Many decades ago – before Graham Teasdale had so much as pulled his infamous velvet suit off the rack and when the word “wag” applied only to a predominate character trait of league footballers – the Brownlow Medal winner would learn of his achievement in far less ceremonious surrounds than the televised gala that celebrated popular 2015 winner Nat Fyfe in Melbourne on Monday night.
When Geelong’s Bernie Smith became the first back pocket to win the award in 1951, a number of press people preemptively hovered in the front yards of he and four other contenders, their camera flashbulbs at the ready. Richmond’s Roy Wright won the next year but didn’t actually take possession of his medal until the following February. Triple-winner Bob Skilton discovered that he’d taken out his first when, having returned by train from night school classes for his plumbing apprenticeship, he saw a mass of cars and people outside his Port Melbourne home.
By the time Fyfe had finished his humble, plain-speaking and genuinely amusing acceptance speech last night, with host Bruce McAvaney and a good deal of the football-loving public reduced to outright fawning, you’d assume that some of the old stagers had also seen something of the past in the winner’s no-frills country manner. In the off-season Fyfe normally returns to the family farm in Lake Grace and mucks in for the family cattle transport business, though his aching body might earn him a reprieve this year.
If much about the Fremantle midfielder is unmistakably 21st century, he also seems a fitting winner in the league’s back-to-basics “year of the fan”. The mess of hair is pure 70s rocker, his spectacular high marks straight out of the Electrifying 80s VHS and his fearless, preternatural knack for finding the ball a marker of virtues that are a common thread through all of football history. Fans live to see players as special as Fyfe emerge.
A relentlessly physical player, he also had some luck along the way too. There were reports for charging into North Melbourne’s Ben Jacobs in round 21, another for tripping Bulldog Koby Stevens and also an artless collision with Hawk Taylor Duryea, which drew a fine. Fyfe’s always gliding from end to end, but he’s often skating on thin ice.
Unlucky was runner-up Matt Priddis, who sets the impossibly high standards that have helped West Coast from obscurity to a premiership tilt this year and finished three votes adrift. Only three times did he fail to gather 25 possessions in a game.
Afterwards coach Ross Lyon was full of admiration for his young midfielder. “Not only is he a great player,” said Lyon, “he’s a great person, is a deep thinker and considered and takes everyone around him along with him.” For once this week nobody in Australia could quibble with Lyon’s thinking. Just as smart were the bookies who’d already paid out on Fyfe bets after round 8.
Fyfe’s triumph was a night of firsts; he became the Fremantle Dockers’ inaugural winner; he was most certainly the first favourite to walk the red carpet with the support of a cane and took the medal as social media feasted on the definitive dodgy “leak” – an AFL online store advertisement spruiking a piece of Brownlow memorabilia in honour of Hawk Sam Mitchell. Fyfe was later at pains to point out he’d rather be in Mitchell’s place this coming weekend than accepting individual awards.
Fyfe’s unconventional entrance only served to highlight the physical toll his scorching-hot season has placed on his body. He’s an incredible sight to see by the boundary line of grounds; closer to the physical dimensions of previous generations’ centre half forwards than midfielders and placing such torque on his frame as he crashes through contests, leaps for high marks and slashes away from opponents that you wonder how he didn’t miss more than four games this season.
To keep playing with a fractured fibula the way Fyfe did against Hawthorn – visibly limping as he barged in for the hard ball and diving for marks like a slips fieldsman – is another trait of the old school. For his troubles he’ll now wear a plate inside the injured leg.
Such is the way of modern football that most of Fyfe’s numbers have already been turned over throughout the course of the year but one that now stands out is that like only Haydn Bunton before him, he’s polled more career Brownlow votes than he’s played league games. It’s near-impossible to drown him out when he’s on song and that he streaked so far ahead of the pack while missing those four games adds extra weight to the feat. Fyfe polled maximum votes nine times inside the first 14 rounds. It’s hard for umpires to miss him now.
There was also something ominous about the Docker thanking his club’s conditioning staff for helping him attain the power and strength for such a scintillating first half of the season, a statement that carried an implied threat. You honestly couldn’t bet against 25 games of peak-condition Fyfe dragging Lyon’s grim and unfashionable squad to similar heights next season, a status that honestly wasn’t expected in 2015. In the absence of viable key position players, he and team-mate David Mundy dragged everyone else along in their slipstream this year.
Fyfe’s win was a triumph for daring, joyful, brilliant and occasionally brutish football, and was studded with a number of transcendent individual performances, none more so than his encounter with Crows ace Patrick Dangerfield, engineered in part by the late Crows coach Phil Walsh, who was also honoured on Monday night.
Walsh was an aesthete and a genuine fan of football and what a fitting epitaph that game will serve as – the most thrilling one-on-one duel of the year. Dangerfield had 38 possessions, eight tackles and a goal. Fyfe was even better, so his side won. “Call me a weirdo,” Walsh said after the game, “but I think we have to protect the look of the game.” Nothing for the rest of the year would be so compelling and heartening.
Still hurting from last weekend’s preliminary final loss, Fremantle fans have at least now got some tangible reward from an AFL season and in Fyfe, certainly the competition’s best player. “I’d live and die for the Dockers and I’d do anything for them,” he said after accepting his award. Like everything that came from his mouth last night it was hard not to believe.
