Читать книгу Fabulous Fred - Paul Amy - Страница 9

WITHIN Fred Cook’s battered blue suitcase are a few large pages long ago torn from a scrapbook. Glued and stapled to the bottom of one is his registration form to play with Footscray. It is dated 11 April 1967 and signed by Cook, Footscray secretary Bill Dunstan and a Victorian Football League director.

Years later, Cook says it’s likely his hand was trembling as pen hovered over paper.

He had set his compass on the Western Oval ever since he had started to come through the ranks at Footscray Tech and the amateur club. At age nineteen he was signed and sealed to play under the coaching of the great Charlie Sutton and the captaincy of (in Cook’s eyes) the even greater Ted Whitten.

Throughout his teenage years he and a mate, Jeff Chapman, had gone to the Footscray ground once a week to watch the Scraggers train. They’d nick the occasional football, but Cook got a greater thrill stealing a glimpse of his heroes: John Schultz, Ray Baxter, Alex ‘Racehorse’ Gardiner, Graham and Barry Ion, John Hoiles, Ray Walker, Charlie Evans. And, of course, Whitten, who would ruffle his hair and say, ‘G’day kid.’ Now he could count a few of his pin-ups as teammates.

And he was another Footscray Tech Old Boy who’d made it to league football. The club had been rich recruiting territory for the Bulldogs. In 1967, Cook was photographed alongside three other Tech talents kicking on at the Western Oval: Noel Fincher, Rod O’Connor and Gary Dempsey.

‘I was probably the happiest young bloke walking the earth, the day I joined that club,’ Cook says. ‘Excited, elated, achievement, words like that. It was a big thing for me.’

Yet not three years later, after thirty-three senior games and the ability to play many more, he walked out, never to return. A spat with officials turned into a saga played out in the newspapers, and in a huff he made off for Yarraville in the VFA. At twenty-one he’d played his last game of league football. His Old Boys teammate Dempsey went on to captain the club and win the 1975 Brownlow Medal during a glittering 329-match career.

Dempsey says Cook was ‘bigger than life even then’ and ‘didn’t like too much discipline’.

‘He wasn’t that keen on doing everything other people’s way,’ Dempsey says.’ He wanted to do it his way, and when he left Footscray and went to the association he was allowed to play his own footy. At Footscray he had to play a team game.’

Dempsey has no doubt Cook could have been a long-term league player. He considers him a wasted talent.

Another of Footscray’s Brownlow Medal-winning ruckmen, John Schultz, agrees. He says league football caught only a glimpse of Cook’s ability.

‘When you think of how much he had going for him, he should have played many more games,’ Schultz says. ‘Nothing frightened him. He was rugged and tough. He’d get the ball at centre half back and go straight down the centre and head for goal. No pussy-footing around. He was the sort of bloke you wanted in your team.’

He recalls Cook as a ‘loveable larrikin’ and ‘personable bloke’ who was ‘always smiling and joshing around’.

Schultz was fond of the youngster. When he retired at the end of the 1968 season, he gifted Cook his aluminium shinguards. Cook never forgot it; when he thinks of John Schultz, he thinks of the shinguards.

Laurie Sandilands, who made his debut for Footscray in 1966 and went on to captain the club, saw a ‘larrikin’ young player who struggled to handle authority, was a non-conformist and had a ‘different attitude to life in general’.

With the amateur season over, Cook and Dempsey first turned out for Footscray in 1966, in a night match against South Melbourne and a reserves game against Collingwood at Collingwood. Cook remembers club secretary Jack Collins dropping by the family home with papers, most probably for a permit, to sign.

Fred Cook senior was initially reluctant for his boy to commit, believing he needed another twelve months in the amateurs. But Collins tempted him with a fistful of finals tickets. He changed his mind.

‘I said to the old man, “Hey, I thought you said I wasn’t ready for it.” And he said, “Fred, you’re never too young to play league football. You’ve got to get in and mix it with them.” Tickets for the finals game were like gold that year. You couldn’t get them anywhere. But Jack Collins had a few and the old man was happy to take them off him.’

Cook was taken aback at the step-up from amateur to league football. A ball hardly hit the ground at training. Leads were honoured with accurate passes that arrived at speed. Players scooped up balls from their boot laces with ease. Cook soon found himself doing the same.

‘Coming from the amateurs, it was like going up three steps in the quality of your football,’ he says. ‘Early doors, I was overawed. I was. But what happens is, you lift yourself to the standard of the players around you. They dragged me along. You say, “Right, this is how league footballers train,” and you get carted along. You eventually get the confidence.’

