Fletch Read online

  About Fletch

  DUSTIN FLETCHER IS THE MOST WATCHED AFL FOOTBALLER OF ALL-TIME

  For 23 seasons, more than 20 million fans have piled into stadiums all over the country to see ‘Fletch’ play over 400 games for his beloved Essendon Bombers on the way to becoming a legend of Australian Rules football.

  Fletch is his long-awaited autobiography – the story of a teen superstar, prodigal son, youngest member of Sheedy’s famous flag-winning ‘Baby Bombers’ and heroic yet humble defender of the realm against the greatest goal-kickers of all-time: Ablett, Lockett, Dunstall, Kernahan, Modra, Hall and Franklin.

  Filled with thrilling, never-before-heard stories of the game and the warriors who play it, Fletch is an extraordinary tale that reflects on dizzying highs – the epic 2000 premiership run, joining the ‘400 Club’ – and cataclysmic lows, including a jaw-dropping insider account of the ASADA drug crisis that has rocked Essendon and the AFL to its core.

  HONEST AND EXPLOSIVE, FLETCH READS AS ‘FLETCH’ KICKS – STRAIGHT, STRONG AND TRUE

  DUSTIN FLETCHER

  FLETCH

  with

  SCOTT GULLAN

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About Fletch

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Wimbledon and Windy Hill

  Chapter 2: A ruck surprise

  Chapter 3: Schoolboy footballer

  Chapter 4: The ultimate

  Chapter 5: Standing the monsters

  Chapter 6: The fat club

  Chapter 7: Our silent battle

  Chapter 8: The greatest team

  Chapter 9: The one that got away

  Chapter 10: Tribunal, teeth and disappointment

  Chapter 11: National pride

  Chapter 12: End of an era

  Chapter 13: Last man standing

  Chapter 14: Return of the Messiah

  Chapter 15: Weaponised

  Chapter 16: Blackest day

  Chapter 17: Peptide pain

  Chapter 18: The call

  Chapter 19: Comfortably satisfied

  Chapter 20: Déjà vu

  Teammates and opponents

  Acknowledgements

  About Dustin Fletcher and Scott Gullan

  Copyright page

  FOREWORD

  Everyone, it seems, remembers 1993 with great fondness. It was a year of remarkable achievements at Essendon Football Club and a period of defining moments in the history of Australia’s place in the world.

  1993 was the year Shane Warne bowled the ‘ball of the century’. The year Sydney won its bid to host the 2000 Olympics. The year we lost Fred Hollows and Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, two great men who had made not just Australia but the world a better place. The year Paul Keating’s Labor government turned an unwinnable federal election into ‘the sweetest victory of all’.

  1993 was also the year a skinny 17-year-old Year 12 student with a pedigree to make Bel Esprit proud arrived at Windy Hill for Essendon training, with his school bag over his shoulder, ready to play.

  Shortly afterwards, Dustin was released by Essendon so he could play in a school game. I remember saying at the time, ‘Dustin Fletcher will only get one chance to play in that school game, but he will have the chance to play a lot of AFL.’

  Boy, hasn’t time proven me right on that one!

  Since 1993, Fletch has played 23 seasons for Essendon and won two premierships in 1993 and 2000. He captained his country magnificently in 2005 and is now, at the time of writing, on the cusp of setting records for longevity that would make Methuselah envious.

  How he did it is the story of this book.

  Nobody plays as many games as Dustin has just on sheer natural talent. Sure, as the son of another Essendon legend, Ken Fletcher, he has been blessed with a wonderful pedigree. But Dustin has got to where he is today by being willing to work not simply as hard as everyone else, but harder.

  Many players with frames as slight as Dustin’s get knocked out of the game in the first two or three years of their careers. It makes the fact he has been such an enduring athlete all the more amazing.

  Fletch was, and remains to this day, a prodigious talent.

