Duo rewrite the script on doing it tough in sport

Much as it goes against the grain to plug anything I didn’t write, two sports books in recent times are such standouts that I must.

I refer to 28 by Brandon Jack and Australia’s Toughest Sports People by Mick Colliss.

Regular readers of these pages will already be familiar with some of Jack’s work, and the surprisingly different angles he wrote from. After all, you might expect that one with his pure pedigree of football – the son of Balmain Tigers and Kangaroos star Garry Jack; the brother of Sydney Swans legend Kieran Jack, and an accomplished Swan with 28 senior matches to his credit himself – would constantly throw those cards on the table. The easy way would be to content himself with opining about who will win which matches and why, and did he ever tell you about the time he handballed the key pass to Adam Goodes to kick the winning goal against Hawthorn?

Former Sydney Swan Brandon Jack has released a memoir of his turbulent time in football.Credit:Getty Images, Supplied

But Brandon was never narrowband, he was always broadband – he never wanted to confine himself to such a limited subject range, no matter the fact his credentials and obvious writing ability would allow him to cruise along doing just that. From his first time in these pages, his writings displayed diversity and restlessness. He was never content with mere prognostications about particular games. He wanted to cover the gamut of so many things, beyond mere results, that were much more interesting: things like racism in sport, sexuality, masculinity, the whole culture and philosophy of football. Then he wanted to write about things that had nothing to do with football at all! This book is all of that writ large.

The anecdotes he tells of his time at the Swans are compelling, of what it was actually like to be out in the cauldron, playing for your life as the cameras rolled. But while 99 out of 100 sports memoirs – and I have written a few myself – sell just how fantastic it was, how magical the whole experience, Jack, typically comes at it from an entirely different angle.

He didn’t really like it. He wasn’t quite sure he had pulled the right rein to be in football in the first place, was deeply unhappy and would regularly wipe himself out on alcohol to, effectively, dull the pain. Fascinatingly, the book documents his journey from being a kid with an initial dream to play in the big league, only to change to AFL, only to find that when he was more or less living that dream it was, in fact, a nightmare he had to escape from – and his journey thereafter. It is really well done, searingly honest and unflinching, as I say on the cover. It is much more than a mere memoir from a retired sportsman.

Gillian Rolton won equestrian gold for Australia at the Atlanta Olympics despite riding with a broken rib and collarbone.Credit:Bryan Charlton

Colliss will also be familiar to many of you. A former Eastwood rugby player with thwarted ambitions to play for the Wallabies – he first made a name for himself through wonderful sporting poetry, including my favourite, the Ultimate Test – before realising there was a way to fulfil his dream of representing Australia after all. With no official national sudoku team, what was preventing him and a handful of mates buying some blazers, declaring themselves the national sudoku team, and heading off to the World Sudoku Championship in India where they won, zilch, zilch, ZILCH for Australia. But what a time they had!

Colliss is a clever writer, with a lovely turn of phrase and a great feel for the kind of Australian sporting stories told in hushed tones at bars and around campfires, decades after the event. In this book, Australia’s Toughest Sports People, he gives a dozen examples of extraordinary sporting courage from Australians, from Rick McCosker playing with a broken jaw in the Centenary Test; to Gillian Rolton ignoring a broken rib and collarbone after falling from her horse in the Atlanta Olympics 1996 to win gold; to Dean Jones’s double century at Madras despite his dehydration and illness, to Dermott Brereton’s heroics in the 1989 AFL grand final, with broken ribs of his own. You get the drift.

I had – as I wrote for the cover endorsement on this one – two chief regrets on reading it. Firstly, that I hadn’t thought of doing it myself, and secondly that Mick did it better in any case!

Twitter: @Peter_Fitz

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