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UNCORRECTED PROOF CHAPTER EIGHT hat I lasted at St Kilda until 2001 was probably due Tto good luck more than anything else. These days, I probably would have been sacked two or three times for some of the things I did. Especially early on, when I was still living in Broadford, I was involved in a lot of incidents that didn’t become public. But even the things that did get told to the club – like what happened at Seymour – you would get sacked for that these days, and rightly so. My biggest problem was that I kept surviving, and so I didn’t do much to change the way I approached life. The reality was that I was a ticking time bomb. I’ve already mentioned how I had a bad attitude and a chip on my shoulder, and like any young bloke I thought I was never wrong. I would always find a way to justify what I had done. When an attitude like that was mixed with alcohol, it sometimes became lethal. 64 baRRY hall UNCORRECTED PROOF My drinking was definitely a problem in those days. It got to the stage that, apart from drinking on the weekends, I was sometimes hitting it two or three times during the week as well. I didn’t feel I had a problem – it wasn’t as though I had to have a drink every day – but when I started drinking I just wouldn’t stop, which obviously affected me in the head. I was generally a happy drunk – until, just like on the footy field, something or someone sparked me. With my bad attitude being amplified by the alcohol, I used to explode. I couldn’t control it, and when I was rubbed the wrong way I would get really aggressive. But I didn’t believe there was anything really wrong with me. I just thought that this was how I was. And, of course, if there was trouble I always convinced myself that I was a victim of circumstances. Not all the off-field problems I had – and there were quite a few of them – were related to my alcohol consumption. Sometimes dickheads just wanted to have a crack at me. As I got better known – and hated by the fans of other teams – it seemed that every time I was out, someone would try to light my fuse. Of course, my fuse wasn’t a long one back then, and I just couldn’t bring myself to back down and walk away. Even when I wasn’t looking for trouble, it always seemed to find me. I’d go out for a night with my mates, and would be copping shit from imbeciles in the car park before we’d even gone inside. I’d try to stay cool but my mates wanted to stick up for me, and I couldn’t let them fight my wars, so then I’d be into it too. Truth be told, I still find it difficult to walk away even now, but I’m a hell of a lot better than I was. If someone Pulling No Punches 65 UNCORRECTED PROOF had a crack at me, I just had to shoot him down. I always had to have the last word. Back then, it was always more about fighting physically than verbally, whereas now it’s the other way. Nowadays, if some drunk footy fan has a go at me, I’ll give him a few words back. Most of the guys who try this aren’t very smart, so I can usually put them in their place fairly easily and then walk away feeling okay about it. When I was a young hot-head, I didn’t think about the consequences of what I did, and I didn’t care too much about them either. I wasn’t bothered if I got sacked, which probably explains a lot about my behaviour. Things did change for me, though, I think because I started to mature a bit, and because I started to care about my football career and my reputation. I realised I didn’t want to carry on like I did when I was younger; I’d worked so hard to get ahead and I risked losing it all. At that time I was on a better contract and getting good money. I thought, ‘If I can keep improving, the potential is there for me to get a bigger contract.’ Money drove me more than a love of the game. I’m so lucky to have had the career I’ve had, and I believe that one of the main reasons I was able to have it was that I got out of Melbourne when I did. At the end of the 2001 season, I knew I just couldn’t handle all the attention. Both out in public and in the media, footy was everywhere. The more high-profile you became as a player, the more recognisable you were in the street. When that happened, your private life disappeared completely, and you weren’t able to do much at all resembling normal. 66 baRRY hall UNCORRECTED PROOF I was also lucky, too, that there wasn’t the same sort of scrutiny on AFL players as there is now. I got into plenty of fights out on the town with my mates, but there were many which the general public never found out about. If there had been camera phones back then, I would have been stuffed. The incident at the Metro in 2001 was one that went public, and if things hadn’t worked out as they did, St Kilda would have had the perfect excuse to get rid of me there and then. But the reality, particularly early in my career, was that I never really got punished by the club for my off-field dramas. While I knew what I was doing was wrong, I didn’t really think it was that unacceptable, so there was no real change in my behaviour. I was involved in lots of incidents back then, and the club was contacted for probably half of them. Mind you, there were also times the club would get calls from people just making up stories. But there were plenty of true stories too. My mates and I used to go to Wild Bill’s at Southland, and one time a couple of blokes were giving us some lip in the car park. Then one of them picked up one of those yellow posts they put in the parking spots. I saw red and started running for him. I grabbed it, but instead of hitting him with it I just used my fists and bopped him. The next day he was on the phone to St Kilda, saying I’d hit him over the head with a pole. One time, my girlfriend and I were out at Crown Casino with a mate and his missus, and we got into a blue. I ended up with blood pouring from my arm where a bloke had bitten me, no shirt on and wearing one shoe. I got a few strange looks when I walked through the joint to the other side to get a cab. Pulling No Punches 67 UNCORRECTED PROOF Like I said, not all the blues involved alcohol, but many did. It got to the point where I couldn’t live anything like a normal life in Melbourne. I was getting even more public attention and was starting to struggle with it. I knew it would eventually bring about the end of my footy career, and possibly something worse. I needed to move away. That was the main reason I decided to agree to being traded at the end of the 2001 season. I also felt that, despite having worked really hard over the previous few years, I wasn’t getting anywhere at the footy club. Because of my past sins, I could see that I would never have the chance to take on a leadership role at St Kilda. Leaving your club is not the sort of decision you take lightly. As it happened, the management at St Kilda told me there had been interest in me from a few clubs and asked me whether I would consider leaving. The money they mentioned was better than St Kilda’s offer, too, and the more I thought about it, the more sense getting out of Melbourne seemed to make. Grant Thomas had wanted me to stay. I remember him saying, ‘We fought to keep you here when Malcolm Blight wanted to trade you,’ but by that time I had decided it was time to move on. Three clubs were interested – Fremantle, Carlton and Sydney. While Carlton’s offer was a good one, I knew it would be best for me to leave Melbourne. Going to Carlton wouldn’t fix my off-field problems – in fact, they would probably worsen – so the Blues quickly dropped off my list. My management and I still spoke with them, though, just in case things went pear-shaped with the other clubs. 68 baRRY hall UNCORRECTED PROOF John Andrews from Elite Sports Properties was the guy who was helping me out at that time. I had been with ESP as my managers since my second year at St Kilda. In the first season I’d had no need for a manager, as what I was getting was all set, so my uncle had just helped me out with anything I needed.

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