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'Marlion's Chance'

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'Marlion's Chance' Marlion Pickett during his debut AFL game – also known as the 2019 AFL grand final. It was a long way from his time playing for a prison footy team in Perth. THE The FIRST glimpse other players – the wider world got with shaved skulls of Marlion Pickett was and rat’s tails and hollow not on an Australian rules eyes – spend much of their football field in Melbourne. He time stressing about making was neither bathed in sunshine parole. On the field, they get doing a balletic blind turn in front of sucked in when opponents taunt 100,014 spectators, nor buried by his them as jailbirds and crims. Pickett, Richmond Football Club teammates though, seems mostly immune from after a cool, calm but dramatic (almost these pressures, launching endless scyth- cinematic) grand final goal. He was not ing runs, flicking nonchalant passes across wearing yellow and black. He was not 27 his body, and flying for marks like a feather in years old. the wind. In one scene, the players and coaches He was 20. He was 60 kilometres east of anonymously rate one another and Pickett fin- Perth. And he was behind bars. ishes on top, with 89 of a possible 90 votes. He Pickett was a character – identified only as talks tenderly about his hopes, too, but with little “Marlion” – in a five-part 2014 TV documentary belief in his voice. called Outside Chance, about an innovative 2012 “Hopefully I’ll make it to the AFL,” he says, eyes criminal justice program, in which inmates of the drifting down, glancing away. “That’s mainly my minimum-security Wooroloo Prison Farm were dream since I was a kid. Hopefully it comes true.” allowed to play football matches against local teams in a The Wooroloo team plays well, sweeping all before regional league, outside their razor-wire confines. The them. The players enjoy the program, too. They eat aim was best summed up by the tagline of the series: junk food from club canteens. They visit their families “Winning their redemption, one game at a time.” on the sidelines. It’s an unprecedented level of freedom. I watched the ABC show before I met Pickett in per- One inmate calls it a torment – “Temptation Island” – son, and it’s confronting. It opens with vision of inmates and so it proves. being strip-searched and foreboding iron doors slam- Late one night at Wooroloo, a player is discovered out- ming shut. It’s narrated by Andrew Krakouer, the former side his cell. The prison officers toss his room and un- Richmond forward who went to jail for assault in 2008, cover contraband. A little marijuana. The player is before being released from prison, then returning to play immediately transferred to the medium-security Acacia MARLION’S CHANCE in the AFL with Collingwood. A sentence from his open- Prison. His privileges are gone. No more footy. “The real ing monologue stands out: “One player, Marlion, looks like tragedy is that he’s the player with the most to lose,” says he has the goods to emulate my journey, and potentially Krakouer. “Marlion.” make it big on the outside.” The jail goes quiet. The program is suspended. The Game footage comes next, and Pickett is instantly rec- documentary is cut short. In the last episode, Pickett ognisable. That languid stride and loping gait. The way fronts a camera. “I got caught with some shit over there. his slender arms cradle the ball and place it gently on the I got charged for it. Stuffed the whole team around foot. Next, in a single snippet of vision, comes a breath- I guess,” he says, shifting and upset. “I coulda done taking confirmation of his football identity. Call it the better, yeah. But you make mistakes in life.” Pickett pirouette. The sweeping, circular, slow-motion spin is an exact replica of the old-fashioned evasive SEVEN YEARS later, Pickett meets me in the play- dance he did on the MCG against the GWS Giants ers’ lounge at the Richmond Football Club, where we that last Saturday in September, on his way to sit on curved couches by a fridge and fruit baskets gathering 22 clean disposals and one premiership and computer game consoles, chatting about life medallion, not to mention a place in sporting and mistakes. Pickett doesn’t make many mis- folklore as the first player in almost seven decades takes in footy. That started when he was six. He to make his AFL debut on grand final day. was the right age for AFL Auskick, but was The series doesn’t detail his crimes, nor does nudged instead by his father to join his big Pickett talk