid all the fanfare, Britts tried to put things in perspective. He congratulated me on my game then let me know that I still had plenty of hard work ahead of me if I wanted to be a star at the highest level.

  A few of the boys who’d been at Shane’s party actually did come to the game. Half-cut before they’d arrived at the ground, they were pretty rotten by the time I met up with them. After a couple of celebratory drinks in the MCG car park, we all went back to Narre Warren and partied through the night. Everyone at Shane’s had watched the game on TV, so I was the hero of the party.

  The next day, I was big news. ‘It’s party time for bubbly Blues,’ blared a double-page headline in the Herald Sun. ‘Fevola bags 12 as Pies crumble.’ Veteran footy reporter Bruce Matthews, who must have drawn the short straw to cover the game while his family and friends were enjoying New Year’s Eve festivities, was full of praise for my performance:

  Carlton unveiled a potential champion spearhead of the 21st century when teenager Brendan Fevola destroyed Collingwood and the much-vaunted millennium challenge at the MCG last night.

  Fevola booted 12 goals with a mature display of direct leading, strong marks and straight shooting to fire the Blues to a ridiculously easy 88-point win—20.17-137 to 7.7-49—in the lopsided Ansett Cup opener.

  The 18-year-old, wearing the No. 25 jumper made famous by Alex Jesaulenko, smashed the Ansett Cup individual goalkicking record and gave the Blues every indication he might provide viable support for the overworked Lance Whitnall in the coming season.

  Journalists starting lining up outside our house from about 10 am. I was seriously hung-over, but at noon I did an interview with a heap of reporters on our doorstep. Then a couple of cameramen came into the lounge room and took some vision of me watching a recording of the game on our TV. It was pretty funny and I felt rather special. That night, the news reports suggested the Blues could finally call off their search for a new Stephen ‘Sticks’ Kernahan, who had retired at the end of the 1997 season after kicking 738 goals in 251 games.

  Looking back, however, kicking those twelve goals was probably the worst thing that could have happened to me at that stage of my career. It made me think that footy was easy. I probably should have read the article that Herald Sun journalist Damian Barrett wrote two days after the game, which had the headline ‘Jezza magic rubs off on Fevola’.

  Fevola will never again be allowed the space that Collingwood afforded him last Friday, and it will be a different assignment when he’s dealing with Glenn Archer and Mick Martyn instead of Collingwood rookies Michael Clark and Michael Gardiner.

  They were wise words, and I wish I’d seen and heeded them instead of falling back into my bad ways. With rare exceptions, I never trained that hard again, never again did all that extra stuff. I thought great performances and big bags of goals were just going to keep happening. If I could kick twelve in a single game, surely I could kick six every week without really trying.

  6 WARMING THE PINE

  The AFL moved the 2000 season forward to avoid a clash with the Sydney Olympics, so we were back on the field in late January, opposed to Fremantle at Waverley Park in our second pool game of the Ansett Cup. A knock-out competition for much of its history, the Ansett Cup had a round-robin format that year—we were in pool B, along with Collingwood, the Dockers and Port Adelaide. Despite annoying Wayne Brittain by taking my foot off the pedal at training, he selected me for the game. My performance was nothing to write home about, but the team’s was: in front of only 5000 people, we won by 84 points, all but wrapping up a spot in the semi-finals.

  Our final pool game was against the Power at Adelaide’s Football Park, and it was in that contest that I received my first post–Millennium Match reminder that footy brought with it as many bad times as good ones. We were 5 points down deep in the last quarter and I still had
no goals against my name when I took a mark within easy range of the big sticks. It was only the Ansett Cup, but still, I had a chance to fulfil a boyhood dream by kicking the winning goal of a match. I trotted towards the man on the mark and sunk my foot into the Sherrin, only to watch it veer off-target for a behind. We lost by 4 points, and I’d failed to kick a goal. If you’re only as good as your last game, suddenly I wasn’t much good at all.