His time at the Bulldogs began promisingly. Footscray had a wooden-spoon season — fourteen losses crowded out only four victories — but the well-built whipper-snapper played seven senior games, mainly as a defender.

Handed jumper No. 29, he was there for Round 1 of 1967, against reigning premier St Kilda at Moorabbin. A crowd of 28,564 watched the Saints collar the Dogs by eighty-one points. Cook started on the bench. He stood next to Verdun Howell when he went on the ground.

‘Howell flogged me. Stood on my head, all those sorts of things,’ he says. ‘I learnt quickly. You had to.’

But his talent attracted good notices in the newspapers.

‘If the performance by nineteen-year-old Fred Cook on Saturday is any criterion, Footscray’s worries about finding a regular centre half back have been erased,’ kicked off one match report.

‘Cook, 6.2 and 13.10, did an excellent job against an accomplished centre half forward in [North Melbourne’s] Bernie McCarthy, a feature being his superb overhead marking. He also showed dash and aggression.’

As he rose, Cook encountered for the first time those ubiquitous sporting figures, the hangers-on.

‘How you doin’ champ?’ people would say to him, patting his back and digging fingers into his arms. Suddenly he had a lot more friends. He couldn’t pop into the Bluestone Hotel without drinkers coming over and wanting to talk football and buy him a beer. ‘Wherever you went everyone seemed to know you,’ Cook says.

Suddenly he wasn’t Mr Fred Cook. He was Mr Popular. Youngsters asked for autographs. He wondered if he should sign ‘Fred Cook’ or ‘Freddie Cook’ and if he should prevail ‘best wishes’ upon the recipients.

His profile got bigger in 1968. Cook played every senior game that year and stood some of the league’s most brilliant forwards, including St Kilda’s Darrel Baldock. He remembers Sutton telling him that Baldock was an explosive player and a champion of the game, but he could be frustrated with close checking — and a few kicks in the heel as he set off for the ball. ‘So that’s what I did, booted him with each and every alternating step,’ Cook says. ‘What a prick of a thing that was to do.’

Cook worshipped Sutton. ‘He encouraged the way I liked to play football,’ he says. ‘In those days you could put the ball under your arm, run down from centre half back and swing your other arm like a club, a mallet. That was legal. Charlie told me that was the way he wanted me to play. I did.’

That encounter against Baldock was in Round 7 at Moorabbin. Both were named in the best. The great Saint was credited with twenty-four disposals and three goals. Cook had eighteen possessions and seven marks.

In the return match in Round 18, Cook again did well in a match St Kilda again won comfortably. In his round-up for The Footscray Mail, Gary Sargeant said Cook was ‘the best of a handful of good players’ and that his marking was ‘the turning point for many St Kilda attacks, but he lacked sufficient support from his fellow defenders to make much difference’.

‘In view of the fact that he was carrying a sore elbow his strong marking is even more praiseworthy.’

Sargeant had hailed Cook’s performance against Fitzroy three rounds earlier. The Roys’ winning margin of five points, he wrote, would have been far greater ‘only for the relentless defensive work of Fred Cook at centre half back’.

‘Cook was in dazzling touch, scorching around the half back line like a two-year-old. His pace and vigour frustrated Fitzroy thrusts continually. The outstanding feature of his play was undoubtedly his brilliant overhead marking. In the air he was unbeatable, outmarking opponents at every contest. Cook’s inspiring leadership of the defence in the second quarter was largely responsible for preventing Fitzroy wrapping up the game at half time.’

Forty-six years later, Dempsey recalls Cook’s marking as his outstanding skill. ‘He was a shocking kick, worse than me, which is saying something. And he was a worse kick than Barry Round, which is amazing. He couldn’t kick it over a jam tin,’ Dempsey says. ‘But he was a good player. Centre half back. Great hands. Great mark of the football.’

Cook didn’t soar to the heights of, say, Carlton aerialist Alex Jesaulenko. But he’d watched the former Australian high jumper Tony Sneazwell train a few times and worked out a method in which he would leap for a mark at the last possible moment, then throw his arms skywards. It worked for him. ‘That’s one thing I could do, catch it,’ he says, remembering that the great football writer Alf Brown once bracketed him with Dempsey, Peter Knights and David ‘Swan’ McKay as the best marking men in the game. Brown asserted that Cook wasn’t as spectacular as Knights or Malcolm Blight ‘but he pulls down big ones more consistently’.

Footscray improved marginally in 1968, winning five games, losing fifteen and settling tenth on the ladder, above only Fitzroy and North Melbourne. Sutton finished up as coach at the end of the season and was replaced by Whitten.

