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29/7/09 9:51:34 AM

THE SECOND COMING OF COUSINS
He enduredthe banfromthe sportheonceruled andfoughtthrough hisdrug
addiction—now Ben Cousinsisbackdoing what he does best. In arareinterview,
he talksabout hisreturntofootballand seeing thebiggerpictureoflife.
Fred Pawle meets“an extremistofthe highestorder”—and AFL’sprodigalson.
PhotographybyPierre Toussaint StylingbyTrevor Stones
GQ0409p120-127BEN.indd 120 28/7/09 9:37:18 AM

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AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009 .com.AU 121
GQ0409p120-127BEN.indd 121 28/7/09 9:37:51 AM

BEN COUSINS
BEN COUSINS IS SILHOUETTED
AGAINST THE TALL WINDOWS
OF THE ROYAL SUITE IN THE
HOTEL WINDSOR, MELBOURNE,
TALKING ON HIS MOBILE. HE’S
WEARING A LIGHT BLUE JACKET,
GREY TEE AND WHITE JEANS
— NOT THE SORT OF OUTFIT YOU’D
NORMALLY ASSOCIATE WITH
HIM, BUT HE LOOKS STYLISHLY
COMFORTABLE IN IT ANYWAY.
His body language betrays none of the
trauma he’s experienced during the past two
years, a period in which he’s gone from star
of a premiership AFL team to drug fiend,
unemployable footy genius, media whipping
boy and now prodigal son. In fact, on first
impression at least, you’d say he hasn’t been
affected by the rollercoaster at all.
His sense of humour certainly remains
intact. He’s at the Windsor to shoot the cover
of this magazine, and halfway through the
session he tells the stylist, “Don’t put me in
an Elwood shirt. Every time I wear one of
those I get arrested.”
Cousins has done a marvellous thing: gone
from rebel in rehab to reformed star, without
resorting to the emasculation of political
correctness. That’s partly because he’s
a footballer, who derives his support not from
the chattering middle classes but from the more
straight-talking ranks of the football fraternity,
and partly because, as I will soon find out when
he grants me a rare interview about his troubled
life, he is candid about his shortcomings.
The shoot finishes, and he changes back
to his own gear: grey loose-weave mohair
sweater lined with a long-sleeve white tee,
patchwork stonewashed jeans and long-toed
leather boots. To escape the photo crew, we
adjourn to the bedroom, its south-facing
windows providing glimpses of the MCG,
where he and West Coast Eagles captain Chris
Judd held the AFL Cup aloft on September
30, 2006, the high point of a career that went
quickly downhill.
For those of you who arrived late, Cousins
was arrested for drug possession in Perth in
October 2007 (the charges were later dropped),
and footage of him half naked and half wasted
in the back of a police car screened across the
country. He was then sacked by the Eagles,
the only club he’d ever played for, and the AFL
suspended him for 12 months for bringing the
game into disrepute.
That suspension — or ‘holiday’, as he puts
it — turned out to exacerbate his problem.
“I had nothing structured in my life,” he says.
“My idea of a holiday is what got me into this
predicament. Idle hands are the devil’s tools.”
He won’t elaborate on the “predicament”
of that year, but he does go into detail about
what happened when the holiday ended with
the rude shock that none of the 16 clubs was
interested in him any more.
Throughout his enforced lay-off , Cousins
had maintained in his own mind that the
hardest hurdle would be gaining permission
to return to the AFL. Once he did that, clubs
would queue up to sign him. The AFL cleared
him in November 2008 on the condition that
he submit to regular drug tests.
By then, Collingwood had already
conducted a thorough investigation into his
behaviour and company, which included hiring
a private investigator to follow him around
Perth for a few days. Aft er the investigator
fi led his report, the club met with Victorian
Police Commissioner Christine Nixon to
discuss its findings. In October 2008, the club
announced it wasn’t interested in Cousins.
He wasn’t worried. Two other clubs, Saint
Kilda and the Brisbane Lions, were still
courting him. He was certain that one of them,
particularly the Saints, would pick him up
in the national draft on November 29. There
had been meetings with the Saints, and in
his mind Cousins considered himself a “really
good prospect”. He was in his apartment
overlooking the Burswood Park Golf Course
in Perth four days before the draft when
a call came through from his manager Ricky
Nixon: the Saints board had just met and
announced the club wouldn’t be picking him
in the draft. Two days later, the Lions made
the same decision.
So that was it then. Not one of the 16 clubs
wanted him. It was game over. A glorious
career (six times All-Australian team member,
one premiership win and a Brownlow medal)
had been overshadowed by his drug-fuelled
indiscretions and cut short, at the age of 30,
by his inability to get himself back on track
during that one-year “holiday”.
Cousins was devastated. He didn’t leave
his apartment for a week. He stayed in bed
and let reality have its inevitable eff ect. “I’m
not a depressive person, but it was a state of
depression,” he says. “I had the life sucked
out of me. I didn’t feel like leaving the house.
I slept a lot, didn’t talk to anyone. I wasn’t
on the phone to my parents or my mates. I just
shut everything out.”
Two things pissed him off about being
rejected in the draft: 80 kids who’d never
played the game at the top level had been
picked before him, and nobody seemed to
understand how much he needed the discipline
and routine of football to avoid the temptation
of straying back towards his addictive vice.
“The process itself of getting me back to footy
probably made me as vulnerable as I’ve
ever been,” he says. “That’s the point that
everyone has missed. The process itself was
so counter-productive to what I was trying
to achieve. I’d been given 12 months off , left
to my own devices.
“The whole thing I wanted about getting
back to playing footy was to give me the
foundation that I needed. If I was in a perfect
state of mind, I could have gone on and done
anything, but I wasn’t.”
His first foray out of the apartment was
to go for a light jog along the Swan River.
He knew he’d need a goal to fill the vacuum.
“I contemplated getting myself fit to run
a marathon in February or March, so I had
something in the immediate future to focus
on,” he says. “I wanted to respond to that
challenge in the same fashion I always have.”
But before he gave in to fate, there was one
glimmer of hope left : the next-stage pre-season
draft, which had in recent years become
a recycling bin for old uncontracted players
hoping to squeeze a season or two from
122 .COM.AU AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009
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27/7/09 1:55:29 PM

