This was in this weekendâs The Australian Magazine about depression in footballers.
Breaking point: AFL players speak out
Richard GuilliattSeptember 7, 2019
Tom Boyd as a promising teenage recruit for the Sydney Giants in 2014. Picture: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images
On a sun-drenched winter day in Melbourneâs outer eastern suburbs, a couple of hundred suburbanites have gathered around the footy oval at Morton Park with their kids and dogs to watch two local Aussie rules teams, Norwood and Blackburn, duke it out in the Eastern Football League. Admission at the park entrance is $8, beer and pies are for sale under the scoreboard and thereâs a raffle for the home team. âIs Boyd playing?â one Norwood fan asks another as they scan the muddy ground for the familiar sight of their teamâs 2m-tall full forward.
Only three months ago, 24-year-old Tom Boyd was earning a million dollars a year as a player in the Western Bulldogs, the AFL team that entered Aussie rules folklore with an impossible victory in the 2016 Grand Final, the clubâs first in 62 years. It was Boyd who sealed that win in the final five minutes of the game, scooping up the ball in the centre square and punting an epic 60m kick through the goals in front of 100,000 fans. Then came two years of injury, poor form and withering criticism. Commentators labelled him âthe biggest bust in the AFLâ; the Herald Sun newspaper conducted a readersâ poll asking âIs Tom Boyd worth $1 million?â; Bulldogs veteran Luke Darcy suggested he should refund some of his salary. The denigration was harsher still in the bearpit of social media, even after Boyd revealed heâd been diagnosed with clinical depression. A fake Tom Boyd Facebook page mocked him; opposition fans hazed him on Instagram as a pampered sook.
On May 16 the Western Bulldogs announced that Boyd was retiring, less than six years after heâd started his career as the AFLâs No. 1 teenage draft pick at the Sydney Giants. When Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge addressed the media the following day, he choked back tears and excoriated those who had dragged down one of the sportâs most promising young stars with their âlack of conscience and drive to be nastyâ. Today at this suburban game you can still hear an echo of the abuse Boyd endured, this time from the mouth of a puce-faced Blackburn fan standing behind the goals clutching a succession of beers. âHowâd ya drop that?â he jeers, as Boyd fumbles a mark directly in front of him. âDidja walk away from it?â The manâs wife hisses â Please â from her fold-up chair, but Puce Face is not to be denied his fun on this sunny afternoon. âHeâs out of the AFL⌠heâs got mental health issues,â he guffaws to his mates. âHe pulled the mental health card. See, theyâre not allowed to test âem for drugs if they pull the mental health card.â The bellowed insults continue through to the final quarter, when Puce Face loudly congratulates Boydâs opponent. âYer absolutely smashinâ him, Duffy â Iâd give you a million dollars if I could,â he brays. âThe $6 million man! I donât think heâs had a kick today.â
Tom Boyd playing for Norwood during an EFL match on June 29. Picture: AAP
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If Boyd hears any of it, he never lets it show. An hour after the game he emerges from the club rooms alone, a bag slung over his shoulder and his head bowed over a mobile phone. Since retiring, he has spoken publicly about his troubles only on his Instagram page, thanking Bulldogs fans for his years at the club and earning more than 10,000 supportive responses. He demurs politely when approached, saying heâs still unsure what he wants to say. Heâs considering the idea of an interview with his old team-mate Bob Murphy, who now hosts a show on Fox Footy.
If Boyd does finally talk in detail about the pressures that forced his retirement, itâs likely to be a familiar story. The past five years have seen a growing roll-call of AFL players afflicted with mental health problems, among them Jack Steven (St Kilda), Travis Cloke (Western Bulldogs), Mitch Clark (Geelong), Matthew Broadbent (Port Adelaide), Aaron Hall (North Melbourne) and Collingwoodâs Dayne Beams and Alex Fasolo. Buddy Franklin of the Sydney Swans, arguably the gameâs biggest star, was unable to play in the 2015 finals because of unspecified issues. Richmondâs tattooed magician Dustin Martin has spoken about the âweird, emptyâ depression that swept over him after his team won the 2017 premiership and he won the Brownlow Medal.
