Australian Football - The Life Cycle of an AFL Player

Release Date: March, 2005
RRP $19.95

PRIME TIME/PAIN
THE PLAYER'S VIEW
By Peter Di Sisto

WHEN WAS THE last time you went to work knowing you might end up seriously injured? So badly hurt that your working life – your livelihood – might effectively be over?
I’m your average AFL player. Sure, I earn a sweet salary for my age – in fact, many of you think I’m overpaid. I’m known in some parts of town. The chicks really dig me. I rarely have to pay for a drink. I drive a nasty car and I’ve just put a deposit on my first investment property. “Cha-ching,” I hear you say. Maybe, but it could all end tomorrow. If I was seriously injured tomorrow and forced out of the game, I wouldn’t know what to do with the next phase of my life. I try not to think about being badly injured, but it’s a fact of life.
Before you start thinking, “Here’s a pampered bastard having an indulgent whinge,” let me put my case. I’m not claiming I’ve got it as bad as some. Nothing like those in the military called to active duty. Not like jockeys, who risk being trampled by 650-kilogram animals. Not like police officers, taxi drivers and security guards. They know about risks; they take them daily. But so do we.
I’m a 23-year-old professional athlete involved in a body-contact sport. It’s one of the best and most spectacular team sports on the planet. Some say the best. Those not familiar with the game marvel at the fact we throw our bodies around at will, without padding or helmets. They think we’re a little crazy – gutsy, but with a genuine streak of madness in our makeup. Some of us probably are a little mad. But most of us play the game simply because we love it, and because we have the skills to do so. Quite a few of us don’t know anything else, even though we’re constantly being told to think about life after the game.
Statistics tell me I’m going to get injured playing this game. Perhaps permanently damaged. Next time you meet a former footballer, look for a limp. Check his hands and fingers and pick the obvious deformities caused by broken bones, ruptured tendons and compound dislocations. Ask him if he struggles to get out of bed in the morning, or whether he’s going to need hip-replacement surgery. Find out what medication he’s using to manage his arthritis. Few of us escape without these painful reminders…
Statistics say the average AFL career lasts a little over four years. I’m about to enter my fifth year, so it seems I’m a little luckier than many. I’m not, however, at the stage of my career where I can demand and receive bags of money. I might be recognised by hardcore footy fans, but I’m not familiar or popular enough to attract endorsement contracts. For now, it’s a base salary, plus a payment for every game I play. In 2004, the average gross salary for an AFL player who played at least one game was $211,230. So every time I miss a game through injury, I miss out on significant income. That’s why every time I get injured, I try to make it back earlier than recommended. But every time I minimise my rehab time, I’m risking more injury. I think that sort of cycle is often referred to as a vicious one...

Peter Di Sisto, writer and editor, AFL Publishing

PRIME TIME/RESURRECTION
THE RISE AND RISE OF AUSSIE JONES
By John Murray

IT’S THE MIDDLE of season 2000 and ‘Aussie’ Jones is fed up with football. He’s fed up with the game, the training, the expectations, the constant public scrutiny and everything else. He wants out. At just 23, the St Kilda footballer who once seemed destined to become an AFL superstar is prepared to pack his bags, leave Melbourne and start a new life in New York.
Jones has been a king of the AFL world in the late 1990s. And, with a reported salary of $160,000, he lives a king’s lifestyle. But the lifestyle, which doesn’t sit well with a long-term football career, and taxing media commitments have led to a lack of form, as well as a lack of interest, on the football field.
Jones has plummeted to such depths that the Saints are contemplating offloading him to another club and the player himself is considering turning his back on the game. How has it gone so spectacularly wrong?
A different world from the 1997 AFL Grand Final.
Dennis Cometti: “Jones is running.”
Bruce McAvaney: “And that’s danger for the Crows. Koster in pursuit. Jones the length of the ground nearly. Sixty out. Will he take them all on? Handball inside to Thompson. A fumble. Back. Aussie Jones goes with the left. Kicks it . . . and gets it. What a goal!
“Well, they’ll talk about that one for a while.”
It was the first quarter of the Grand Final, St Kilda and Adelaide were fighting for early supremacy at the MCG and Channel Seven commentator McAvaney had just called one of the great goals in Grand Final history. If there were any football fans who hadn’t known Jones’s name, they did now.
There seemed little danger to the Crows when Jones collected a kick from Robert Harvey on the right wing. Little danger that is, until he started running.
The Saints’ speedster scampered down the ground, five bounces taking him closer to goal. A sixth, followed by a handball exchange with Andrew Thompson, brought him to the 50-metre line where he unloaded a left-foot bomb that sailed through the big sticks.
The day eventually turned sour for the Saints, as Adelaide kicked away in the final quarter to seal a historic first flag, but for Jones, it was a tale of personal success.
The 1997 season had already been highly productive for St Kilda’s pacy protégé. He had won All-Australian honours and represented Victoria in State of Origin. On Grand Final day, it got even better. Relishing the big stage, he collected 17 kicks, 12 handballs and four marks, and kicked that goal. Had the Saints got over the top of the Crows, he would have been a frontrunner for the Norm Smith Medal.
The next day he turned 21. Jones had come of age and looked set to take the competition by storm.