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“I had the
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GQ0409p120-127BEN.indd 123 28/7/09 9:38:40 AM

GQ0409p120-127BEN.indd 124 28/7/09 9:39:15 AM

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their fading careers. Although only six
clubs were participating in it, he decided to
nominate anyway.
He realised he needed help in his campaign.
He rang AFL legend Kevin Sheedy, who
happened to be in Perth at the time, staying
at the Duxton, in the city. Sheeds met him
and his dad Bryan at the hotel. Cousins told
Sheedy that he never thought it would come
to this, and that he was now desperate.
Sheedy replied that the only way Cousins
could sell himself was in person, and the
only clubs with a remote chance of looking
at him were in Melbourne.
After the meeting, Sheedy called Richmond
Tigers coach Terry Wallace and told him
Cousins was a troubled kid who deserved
a second chance. At 6am on December 11,
Cousins landed in Melbourne and was taken
straight to the home of Richmond stalwart
Barry Cameron, where a selection of club
players and officials grilled him for six hours.
Cousins didn’t know it, but Wallace had been
watching him all year, and had until then not
seen enough positive changes. “Ben would
be the first to say that his year off was when
he lost his way,” Wallace tells me later. “It
gave him more freedom and more time, which
clearly wasn’t a good thing. We monitored him
behind the scenes, and didn’t see a change
in Ben’s attitude that suggested there was an
urgency about him playing again.”
All that changed on December 11. “There
was a sense of desperation — for the first time
ever, I reckon — that Cousins thought he had
stuffed up, that he’d lost his opportunity to
play again,” Wallace recalls.
“He was brutally honest [at the meeting]. If
he’d come in and started to spin us a yarn, we
would have just said ‘seeya’ straight away. But
he came in and said, ‘Look, I still have issues,
the last time I had issues was X, Y and Z.’
He was very, very honest about the problems
he was facing.”
WallaceisspeakingfromPerth,where he’s
doingaseriesofmotivational speeches that
have invariably morphedinto discussionsabout
how Cousinsisgoing these days.“He’s got
afightonhis handsevery daythathegetsup,”
he says.“When you’re ayoung person who’s
hadarock-starlifestyle thrownatyou,and
then gotinvolvedinadrug-culturescenario, all
you’re thinkingabout is yourself. It’s notuntil
something is takenawayfromyou that you
start to think about thebiggerpicture.
“Unfortunately foralot of people whoget
caught up in that drug culture, they lose their
marriage, theirfamily livesare neverthe same
—those areall scenarios that otherpeople have
hadtodealwith. Iknow Benhas hadthose
problems alongthe way—family problems and
allthose types of things —but what flicked the
switchfor Benwas hislossoffootball.”
Following that meeting, a dream started to
form in the minds of Richmond fans, spurred
by another AFL legend, 3AW announcer
Gerard Healy. A player with more talent and
experience than almost anyone alive was on
the market, and desperate for a club. Hello?
The Tigers hadn’t had a premiership win since
before Bob Hawke was prime minister, and not
since Ian Stewart had defected from St Kilda
in 1971 had they embraced one of the game’s
megastars. The phone at the club’s Punt Road
headquarters started to ring with fans offering
unsolicited advice for the board.
“mylifeis
in excess.
i’man
extremist
of the
highest
order.”
Nevertheless, the decision, complicated
by pre-season draft technicalities, remained
uncertain right up until the night before. As
late as December 15, Richmond’s football
operations manager, Craig Cameron, was still
hosing down the hype. “It’s highly unlikely
we’ll pick Ben,” he said.
“I hope he gets drafted,” Sheedy had said
a few days earlier. “It’s about the person, not
even necessarily about Richmond or footy
in general. I would just like to see him get
his life together.”
Cousins, though, was starting to see the
situation in exactly the opposite context. It
was about Richmond. And it was about footy.
In a candid comment to Collingwood president
Eddie McGuire on December 16, Nixon said his
client had finally started to grasp the bigger
picture. Nixon admitted that in September,
back when Collingwood was still interested,
“no-one could have picked him up”.
How things change. On December 16,
Richmond had the sixth pick in the pre-season
draft, and took Cousins. Two months earlier,
the likelihood of this happening was so remote
that Sportingbet was offering $17 on it.
GQ0409p120-127BEN.indd 125 28/7/09 9:39:42 AM