  Essentially, Dustin Fletcher has been the ultimate professional in his approach to football and to life. He is fiercely competitive not just with opponents but also with himself and is ruthlessly honest in his own appraisal of his performances. It says a lot about the way his parents brought him up, as well as speaking volumes about the man he has become.

  Who knows how long Dustin Fletcher will continue to decorate our great game?

  For now let it be enough to read this book, celebrate his story and salute the achievements for which Fletch, his family, all Essendon supporters and AFL followers everywhere can be justly proud.

  Kevin Sheedy

  July 2015

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘Dad, what’s AOD-9604?’ The question from my oldest son, Mason, stopped me in my tracks. He was 13.

  I was shocked, but I wasn’t surprised. The drug scandal that had hit my football club was everywhere in the media and on the street and it was impossible to shield our children from it.

  ‘You don’t need to be worrying about that,’ I said.

  I was doing enough worrying for all of us. Each day there seemed to be another revelation in the newspaper about what had gone on at the Essendon Football Club throughout 2012. What drugs had we really been given? Who was taking them and who was administering them? And why?

  These were questions that refused to go away and I soon found out they were even being asked of my children by their primary schoolmates. Even other parents had been approaching Mason and his younger brother, Max, then 10, at school and asking them about the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) investigation into the Essendon Football Club.

  One afternoon, I sensed there was something up with Max. He’d come home from school quiet and thoughtful and I could tell he wasn’t himself. I sat on the end of his bed and asked what was up. At first he wouldn’t say anything but then out of the blue he asked me the question about what was happening at the football club. I knew it hadn’t come from his mind – someone had filtered it to him.

  It soon came out that other kids at school were saying stuff to him in the playground. ‘Your dad’s on drugs,’ came the taunt. ‘The Bombers are cheats.’

  I didn’t care what people thought about me, but when it started to impact on my family I did care, very much. A line had been crossed and I was angry and upset. Yet I knew what I was experiencing was nothing compared to what my friend and coach, James Hird, and his family were going through.

  It seemed like a lifetime ago that Hirdy and I had been teammates in the 1993 premiership victory. We were young, happy, carefree and doing what we loved.

  And we’d never heard of AOD-9604.

  CHAPTER 1

  WIMBLEDON AND WINDY HILL

  ‘You’re playing.’

  As soon as I heard those words from Kevin Sheedy I put the phone down on the bench and turned to my parents, who were eagerly waiting to hear why the Essendon coach had rung me at the family home on a Thursday night.

  ‘I’m playing on Saturday,’ I said. Mum and Dad looked just as shocked as I was and for a few seconds we all forgot that Sheeds was still on the line. I can’t remember what else he said to me in any case, because my mind was a blur. It was 1993 and I was 17 years old and still at school, but in two days time I would become an AFL footballer.

  The first thing my mother, Rosemary, thought of was the debutante ball I was scheduled to attend on the Saturday night. Sheedy’s phone call certainly threw a spanner into the works for that shindig.

  I was stunned. I’d had no idea I was even in contention. Essendon had won th
e pre-season competition but I hadn’t played in any of those matches. I was a skinny rake standing 196 centimetres and tipping the scales at 79 kilos wringing wet, and in a couple of the practice matches I’d played I’d managed to hold my own – but that was about it. When I’d agreed to join the Bombers as a father–son recruit, the contract I signed for the 1993 season had me playing 12 reserve games and eight school games. No mention of the big leagues.

  My father, Ken, who’d played 264 games with Essendon from 1967 to 1980, was the coach of my team at Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School and he was obviously keen for me to remain with the school program as my body and game developed. That was the plan, and neither of us had thought there would be any issues given I was more than likely a couple of years away from being ready to play AFL – if I even turned out to be good enough.

  Now here I was selected in the Essendon team for its Round 2 clash against arch rival Carlton.