Seven-and-a-half years later, Jones, now 28, is in a relaxed mood at Moorabbin on the first day of training for 2005. And he can afford to be. Season 2004 was a stellar year for both player and team. He passed the 200-game milestone, made the All-Australian side – this time in the back pocket – and the Saints came within a goal of reaching the Grand Final.
If anyone had recently returned to these shores after being stranded on a remote island since 1997, the natural assumption would be that Jones had fulfilled the ample potential shown at the start of his career. However, things are not always as they seem…

John Murry, writer and editor, AFL Publishing

EXPRESSIONS
A GAME FOR THE BOYS
By Virginia Bourke.

“CAN’T KICK, CAN’T HANDBALL” was a male friend’s wry suggestion for a title for this article about women and AFL football. His words flowed effortlessly from a rich store of aphorisms built up during years of playing amateur Australian Football.
I laughed. His glib remark was made over the tiny head of the four-week-old son he nursed. He had taken a month off work to care for his new son and young family. The incongruity between his sexist comments and the reality of his life (hands-on father prepared to share the load with his wife) was striking. That incongruity mirrors the capacity of AFL football culture to harbour and foster patriarchal values in a society where women have made many advances towards equality with men and where both women and men have challenged many stereotypes. In the culture and history of AFL football, in its clubs and governing bodies, a number of factors converge to perpetuate a particularly durable, and often insidious, form of patriarchy.
In any analysis of women and football, the AFL points enthusiastically to statistics: 45 per cent of AFL supporters are women; more than four million women are football fans; 35 per cent of all AFL club members are women; 12 per cent of AFL Auskick (junior program) participants are female. This level of interest in the game by women is impressive, but not surprising. Football appeals to women for all the same reasons it appeals to men: its spectacle and ritual, its weekly demonstrations of grace and athleticism, its heroism and courage. At any AFL football game, the same emotions are triggered in women as in men: anticipation, excitement, disappointment, loyalty, devotion. The dank smell of the grey concrete of VFL Park in the 1970s and ’80s, its splintering seats, shared buckets of soggy chips and the quasi-expletives roared by my mild-mannered father are as much a part of my childhood football memories as they are of those of my brothers. The local football club (many with an affiliated netball club) is often a linchpin of social life in suburban and country Australia. For AFL fans, the ritual of the game becomes part of who you are – whether male or female.
But the fact remains that, even if all is equal in the world of fans, supporters and spectators, in other areas there is gross inequality. For all the AFL’s enthusiasm about the number of women in its supporter base, women are hardly visible in leadership positions in the institution itself. The AFL Commission is currently a male bastion, although last month, it announced an additional position had been made available on the Commission. There was no doubt the space was made available for a woman. The decision was not unanimously supported by AFL clubs. In 2004, only one of the seven AFL Tribunal members was a woman. The 42 per cent of AFL staff who are female are concentrated in the lower levels of the organisation. Of the nine general managers who form the AFL executive, none is a woman. In this, the AFL is not so different from many other large Australian companies (fewer than 10 per cent of board positions or senior executive jobs in these companies are held by women, according to Dr Anne Summers in her book, The End of Equality, Random House Australia, 2003), but it is disappointing that an organisation that relies on game attendances by its fans does not adequately and actively represent almost half of them…
An exclusionary sport such as Australian Football can create a flow-on effect: for at least 26 weeks of the year, the fact that men are generally biologically stronger and faster than women is reinforced. The headlining of that biological ‘superiority’ can transmogrify into a belief – among players and fans – in the overall superiority of men generally…

Virginia Bourke, lawyer, Geoff Slattery Publishing