The Fitz Files: it's a Buddy nightmare

By Peter Fitzsimons
Updated March 21 2014 - 4:14pm, first published 3:41pm

I will not be unkind. I will not be unkind. I will NOT be unkind.

OK, I think I’ve got it. I think I can manage this ...

It is about the Swans and Buddy Franklin. You will recall your humble correspondent ranting unpleasantly from the beginning that the deal between the Swans and Franklin last year – whereby a club famous for its team-first, team-always culture put $10 million over nine years towards a 27-year-old party fiend with chronic knee problems who didn’t finish in the top 10 of the best and fairest in his last season with Hawthorn – might have been a tad close to the worst decision made by a sporting organisation since Balmain decided to get Alan Jones to coach them in 1989.

And last Saturday we had, if not the denouement, then at least the beginnings of it.

For when you have Greater Western Sydney spending the money it could have given to Franklin on securing four – count ‘em FOUR – experienced, first-class AFL players and dusting the Swans in the first round, with Franklin only getting one goal and looking out of sorts meantime, is it not bleeding obvious that things are awry? If that his how the first game of a nine-year stretch looks like, how do you dinkum think the last game will be?

Insanity from the first.

Send angry emails, etc, to pfitzsimons@smh.com.au, and see if I care. I shall be in my trailer.

Stand down for your own good, Liam

Takes my breath away. Here is the Wests Tigers Liam Fulton midweek on being concussed: “Oh, mate, I've been knocked out that many times that I'm probably beyond it, to be honest. I’ve been knocked out over 10 times. If I’m going to get dementia I'm going to get it ... What can I do about it? To be honest, I saw the articles and read them all and I still wanted to play. You get paid well and I think everyone knows there are head knocks involved.”

Yup, but it is only recently footballers have come to understand that you can be every bit as punch-drunk as a boxer by continued head knocks, being treated in exactly the cavalier manner you embody, Liam. Mate, as explained to me by one of the world’s foremost brain specialists in Boston, you need to think of it the way you do when bending a wire coathanger back and forth to break it. At first it's hard, then easier and easier to break. So, too, your grip on consciousness ...

Last year, an ex-footballer who played for a decade beside a 1990s league icon, said to me: “At first you could hit him in the head with a sledgehammer and he wouldn’t go down. At the end, he was being carried off unconscious after someone just tapped him.”

Not coincidentally, that player is the one whose name most comes up when footballers of that era whisper about the blokes most clearly affected.

My view? If a player like Fulton does not have the wherewithal to pull himself out of the game after so many concussions, then the game must exercise its duty of care to him and stand him down. In what other field of employment would an employee be allowed to continue engaging in an activity so demonstrably detrimental to his future, most particularly when that employee will have every right to sue the pants off the employer in years to come for allowing him, encouraging him, to continue?

As to you, personally, Liam, if you don’t stand down for yourself, do it for your fine wife. And ask someone who knows, what it's like to look after a loved one with serious dementia.

When men were men and concussion didn't exist

As you were. In my column on Thursday I highlighted the nonsense of Newcastle Knights coach Wayne Bennett claiming last week his club took concussion seriously and were good at “self-policing”, when as recently as last year, one player was badly concussed TWICE in 12 minutes and still finished the game, going on to play the following week and every week for the rest of the year.

It prompted one reader to send me an excerpt from page 224 of Bennett’s autobiography, The Man in the Mirror, where he refers to game one of the 2001 State of Origin series: “About seven or eight minutes into the half, Shane Webcke wanted to come off. He’d copped a head knock and couldn't see the football. He was as important to us then as he had ever been. I sent a message out, ‘Can you see the blue jerseys?’

“And the message came back, ‘Yes, he can see the blue jerseys’.

“I said, ‘I don’t need him to see anything else, because all I want him to do is tackle. I don't need him to see the ball, so tell him not to bother calling it. He is not coming off. He is staying out there’.”

Bennett, and the NRL, will be very lucky if some day soon, that statement, or myriad ones like it from other league identities, is not presented as evidence in a legal suit from a posse of brain-damaged players.

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