When North Melbourne player Majak Daw fell from the Bolte Bridge late one night last December, sustaining a fractured pelvis and hip, the issue reached a breaking point. Former Carlton player Jake Edwards, who has admitted attempting suicide, took to social media to angrily demand that the industry wake up. Retired North Melbourne player Wayne Schwass, who has campaigned on the issue since revealing his own depression 13 years ago, likewise excoriated the AFL. Last month, the AFL responded by appointing clinical psychologist Dr Kate Hall as its newly created head of mental health and wellbeing, assisted by Dr Ranjit Menon as the codeâs chief psychiatrist. One question theyâll surely need to explore is how mental health became the No. 1 crisis issue in the nationâs most popular sporting spectacle. Are players simply talking more openly about a problem that has long bubbled beneath the surface, or do the AFLâs troubles offer a warning about the way big money and new media are transforming sport?
Hawthorn vice-captain Nathan Thompson fronts the media in 2004 to discuss his battle with depression. Picture: Craig Borrow
In May 2004, Hawthorn Football Club Âsummoned Melbourneâs sports media to its headquarters at Glenferrie Oval for an unusual Wednesday afternoon press conference. Facing the cameras that day was the teamâs vice-captain, Nathan Thompson, a 26-year-old who stood 196cm tall and was Hawthornâs leading goalkicker. Flanking him were his coach, Peter Schwab, captain Shane Crawford and a woman few recognised â Jane Burns from the mental illness awareness organisation Beyond Blue. Most of the gathered journos knew why they were there, thanks to a television report the night before, but many were still flummoxed to hear Thompson confirm the news: heâd been diagnosed with clinical depression and was in the care of a psychiatrist.
âIâve been low â really, really low,â he said. âItâs not just a week-by-week thing; itâs more a day-by-day or minute-by-minute thing.â Two weeks earlier, Hawthorn had announced he couldnât play because of an unspecified illness. In fact, heâd had a total breakdown during training, collapsing on a bench and finding himself unable to get up.
This was not a story familiar to AFL fans or the sports media. Athletes had spoken in the past about the depression that afflicted them after retirement â Geelong football legend Gary Ablett had recently admitted he plunged into drug addiction after he stopped playing â but Nathan Thompson was still in the prime of his career. He earned more than $300,000 a year and bought his first home at age 22. It seemed unthinkable that he might be lying awake at night, ruminating on his anxieties until he was bathed in sweat, plagued by suicidal thoughts and perversely hoping a catastrophic injury might end his career.
Thompson went on to play for another four years and become a campaigner on mental health, cautioning athletes â particularly men â to talk about the stress and self-doubts they experience and seek help before they spiral into depression. Two years after Thompson went public, Wayne Schwass revealed he had spent his glory years at North Melbourne Football Club suffering panic attacks, insomnia and suicidal thoughts. Other athletes who have spoken out in recent years include Olympic swimmers Michael Phelps and Ian Thorpe, cricketers Andrew Flintoff, Moises Henriques and Shaun Tait and rugby league players Darius Boyd, Eric Grothe and Greg Inglis.
The fact that elite competitive sport can be stressful is hardly a revelation; those who step into its arena grapple with physical injury, extreme highs and lows and the constant spectre of public failure. Even so, the sheer number of AFL players who have retired or taken leave from the game due to mental stress has been striking.
Melbourne psychiatrist Dr Adam Deacon has been treating AFL players for more than a decade and while he acknowledges itâs unclear whether they suffer mental illness in disproportionate numbers, he says the stories they tell are strikingly similar. Deacon likens it to a syndrome, one that stems in large part from the highly geared nature of professional sport and the particular intensity of AFL football worship. Young men, he points out, are the demographic most at risk of mental illness, and the AFL academy system recruits them as teenagers into an ultra-competitive environment in which they become a focus of intense scrutiny. By the time theyâre 18, the freewheeling fun they found in footy may already have been replaced by the relentless 7am-to-4pm focus of fighting to retain a spot in the team.
