The Coon Dog
17-11-2007, 02:47 AM
How the AFL failed to catch a falling star (http://www.realfooty.com.au/news/news/afl-failed-a-falling-star/2007/11/16/1194766973046.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2)
Whilst not a Bulldog's story, one worth reading from today's Age. Very sad indeed.
EZRA Bray has disappeared again into the long grass somewhere outside Darwin. Plenty of people have gone looking for him in the five years since he fell out of favour with AFL football. Despite some of the best intentions, no one has truly found him.
As with Ben Cousins, Bray has had a continuing and desperate battle with substance abuse. As with the fallen West Coast champion, Bray is a political football — albeit one with a significantly lower profile — whose tragic case has continued to embarrass, perplex and sadden the AFL and its stakeholders.
As a speedy and skilled 16-year-old midfielder, Bray was selected in the Australian junior squad that toured Ireland in 1998. In February this year, his father, Russell, watched him on a television set in Alice Springs representing the St Mary’s club in Darwin.
“He just stood there like a stump,” Russell Bray recalled. “My poor son was lucky he wasn’t killed. His mind was gone. A kid, one of the Cockatoo-Collins, went through him and he was taken to hospital, of course.” Several months earlier, during a game in Alice Springs, Russell Bray had pleaded with the coach to drag his son from the ground, fearing he might break his neck.
Ezra Bray’s journey since he was drafted at pick No. 17 by the Geelong Football Club on the eve of the 2000 season has been a downward spiral of drug and alcohol abuse that his father believes began during his two years on the Cats’ senior list.
Said AFL Players Association boss Brendon Gale, who inherited the case that also has continued to haunt him: “I haven’t learned anything from Ezra’s story I didn’t know already. If we’re going to draft them at that age, you can’t just coach them.
“Some clubs do it well and some clubs, frankly, don’t. And at those clubs, they slip through the net. We are talking about all sorts of problems ranging from illiteracy to drug abuse, and in fairness, the support mechanisms provided now are much more extensive.”
Unlike Cousins, Ezra Bray’s fall has come without fanfare or consistent united family support or the money for a sixfigure rehabilitation program on the other side of the world. Like Cousins, Bray’s story has involved plenty of quiet buckpassing and not a small amount of guilt.
In March this year, around the time that Cousins was flying business-class to the Summit Centre in Malibu, Gale sanctioned an unofficial search party of one to fly to Darwin to find the missing Bray in an attempt to bring him back to Melbourne and place him in an Aboriginal care facility specialising in drug and alcohol abuse.
The woman whose flight and hotel bills Gale’s association paid for was Lynne O’Keefe, the mother of Sydney premiership player Ryan O’Keefe and the woman who had become the 17-year-old Bray’s second mother during the year leading up to the 1999 national draft.
It was a year of cultural awakening, domestic disputes and tension, but Lynne O’Keefe has never lost touch with the boy she says changed her life and that of her family. Even after he threatened her with a knife in her kitchen earlier this year, she has refused to give up on him, but the Darwin experience was one that still haunts her.
Her flight landed late at night and the hotel the association had booked her into was locked up when she arrived.
For four days, says O’Keefe, various family members drove her around Darwin apparently searching for Bray with no success. Bray’s mother, Ingrid, and stepfather, Peter Atkinson — a former senior Northern Territory football official — appeared to have given up, and elsewhere during her search O’Keefe felt threatened and frightened.
She called Gale in tears and asked him to book her a flight home. Upon her return, she called the Geelong Football Club and told an official on the other end of the line: “Don’t you ever let this happen again. Don’t you ever neglect a player like this again.”
The unnamed official assured her: “We know that. It’s different now.” It needs to be. The AFL, ignored for years by the Federal Government, has built a multimillion-dollar relationship with Canberra on the platform of indigenous development.