BEN COUSINS
Tigers fans went nuts — jamming the
switchboard again, this time with applications
for season tickets. Attentive fans quickly
pointed out that Cousins’ first game in yellow
and black would be against Carlton, the new
home of Chris Judd, with whom he dominated
the midfi eld in the premiership-winning Eagles
squad of 2006. Six thousand fans signed up
in the week aft er Cousins was picked, taking
the Tigers’ membership to an all-time high
— it’s now around 37,000. Cousins was on
a plane the morning aft er the pre-season
draft. Two thousand people turned up at
Punt Road to watch his first training session,
after which he faced
a monster media
conference that
fi lled dozens of
newspaper pages
across the country
the next morning.
During that year off ,
Cousins worked on a
project about which he
remains very secretive:
a documentary about
his drug problem,
which he describes as a “cautionary tale about
addiction”. The film hasn’t wrapped yet, but he
hopes to see it broadcast sometime in the next
12 months. One newspaper estimates it has
cost him $100,000, and that its Australian TV
rights would be worth $350,000. Addiction is
a compelling topic. Even in our interview, he
keeps steering the topic back to his problems,
and the ways in which he’s overcome them.
“I like to think I’ve got through this intact,
although some would argue I haven’t,” he
says with another laugh. “But I keep things
in perspective. I’m nothing more, nothing less
than just a footballer.”
But it would be easy for you to fall into
the trap of thinking you are more than just
a footballer.
“Yeah, but throughout all this, if nothing
else, my indiscretions or strife and struggles
I have with just day-to-day life reinforce to
me that I’m just like everybody else… People
from all walks of life can find themselves in
trouble and strife, or mixed up with drugs.
There’s no right and wrong formula. I don’t
attribute my predicament to just being
a successful footballer with a lot of money.
I think the percentage of doctors that need
treatment for addiction is no less than any
other professional field or trade or anyone else
in society. It doesn’t discriminate. It breaks
down all those barriers.”
“FROM THE
OUTSIDE
IT WAS A
CHARMED
LIFE, BUT
IT’S NOT
ALL ROSES.”
Do you still drink?
“Yeah.”
Does that fl ick any switches in your head?
“I have to be careful with that sort of stuff .”
It always starts with drinking, doesn’t it.
“It can do, but I’m on a pretty strict regime.
I can’t aff ord to slip up, and enjoying the
occasional drink is something I look forward
to. It’s all in moderation.” He flashes his
million-dollar grin again.
You do nothing in excess these days?
“My life is in excess. I do everything in
excess. I’m an extremist of the highest order.
They’re the very qualities that have made me
very good at what
I do, football-wise.
Take them away from
me, you take away
the qualities that
make me very good
at playing football. It’s
just about harnessing
them in other areas
so I can still get the
best out of myself
without losing it.”
Those demons won’t
go away, eh?
“I’m not naive
enough to think that I can just wash my hands
of where I’ve come from and it’s all in the past.
The harsh reality of it is that it’s a struggle.”
The next day I’m at Punt Road to watch the
squad train. I’m not alone. About 150 fans,
most of them in yellow and black, are here too.
Ben’s the last on the ground, and as he runs out,
the fans watch in hushed reverence. They’re
unaccustomed to seeing the league’s superstars
run down this race. “Beeeennyyyyy,” one of
