Such was my change in attitude, I even decided to start developing my life outside football by enrolling in a real-estate course at RMIT. (I must admit, however, that I only went to one class. My classmates were all middle-aged people and the teacher was boring, so I never went back.) When the Carlton FC magazine interviewed me for its pre-season edition, I was as happy as I’d been in many years.
I just think that I realise how important footy is to me and in the past I think my focus wasn’t on footy. I was too worried about other things and I got a bit carried away with them. Now my focus is totally on footy and working hard for the team. Playing good footy and feeling fit has made my life a lot better. I suppose it is a bit of maturity, but at the end of the day it will be what I do on the field that will speak loudest.
That was exactly how I felt at the time. I was twenty-two years old, and life was good.
On the eve of the pre-season competition, we headed to Alice Springs to do some community visits. I had a great time mucking around with little kids in hospitals and at the footy clinics we hosted. I ended up being pictured in the Herald Sun high-fiving a tiny Aboriginal girl. My big grin wasn’t put on. I’d always loved kids and I was really enjoying myself. I spoke to reporter Mark Stevens for the accompanying article, the first exclusive newspaper interview I had done in two years. The headline ‘Wild child no more’ summed up where I was at. I told Stevens that it was time to ‘step up or nick off’, adding, ‘I’m getting older and I’m feeling more mature.’ With regard to Denis’ influence on the club since he’d taken over, I said, ‘It’s been great. He praises everyone. All the players have warmed to him. Everyone’s so confident.’ The last bit of that quote wasn’t completely accurate. I was right on board with what Denis was doing, but despite his reputation for galvanising teams, a number of our senior players were still not so keen on their new boss.
The pay cuts had also left the likes of Kouta feeling that the club didn’t care about the blokes who had been its great servants. He wrote in his book:
The three years of Collo’s presidency, from 2003 to 2005, were the most unenjoyable years of my time at Carlton. It’s a part of my career that I want to forget. Under Collo’s regime, there were no innovations, only cost-cuttings. No one could see any light. There was no hope …
Collo and many of the members of his board had a poor rapport with the players. Collo was unfriendly to us. He didn’t really rate us. He always looked down at us like we weren’t worth anything, and the players felt it.
I don’t really have an opinion on Collo. He did seem to be a very strange bloke, but on the whole I managed to steer clear of him. I left it to my manager to deal with him.
To get back to the footy, after recovering from a finger tendon injury, I regained full fitness in time to play in our opening Wizard Cup match against Collingwood at the stadium then known as Telstra Dome. I kicked four goals in the second half, was named our third-best player, and drew plenty of praise from Denis for my efforts. It proved to be our only game in the Wizard Cup, which had reinstituted its knockout format, as Nathan Buckley put on a master class and the Magpies won by 56 points. But I was named among Carlton’s best players in each of our subsequent practice matches, and the good times rolled on away from the field when I was a groomsman at Simon Beaumont’s wedding. When Beauie and his wife bought a new place together, I decided to move in with midfielder Simon Fletcher. ‘Fletch’ was a gun in the kitchen, so he played a big role in keeping my skinfolds under control.
I was jumping out of my skin with excitement in the week leading up to our first home-and-away game against the Swans at the Olympic stadium in Sydney. But I was also feeling a lot of pressure. Denis had thrown out the high-possession game plan favoured by Wayne Brittain and replaced it with the long-kicking style of play that had taken North Melbourne to seven consecutive preliminary finals. At the Kangaroos, the plan had basically involved long bombs to a key forward, who just happened to be Wayne Carey, the best centre half-forward in the history of the game. At Carlton, the long bombs would come to me. I knew I was no Wayne Carey, but at least I was going to get plenty of chances to kick some goals.
