Fabulous Fred. Paul Amy
premier St Kilda at Moorabbin. A crowd of 28,564 watched the Saints collar the Dogs by eighty-one points. Cook started on the bench. He stood next to Verdun Howell when he went on the ground.
‘Howell flogged me. Stood on my head, all those sorts of things,’ he says. ‘I learnt quickly. You had to.’
But his talent attracted good notices in the newspapers.
‘If the performance by nineteen-year-old Fred Cook on Saturday is any criterion, Footscray’s worries about finding a regular centre half back have been erased,’ kicked off one match report.
‘Cook, 6.2 and 13.10, did an excellent job against an accomplished centre half forward in [North Melbourne’s] Bernie McCarthy, a feature being his superb overhead marking. He also showed dash and aggression.’
As he rose, Cook encountered for the first time those ubiquitous sporting figures, the hangers-on.
‘How you doin’ champ?’ people would say to him, patting his back and digging fingers into his arms. Suddenly he had a lot more friends. He couldn’t pop into the Bluestone Hotel without drinkers coming over and wanting to talk football and buy him a beer. ‘Wherever you went everyone seemed to know you,’ Cook says.
Suddenly he wasn’t Mr Fred Cook. He was Mr Popular. Youngsters asked for autographs. He wondered if he should sign ‘Fred Cook’ or ‘Freddie Cook’ and if he should prevail ‘best wishes’ upon the recipients.
His profile got bigger in 1968. Cook played every senior game that year and stood some of the league’s most brilliant forwards, including St Kilda’s Darrel Baldock. He remembers Sutton telling him that Baldock was an explosive player and a champion of the game, but he could be frustrated with close checking — and a few kicks in the heel as he set off for the ball. ‘So that’s what I did, booted him with each and every alternating step,’ Cook says. ‘What a prick of a thing that was to do.’
Cook worshipped Sutton. ‘He encouraged the way I liked to play football,’ he says. ‘In those days you could put the ball under your arm, run down from centre half back and swing your other arm like a club, a mallet. That was legal. Charlie told me that was the way he wanted me to play. I did.’
That encounter against Baldock was in Round 7 at Moorabbin. Both were named in the best. The great Saint was credited with twenty-four disposals and three goals. Cook had eighteen possessions and seven marks.
In the return match in Round 18, Cook again did well in a match St Kilda again won comfortably. In his round-up for The Footscray Mail, Gary Sargeant said Cook was ‘the best of a handful of good players’ and that his marking was ‘the turning point for many St Kilda attacks, but he lacked sufficient support from his fellow defenders to make much difference’.
‘In view of the fact that he was carrying a sore elbow his strong marking is even more praiseworthy.’
Sargeant had hailed Cook’s performance against Fitzroy three rounds earlier. The Roys’ winning margin of five points, he wrote, would have been far greater ‘only for the relentless defensive work of Fred Cook at centre half back’.
‘Cook was in dazzling touch, scorching around the half back line like a two-year-old. His pace and vigour frustrated Fitzroy thrusts continually. The outstanding feature of his play was undoubtedly his brilliant overhead marking. In the air he was unbeatable, outmarking opponents at every contest. Cook’s inspiring leadership of the defence in the second quarter was largely responsible for preventing Fitzroy wrapping up the game at half time.’
Forty-six years later, Dempsey recalls Cook’s marking as his outstanding skill. ‘He was a shocking kick, worse than me, which is saying something. And he was a worse kick than Barry Round, which is amazing. He couldn’t kick it over a jam tin,’ Dempsey says. ‘But he was a good player. Centre half back. Great hands. Great mark of the football.’
Cook didn’t soar to the heights of, say, Carlton aerialist Alex Jesaulenko. But he’d watched the former Australian high jumper Tony Sneazwell train a few times and worked out a method in which he would leap for a mark at the last possible moment, then throw his arms skywards. It worked for him. ‘That’s one thing I could do, catch it,’ he says, remembering that the great football writer Alf Brown once bracketed him with Dempsey, Peter Knights and David ‘Swan’ McKay as the best marking men in the game. Brown asserted that Cook wasn’t as spectacular as Knights or Malcolm Blight ‘but he pulls down big ones more consistently’.
Footscray improved marginally in 1968, winning five games, losing fifteen and settling tenth on the ladder, above only Fitzroy and North Melbourne. Sutton finished up as coach at the end of the season and was replaced by Whitten.
In an article in The Sporting Globe, Sutton said business pressures and the time needed to coach at VFL level had prompted him to step down. He called Dempsey a ‘real up-and-comer’. And he had good things to say about Cook, declaring that he should develop into one of the club’s best players. Sutton described him as a ‘big, strong dasher’ who was unafraid to get in front for a mark and could turn defence into attack.
Cook earned seven Brownlow Medal votes, behind only three other Bulldogs: Schultz (eleven votes), George Bisset (nine votes) and David Thorpe (eight votes). He was judged Footscray’s most improved player. And by that stage he had youngsters carrying his bag into the ground. One of them, he says, was Doug Hawkins, later to break Whitten’s games record.
Hawkins chortles when the scenario is put to him. ‘I may have. I can’t honestly remember. But it’s a bloody good story anyway.’ Referring to his own rise, Hawkins adds, ‘But you can say this: twenty years later, Freddie Cook wasn’t fit to carry my bag into any football ground!’
The 1969 season didn’t begin well for Cook. On a pre-season jaunt to country Victoria he messed with bags on the bus, swapping players’ gear around. It was harmless stuff, but five minutes later he himself couldn’t see the humour in it. Officials, he says, took a dim view of his antics and ‘filed it away for a later date’.
He played the first six senior games of the season, then was dropped.
The way Cook tells it, Sutton, trying to maintain spirits around the club after five consecutive defeats, arranged a get-together at his home the day after the Round 6 defeat against Collingwood. Collins, he says, heard about it and, fearing a booze-up, asked players not to attend. Those who did might be disciplined, he warned.
But Cook went along and was dumped to the reserves the following week against South Melbourne, as were Laurie Sandilands, Gary Merrington, Ivan Marsh and Len Cumming. He stewed.
‘Of course I was shitty. I didn’t see any harm in going to Charlie’s place. It wasn’t like I was going there to drink the joint dry,’ he says. ‘I’d learned to stand up for myself, see, and I wasn’t going to let Jack Collins tell me what I could or couldn’t do.’
As he slummed it in the reserves, growing more annoyed by the week, Cook got talking to Martin Duggan, who ran the Bluestone Hotel and also supplied beer for a social club, The Grafters, attached to VFA team Yarraville.
Duggan told Cook that Footscray was treating him shabbily by keeping him out of a senior team in which he’d established himself the previous season. How about going to Yarraville for the rest of the season? he asked. You’ll be looked after. And you can always go back to the Bulldogs once heads cool. They know you can play. They’ll take you back any day.
Cook says Duggan offered him a sign-on of $4000 and a house of his choosing. He would also receive weekly match payments of $90. All he had to do was play out the season at Yarraville and then all of 1970. Where he went after that was up to him.
‘My head started spinning. That was a massive package,’ Cook recalls. ‘And I couldn’t say no. I needed the money.’
By that stage Cook was twenty-one, but already married with a child. He’d met Bernadette Dewan at the Hampton Hotel. They wed at St Paul’s Catholic Church in Bentleigh in 1968, not long after their daughter Jacqueline was born.
The