them yells, but Cousins doesn’t lift his gaze
from the ground ahead and quickly blends into
the team on the field.
While his teammates go through kicking
and passing drills, he spends most of the
session stretching his hamstrings. That’s
understandable. He’s 31, and he’s had
a history of hammy injuries, including one
that struck during the last quarter of that
round-one showdown with Judd and kept
him out for six weeks.
Half an hour later, he’s the first one to leave
the field and head back to the rooms. Again
the fans watch in silent awe as he jogs past,
eyes down. A few minutes later, the rest of
the squad and caretaker coach Jade Rawlings
(Wallace resigned in June) are mobbed for
signatures as they come off the ground. Fullforward
Matthew Richardson, still the team’s
most popular star, lingers for half an hour until
the last autograph-hunting kid has gone.
But while the fans are still getting used to
having Cousins in yellow and black, the team
itself has long since adapted to his presence.
One of his fellow midfi elders, Daniel Jackson,
tells me they were all “awestruck” when
Cousins turned up for his first day of training,
media circus (including Cousins’ own film
crew) in tow, but had now grown accustomed
to his presence and input.
“He fitted in straight away,” he says. “A few
guys went and had a chat with him on the first
day. He’s a very funny guy.”
When I later meet coach Rawlings in his office
next to the club gym, he says the star recruit
has been suitably humble in his approach to
the team. “There’s a respect for what he’s done
in footy, but he’s got to find his way first,”
Rawlings says. “I suppose he doesn’t want to
tread on the toes of the designated leaders.
Those leadership roles aren’t just handed out
when you walk through the door. But people
want to hear from him, and what he says has
leadership written all over it.”
It’s not until I’m leaving, and walk past
the small crowd of fans still waiting outside
the club rooms, that I realise the signifi cance
of Rawlings’ last statement. An AFL coach
talking about Cousins in terms of leadership
potential? What was Sportingbet off ering on
that back in October?
I call Cousins at home a few days later to
clarify a couple of points, and ask him whether
that brush with oblivion had made him realise
for the first time that the world didn’t revolve
around him.
“I’m aware that there’s a whole bigger picture,
and that me coming back to footy wasn’t just
about me. It was about so much more,” he says.
But you’d lived a mostly charmed life…
“Oh, I’ve lived a pretty well-rounded life,”
he says. “I don’t think it was the only time I’ve
ever been able to think of anyone but myself.
From the outside it was a charmed life, but
it’s not all roses. I worked hard to get there.
I wasn’t born a great footballer. I’ve worked as
hard as anyone I know my age. It wasn’t just
going out to have a kick when you wanna have
a kick and then go back to all the partying. I’ve
worked my guts out to get what I have.
“I consider myself a pretty resilient person.
I’ve had to go through a fair amount. Football
is challenging. So is life. Along the way I’ve
had to deal with some hardship. That’s one of
the things I’m pretty proud of — the way I’ve
been able to get through it. I’m not entirely
happy with how I found myself in those
predicaments, but that’s only half of it. Tough
people last, tough times don’t.”
126 .COM.AU AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009
GQ0409p120-127BEN.indd 126
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