  Despite the loss to Port Adelaide, our high percentage meant we went through to the first semi-final at Waverley Park. Again we lost, going down to the Kangaroos by 21 points, and again I didn’t do much in the game. So for the next three weeks I had to knuckle down on the training track to try and make sure that Britts and Parko saw fit to select me for our opening home-and-away game against the Brisbane Lions at Princes Park. The two men had set up a unique coaching arrangement for that season. Wayne, who had previously been the reserves coach, was now the match-day coach for the seniors. That basically meant he ran the team, while David, who had signalled his intention to retire at the end of the year, worked as his advisor. David was still called the senior coach, but really he might better have been titled the director of coaching.

  My life changed quite a bit in those three weeks before we took on the Lions. My teammate Simon Beaumont, who was five years older than me, invited me to move into his place in the trendy suburb of South Yarra. Beauie knew I was struggling with all the commuting from Narre Warren, so being the awesome bloke and clubman that he was, he wanted to help me out. I was stoked to finally be moving out of home. Partly it was because I wanted to get out of Mum’s hair, but I had also just turned nineteen and I was keen to get among the good times in the city. The interstate boys were usually put in houses together, and they were always telling stories about how good it was to live in a house full of young blokes. They had the freedom to do whatever they wanted—go out late, bring home girls, those sorts of things. I ended up living with Beauie for three years, and South Yarra proved to be a fair step up in class from Narre Warren on all fronts.

  One big problem I had after moving out of home was that my diet was terrible. I had never cooked anything in my life, as Mum had always looked after me—I had no idea how to prepare even the simplest meal. Beauie took care of me as best he could, but when he was over at his girlfriend’s place I used to eat two-minute noodles, or I’d duck down to the local takeaway and get chicken and chips. Mum would often cook a big casserole and put serves of it in my freezer, but she couldn’t do that very often as she was still busy caring for Jason. None of the other young blokes at the club knew much about cooking either, so we often ate out together. Going out with the lads to have pizza and pasta down on Lygon Street was heaps of fun, but the fatty food we ate didn’t help when it came to training.

  Fortunately, when it came to everything else, Carlton’s staff and my manager, Paul Connors, took care of it all. They basically took over from Mum and became my chief carers. They sorted out my tax return and made sure my mobile phone bill was paid. Paul looked after my salary to the point where he just gave me a spending allowance every week—it was something like $500—and put the rest in the bank. Most of the young players at the club had similar relationships with their managers. The club liked it that way, as they just wanted us to concentrate on playing footy. But the downside was that I missed out on learning a lot of life skills. Even now, I still don’t know how to pay a power bill or a water bill. I’ve always had other people do it for me.

  Because the game had recently become fully professional, AFL players no longer had to hold down full-time jobs outside of the game, so we had no real responsibilities other than to turn up to training every day. In that regard, being employed by an elite footy club was much like being at school. You had all these people minding you, looking after you, trying to make sure you did the right thing; in fact, in Parko, we even had a teacher for a coach. When we arrived for training, the club’s staff would have all our footy gear ready, waiting for us. The boys would eat together, like you do at the start of lunchtime at school, and then we’d go and play games, like trying to kick a ball up in the air as many times as possible without touching it with our hands. We also played heaps of cricket during the pre-season, and once again it was just like school because we only had a shitty bat and a tennis ball.

  Thanks to Parko’s insistence that the club do its best to make us more rounded people, the Blues developed a program to ensure we were devoting some thought to what we’d do when our footy careers ended. The program was called PACE—Professional Athlete Career Education—and it was run by the club’s player development manager, Lawrie Fabian, who had taught physical education in Australia and overseas and had also lectured alongside David Parkin at Deakin University. PACE featured cooking lessons and investment advice, and during my first couple of years at Carlton, it also provided me with a couple of ‘interesting’ jobs. The first involved selling Whitman’s chocolates. I had to go to supermarkets wearing a Whitman’s uniform and set up special displays that drew attention to the company’s products. I received heaps of free chocolate, but I thought it tasted like shit. I also had a job with a pottery distribution company, making deliveries to hardware stores like Bunnings. That was another terrible job. I think we got paid about $20 for a half-day’s work. A lot of the time I just rang up and told them I was sick.

