Fabulous Fred. Paul Amy
‘I worked out I had to start looking after myself,’ Cook says.
‘In 1968 I played twenty home-and-away games, three night games and I was paid $875 for the whole season.’
As he wallowed in the reserves, Richmond came calling. Tigers official Alan Schwab phoned Cook and said the club was keen on him. Cook remembers talk of a swap with Mike Perry.
Footscray’s secretary at the time, Bill Dunstan, told Footscray Advertiser reporter Roy Jamieson, ‘A Richmond official phoned me late last week. We talked about Sunday football and then about other things. Then he asked me, “What is the position with Fred Cook?” I told him, “You have got to be joking.” I said that Cook had been dropped to the reserves because he had lost a bit of form, but it probably would not be long before he got his form back and was returned to the senior team.’
But Cook was less convinced of his senior prospects. He was no fan of Collins and believed his spell in the reserves had to do with issues other than football. He thought he’d played well in one reserves match, only to be deflated when a member of the match committee assessed his performance as ‘just fair’.
He made up his mind: he would buy the house Duggan had dangled and he would go to Yarraville. He and Bernadette took a fancy to a three-bedroom weatherboard with nice gardens in Pitt Street, West Footscray, clinching it for $9700 from the Farnbach Burnham real estate agency.
‘All of a sudden at twenty-one years of age I’m sitting in my own home,’ Cook says. ‘Even the rates were paid for me. Hey, I’m on Easy Street.’
On 6 June, The Age and Sun newspapers reported Cook had walked out on the Bulldogs and was headed for the VFA without a clearance.
Cook told Age man Peter McFarline he’d played poorly against Collingwood, but his earlier performances had him leading the club voting on Channel 7’s World of Sport program.
He mentioned the Sunday get-together at Sutton’s home, pointing out that nine of the eleven players who attended had been dropped.
‘I received a very good offer from Yarraville. It helped my wife, child and myself into a home, and it was too good to turn down.’
In an interview with The Footscray Advertiser, Cook said the committee had told him he had to ‘curb my “mannerism” around the club and to direct it in a way that would help the club’. He said, ‘But it has always been my nature to speak to people as I find them. I would rather say something to a man’s face than go behind his back and tell someone else.’
Shortly after Cook’s walk-out, Collins declared that Sutton was ‘not very welcome at the club’. He said the 1954 premiership coach ‘had something to do’ with the defender defecting to the association.
At the time Cook denied it, but he says Sutton did encourage him to make the move. ‘He said to me, “You’re not getting a go here, you’ve got a top offer from Yarraville, you might as well go.” Mind you, I had hundreds of advisors. But I couldn’t see them picking me again. They dropped me to the seconds as a smartener-upper. They left me there rotting.’
Cook remains adamant he was in contention to play for Victoria, saying a selector had told him it would be embarrassing for all concerned if the state centre half back was plucked from the reserves.
‘I was probably the third cab off the rank,’ he says, ‘but I could have ended up the first because of injuries to others players, namely Peter Walker of Geelong and Peter Steward of North Melbourne.’
Did he put his grievances to his coach? It would have made no difference, he says, because Whitten wasn’t picking the side.
He went to Whitten’s house in Altona and told him he was going. Whitten said he was disappointed, but understood. ‘He actually wrote me a letter and told me to pull my head in because I was captaincy material,’ Cook says.
Even as he took off to Yarraville he was thinking about a return to league football. But what was shaped as a long and successful career was over.
Sandilands cannot remember Cook’s run-in with Collins, but says he wasn’t alone in clashing with the secretary. Sandilands also had his differences with Collins. ‘Jack was a very hard man to get on with, particularly if he’d had a drink,’ he says. ‘Freddie had a drink and I had a drink and we weren’t Jack’s favourite people.’
Sandilands says Cook certainly created an impression at Footscray. ‘He was there for 1967, 1968 and a bit of 1969. So the time he spent there was brief, but everyone remembers it.’
Cook’s school mate Ricky Spargo finished with sixty-four games for Footscray from 1966 to 1971. He still laughs about the time he was twentieth man in a match and Cook was the nineteenth. Cook had turned up in a terrible state after a night of ‘wine, women and song’. The trainers did their best to rouse him for the match ahead. As they watched the play in the second quarter, Cook called over a pie seller and said to Spargo, ‘Now, what are you having, a pie or a pastie?’ Spargo said he couldn’t possibly stomach either. Cook gulped down a pie and washed it down with a can of Coke.
‘True story,’ Spargo says. ‘That day they actually found him asleep at the club. The bugger hadn’t been to bed from the night before.’
John Schultz says it was a shame Cook’s time at the Western Oval ended so suddenly, believing Footscray could have used him for many years.
Schultz chuckles as he recalls kicking and marking practice that pitted he and Murray Zeuschner at one end and fellow big men Cook and Dempsey at the other.
Zeuschner was a dedicated footballer and desperate to prove himself a senior player. He made Schultz fight for every mark. Schultz figured that if he could get through such spirited training sessions on Thursday nights, he could get through matches on Saturday afternoons. But there was no such fierce competition at the other end. The new chums waxed.
‘Here we are going very hard indeed and the other two were taking it in turns to take marks!’ Schultz says. ‘They were lackadaisical, both of them. They were just going through the motions. They had so much talent, but at that stage they didn’t realise it. The penny dropped with Gary and he became a real star, won his six best and fairests. But maybe Fred didn’t understand what he had.’
Yarraville, then coached by 1958 Collingwood premiership player John Henderson, quickly understood what it had: an exceptional player. Cook helped the Eagles to a 9–9 season, being named in the best in ten of his eleven games. In his first match in the VFA, he lined up in the ruck and slotted five goals in a narrow defeat against Dandenong.
Jim ‘Frosty’ Miller played in the match for Dandy. By the time they finished their VFA careers Cook and Miller had more than 2000 goals between them — and lasting fame in the Victorian game.
5
THE voting for the J. J. Liston Trophy, the award for the VFA’s best and fairest player, reflected Fred Cook’s impact at Yarraville in 1970.
The Eagles had a poor season, winning only one game, finishing on the bottom of the ladder and being relegated to Division 2. Yet Cook won the Liston. Well, he didn’t win — he streaked it in, polling forty-one votes to defeat the runner-up, Williamstown’s former Footscray player Kevin Jackman, by fourteen in the count at VFA House. He was overlooked for votes in only four games.
Cook celebrated his victory at the Yarraville clubrooms, where teammates were photographed hoisting the sideburned and suited star on their shoulders. Footscray great Charlie Sutton, driving home from his Yarraville hotel, dropped in to offer congratulations.
Cook had paid for the shindig using money won in player awards tallied by the local paper. ‘That was the done thing. Any coin you picked up you put towards a piss-up for the players.’
Cook turned up late, not wanting to leave home until he found out he’d won. His father phoned to confirm his victory.
He had entered the count as