Adam Deacon. Picture: supplied
âA football club is a unique workplace,â says Deacon. âIn most jobs, employees will undergo a performance review perhaps once or twice a year, but AFL footballers are performance-reviewed most days, sometimes several times a day by various staff. They are constantly being managed; thereâs a high level of scrutiny on their physical states, their emotional states and performance, which can lead to heightened levels of self-Âconsciousness and self-criticism. Then add that in any given week there are 45 players eligible for 22 playing positions in the seniors team. Most people go to work knowing theyâll be secure in their role, but many of these guys find out week to week whether they will get to do the job that can shape their sense of self-worth. So their sense of themselves is constantly challenged.
âAnd thatâs just the baseline. On top of that is the burden of media commentary, social media and the football public, which is often critical of them. Thereâs an unusual level of attention given to them, which is absorbed by them and can lead to psychological strain.â
In late 2016, Collingwood Football Club hired Deacon as its team psychiatrist two days a week, the first such appointment in the clubâs history. Months earlier, Collingwood defender Jonathon Marsh had suffered a psychological breakdown at the end of the final game of the season, a one-point loss to Hawthorn at the Melbourne Cricket Ground that left him sobbing uncontrollably in the dressing room. Marsh was only 21, and had been undergoing treatment for depression and insomnia for more than a year. Later that year he announced he was retiring from the game and returning home to Western Australia.
Marsh has since revived his footy career at St Kilda and opened up about the events that led to his breakdown. He doesnât identify any particular triggers and says he has many great memories of his time at Collingwood, but his account mirrors many of Deaconâs observations. A country boy from Margaret River, Marsh was recruited at 17 to the WAFL team East Fremantle, where his grandfather Ray Sorrell had been a legend in the 1950s and 1960s. âItâs pretty early on to be scrutinised,â he acknowledges. âThere was a phase there where I wasnât playing good football and there was a chance Iâd get dropped and have to go back to Margaret River. Itâs so stressful: Iâm 17, Iâm supposed to be enjoying playing, and already Iâm just thinking about week-in, week-out team selection. But itâs one of those things you have to get used to, I guess, because as soon as you get into a league team in the WAFL or SAFL or AFL, youâve got to hold your spot every week.â
Jonathon Marsh in 2013. Picture: Michael Dodge/Getty Images
At 18, when he flew east to join Collingwood, Marsh was 194cm tall and could sprint 20m in 2.78 seconds. Still, that only qualified him as the AFLâs 77th draft pick selection, and it was nearly two years before he got a seniors game. By then the euphoria of living the AFL dream was already being undermined by a gnawing feeling that at first seemed like homesickness but became a deeper malaise, that âweird empty feelingâ Dustin Martin described. âThe first half of 2015 I was just desperate to get into the seniors side, and once I was in, I just wasnât enjoying it,â he recalls. His form wasnât as consistent as he wanted and a hamstring injury sidelined him for 10 weeks. Insomnia set in, and he began withdrawing and spending more time in the tiny flat where he lived alone.
By 2016, the same year his grandfather was inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame, Marsh had been diagnosed with clinical depression and was taking sleeping pills and an antidepressant. He recalls feeling as if he were carrying an extra 10kg on the ground, so that even his best playing wasnât the peak he sought. âAFL reviews are pretty serious,â he acknowledges. âYou get scared that youâre not playing well for the team. I donât wanna let people down, I donât wanna be dropped â I donât wanna walk in on Monday and have eight clips of me doing the wrong thing, and everyone saying, âThis is crap, Marshyâ while Iâm feeling not great already. Thereâs obviously fun moments in games â I canât say I went out there every game and hated it. It was just the overall feeling of playing every week didnât feel like it used to⌠Iâve got a lot of personal pride in myself and how I play football. To lower those colours â it gets scary, for sure.â
The dressing room collapse, when it came, had nothing to do with the one-point loss to Hawthorn; it was relief that the season was over, fuelled by a loss of the joy of playing. Marsh has said he decided to return to WA for his personal safety, alluding to thoughts of self-harm. Once home he underwent psychological counselling, enrolled in a teaching course and began playing again for East Fremantle. By the time St Kilda lured him back to the AFL earlier this year he had weaned himself off medications, and he says the counselling has enabled him to enjoy football without making it the defining raison dâetre of his life.
