A father of an AFL footballer delisted at the end of last year speaks out against drug use in the league. Picture: Getty Source: Getty Images
WE'LL call him "Dad" and give his son the name "Mick".
Mick was delisted at the end of last year by a Melbourne-based AFL club, mainly for being not good enough, but partly because he had lost all interest in playing footy.
"I've never seen him as happy as the day he got dropped from the club," Dad said, insisting on the anonymity to protect his son.
Mick didn't take drugs until last year.
His preferred choice of narcotic was speed and ecstasy tablets, all combined with alcohol.
Up to eight of his teammates also took them. It was part of the routine, Dad said, and it is why he thinks the drugs summit yesterday could be the unmasking of a huge problem at footy clubs.
"Don't think for a moment any club is clean," Dad said.
"My son's club is just one example. There can't be just one club - now let's say two after Collingwood admitted it as well - it can't be that they are the only two clubs.
"Two years ago the clubs tried to get the boys off alcohol and they all turned to the drugs, and I think now they're trying to get them to have a beer again.
"And why shouldn't they?
"You get drafted by a club, and all your mates are going out on the piss week in, week out, and you're not. And they expect you to stay clean, to stay off the beer and off the drugs for eight months of the year. It's a bloody hard gig.
"A lot would be able to do it, and not everyone is on drugs, but I reckon there would be quite a few."
Mick was a talent. He played representative football all through juniors, made the Victorian under-15s, got all the way to the Australian Institute of Sport. AFL was the logical next step.
"Unfortunately," Dad said, "the club drafted him and it was probably the worst thing that happened.
"In all that time he was going through the juniors, easily the biggest message they gave them was to stay away from drugs, that they would be tested. They were all paranoid about drugs, to the point where my son went to a party and someone was smoking dope and he panicked.
"He actually asked me, that if he walked past somebody smoking dope, did that mean it would show up somehow if you have a drug test. I said, 'No, mate, don't worry about it'. But that's how far they drummed it into them.
"It's funny, but he went to an AFL club with that attitude and within 12 months he's out there taking drugs."
And not just Mick.
"He told me he knew of about eight players who took drugs, and he said eight only because they were ones he knocked around with," Dad said. "So who knows how many others?"
The drugs issue with Mick came to a head when there was an incident during the holidays. Mick landed in hospital after taking a bad batch of drugs, and although Dad suspected his son was taking drugs during the season, it was only after the hospital scare that the full story of Mick and his teammates became real.
"I had to take him to doctors for three days, think about a psychologist - he was spinning out," Dad said.
In 2011, six players failed drugs tests.
AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou has flagged a spike in positive tests for the 2012 season.
The results are yet to be announced.
"The AFL just must not test them, mate," Dad said.
"Mick wasn't tested. He would have told me. The AFL must think we're numbskulls, fair dinkum."
Dad accepts that Mick chose to take illegal drugs and does not abdicate responsibility for that.
"But what I'm saying is that he never thought about doing it until he got into that environment," Dad said.
He said Mick, whom he described as quiet, was prescribed medication by the club to deal with depression.
"But he never took it," Dad said. "He was depressed, and I've never seen him as happy as the day he got dropped from the club."
In the end, Mick did not leave the club on bad terms.
Dad said his own eyes had been opened to the extent of drug use in the AFL and the wider community.
"I didn't realise until my son told me," he said. "That most of his mates outside of footy take them, the blokes he plays footy with ... I can't believe it."
Mick lives at home at weekends to avoid the drugs pitfalls and plans playing suburban football this year.
"We're happy with that," Dad said. "But (there has been) very little follow-up from the club from a welfare point of view. If you are in the top 22, they won't delist you if you come with a syringe hanging out of your arm.
"When you are on the fringe they drop you like a hot potato, and that's reality."
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