The league’s expensive foray into South Africa has come on the back of its boast that while indigenous Australians make up 1% of the country’s population, they make up 12% of AFL senior lists. Regardless of which party wins next Saturday’s federal election, the AFL will receive $20 million over four years from the education department alone to fund its indigenous academies — which now total 16 — based on the West Australian Clontarf model.
This time last year, an all-time-high 16 indigenous footballers were taken by AFL clubs — almost 25% of all those taken in the national draft — and at the most recent AFL Commission meeting, the league’s game development unveiled a six-part indigenous platform furthering its boast that football alone can make a difference amid the drug-and-alcohol-devastated communities most Australians never see.
In the words of the AFL’s game development general manager, David Matthews, the AFL model is working, with the Qantas-sponsored Kickstart program providing hope for an estimated 87,000 young indigenous Australians.
All of this has come too late for Ezra Bray. According to the 1982 Norm Smith medallist Maurice Rioli, the AFL will miss a generation of talented young Aboriginal footballers because of substance abuse and inadequate football development in the NT.
Highlighting the dearth of football programs outside Darwin and Alice Springs, Rioli, a local government officer on Melville Island, told an audience at an indigenous lunch in Melbourne earlier this year: “Right now, in a lot of communities, we are at the crossroads. These kids love their footy. They walk up and down the main street holding footballs and they wear their AFL club jumpers to school . . . I am banging my head against a brick wall. Once they turn 13, they turn to marijuana.”
Even now, eight years after Bray was drafted, indigenous football pioneer Paul Briggs, president of Rumbalara in the central Victorian Murray League, believes AFL clubs still struggle with the cultural problems associated with recruiting indigenous footballers.
“I still don’t think the system is strong enough to handle cases like Ezra, and he is not the only one,” said Briggs, whose club tried to rehabilitate Bray during its troubled 2007 season. “There needs to be a far more professional approach and a stronger case management of what these boys need.
“Once they take their footy jumper off and put their street clothes on, it’s just too hard for them. We found it hard to give Ezra the help he needed. He just kept rejecting it. He refused to acknowledge he needed help and we kept finding him or the police kept finding him drinking on the streets.”
It was in 1999, on the eve of the national draft, that The Age first met the bright-eyed, affectionate teenager, a prodigiously talented Aboriginal footballer who had been flown from Darwin to Melbourne on an AFL scholarship and placed in the home of another draft hopeful, the St Kevin’s College football hero O’Keefe. While O’Keefe was no certainty to be drafted, Bray was a defi nite top-20 draft choice.
Although the teenagers had argued during their year together, usually with O’Keefe berating Bray for slacking off at training or school and Bray responding by telling his housemate to “lighten up”, they often sat up late into the night and talked about the day they might play AFL football together.
Since the 1999 draft, however, the pair have come together only fleetingly and mostly due to tragedy. Lynne O’Keefe’s second son, Aaron, 18, was killed as a passenger in a car accident in 2002 and although Bray did not attend the funeral, he turned up devastated at the O’Keefes’ Moonee Ponds home several days after his death.
Now divorced, Lynne O'Keefe lives with her two younger children, Mason, 13, and Brydie, 15, a student at Genazzano College who has applied for a school placement into an Aboriginal community next year in a bid to learn more about the indigenous culture.
While Lynne's 26-year-old son Ryan was disturbed when he learned of her failed pilgrimage to Darwin, he brought several sets of clothes to Melbourne for Bray in his latest attempt at a football comeback and organised a meeting with his Sydney teammate Adam Goodes and his former housemate in a bid to help him.
Geelong chief executive Brian Cook had been at the club for not quite a year when Bray arrived in late 1999. Cook remembers his talent and promise but allegedly did not argue when the Cats' football manager, Garry Davidson, recommended the club delist Bray because he believed his substance problems — including at the time petrol and ecstasy — already had caused too much damage.
"It's a terribly sad story — a difficult story," admitted Cook, who returned this week from a six-day trip to Groote Eylandt off the north coast of Australia, where the Cats have become the latest in a series of AFL clubs to establish a community partnership with the region — partnerships that did not exist in 2000.