  Ever since I could remember it had seemed to be my destiny to pull on the famous red and black jersey. Dad was an Essendon boy to his boot heels, although he’d taken a few different twists and turns before he got there. As a kid he moved around a lot following his father’s work as an air traffic controller with the family, spending time in Central Australia and South Australia before coming to Melbourne when he got a job at Essendon Airport. Sadly, Geoff Fletcher died six months after they arrived, following a short battle with cancer. The family settled in East Keilor and Dad went to school at Niddrie High, which is in the suburb next door to Essendon.

  My grandma, Muriel, hadn’t allowed Dad to play football until he turned 18 so he kept involved in the game as a boundary umpire. He tried out for Essendon’s under-19 team and made the cut, playing in a premiership in his first season.

  The following year he made his debut for the Bombers as a 19-year-old and despite being undersized – he was only just over six foot tall – Dad started his career as a fullback. He says he didn’t come good until he was 25 and by that stage he was playing on the wing and had become known as ‘the Racehorse’ because he would run opponents off their legs.

  His best season was in 1978 when, as captain of the club, he won Essendon’s best and fairest award.

  Three years prior, I’d been born just one kilometre from Essendon’s home ground of Windy Hill. Funny thing is, for all the footy in my blood, for most of my childhood I never actually dreamed of wearing the Essendon sash or running out for the Bombers at the MCG on Grand Final Day. All my thoughts were consumed by another sports mecca: Wimbledon.

  *

  The key was to get to the concrete end. Fighting off my older sister, Rebecca, and younger brother, Lachlan, for that cherished end of the tennis court in the Fletcher family backyard was always an interesting battle.

  Our parents had built a house on an acre block in Greenvale, a semi-rural area in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, and the yard was massive but we couldn’t afford to have a real tennis court. So we improvised.

  We had a proper-sized net with the correct poles, but one end of the court was concrete while the other was an uneven patch of dips, hills and motley tufts of grass. It meant your game fluctuated significantly depending on which end you were stationed at. The concrete end, where the ball carried easily and bounced up perfectly, allowed you to play all your groundstrokes. The other end was a no-bounce zone and strictly for volleying.

  When it came to tennis there was, again, a Bombers connection. My first tennis coach in Greenvale was Barry Davis, a 218-game club legend who’d won Essendon’s best and fairest three times between 1968 and 1971, and played with and later coached Dad for the last couple of years of his career before handing over to Sheedy for the 1981 season.

  By under-12s I’d moved on from Barry’s tuition to the Essendon Tennis Club. It wasn’t long before I was playing juniors on Saturday mornings and then senior pennant in the afternoons. This meant Mum and Dad were dropping me off at the courts at 7.30 am and not picking me up until after 6 pm.

  Essendon’s main rivals in the juniors came from the nearby Maribyrnong Tennis Club. They had a couple of handy players who would later become close mates, Chris Anstey and Joe Sirianni. The three of us started making representative teams together, including the much-coveted Shell Squad, which was the pinnacle for juniors in Victoria at the time.

  The most exciting part of cracking the Shell was all the new gear we received, and my Shell squad tracksuit got a huge work-out as we tried to mimic the star players of the day, my favourite being Stefan Edberg, the graceful Swede who had won nine Grand Slam titles.

  Tennis was a big commitment, for me and for my parents. I’d be playing tournaments all over Melbourne, starting on a Friday night in Keysborough or Camberwell and then going all weekend.

  In the school holidays the Fletchers would hit the road with the Anstey family. Mum and Dad became good friends with Chris’s parents and they loved joining us boys as we started on the circuit, playing big country tournaments in places like Mildura, Shepparton and Albury–Wodonga.

  Chris would later go on to become one of the best basketballers Australia has produced, in a long career for the Melbourne Tigers that also included seasons in the American National Basketball Association (NBA) with the Dallas Mavericks and Chicago Bulls followed by stints playing in Russia.