Our 2003 campaign started horribly when the Swans flogged us by 74 points. Older players like Koutoufides and McKernan had no impact on the game, and straightaway there were murmurs in the change rooms about Denis’ game plan. A young kid by the name of Jon McCormick, who had only recently been promoted off the rookie list, was one of our few decent players. Thankfully, I was another. I had fourteen kicks and took eight marks, although I undid most of that good work by kicking 2.5 and one out on the full. In the coming weeks, however, my form and that of the team would improve greatly. I booted five goals in our narrow loss to Collingwood in round 2, leading Denis to say the following in his post-game press conference:
He has been our best player since I have been at the club. Brendan can make something of his football. If he really wants to, he can set himself up in his life if he really makes a total commitment like he is now. He is a role model.
A role model! It was now clear: I was Denis’ number-one man. During that first year he was in charge, I would’ve run through a brick wall for him.
I made him smile again in round 3 when I kicked four goals in our upset win over Essendon. Never a coach who liked singling players out for praise when he fronted the media, Denis broke his rule after that win, telling reporters that he was particularly proud of myself and Ryan Houlihan. The papers voted Hoops best-on-ground and me second-best. The media also hailed Denis, with Mike Sheahan writing, ‘Pagan will rebuild Carlton his way, just as Malthouse has done at Collingwood.’
Another bout of the kicking yips—I booted 2.5—saw us fall to high-flying Port Adelaide at Princes Park in round 4. But a week later, when we took on Denis’ old side, there was no stopping me. I ran onto the field wearing a new pair of eye-catching white boots and I was in the thick of the action from the outset. I took two strong marks and kicked a couple of early goals, which forced North’s new coach, Dean Laidley, to send Shannon Watt to the back pocket and give Leigh Colbert a go at keeping me in check. But with my teammates sending in long bombs whenever they ran past the centre, I just continued on my merry way. I slotted the ball through from all sorts of angles and all sorts of distances. Every time I went back to have a shot, I just believed it would go through, and we won a classic match by 9 points. My final haul of 8.2 was my best effort since the New Year’s Eve game way back in 1999. My afternoon’s work even included a scuffle with the toughest man in football, Glenn Archer, during which he threatened to grab a handful of my shaggy mop of hair.
31 August 2003: Carlton v Kangaroos, before the final siren (Newspix/George Sal)
Football was fun again, and I could not have been happier. The Carlton fans were delirious as well. The club’s previous record membership was soon broken with a final tally of more than 33,000. The cash from the new members was a vital boost for the club, as it was still relying on AFL support to survive.
It wasn’t only me who was the flavour of the month after our big win against the Kangaroos. My great mate Hoops had been on fire as well, kicking three goals. We were referred to in the media as Denis’ ‘beloved project players’, and that was fine with us. The coach was in our corner and we were having the time of our lives. I was now the competition’s joint leading goal kicker alongside Melbourne’s David Neitz. I had also taken eleven contested marks, the most in the league; the next best was five.
Yet football has a way of knocking you down when you get a bit carried away, which is what happened in the next two rounds. I managed only one goal in each game, both of which we lost. As happy as I’d been after the game against the Kangaroos, I felt incredibly flat after those ordinary performances against the Hawks and Saints. It didn’t help that opposition supporters would continually remind me about my past when I was having a shocker. They’d hang over the fence and yell, ‘Get us a fire extinguisher. We’re on fire!’ When one of our trainers c
ame out to me with a water bottle, fans would scream, ‘Sure you don’t want a beer you dickhead?!’
Jonathan Hay flogged me the day we played Hawthorn. I didn’t take a mark in the first half, which led Denis to bench me for a long period. But that left our forward line in disarray. That was the downside of Denis’ reliance on me. It felt like I had to kick a bag for us to win. In fact, Denis occasionally said things like, ‘Son, if you don’t kick six goals then we’re stuffed.’ It meant that when I had a bad game and we were beaten, I blamed myself for the loss. That was a terrible feeling. Sometimes when I failed to deliver, I felt sick with despair. Even when I’d kick four or five goals, people would just say, ‘Well, so you should have kicked them.’ But it’s bloody hard work when your team is on the bottom of the ladder.