Continued...
Whilst not a Bulldog's story, one worth reading from today's Age. Very sad indeed.
EZRA Bray has disappeared again into the long grass somewhere outside Darwin. Plenty of people have gone looking for him in the five years since he fell out of favour with AFL football. Despite some of the best intentions, no one has truly found him.
As with Ben Cousins, Bray has had a continuing and desperate battle with substance abuse. As with the fallen West Coast champion, Bray is a political football — albeit one with a significantly lower profile — whose tragic case has continued to embarrass, perplex and sadden the AFL and its stakeholders.
As a speedy and skilled 16-year-old midfielder, Bray was selected in the Australian junior squad that toured Ireland in 1998. In February this year, his father, Russell, watched him on a television set in Alice Springs representing the St Mary’s club in Darwin.
“He just stood there like a stump,” Russell Bray recalled. “My poor son was lucky he wasn’t killed. His mind was gone. A kid, one of the Cockatoo-Collins, went through him and he was taken to hospital, of course.” Several months earlier, during a game in Alice Springs, Russell Bray had pleaded with the coach to drag his son from the ground, fearing he might break his neck.
Ezra Bray’s journey since he was drafted at pick No. 17 by the Geelong Football Club on the eve of the 2000 season has been a downward spiral of drug and alcohol abuse that his father believes began during his two years on the Cats’ senior list.
Said AFL Players Association boss Brendon Gale, who inherited the case that also has continued to haunt him: “I haven’t learned anything from Ezra’s story I didn’t know already. If we’re going to draft them at that age, you can’t just coach them.
“Some clubs do it well and some clubs, frankly, don’t. And at those clubs, they slip through the net. We are talking about all sorts of problems ranging from illiteracy to drug abuse, and in fairness, the support mechanisms provided now are much more extensive.”
Unlike Cousins, Ezra Bray’s fall has come without fanfare or consistent united family support or the money for a sixfigure rehabilitation program on the other side of the world. Like Cousins, Bray’s story has involved plenty of quiet buckpassing and not a small amount of guilt.
In March this year, around the time that Cousins was flying business-class to the Summit Centre in Malibu, Gale sanctioned an unofficial search party of one to fly to Darwin to find the missing Bray in an attempt to bring him back to Melbourne and place him in an Aboriginal care facility specialising in drug and alcohol abuse.
The woman whose flight and hotel bills Gale’s association paid for was Lynne O’Keefe, the mother of Sydney premiership player Ryan O’Keefe and the woman who had become the 17-year-old Bray’s second mother during the year leading up to the 1999 national draft.
It was a year of cultural awakening, domestic disputes and tension, but Lynne O’Keefe has never lost touch with the boy she says changed her life and that of her family. Even after he threatened her with a knife in her kitchen earlier this year, she has refused to give up on him, but the Darwin experience was one that still haunts her.
Her flight landed late at night and the hotel the association had booked her into was locked up when she arrived.
For four days, says O’Keefe, various family members drove her around Darwin apparently searching for Bray with no success. Bray’s mother, Ingrid, and stepfather, Peter Atkinson — a former senior Northern Territory football official — appeared to have given up, and elsewhere during her search O’Keefe felt threatened and frightened.
She called Gale in tears and asked him to book her a flight home. Upon her return, she called the Geelong Football Club and told an official on the other end of the line: “Don’t you ever let this happen again. Don’t you ever neglect a player like this again.”
The unnamed official assured her: “We know that. It’s different now.” It needs to be. The AFL, ignored for years by the Federal Government, has built a multimillion-dollar relationship with Canberra on the platform of indigenous development.
The league’s expensive foray into South Africa has come on the back of its boast that while indigenous Australians make up 1% of the country’s population, they make up 12% of AFL senior lists. Regardless of which party wins next Saturday’s federal election, the AFL will receive $20 million over four years from the education department alone to fund its indigenous academies — which now total 16 — based on the West Australian Clontarf model.
