Brandon Jack is waiting for sunshine to peek through the canopy of Australian figs and evergreen oaks of Sydney’s Centennial Park. He has spent many hours traversing the tracks of this park, pushing his mind and body to their limits, but today in baggy jeans and a nondescript hoodie, he is at the mercy of the brisk morning breeze.
The former AFL player turned author has lived near the park for more than a decade, after growing up on the other side of the city in a high-profile sporting family then joining the Sydney Swans as an 18-year-old. He doesn’t visit Centennial Park nearly as much as he used to, when he would arrive with a defined purpose and plan. A bright red training singlet and high-end runners were the uniform back then, as Jack and a selection of his Swans teammates powered around the 3.5km loop.
“There was a group of players in my position, not really in the team, who were all 20, 21,” Jack says, as we leave the Greenhouse cafe and begin our stroll around the same track. “We’d come here three or four times a week and run on this footpath. Not slow, we’d be hammering it. A group of nine or 10, some of us were big blokes … and we were just hellbent on getting everything out of our run.”
Jack was a dedicated – bordering on obsessive – trainer during his time with the Swans. No matter how hard he worked, it still wasn’t enough for him to cement his place in the side. After five years he was still trying to live up to his own expectations, still seeking his place among the well-established stars. A footballer on the brink of breaking into a team chasing premiership glory. The younger brother of Kieren, the club’s co-captain. The son of Donna and Garry, the latter an Australian and New South Wales rugby league great. And then, at the end of the 2017 AFL season, Jack was let go by the club.
Forced into a not unwelcome change of direction, Jack has since followed a more literary path, penning columns, a memoir and now a novel which revolve, in some way, around the world of elite sport and its culture. The memoir, 28 – named after the number of senior games he played with the Swans – was all the more eye-opening for its brutal honesty. It is a story Jack did not want to tell.
“I hated football, I didn’t want to talk about football,” he says. The book was first presented as a collection of essays “with no mention of footy other than one paragraph – which my editor quickly said was the most interesting thing I’d written. Then I found a box of journals from my footy days, and I was like, ‘oh, I forgot about this person’.”
Once Jack settled on the idea of writing a memoir that draws heavily on his experiences inside an AFL club, he says he was determined “not to do a conventional sports memoir, where I’m chaired off the field at the end”. But he concedes he still presented a sense of closure at the end of 28 by “going back and playing football”.
Jack returns to football in his second book, Pissants. This time the professional football club is fictional, though the main players are still on the fringe of the senior team. The setting might be familiar but Jack is exploring more than just the themes he covered in 28. He is out to learn more about himself as a writer.
The language used by the characters in Pissants is crude and confronting. Their actions are discomforting and, at times, misogynistic. They live life on the edge but Jack seldom shows whether the characters pay a price when their behaviour crosses the line.
“There are things the characters say, and things that they do, that I disagree with. When I tried to change it, it felt really fake. It felt like it lost energy. Because with my experience of the football world, I know that beneath what you see on the field and in the interviews, it’s all a little bit dark.”
As we pass by Centennial Homestead and the park’s bird sanctuary, the sun is out, the wind has dropped, and Jack has rolled up his sleeves. He puts deep thought into each comment, especially as he connects the Pissants characters to his own time spent as something of an outsider who found himself within the walls of an elite football club.
Jack remains curious how sports, clubs and their players present themselves externally, particularly on social media. He brings it up more than once on our walk, perhaps no surprise after he published a 15,000-word essay on the topic last year. He even spent time shadowing the GWS Giants media team to understand how the AFL’s undisputed meme champions operate. It only made Jack more cynical of the way that sports clubs use their own channels to connect supporters to the stars, give every No 1 fan a seemingly direct link to their idols. “We should be more wary of this type of media, because they’re controlling the narrative even more,” he says, before pointing to the disconnect between disarming social media “banter” and the behaviour of several Giants players at a post-season party last year. “When that came out, I just thought ‘that’s scarier than the shit I’m writing’.”
But Jack is adamant that his novel “is not a comment on the footy world” or the young men – and, to a lesser extent, women – who inhabit it. “I just wanted to prove to myself that I could write funny characters. Obviously there are things I’m subconsciously exploring, but there’s no agenda to this book for me.
“On 28, we had ‘masculinity’ on the cover, and I regretted it straight away,” Jack says. “It’s a word that still makes me uneasy. It was my first book, I didn’t know how to trust my gut. It makes me shrink up when I hear that word now. I don’t use it, never really have. That goes back to why I’ve written a novel about characters, because I don’t need to use that word, ‘masculinity’. I can show it.
“The Pissants group, that core group of players that we follow, are unknowingly staring out into the void searching for meaning,” he adds. “They’re at their footy club, and they’re getting nothing back. They’re not wanted, they’re not needed. So they’re experiencing a kind of existential dread of ‘what is my purpose?’, which they funnel through their rituals and drinking games. They’re creating and cultivating their own meaning in the universe. That’s how a lot of us operate.”
Jack’s walking pace begins to slow as he tries to find the right words. He is usually at ease discussing the darker side of elite sport; it is terrain that he has covered many times before. But occasionally he hits a nerve within himself, this time when considering his Pissants characters and their place in the sporting and broader world. “Unknowingly or unconsciously, we’re just trying to fill that gap that would be loneliness or lack of purpose, by giving meaning to random things,” he adds.
The 31-year-old distances himself from the AFL club and culture that he was part of for five years. He rarely watches matches on TV, let alone attends the Swans’ home games at the stadium that we could walk to with a slight diversion. But he still catches up with friends who happen to now be among the established players at the club that he was once desperate to join. Football and being part of the inner sanctum has been pushed into Jack’s past but it remains within him. It remains his muse.
He is no longer looking for validation from coaches and teammates. Now he writes – and runs – for himself.
“It took me a while post-footy to just enjoy going for a run,” Jack says. “But I’ve found the joy in putting the runners on, putting headphones in and just going at a slow pace, far less intense than I used to. Sometimes I find myself creeping up when it’s meant to be an easy 5km run, sometimes I end up flogging myself. There’s something I still like about knowing what my mind and body can do.”
Pissants by Brandon Jack is out now through Simon & Schuster