I had a chance to redeem myself when we played the Western Bulldogs at Princes Park in round 8, my fiftieth AFL game. Getting the ball wasn’t an issue that afternoon, but a strong breeze made kicking straight just about impossible—for me anyway. My first six shots at goal were all behinds; it was bloody comical. I was finally handed a goal on a platter in the third quarter when Brian Harris (these days known as Brian Lake) ran across the mark and I was gifted a shot from the goal square. I ended the game with 1.6, although my wayward performance was largely forgiven because we’d won by a point. A week later I was back in the bad books, however, when I hardly got a touch and we were flogged by the premiers of the previous two years, the Brisbane Lions. The Lions might as well have been in a different league from us. We celebrated in the rooms at half-time after finding ourselves leading by 11 points, but Leigh Matthews’ men wiped the smiles off our faces in the second half by booting seventeen goals to three. It was a brutal reality check.
Denis was disgusted with our capitulation. He made us watch a full replay of the game when we gathered for our recovery session on the Monday, then he flogged us on the track, which made many of the senior players even more resentful of him. That glorious afternoon when we’d smashed the Kangaroos now seemed like a dream. Denis was still encouraging me, and I still had a lot of faith in him, but it wasn’t even the halfway mark of the season and our finals hopes were already gone.
We had the odd highlight during the rest of the season, the best being the reception Carlton fans gave Jarrad Waite when he kicked a goal at the social club end of Princes Park in our round 14 game against Melbourne. Jarrad’s father, Vin Waite, a star defender with the Blues in the 1960s and 1970s, had recently died of a heart attack at the age of just fifty-four. Just playing in the game was a massive effort for Jarrad, but he did it to honour his dad. And when he grabbed the ball on the wing and began dashing towards the 50-metre arc, the Blues faithful were out of their seats. When Jarrad’s kick went straight through for a goal, the crowd went absolutely berserk. The roar just about lifted the roof off the social club. It was magnificent. Jarrad’s teammates ran from all over the ground to congratulate him—I remember grabbing him and giving him a big hug. Those are the kinds of moments that make you love your footy club. We were, despite our many challenges, still a big family.
Yet we lost that game against Melbourne, and we lost every weekend for the rest of the season. Some of our performances were downright disgraceful, like when we lost to West Coast in Perth by 116 points. We also lost to Collingwood by 73 points and to St Kilda by 91. As our campaign fell apart, Denis began ripping into many of the senior players. He gave Anthony Koutoufides a fearful spray during Kouta’s 200th game, which was the debacle against the Saints. Kouta was struggling with sore knees, but at three-quarter time Denis just looked at him and yelled, ‘Kouta, if you don’t start jumping, you’re better off retiring.’ Kouta was understandably shattered. I think he hated Denis completely after that, even though Denis rang the next day to apologise.
In fact, most of the players had developed a seething hatred of the coach. They especially hated Denis’ training drills, which were always the same. Although I was never a fan of Wayne Brittain’s game plan, his training methods could at least be interesting. He would tailor our training to match the strengths of our upcoming opponent, so if we were playing North Melbourne we would do a lot of one-on-one stuff, and if we were taking on the Western Bulldogs we’d prepare ourselves to combat their running style of play. But Denis stuck with the same training drills no matter what, because his mantra was, ‘Don’t worry if everyone else knows what we’re doing. As long as we know what we’re doing, then everything will be fine.’ I’m certainly not going to whack Denis, like many other Carlton people have done in recent years. I believed in the way he trained us; I thought that he was doing all he could to make us successful. However, I will admit that his training regimen did become quite monotonous.
Another problem Denis had was that his pre-training meetings went on forever. He would go on and on about this and that, sometimes having a crack at blokes, sometimes talking for ages about our opposition. Those meetings certainly became boring. But I suppose Denis’ major failing was that he never won over all the senior players. He rarely asked them for any input because Denis was a my-way-or-the-highway sort of coach. Clearly that had worked at North Melbourne, but it wasn’t working at Carlton. Brett Ratten and Adrian Hickmott got so sick of what was going on that they retired. Maybe our players were just from a completely different generation from him. I don’t really know exactly why it all went pear-shaped.