This time last year, an all-time-high 16 indigenous footballers were taken by AFL clubs — almost 25% of all those taken in the national draft — and at the most recent AFL Commission meeting, the league’s game development unveiled a six-part indigenous platform furthering its boast that football alone can make a difference amid the drug-and-alcohol-devastated communities most Australians never see.
In the words of the AFL’s game development general manager, David Matthews, the AFL model is working, with the Qantas-sponsored Kickstart program providing hope for an estimated 87,000 young indigenous Australians.
All of this has come too late for Ezra Bray. According to the 1982 Norm Smith medallist Maurice Rioli, the AFL will miss a generation of talented young Aboriginal footballers because of substance abuse and inadequate football development in the NT.
Highlighting the dearth of football programs outside Darwin and Alice Springs, Rioli, a local government officer on Melville Island, told an audience at an indigenous lunch in Melbourne earlier this year: “Right now, in a lot of communities, we are at the crossroads. These kids love their footy. They walk up and down the main street holding footballs and they wear their AFL club jumpers to school . . . I am banging my head against a brick wall. Once they turn 13, they turn to marijuana.”
Even now, eight years after Bray was drafted, indigenous football pioneer Paul Briggs, president of Rumbalara in the central Victorian Murray League, believes AFL clubs still struggle with the cultural problems associated with recruiting indigenous footballers.
“I still don’t think the system is strong enough to handle cases like Ezra, and he is not the only one,” said Briggs, whose club tried to rehabilitate Bray during its troubled 2007 season. “There needs to be a far more professional approach and a stronger case management of what these boys need.
“Once they take their footy jumper off and put their street clothes on, it’s just too hard for them. We found it hard to give Ezra the help he needed. He just kept rejecting it. He refused to acknowledge he needed help and we kept finding him or the police kept finding him drinking on the streets.”
It was in 1999, on the eve of the national draft, that The Age first met the bright-eyed, affectionate teenager, a prodigiously talented Aboriginal footballer who had been flown from Darwin to Melbourne on an AFL scholarship and placed in the home of another draft hopeful, the St Kevin’s College football hero O’Keefe. While O’Keefe was no certainty to be drafted, Bray was a defi nite top-20 draft choice.
Although the teenagers had argued during their year together, usually with O’Keefe berating Bray for slacking off at training or school and Bray responding by telling his housemate to “lighten up”, they often sat up late into the night and talked about the day they might play AFL football together.
Since the 1999 draft, however, the pair have come together only fleetingly and mostly due to tragedy. Lynne O’Keefe’s second son, Aaron, 18, was killed as a passenger in a car accident in 2002 and although Bray did not attend the funeral, he turned up devastated at the O’Keefes’ Moonee Ponds home several days after his death.
Now divorced, Lynne O'Keefe lives with her two younger children, Mason, 13, and Brydie, 15, a student at Genazzano College who has applied for a school placement into an Aboriginal community next year in a bid to learn more about the indigenous culture.
While Lynne's 26-year-old son Ryan was disturbed when he learned of her failed pilgrimage to Darwin, he brought several sets of clothes to Melbourne for Bray in his latest attempt at a football comeback and organised a meeting with his Sydney teammate Adam Goodes and his former housemate in a bid to help him.
Geelong chief executive Brian Cook had been at the club for not quite a year when Bray arrived in late 1999. Cook remembers his talent and promise but allegedly did not argue when the Cats' football manager, Garry Davidson, recommended the club delist Bray because he believed his substance problems — including at the time petrol and ecstasy — already had caused too much damage.
"It's a terribly sad story — a difficult story," admitted Cook, who returned this week from a six-day trip to Groote Eylandt off the north coast of Australia, where the Cats have become the latest in a series of AFL clubs to establish a community partnership with the region — partnerships that did not exist in 2000.
Continued...