Fabulous Fred. Paul Amy

      WHEN you mention Fred Cook to people who haven’t seen him for a while, they invariably respond with a question: ‘How is Freddie?’

      You suspect they really want to ask, ‘Is he off drugs?’ They are pleased to hear he hasn’t used for a few years. Cook was on amphetamines for more than two decades. He has long been removed from the lifestyle he enjoyed as a football and media figure and the proprietor of the Station Hotel in Port Melbourne.

      When old friends saw him after his slide it was usually on the TV news, after he had been arrested or dealt with in court. He was inhabiting a world they didn’t recognise and they felt powerless to pull him away from its orbit.

      Yet affection for him has never wavered. People who know him well speak of a sociable man who was always generous with his time and money at the peak of his popularity. They acknowledge his flaws and foibles — his self-destructive streak and tendency to take things to excess, an ability to sniff a short-cut and an immaturity apparent when he casually sprinkles his female conquests into conversation (his wife, Sally Desmond, says he’s sixty-six going on fifteen; his sister Pam says he never grew up). But they describe him as a ‘loveable larrikin’ or ‘scallywag’ or ‘likeable rogue’ with a capacity to lighten the mood around him. They wish only the best for him.

      ‘Mate, I wasn’t saddened by what happened to Freddie. I was heartbroken,’ says his former school mate and Footscray teammate Ricky Spargo. ‘Such a lovely bloke and to see him go down like that … We all loved the bloke. My mum’s 101 and she’s loved him all her life, like my old man [former Footscray player Bob Spargo] did.’

      He can barely talk about Cook’s post-football life. ‘Nah, can’t cop it. That wasn’t my Freddie.’

      Spargo was thrilled to learn Cook was doing okay. He hasn’t seen him for a long time, but thinks of him often and always fondly. He doubts there is a bad bone in his body.

      Balmer holds the same opinion. He says Cook did and still does put friends first. ‘Nothing he’s been through has knocked that quality out of him,’ he says. ‘He looks out for others more than he looks out for himself, and as a consequence of that he’s left himself destitute. And it’s sad, just tragic.’

      Former Port Melbourne coach Gary Brice was devastated as he watched Cook’s life unravel. He speaks about him with the warmth that football coaches reserve for players who won them premierships. Cook played in three flags under Brice.

      ‘It was a disappointing period of his life. Very disappointing,’ he says. ‘Hopefully he’s got it under control, because I guess with that sort of addiction you never get over it. It’s something you have to live with and manage through your life.’

      Cook is living on the Mornington Peninsula, where he headed with his future wife Sally Desmond after he was arrested for drug offences for the first time, in 1986.

      But he cannot tell a redemption story, a tale of emerging stronger from a wretched experience. It’s a daily struggle to stay clean. He has said it hundreds of times: ‘I didn’t use yesterday, I haven’t used today and I probably won’t use tomorrow.’

      If someone produced white powder, a spoon and a clean needle and told him he could use with no consequences, away he’d go, jabbing his arm as quickly as he could. But he knows the consequences only too well.

      In the beginning he took speed to keep up with his many commitments, time management in powder form. A few months earlier he had been asked to retire from Port Melbourne, his footballing home for fourteen years. He says now that drugs were his way of substituting the surge of adrenaline that came from kicking hundreds of goals and winning premierships.

      It’s a familiar tale: a feted sportsman losing his way after his career ended and the cheering had stopped. Few fell as far or spectacularly as Fred Cook. In his later years, when he should have been speaking about his career or commenting on football affairs, he was trotted out to talk about criminal figures, including Kath Pettingill for the special The Mother of Evil. He told how she marked one lot of foils green (for amphetamines) and others red (for heroin) when her son Dennis Allen was shifting drugs at a furious rate in Richmond in the 1980s.

      Allen had money falling out of his pockets then. Cook says he would be equally flush if he had a dollar for every time he’d been told he had the world at his feet — and squandered it. ‘Pissed it away,’ is how he puts it. His regret runs deep, but he tries to suppress it, thinking he’d go mad if he brooded over his many mistakes. Besides, he says, it’s hard enough to deal with the present, let alone the past.