We saved our worst effort for the final round, a Saturday night game against North Melbourne at Telstra Dome. We were eleven goals down by half-time and eventually lost by 124 points. It was the worst loss in the club’s history, surpassing even the terrible defeat at the hands of West Coast a few weeks earlier. I can only think of one word to describe it: humiliating. The result meant we had lost our last ten games of the season by an average margin of 60 points. I think Denis was pretty shell-shocked by the whole thing. The Western Bulldogs had registered only three wins and a draw, compared to our four wins, so they found themselves taking home the wooden spoon. But even then the newspapers drove the boots into us. ‘Blues so bad they can’t even win spoon,’ was the headline in the Herald Sun.
But while Carlton had performed horribly, I was proud of the way I had turned my career around to become the club’s good news story. I kicked four goals in the last quarter against the Roos, which gave me five for the game and sixty-three for the season. ‘Brendan Fevola aside, no-one at Carlton enhanced his reputation this year, and that’s on and off the field,’ read another Herald Sun report. I won the club’s goal-kicking award and finished third in the best-and-fairest behind Andrew McKay, who had taken over the captaincy when Ratts had retired, and Anthony Koutoufides. Winning his first club champion award was a great achievement for Andrew, who had completed his eleventh season at the club, and he decided to go out on a high by announcing his retirement a few days later. Kouta’s year had also been inspirational, especially when you take into account the fact that he had been battling chronic knee problems and hated the coach. My reward for my best season yet was a new two-year contract worth $220,000 per year, which more than made up for the pay cut I’d taken the year before. The deal confirmed my rise from trade bait to top-five player.
So Carlton’s ugly season aside, life was good, really good. And it became even better when I met the young lady who would become the love of my life. It was a stinking hot December day, about 40 degrees Celsius, and after finishing a typically tortuous pre-season training session, a few of us—Andrew Merrington and Adam Pickering among them—decided to go down to St Kilda Beach. We had a swim and mucked around with a few of the Richmond boys who were down there, then headed to some nearby bars for a couple of quiet drinks. A few beers turned into a few more, and we decided to go to the beachside Stokehouse restaurant for dinner. I was just wearing my blue Nike training shorts and a singlet, but they let me sit in the outdoor area. A mate of mine, Tony Sheahan, son of the long-serving football writer Mike Sheahan, was there with a female friend of his. On my way to the toilet,
I walked past where Tony was sitting and checked out his friend—I thought she was stunning. She caught me looking at her and smiled back. Then, on my way back past them, I stopped and had a chat. I’m certain she had the hots for me straightaway! I learned that her name was Alex and that she had been a model in her teens and was now running a very successful photography business. As we sat there and talked, she pointed out her daughter, Mia, who was playing on the beach a few metres away. I love kids, so I went over and started building sandcastles with Mia. Then we started running around and playing chasey. It was heaps of fun. Mia was only three, but she and I were on the same wavelength! I think Alex could tell that I liked being around kids and she was really impressed by that. There was no awkwardness.
Alex gave me her phone number and we caught up a few times during the following month. I remember the first time I went to see her at her place in the bayside suburb of Beaumaris. Ryan Houlihan was going down there to see his manager, so he dropped me off. I was so nervous. ‘What am I going to say?’ I asked Hoops. ‘What am I going to talk about?’ But after I’d rocked up, Alex and I chatted and watched a bit of TV with Mia, and I never really left. They couldn’t get me out! By early 2004, I moved my stuff from Fletch’s place to Beaumaris and began living very happily with Alex and Mia. I felt so content when that happened. Alex was patient and smart and I was very much in love her.
9 A FIFTY-FIFTY PROPOSITION
Fev: In My Own Words Page 11