In an article in The Sporting Globe, Sutton said business pressures and the time needed to coach at VFL level had prompted him to step down. He called Dempsey a ‘real up-and-comer’. And he had good things to say about Cook, declaring that he should develop into one of the club’s best players. Sutton described him as a ‘big, strong dasher’ who was unafraid to get in front for a mark and could turn defence into attack.

Cook earned seven Brownlow Medal votes, behind only three other Bulldogs: Schultz (eleven votes), George Bisset (nine votes) and David Thorpe (eight votes). He was judged Footscray’s most improved player. And by that stage he had youngsters carrying his bag into the ground. One of them, he says, was Doug Hawkins, later to break Whitten’s games record.

Hawkins chortles when the scenario is put to him. ‘I may have. I can’t honestly remember. But it’s a bloody good story anyway.’ Referring to his own rise, Hawkins adds, ‘But you can say this: twenty years later, Freddie Cook wasn’t fit to carry my bag into any football ground!’

The 1969 season didn’t begin well for Cook. On a pre-season jaunt to country Victoria he messed with bags on the bus, swapping players’ gear around. It was harmless stuff, but five minutes later he himself couldn’t see the humour in it. Officials, he says, took a dim view of his antics and ‘filed it away for a later date’.

He played the first six senior games of the season, then was dropped.

The way Cook tells it, Sutton, trying to maintain spirits around the club after five consecutive defeats, arranged a get-together at his home the day after the Round 6 defeat against Collingwood. Collins, he says, heard about it and, fearing a booze-up, asked players not to attend. Those who did might be disciplined, he warned.

But Cook went along and was dumped to the reserves the following week against South Melbourne, as were Laurie Sandilands, Gary Merrington, Ivan Marsh and Len Cumming. He stewed.

‘Of course I was shitty. I didn’t see any harm in going to Charlie’s place. It wasn’t like I was going there to drink the joint dry,’ he says. ‘I’d learned to stand up for myself, see, and I wasn’t going to let Jack Collins tell me what I could or couldn’t do.’

As he slummed it in the reserves, growing more annoyed by the week, Cook got talking to Martin Duggan, who ran the Bluestone Hotel and also supplied beer for a social club, The Grafters, attached to VFA team Yarraville.

Duggan told Cook that Footscray was treating him shabbily by keeping him out of a senior team in which he’d established himself the previous season. How about going to Yarraville for the rest of the season? he asked. You’ll be looked after. And you can always go back to the Bulldogs once heads cool. They know you can play. They’ll take you back any day.

Cook says Duggan offered him a sign-on of $4000 and a house of his choosing. He would also receive weekly match payments of $90. All he had to do was play out the season at Yarraville and then all of 1970. Where he went after that was up to him.

‘My head started spinning. That was a massive package,’ Cook recalls. ‘And I couldn’t say no. I needed the money.’

By that stage Cook was twenty-one, but already married with a child. He’d met Bernadette Dewan at the Hampton Hotel. They wed at St Paul’s Catholic Church in Bentleigh in 1968, not long after their daughter Jacqueline was born.

The young family was living in a flat in Hyde Street, Footscray, made vacant when the Bulldogs’ South Australian recruit Peter Anderson went home. Cook was working at Walpamur Paints.

‘I worked out I had to start looking after myself,’ Cook says.

‘In 1968 I played twenty home-and-away games, three night games and I was paid $875 for the whole season.’

As he wallowed in the reserves, Richmond came calling. Tigers official Alan Schwab phoned Cook and said the club was keen on him. Cook remembers talk of a swap with Mike Perry.

Footscray’s secretary at the time, Bill Dunstan, told Footscray Advertiser reporter Roy Jamieson, ‘A Richmond official phoned me late last week. We talked about Sunday football and then about other things. Then he asked me, “What is the position with Fred Cook?” I told him, “You have got to be joking.” I said that Cook had been dropped to the reserves because he had lost a bit of form, but it probably would not be long before he got his form back and was returned to the senior team.’

But Cook was less convinced of his senior prospects. He was no fan of Collins and believed his spell in the reserves had to do with issues other than football. He thought he’d played well in one reserves match, only to be deflated when a member of the match committee assessed his performance as ‘just fair’.

He made up his mind: he would buy the house Duggan had dangled and he would go to Yarraville. He and Bernadette took a fancy to a three-bedroom weatherboard with nice gardens in Pitt Street, West Footscray, clinching it for $9700 from the Farnbach Burnham real estate agency.

‘All of a sudden at twenty-one years of age I’m sitting in my own home,’ Cook says. ‘Even the rates were paid for me. Hey, I’m on Easy Street.’