  We were both tall, skinny kids – Chris was 213 centimetres to my 196 centimetres – with big serve-and-volley games that meant we were almost impossible to pass at the net. It made us a pretty dynamic partnership on the tennis court, and soon titles started to come our way. At one stage, after winning the Victorian Schoolboys title four years in a row, we were the best junior doubles partnership in the state.

  It had been a long and interesting ride to the top. In our first year on the junior circuit, Chris and I were a total surprise packet. But when we came back as the defending champions, I was bemused to see us nowhere near the top of the seedings. Even after winning three titles back to back we were only seeded No.7, and while we’d improved to a No.4 seeding coming into our fourth title in under-16s, the lack of recognition annoyed us. Much to our frustration, the kids who were better at singles were always ranked higher in doubles. But when they were paired up against a proven doubles team like Chris and me, we beat them every time.

  I was the low-key member of the Fletcher–Anstey partnership. Chris used to really fire up on the court and wasn’t shy to say what he thought of my form or that of the opposition or the umpire. But we had fun and got great enjoyment from winding each other up, usually over double-faults. Chris had a big service and after striking out on his first serve, developed a reputation for failing to inform his partner that he intended unleashing another big one on the second serve. ‘Did I say go for that serve?’ was my standard question to Chris, who’d send back a big smile.

  Away from the doubles, Chris and I also had some dingdong battles in singles, where there were a lot of bragging rights up for grabs – although our little mate Joe, who would go on to make it on the professional circuit, rising as high as 138 in the world rankings, normally had our measure.

  I still had some excellent singles victories, including one particularly memorable triumph over a kid from Williamstown who would go on to become a two-time Grand Slam finalist. Mark Philippoussis was a year younger than us but so talented that he played up in our division. All of our parents were heavily involved in junior tennis and many times I saw firsthand the pressure some ‘tennis dads’ applied on their children to succeed. In Mark’s case it was intense. Despite my own father’s history as a professional sportsman, he never put any pressure on me to be a winner or emulate his own lofty deeds in the sports arena.

  *

  When it came to football I knew there was an expectation surrounding the sons of gun players. But if anything, Dad held me back in those early days. When we moved back to Melbourne from Tatura, where Dad captain-coached in the Goulburn Valley League for three years after his playing career finished, we briefly lived in Keilor and I
played one season of Australian Rules footy in the under-10s. That was the only football club I had any involvement with until I was aged 16 and in Year 11.

  Dad would always laugh when he saw banners for kids in under-12s who were playing their 100th game. He thought it was wrong for football to be such a dominant part of a young man’s life, and when it came to his own son he was more than happy for me just to have a kick at school.

  I was still asked to try out for representative teams, though, and my height often got me a look-in. I made the Victorian under-12 team alongside a hard nut named Gary Moorcroft who would later play with me at Essendon, and we played the national championships together in Canberra. In the under-15s I made the Dick Reynolds schoolboys squad for select players in our region and we played against teams from other zones throughout Victoria.

  However, a crossroads was looming.

  With each year it was getting harder to combine the training and playing demands of tennis and football. When I was about 15 and in Year 10, I started playing in the senior football team at school and there was a critical shift in my thinking. It still wasn’t a declaration either way – more a subtle move towards football. I’d realised the bottom line with tennis was you had to be ridiculously good to make it in the big time. Plus you needed a lot of money for coaching and travel, even just to give you a shot.

  This reality was starting to sink in when it was rammed home at a tournament at Melbourne Park where some kids from Korea had been invited over to play. These guys were at a different level and everyone knew it.

  As I was gravitating towards football, Chris’s basketball career was starting to take off. For both of us tennis had become a year-round commitment, but now, where once I would have chosen to play in a tennis tournament, I was opting to attend a football squad tryout. So, although I kept playing tennis for Essendon Grammar – at one stage coming up against Mentone Grammar’s Andrew Ilie, who years later made it to No.38 in the world – my gradual and perhaps inevitable evolution into a full-time footballer had begun.