MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - MAY 28: Joel Selwood of the Cats celebrates a goal during the round 10 AFL match between the Collingwood Magpies and Brisbane Lions at Melbourne Cricket Ground on May 28, 2017 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Michael Dodge/Getty Images) Photograph: Michael Dodge/Getty Images
In 2013, dual Brownlow medallist Greg Williams described Joel Selwood as “too courageous for his own good”, and a walking time bomb who needed to be protected from himself. That Williams had been diagnosed with a degenerative brain condition that he linked to repeated head-knocks provided his caution with a hint of menace.
Responding on Nine’s Footy Classified shortly after Williams’ warning, Selwood said there were many things that he’d learnt as a kid that he couldn’t take out of his game. “It’s just so hard to change,” Selwood said. “There are times in games when you have to go for the footy, and that’s one thing that I’ve never had a problem with.”
Here we are, four years later and still not much has changed. The atmosphere of a siege still pervades Selwood’s game and he consciously ignores every self-preserving impulse any normal person should have. He ignored them again during the first quarter on Friday night at Simonds Stadium, when he had a tête-à-tête with Andy Otten’s elbow. This time Selwood hit the ground hard, getting to his feet with a head that looked as if it had come out Kathy Griffin’s prop bag.
Notwithstanding the chunk missing from above his right ear, Selwood pushed away the club’s medical staff to try and return to the contest, ten years of hard-at-it football fashioning his stride, his face again painted in blood. As he reluctantly sought treatment on the bench, the editors at Seven’s Friday night football coverage began splicing together film of the collision to add to a Selwood showreel already crammed with enough blood and hits to the head to make the Rocky films seem tame.
Selwood returned to the ground early in the second quarter with 12 stitches and another scar on the side of his head. “He doesn’t need any more [scars],” said his younger brother and teammate Scott after the Cats posted an impressive 22-point win against fellow Premiership hopefuls Adelaide. “He has got enough scars and he is ugly enough as it is.”
He’s also got enough Brownlow votes (without having won it), but will probably end up with three more after another best afield performance – 21 contested possessions and nine clearances that continued the Crows’ sorry record at Simonds stadium, a venue at which they’ve not won since 2003.
Selwood’s game had been infused with iron long before he first walked through the door at Kardinia Park at the dawn of a Geelong era. The comedian Jerry Lewis once confessed that he tried to get his father to show some emotion by offering him $50,000 to smack Lewis around. Selwood had his two talented older brothers do it for free.
Like a lot of kids, Selwood played his first competitive game of football when he was eight. The difference was that Selwood played his in his brothers’ under-12 team. “We were short, so he bobbed up in his first game as an eight-year-old playing against 12-year-olds and he kicked two or three goals off the forward flank,” older brother Troy recalled to The Age’s Michael Gleeson in 2007.
All sporting eras contain a little bit of luck, and Geelong’s may have been that Selwood had to undergo knee surgery after just six games into his final season with the Bendigo Pioneers in the TAC Cup. This is the only reason why a kid who AFL national talent manager Kevin “Shifter” Sheehan rated as “the best 17-year-old in Australia” fell to Geelong after Hawthorn took luckless Mitchell Thorp with pick six.
From his first game of AFL football, Selwood has personified a harder and more talented Geelong. His early years were a reminder that it’s not always just the old guys who know what toughness means. But not only is Selwood the Cats’ hardest (it’s almost as if he seeks the stitches and scars), for a good part of his ten-and-a-half seasons he has also been the most influential.
By any conventional measure, Selwood is a champion of the game: three Geelong best and fairest awards, five all-Australians nods (three as captain) and three premierships. Selwood also has four AFLPA Robert Rose Awards for Most Courageous. After he won his last three in 2012, 2013 and 2014, you suspect the AFL now just award it to the runner-up.
But despite his burgeoning trophy cabinet, Selwood has been the star who hasn’t seemed to care much about being one. If Patrick Dangerfield has assumed the superstar mantle at Geelong, you sense that it suits Selwood just fine. Reflecting the impact of football’s most devastating one-two punch, Dangerwood has quickly become football’s most exhausted portmanteau.
Yet in many ways the term would be relevant even if Dangerfield didn’t return home to Moggs Creek, a one-hour drive from Geelong. Danger is what fires Selwood, and it is this danger and an appetite for the contest that makes him such a compelling figure in a game, particularly for fans.
While eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke didn’t see a game of AFL, his theory of the sublime goes some way to explain our pleasure in watching Selwood. Part of Burke’s thesis is the notion of “negative pain”, the idea that a feeling of fear – paired with a sense of safety, and the ability to look away, can produce a feeling of delight. For those who don’t consume themselves with demands for him to appear before The Hague for his ducking, watching Selwood for the past ten years has been just that – a delight.
Week after week, the Geelong champion plays in a fearless style that brings into relief the plastic macho of those of us who write about football and question the mental toughness of players.
What cannot be questioned is Selwood’s hardness and his impact on the club where he has played all of his 239 games. In an era where a player’s worth is increasingly defined by multi-year, multi-million contract offers, Selwood is a generational player who not only defines Geelong’s most successful era, but personifies it. And he has the scars to prove it.
