Fabulous Fred. Paul Amy
Spargo and Cook met at the Technical school and became great friends. They had a lot in common. ‘Freddie was like me,’ Spargo says. ‘He was a bit wilder than me, but he loved life. He was always up. He was always happy. And he had a big mouth!
‘You wouldn’t meet a better bloke. I would have killed for him. Geez, I’ve got some great memories of Freddie.’
Pam Cook says her brother was fortunate to discover he was an exceptional footballer.
‘Wouldn’t we all love to find that one thing in life that we’re really good at and can excel at? He found that.’
When his hands weren’t holding a football, Cook was known to put them to mischievous use, breaking into factories and stealing cars. He insists the vehicles were never knocked around and that he always dumped them outside police stations.
When he needed a few bob he stole soft drinks from the back of a local fish and chip shop, and took them around the front and sold them.
‘It was typical teenage-boy stuff,’ Cook says. ‘No harm done, really.’
But police took a dimmer view of his behaviour and more than once brought him home to his startled parents. They were dismayed by their son’s casual regard of the law. The indifference never left him.
He first appeared in court in June 1963 for ‘factory break and steal’ and ‘illegal use of motor car’, receiving probation for seventy-eight weeks. In March 1965, he was up for ‘larceny from motor vehicle’. He was given a good behaviour bond.
When he was about fourteen, Cook and his mates dug a tunnel in the soft, sandy soil of the banks of the Yarra River, covered it with railway sleepers and canvas, and went about filling it with stolen goods for which they ultimately had no use. When a security guard from an oil company came across the lair and reported it to police, The Sun newspaper dubbed the unknown gang ‘The River Pirates’.
A few years earlier, Cook and Rodney stumbled upon two children who had gone missing in Yarraville. The brothers had jumped the fence of the Tip Top factory to take the delivery vans for a spin. Climbing into the self-locking vehicle, they found the frightened youngsters, a boy, five, and a girl, four, huddling in the back.
When police arrived, the Cooks thought they would be in trouble for trespassing. But they were praised for rescuing the children.
‘If it wasn’t for my brother being mischievous, they would probably have died,’ Pam Cook says.
Under the headline ‘Children Trapped 30 Hours In Van’, The Sun newspaper reported the incident, quoting a ten-year-old ‘Freddy’ Cook as telling the boy: ‘You’d better get home. He told me faintly, “I think I’d better.”’
It was the first of many times that Fred Cook was held up as a hero.
4
WITHIN Fred Cook’s battered blue suitcase are a few large pages long ago torn from a scrapbook. Glued and stapled to the bottom of one is his registration form to play with Footscray. It is dated 11 April 1967 and signed by Cook, Footscray secretary Bill Dunstan and a Victorian Football League director.
Years later, Cook says it’s likely his hand was trembling as pen hovered over paper.
He had set his compass on the Western Oval ever since he had started to come through the ranks at Footscray Tech and the amateur club. At age nineteen he was signed and sealed to play under the coaching of the great Charlie Sutton and the captaincy of (in Cook’s eyes) the even greater Ted Whitten.
Throughout his teenage years he and a mate, Jeff Chapman, had gone to the Footscray ground once a week to watch the Scraggers train. They’d nick the occasional football, but Cook got a greater thrill stealing a glimpse of his heroes: John Schultz, Ray Baxter, Alex ‘Racehorse’ Gardiner, Graham and Barry Ion, John Hoiles, Ray Walker, Charlie Evans. And, of course, Whitten, who would ruffle his hair and say, ‘G’day kid.’ Now he could count a few of his pin-ups as teammates.
And he was another Footscray Tech Old Boy who’d made it to league football. The club had been rich recruiting territory for the Bulldogs. In 1967, Cook was photographed alongside three other Tech talents kicking on at the Western Oval: Noel Fincher, Rod O’Connor and Gary Dempsey.
‘I was probably the happiest young bloke walking the earth, the day I joined that club,’ Cook says. ‘Excited, elated, achievement, words like that. It was a big thing for me.’
Yet not three years later, after thirty-three senior games and the ability to play many more, he walked out, never to return. A spat with officials turned into a saga played out in the newspapers, and in a huff he made off for Yarraville in the VFA. At twenty-one he’d played his last game of league football. His Old Boys teammate Dempsey went on to captain the club and win the 1975 Brownlow Medal during a glittering 329-match career.
Dempsey says Cook was ‘bigger than life even then’ and ‘didn’t like too much discipline’.
‘He wasn’t that keen on doing everything other people’s way,’ Dempsey says.’ He wanted to do it his way, and when he left Footscray and went to the association he was allowed to play his own footy. At Footscray he had to play a team game.’
Dempsey has no doubt Cook could have been a long-term league player. He considers him a wasted talent.
Another of Footscray’s Brownlow Medal-winning ruckmen, John Schultz, agrees. He says league football caught only a glimpse of Cook’s ability.
‘When you think of how much he had going for him, he should have played many more games,’ Schultz says. ‘Nothing frightened him. He was rugged and tough. He’d get the ball at centre half back and go straight down the centre and head for goal. No pussy-footing around. He was the sort of bloke you wanted in your team.’
He recalls Cook as a ‘loveable larrikin’ and ‘personable bloke’ who was ‘always smiling and joshing around’.
Schultz was fond of the youngster. When he retired at the end of the 1968 season, he gifted Cook his aluminium shinguards. Cook never forgot it; when he thinks of John Schultz, he thinks of the shinguards.
Laurie Sandilands, who made his debut for Footscray in 1966 and went on to captain the club, saw a ‘larrikin’ young player who struggled to handle authority, was a non-conformist and had a ‘different attitude to life in general’.
With the amateur season over, Cook and Dempsey first turned out for Footscray in 1966, in a night match against South Melbourne and a reserves game against Collingwood at Collingwood. Cook remembers club secretary Jack Collins dropping by the family home with papers, most probably for a permit, to sign.
Fred Cook senior was initially reluctant for his boy to commit, believing he needed another twelve months in the amateurs. But Collins tempted him with a fistful of finals tickets. He changed his mind.
‘I said to the old man, “Hey, I thought you said I wasn’t ready for it.” And he said, “Fred, you’re never too young to play league football. You’ve got to get in and mix it with them.” Tickets for the finals game were like gold that year. You couldn’t get them anywhere. But Jack Collins had a few and the old man was happy to take them off him.’
Cook was taken aback at the step-up from amateur to league football. A ball hardly hit the ground at training. Leads were honoured with accurate passes that arrived at speed. Players scooped up balls from their boot laces with ease. Cook soon found himself doing the same.
‘Coming from the amateurs, it was like going up three steps in the quality of your football,’ he says. ‘Early doors, I was overawed. I was. But what happens is, you lift yourself to the standard of the players around you. They dragged me along. You say, “Right, this is how league footballers train,” and you get carted along. You eventually get the confidence.’
His time at the Bulldogs began promisingly. Footscray had a wooden-spoon season — fourteen losses crowded out only four victories