âOne thing a lot of the players do is reminisce about the golden days when they played football at school,â notes Adam Deacon. âWhat originally brings people to the game is the pure joy of discovering as kids how to manipulate this crazy ball through air. But thereâs a rapid transition from that world to the AFL world.â
The coachâs box at an AFL game today often accommodates a dozen or more people seated in rows, armed with laptops. Specialist coaches for small players, forwards and defenders are joined by âmindset coachesâ, âopposition analystsâ and âperformance analystsâ, supported in turn by medical officers, physiotherapists, dietitians, rehabilitation specialists and trainers.
St Kildaâs manager of player welfare and development, Tony Brown, acknowledges that many of these roles â including his own â did not exist a decade ago. Brown played 108 games for the St Kilda seniors between 1995 and 2001 and has no memory of being subjected to such intense scrutiny.
âEvery training session today is filmed,â he notes. âEvery time they walk through the door they get a GPS tracking unit put in their back so everyone knows how fast theyâre running and their high-intensity speed. Bloods are done, urine is taken to see if theyâre hydrated. So absolutely theyâre more scrutinised these days than when I was playing.â As Brown notes, players also have far more support available in managing their careers. But one thing the clubs canât control is the harsher attention they can experience outside the cocoon of the team rooms.
âYou played football and made millions you fraudulent depressant⌠Go to india south east asia central america those people on the streets have the right to be depressed. U are a coward and a disgraceful human milking the poor me card and the mental health card.â
â Message to Tom Boyd on Instagram, six weeks after his retirement
Geelongâs Mitch Clark is consoled by coach Chris Scott after a 2015 AFL match against Collingwood. Picture: Michael Willson/AFL Media
It has become a truism to say that Aussie rulesisa secular religion to its followers. Footy isnât life-or-death in Melbourne, the joke goes, itâs far more important. Dozens of books have analysed the peculiar tribal intensity of AFL supporters, which cuts across race, class and gender. At games that fervour finds its expression in the frenzied, often hilarious, sometimes appalling improvised commentary that supporters scream from the stands. Earlier this year a Carlton supporter known only as âFrankieâ was ejected from Marvel Stadium after leaning down at an umpire and shouting, âYou bald-headed flog!!â The incident sparked weeks of debate about whether âbald-headed flogâ was a phrase outside the bounds of traditional crowd etiquette. Frankie himself insisted he had chosen his words carefully so as not to offend women and children, and former Geelong champion Cameron Ling came to his defence. âThere are certain ways you can and canât abuse,â opined Ling. âItâs all part of the gameâ.
With the advent of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, however, the brutal judgment of some footy fans has become both more weaponised and more visible, as Geelong player Mitch Clark discovered in 2015. Clark had joined Melbourne Football Club in 2012 as a gun forward earning a reported $750,000 a year, but in April 2014 he announced his retirement due to depression, an issue that had been compounded by his guilt at being paid so handsomely while unable to play due to injury. Like Nathan Thompson and Wayne Schwass before him, Clark had suffered an emotional collapse one day during training. After trying to revive his career at Geelong in 2015, he again broke down in tears after a game and left the ground clutching his head, a moment of anguish captured by photographer Michael Willson. Hundreds of AFL fans expressed sympathy and support for Clark; others never forgave his perceived betrayal of Melbourne. Booing erupted at some games whenever he touched the ball, and on Instagram he was sent a photo of himself with a noose around his neck. Today he lives in Western Australia and still posts Instagram updates on his battles with depression.