  Lawrie Fabian was a nice bloke, but even though he tried his best to remind me that the average AFL player’s career only lasted four years, I didn’t listen to much of what he had to say. I was going to be a rich superstar footballer. Besides, I’d only just begun my career. I couldn’t see the point of thinking about retirement. Surely it was more than a decade away.

  I didn’t do enough on the training track to earn a place in the team for round 1 of the new season. But I was named as an emergency and ended up being a late inclusion when a back injury forced out one of our key defenders, Stephen O’Reilly. The game was played on a stinking hot March day, with the temperature peaking in the third quarter at 33.4 degrees Celsius. Not that it worried our evergreen captain, Craig Bradley, who racked up thirty-three possessions in a best-on-ground performance as we started the season in style with a 40-point win. It was ‘Braddles’ who hit me on the chest with a superb pass shortly after I came off the bench in the second quarter. The subsequent shot at goal was officially my first kick in an AFL match. I’d dreamed about slotting a goal with my first kick, so I desperately wanted it to be straight. Alas, it cannoned into the top of a post. I made amends by finishing the afternoon with three majors, but I’d missed another four shots at goal. I really should have booted a few more. That would have been a brilliant way to start the year.

  In those days, there were a couple of great traditions attached to our home games at Princes Park. Following the final siren, we would make the fitness staff happy by stretching, drinking heaps of Gatorade and eating some lollies or pizza. Then we would have a shower, put on our suits and go up to the social club for a couple of drinks with the supporters. After that, we’d walk a few hundred metres to the Princes Park Carlton Bowls Club, where the trainers would put on beers and a feed for all the boys. All the girlfriends would come back there too, and if we’d won, everyone would watch a replay of the game. It was a really good family culture. Because we had plenty of veterans on our list, a number of the players had kids and they’d be running around on the bowling greens. It was like a real footy club; it reminded me of the Narre Warren days. When I was having a drink with Brett Ratten or Anthony Koutoufides, though, I’d often think to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting here with all these blokes.’ I’d watched these superstars on TV for so many years and now I found myself socialising with them. I had to pinch myself on many occasions.

  After away games at Waverley or the MCG, we’d often have dinner and a few beers at the Kent Hotel on Rathdowne Street in Carlton. It had a similar family atmosphere to that at the bowling club, with the older players bringing their partners and kids along. The Ke
nt would shut about midnight and then the sensible ones would go home to bed. In my first year, I was often one of those sensible ones, although the temptations of Melbourne’s nightclub scene eventually got the better of me.

  My promising performance against the Lions ensured I retained my place in the side for our next game against Hawthorn at Princes Park. The game started at the unusual time of 12.10 pm so that Channel 7 could telecast it on delay in Melbourne, and I began on the bench again before Britts sent me to the forward line during the second quarter. My confidence was high, and it went higher still when I hauled in a few big marks, which had the pro-Carlton crowd roaring. Wearing a long-sleeve jumper and with stubble across my face, I kicked a couple of goals before half-time, and felt ready to kick a bag. But things went awry in the third term. Thanks to our midfield dominance, the ball kept coming to me, but my kicking was all over the shop. I kicked 1.5 for the quarter, and although I ended the afternoon with four goals, it was again a case of little reward for a lot of effort. At least I earned my keep by helping Simon Beaumont chair Kouta off the ground after what had been his 150th game.

  Despite my poor kicking, my performance attracted plenty of attention. In his match report, the Herald Sun’s Mark Robinson wrote: ‘This kid has freaky qualities and with a bit of luck he could have been the league’s leading goalkicker.’ (That honour went to Matthew Lloyd, who had already kicked fourteen.) The following weekend, an article appeared in the AFL Record that had been written by former AFL forward Richard Osborne. Talking about my effort against the Hawks, he said that I’d ‘displayed natural aerial ability with nine very strong grabs and in the weeks to come could be a real impact player. His 12-goal effort in the Ansett Australia Cup game against Collingwood certainly does not appear to have been a one-hit wonder’.