Victorian Lions Supporters Group

[Lionel Brisroy]

An interesting article about being drafted by Fitzroy in the mid 90's. No wonder we were on the bottom of the ladder in the 1990's if this was the prevailing attitude.

F... for Fitzroy

Peter Hanlon | November 19, 2008 | The Age

WHEN the moment came, Rob McMahon was sitting at the front of the room with the other young-men-most-likely. A television camera panned along the row, capturing the anticipation and relief as the names of the top 10 of the 1994 draft were called.

Pick six was Fitzroy's and the name paired to it was his. Through the silence, from the back of the room, came an anguished cry. "My old man let out the F-bomb," he says.

McMahon's mind sped back to a conversation in the car on the journey from Moe, when his dad and the local club's footy manager concluded they'd be happy for him to be drafted by anyone, so long as it wasn't the embattled Lions. "I was thinking, 'Shit, what just happened there? Oh, that's right, we didn't want to go to Fitzroy, did we?' "

Actually, McMahon didn't care who chose him. He was 17, reckoned going in the top 10 was just amazing and felt like he had the football world at his feet. "I thought Fitzroy would be around forever."

New coach Bernie Quinlan was there to shake his hand, his arms were slipped into a maroon-and-blue club jacket for the obligatory photos, officials told him he could be the next "Superboot".

As it happened, Quinlan didn't survive his first year. His club scarcely lasted much longer. The swirling football planets never quite aligned for him and McMahon played just two games.

The text messages will start landing in his inbox in the coming days, as they do at this time every year. Mates will have heard his name on radio, among lists of top-10 draft picks who didn't make it. "Then on draft day I'll get, 'No. 6, he'll be no good!' "

They are mischievous reminders, but he moved on long ago. Football is no longer his first priority, or even second or third. He still plays and is glad to have come around to liking the game again. It hasn't always been this way.

WERE he a believer in omens, McMahon might see his last game pre-Fitzroy as a sign that he was destined to be toyed with and teased by the sport he played so well.

His second full season with Gippsland Power had finished and Moe was to meet Leongatha in a preliminary final. He hadn't played a senior game for his home town, but they picked him anyway. "It meant someone had to get dropped, which didn't go down too well."

The selection was permitted because games in the state's best underage competition qualified the elite for their home league finals. Teams whose young guns were sure to be drafted, such as McMahon, had added incentive: ongoing dividends from AFL clubs as their careers progressed.

On game day, McMahon pulled his quadricep muscle in the warm-up. He didn't tell a soul. "I was in massive pain, but there was no way I was going to tell anybody. A poor bloke had been dropped. If I'd pulled out in the warm-up it would have been terrible."

He hobbled about and Moe bowed out.

Soon he was in Melbourne, completing his schooling at Marcellin College and living with two women in a share house arranged by Fitzroy in Bulleen, one of the nomadic club's temporary homes as its terminal spiral took hold. "If I did it again I'd live with players," he says now. "They turned out to be very nice people, but I wouldn't live in Bulleen with two ladies I didn't know and no (driver's) licence. Why would you do that?"

A typical day began with an early rise, a taxi to Coburg for weights, then back across town to school. Then it was another taxi to another training session, maybe at Coburg, maybe Bulleen, maybe another ground, or even on a golf course. Anywhere the Lions could find.

Remarkably, he passed his VCE. It helped that he knew no different. "I didn't know it didn't run quite as well as the other big Melbourne clubs. It was still an AFL club. I didn't care."

By 1996 he had a car, a spot in a business marketing course at Box Hill TAFE and was playing well in Fitzroy's reserves. McMahon, who had grown from 188 centimetres at draft time to just over 191, played full-forward, full-back, centre half-forward, on a flank.

He gave them plenty of options and eventually they gave him a chance, against Footscray at Western Oval and the old Brisbane Bears at Princes Park. He hit the post three times against the Bears, then squeezed a long one through from a free kick. He has a goal to go with his two games — more than most.

Meanwhile, the walls were closing in on a proud club. Training sessions were followed by crisis meetings, men in suits telling bewildered players the money had dried up and they weren't sure how the chapter would end.

"The young players probably treated it as a bit of a joke, thinking, 'Yeah, whatever, we'll get drafted somewhere else, move on.' But it was serious stuff, the end of the club. And they knew the end was coming."

What mattered to McMahon was that he was playing senior footy and, no matter what happened to the Roys, he was on the AFL launch pad, ready to take off.

Then, with the death certificate signed, he made way for older, longer-serving players in the club's last two games.

He watched Fitzroy's last game on TV, filthy that he wasn't playing. "I don't remember it at all," he says.

EIGHT Lions went north to Brisbane, the remainder scattered on the next draft's breeze. McMahon went to Hawthorn with pick 53 and was happy with his new home. In mid-1997 he remembers a six-week period when he was in the best three in the seconds every week.

"I was waiting for the call-up, but it didn't come." Playing full-back in the curtain-raiser on grand final day was as good as it got.

Delisted, he did the pre-season with Essendon, the team he supported as a boy. "It came down to me and another bloke who'd been dropped from the Bulldogs. I was pretty excited about that. Then Essendon had some salary cap issues and they lost the draft pick."

Yet again, something had got in the way. By now, he was fed up. At least with life in the AFL, maybe with footy altogether. He had four years in the VFL with Williamstown, but his heart wasn't in it.

"Footy was always just the thing I did, the thing I could play without having to think. It was the natural thing to do. I don't think I was ever going to stop playing footy, I just realised I was doing it under sufferance," he says.

A move to Bell Park in Geelong rejuvenated him, helped by a premiership in 2003 under Ken Hinkley's coaching when the club played St Mary's five times for the season and beat them once — in the grand final replay after a draw the previous weekend. He loves retelling that story come finals time.

A stint at Darley in the Ballarat league followed and he's now with Melton South. His job as a platform manager with AXA eats up the time and the 40-minute journey each way to training and matches can be a grind. He's 31 and starting to look forward to his weekends off, but might still go around again. The footballer within who knows you're a long time retired is hard to silence.

Many things follow the high draft pick who never quite makes it, like the annual phone calls from suburban and country clubs scouring the country for talent. You get paid well, but the pressure to perform and the belts to the back of the head mean it's hardly easy money.

As pick six in the country, the expectation has always been there. Only the landscape has changed.

"I've always loved footy and love it now, but it's been a roller-coaster," McMahon says.

"I've done the full circle, from footy being my life and loving it, to hating it for several years, thinking about your options, but footy was always the thing that came the easiest, so you stuck through it."

Now, the spotlight isn't so bright and the reminders make him laugh. Some Melton teammates rang him one Saturday night, in fits of laughter, because the party they were at had a poster of Fitzroy's 1996 squad on the wall. The players were lounging about and there was Robert McMahon, bowl haircut and all.

In sporting memorabilia shops, you might find another reminder of his part in the last days of a foundation club — a "Life Of Fitzroy" poster. It is a montage of players down the years and, for reasons unknown, the biggest image on it is that of McMahon.

"I was there two years, it's embarrassing. I still get texts from people saying, 'I can't believe you're in that photo.' There's Bernie Quinlan, Micky Conlan, Kevin Murray, all these famous Lions, and there's my big boofhead!"