about them on camera, but he was brother in the under-nines. sent away for 30 months following a string of That was in Balga, a suburb of Perth, but burglaries in the Perth suburbs, where he the family – four boys and three girls – spent his late teens. “I stuffed up in the past. moved soon to Manjimup, 300 kilometres Probably boredom,” he says on the doco, south of the capital, inland from sheepish but honest. “Alcohol. Being Margaret River. It was all wheat and brought up around drugs. Everything sheep there once, now it’s truffles goes downhill from there. Guess and wine. They moved more you’ve got nothing to look than once through his forma- forward to, so you start tive years, to Midland and committing crimes, then York and Lakeside, and It’s quite the tale: Marlion Pickett, a young bloke from crime, you end he played football from Perth, makes his AFL debut in this year’s up in here.” wherever grand final, wowing the crowd with his raw talent. His backstory is even more remarkable. BY Konrad Marshall 10 GoodWeekend GoodWeekend 11 With 12 months left to run on his sentence, he WAFL, mate,” says Van Der Wielen, laughing. “No one as long as he needed, but Pickett wanted to be en- Thursfield believes Pickett never really leaves that NCE THE big game was over and all the inter- watched an awful lot of AFL matches, and those of the wanted to go near him. Physically he would dominate sconced in a home with parents and children, so he mode, and is perhaps the very definition of single- Oviews done, the Tigers scattered to the four lower-level state league, the WAFL. He quit drinking, you, and then he’d rip you apart with skill, too.” moved out after a fortnight, to live with the host family minded. “He’s always engaged. He doesn’t say a whole winds, as players do when the off-season beckons. You and hasn’t had a drop of alcohol in seven years. “I made Matt Clarke, Richmond’s national recruiting man- (“Sue and Vin”) of young Indigenous half-back Derek lot, but he listens with great intent. He’s got this lovely can find most of them on Instagram. Forward Tom my mind up: ‘When I get out, everything is about footy ager, was paying attention, but WAFL games can be an Eggmolesse-Smith. “They were really supportive and look in his eyes, too. You know what he’s doing it for, Lynch at a café in Bali. Backman Alex Rance at and family.’ The first week I got out of prison, I walked unreliable gauge of ability, in part because they play on really caring. I felt at home.” and that nothing will stop him.” Yosemite National Park in California. Nick Vlastuin straight into South Fremantle Football Club.” such wide grounds, without the same congestion or He seemed to take the entire upheaval in his stride, kiteboarding in Indonesia. Sydney Stack winning a That was 2012. The South Fremantle Bulldogs are a contact as in the AFL. Pickett was also positioned having what people around him describe as an unflap- PLENTY COULD have stopped him. Once drafted by dance contest in Thailand. proud club, with strong historic ties to Richmond. across half-back and on the wing, until Tim Kelly left pable personality. “He’s affable, low-maintenance, un- Richmond, his path to an historic debut was neither Pickett, before the first long night of post-match cel- Champion centreman Maurice Rioli was a star there for Geelong. Pickett took his spot in the middle, and flustered, self-sufficient,” says Matt Clarke. “He’s linear nor smooth. After his famous first goal in the ebrations had even really begun, went home early. His before and after his playing career with the Tigers. went from gazelle to bull. “You could see the AFL actually a pretty adventurous character, too. I remem- third quarter of the grand final, in front of a televised mother, Angela, and father, Thomas, had flown across Krakouer was recruited from there, too. There are traits,” says Clarke. “He’d hit bodies. He’s actually a ber in his first week asking him what he was going to audience of 2.94 million, you might remember him am- for the grand final, his dad confined to a wheelchair many more but one among them stands out: Mal natural collision player.” do on his day off, and he said, ‘I’m just gonna get on the bling forward with the barest smile on his face, raising owing to crippling emphysema, and he wanted to share Brown, the former Richmond powerbroker (or at least The Tigers also liked that he had shown loyalty to trams and go and see Melbourne. Where do you reckon one hand in the air. He wasn’t calling attention to his the moment with them.
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