Dayne Beams (centre). Picture: AAP Image/Daniel Pockett
Brisbane Lions player Dayne Beams suffered even worse hazing after leaving that team last year to return to his old club, Collingwood. In early 2018 Beams had stepped down as captain of the Lions and stopped playing due to severe depression following the death of his father. At the time he had pledged his loyalty to Brisbane, and his decision to return to Melbourne provoked so much abuse that he began direct-messaging the people trolling him in an attempt to reason with them. âIâve made it a thing for myself to call the nasty ones out,â he explained earlier this year. In late June, one of the trolls Beams was jousting with provoked him over rumours about his gambling and then delivered the cruellest gibe imaginable: âAt least my dads [sic] still aliveâ. Beams was so gutted he posted the exchange on his public Instagram feed, discovering in the process that the troll was a 13-year-old aspiring Aussie rules player. The youth subsequently apologised to Beams in writing and a phone call, but a week later Beams posted an anguished message on Instagram: âI am a broken man at the moment and this is very very real for myself and the people that I love.â He is currently on an indefinite mental health break.
âThere seems to be this pull among young players to seek validation on social media,â says Wayne Schwass, who now runs a mental health advocacy organisation called Puka Up. âWhat we do in elite sport is train the athlete to be a great athlete. But do we equip them with the emotional tools to cope with the criticism and negativity that comes from social media? I donât think we do enough.â
In online chat forums such as bigfooty.com.au the defamatory innuendo that circulates about players reflects a cynical view among many punters that the phrase âmental health issuesâ is often a euphemism for drug, alcohol or gambling problems. The AFLâs tight control over media may be fuelling those suspicions. Many players have spoken out about depression in recent years, but usually from within the confines of the team website, the official broadcasters or a brief press conference. Buddy Franklin has never revealed what his issues were, despite holding a press conference and conducting an interview with former Richmond player Matthew Richardson on the Seven Network two years ago.
Seven, Foxtel and Telstra paid $2.5 billion for the broadcast rights to the AFL, and Foxtel alone now boasts eight footy commentary shows on its 24-hour dedicated AFL channel. The saturation coverage continues on radio, in print, on television and online as a legion of football writers and players-turned-commentators dissect the game and its participants. Mick Malthouse, one of the most successful coaches in AFL history, swears that when he started coaching in 1984 there were only 34 accredited AFL journalists. âNow thereâs 900,â says Malthouse, âand theyâre all looking for a front-page story or a scoop that gets them on Fox Footy. They tend to forget the impact these stories can have on people. The coach theyâre criticising whoâs just been sacked might have a family back home who are bawling their eyes out.â
Wayne Schwass. Picture: Jake Nowakowski
Wayne Schwass says he was appalled by the mediaâs pursuit of Tom Boyd in 2016 and 2017. At its height, commentator Mark Robinson asked rhetorically: âWhatâs he on â $1.4 or $1.7 million this year? ⌠This is the biggest bust this year in AFL history.â On Fox Footy, Cameron Mooney joined the clamour for Boyd to take a pay cut, saying: âI donât think you pay $1 million on potential.â Boyd later revealed heâd been suffering panic attacks so severe that he nearly ran off the road while driving, and that his insomnia left him virtually sleepless for more than a month. âTom Boyd didnât negotiate his multi-million contract with the Western Bulldogs,â Schwass says. âThat was negotiated on his behalf, and it frustrates and infuriates me that people in these positions in the media make such simplistic connections.â
Like Malthouse, Schwass applauds the AFLâs decision to create a mental health team, and he is heartened that so many players are willing to speak about their issues, both to their coaches and to the public. But he remains frustrated that some clubs still only employ mental health specialists part-time, and that the AFL has been so tardy in responding to an issue that he has been lobbying the sports administrators about since 2006.
âWeâve got a growing number of players who are under significant stress, which comes not only from mental health issues but might be related to alcohol, gambling, drugs or family issues. Weâve had an arms race in terms of investing in strength and conditioning coaches, development coaches, physiotherapists and other staff focused on physical health, and yet in 2019 weâve got clubs that still only have a part-time psychologist. What happened with Majak Daw, as upsetting as it was, was probably the wake-up call that was needed. My greatest fear is that we will lose someone in our industry to suicide. What we need to do is get ahead of the curve and develop programs that give mental health the same priority as physical health.â
Lifeline 13 11 14, Beyond Blue 1300 224 636