On 6 June, The Age and Sun newspapers reported Cook had walked out on the Bulldogs and was headed for the VFA without a clearance.

Cook told Age man Peter McFarline he’d played poorly against Collingwood, but his earlier performances had him leading the club voting on Channel 7’s World of Sport program.

He mentioned the Sunday get-together at Sutton’s home, pointing out that nine of the eleven players who attended had been dropped.

‘I received a very good offer from Yarraville. It helped my wife, child and myself into a home, and it was too good to turn down.’

In an interview with The Footscray Advertiser, Cook said the committee had told him he had to ‘curb my “mannerism” around the club and to direct it in a way that would help the club’. He said, ‘But it has always been my nature to speak to people as I find them. I would rather say something to a man’s face than go behind his back and tell someone else.’

Shortly after Cook’s walk-out, Collins declared that Sutton was ‘not very welcome at the club’. He said the 1954 premiership coach ‘had something to do’ with the defender defecting to the association.

At the time Cook denied it, but he says Sutton did encourage him to make the move. ‘He said to me, “You’re not getting a go here, you’ve got a top offer from Yarraville, you might as well go.” Mind you, I had hundreds of advisors. But I couldn’t see them picking me again. They dropped me to the seconds as a smartener-upper. They left me there rotting.’

Cook remains adamant he was in contention to play for Victoria, saying a selector had told him it would be embarrassing for all concerned if the state centre half back was plucked from the reserves.

‘I was probably the third cab off the rank,’ he says, ‘but I could have ended up the first because of injuries to others players, namely Peter Walker of Geelong and Peter Steward of North Melbourne.’

Did he put his grievances to his coach? It would have made no difference, he says, because Whitten wasn’t picking the side.

He went to Whitten’s house in Altona and told him he was going. Whitten said he was disappointed, but understood. ‘He actually wrote me a letter and told me to pull my head in because I was captaincy material,’ Cook says.

Even as he took off to Yarraville he was thinking about a return to league football. But what was shaped as a long and successful career was over.

Sandilands cannot remember Cook’s run-in with Collins, but says he wasn’t alone in clashing with the secretary. Sandilands also had his differences with Collins. ‘Jack was a very hard man to get on with, particularly if he’d had a drink,’ he says. ‘Freddie had a drink and I had a drink and we weren’t Jack’s favourite people.’

Sandilands says Cook certainly created an impression at Footscray. ‘He was there for 1967, 1968 and a bit of 1969. So the time he spent there was brief, but everyone remembers it.’

Cook’s school mate Ricky Spargo finished with sixty-four games for Footscray from 1966 to 1971. He still laughs about the time he was twentieth man in a match and Cook was the nineteenth. Cook had turned up in a terrible state after a night of ‘wine, women and song’. The trainers did their best to rouse him for the match ahead. As they watched the play in the second quarter, Cook called over a pie seller and said to Spargo, ‘Now, what are you having, a pie or a pastie?’ Spargo said he couldn’t possibly stomach either. Cook gulped down a pie and washed it down with a can of Coke.

‘True story,’ Spargo says. ‘That day they actually found him asleep at the club. The bugger hadn’t been to bed from the night before.’

John Schultz says it was a shame Cook’s time at the Western Oval ended so suddenly, believing Footscray could have used him for many years.

Schultz chuckles as he recalls kicking and marking practice that pitted he and Murray Zeuschner at one end and fellow big men Cook and Dempsey at the other.

Zeuschner was a dedicated footballer and desperate to prove himself a senior player. He made Schultz fight for every mark. Schultz figured that if he could get through such spirited training sessions on Thursday nights, he could get through matches on Saturday afternoons. But there was no such fierce competition at the other end. The new chums waxed.

‘Here we are going very hard indeed and the other two were taking it in turns to take marks!’ Schultz says. ‘They were lackadaisical, both of them. They were just going through the motions. They had so much talent, but at that stage they didn’t realise it. The penny dropped with Gary and he became a real star, won his six best and fairests. But maybe Fred didn’t understand what he had.’

Yarraville, then coached by 1958 Collingwood premiership player John Henderson, quickly understood what it had: an exceptional player. Cook helped the Eagles to a 9–9 season, being named in the best in ten of his eleven games. In his first match in the VFA, he lined up in the ruck and slotted five goals in a narrow defeat against Dandenong.

Jim ‘Frosty’ Miller played in the match for Dandy. By the time they finished their VFA careers Cook and Miller had more than 2000 goals between them — and lasting fame in the Victorian game.