Caroline Wilson wrote of Jobe Watson’s Essendon debut in 2003 that “watching him stand alongside James Hird was a better advertisement for the AFL than two years of Campaign Palace commercials”.
How things can change through a 14-season career. Watson, who entered the league as a teenager and was part of an undeniable feel-good father and son story, leaves the game as a wearied 32-year-old with one of the game’s most complex legacies.
“I have come here to announce this will be my last season with the football club,” Watson said on Wednesday. “It is time to retire and move on.”
“Move on.” Whatever your view on Watson and the Bombers’ supplements saga, no one can deny that as the club’s captain, it was Watson who was left to bear much of the burden.
In his first game after admitting on Fox Footy’s On the Couch that he took the drug AOD-9604, Watson was booed every time he touched the football (29 times) by a hostile crowd at Perth’s Domain Stadium. He, more than any other of the Essendon 34, was the public face of the scandal, a role he carried during the interminable court and tribunal hearings. It was always going to take a toll, even after an enforced sabbatical in New York in 2016. “He’s gone over there with the intention to make coffees,” said team-mate Brendan Goddard in one of the more notable examples of the football-speak genre.
Michael Phelps’s coach Bob Bowman once told the New York Times that athletes have a volitional and psychological window. “It closes. A lot of it has to do with the effort you put in up to that point.”
The two-time All-Australian’s struggles since he returned during this year’s pre-season suggest that window may have closed during the time spent at what he described as “the fourth best brunch spot in Manhattan”. In short, he was burned out and there was always a suspicion that he came back not for himself, but for the club. “I love the game but it doesn’t feel the same to me as what it did.”
Since he made his debut as a slightly overweight teenager with an iffy kick, through to the FEMINIST snapback he wore to his press conference last year announcing his return to the game, Watson has appeared as something of an outlier in a macho profession played by men you’d hesitate to invite to a wine tasting. This, you suspect, compounds the enormity of the role he had to play.
“It wasn’t something I enjoyed. I am a pretty private person. It ends up changing you as a person,” Watson said. “You start to over-analyse things, having such scrutiny on you. Everyday life changes.”
While it may have changed him as a person, Watson always handled himself in a manner of which his club should be proud, particularly in returning his Brownlow medal, a decision that was left to Watson after the AFL abrogated its responsibility to make the call.
Having mishandled the saga and sabotaged careers, you could argue the club was lucky to be led by Watson – something the Essendon president Lindsay Tanner went some way to addressing in a statement that said Essendon “take[s] responsibility for placing Jobe in this position and unreservedly apologises to him and his family”. Somewhat ironically, much of his legacy will come fromleading the club through unprecedented adversity.
Watson said in his retirement announcement that whatever he may have achieved as a player, he hoped his behaviour on and off the field would also form part of how he would be remembered.
His career stacks up on numbers alone. Even disregarding the 2012 Brownlow, Watson’s 217 games include two All-Australian nods (granted one of those was in 2012) and three Essendon best and fairests. Along with Chris Judd, he was one of the early prototypes of the 6ft 2in midfielder (albeit without Judd’s turn of speed) who sculpted a reputation as a tough, in-and-under midfielder, one who couldn’t help but find the ball.
But Watson’s legacy will forever be complex and tainted. Those who have booed him for three years will not be cheering him on his lap of honour, and the AFL will not be calling on him to front any advertising campaign for the game. But ultimately, the legacy that matters most may be the one he has with his father’s club.
It is always difficult for a son to walk in his father’s footsteps, particularly when they walked 300 games and three premierships. But among the Bombers faithful, Jobe Watson’s No. 4 will occupy the same iconic place as his father’s 32, and that’s no small feat.
