REMEMEBERING FRED COOK IN LIFE AND AFTER HIS DEATH IN FEBRUARY 2022 VFA LEGEND FRED COOK TALKS DRUGS and Ben Cousins
My tribute to Fred Cook in The Age - 25 March 2007
Unlike Ben Cousins, former Port Melbourne VFA goal-kicking champion Fred Cook never played in an AFL grand final or won a Brownlow Medal. Nor did he have his drug addiction trawled over in the national media. However, like Cousins he was a football hero when amphetamines ravaged his life in the late 1980s. Now he has some strong but compassionate words for Cousins. The words date back twenty years to the night his mate Sam Newman arrived at the City Watch House to bail him out. ‘Why don’t you apply the same principles that made you a champion footballer to your private life?’ said Newman, with a shake of the head.
Cook dominating at Port Melbourne in the early 1980s.
Although Cook’s addiction to amphetamines meant the words were lost on him, he believes it’s the only way forward for Cousins. ‘Ben doesn’t need hangers-on or blokes blaming his girlfriend. He needs some friends who are prepared to be brutal about his life,’ he says.
For Cook the magic of amphetamines came from a world not foreign to the one Ben Cousins inhabits. ‘Try this,’ notorious criminal Dennis Allen had said when Cook complained of a cold, midway through 1984 in the pub he owned a few kilometres from the Port Melbourne ground. In Allen’s hand was a bag of white powder, which he pierced with a knife before placing some of the contents in Cook’s Bacardi and Coke. ‘How good’s this, I thought?’ The cold disappeared and I could go all night, especially with women,’ he remembers.
Married three times, Fred Cook is an old style fifty-nine-year-old, who enjoys rattling off stories about his conquests. The stories might be embellished, but there’s no doubt he lived every day, often in the company of celebrities, football stars and women, as if it was his last. The names of football identities with whom he shared amphetamines and the horrible stories of his time with Allen are regaled with the naivety of a boy who has yet to truly grow up. ‘Allen was a big-time crook and rapist, and I have no time for rapists. But living on the edge with people who carried guns and tried to beat the cops, and washing Allen’s drug money through the pub was so dangerous it was genuinely exciting,’ he says.
For all his sins, there’s nothing sanctimonious about Fred Cook's assessment of Ben Cousins’ predicament: ‘He’s living on the edge. I’ve been there and know how exciting it can be. But seeing pictures of him on TV, it’s obvious his brain is scrambled. All the rehabilitation in the world is useless unless he genuinely wants to get off the amphetamines. Maybe when people start to ostracise him and the money dries up, he’ll find a way.'
For Cook the cash started to dry up when the amphetamines led him to neglect the pub and squander money, hundreds and thousands of it, he says, on bad business decisions. By the late ‘80s petty criminality had become a way of life and jail a formality. In 1992, when I was the Federal Member for Wills, I visited Cook in Pentridge Prison where he was doing time for drug related crimes. How could a man of such fame throw it all away, I thought?
Ask any football lover over the age of forty about the 1976 VFA grand final and the name Fred Cook will burst from the lips. Only Dermott Brereton’s courage in the 1989 VFL/AFL grand final comes close to what Cook did that day at the Junction Oval in front of 30, 000 people and a huge television audience. Concussed after being king-hit by Dandenong full-back, Allen Harper, and bleeding profusely from deep cuts to his mouth, Cook went on to kick five goals and stamp himself as a genuine Victorian football hero. This was a man who survived a heart attack in 1972 to play in six VFA premierships - 1974/76/77/80/81/82 - and was better known than scores of VFL/AFL footballers. So good was he that in 1978 - at 30 years of age - he turned his back on a lucrative offer from reigning VFL/AFL premiers, North Melbourne. Cook was a football god.
Although he has lived to tell his story, is working, and says he’s freed himself from amphetamines, Fred Cook says he doesn’t know where Ben Cousins will be in a year’s time. ‘No amount of preaching will solve his problems. He has to dig deep, really deep, because being on amphetamines can be fantastic. Your problems disappear. Your injuries disappear and you never get tired. Then one day it all falls apart. It’s very sad.’ Yes indeed, Fred, it is!
Postscript:
Fred Cook died on 1 February 2022. He was 74 years of age. Forged in the old working-class western suburbs, Fred played 33 VFL/AFL games with Footscray before crossing to the VFA in 1969 as a 21-year-old. Had he stayed at Footscray, he'd have been a VFL/AFL star.
In 2007 I interviewed him at a Port Melbourne game. He was in fine form. Looking for drug addiction help?
MY TRIBUTE TO FRED COOK ON HIS PASSING IN FEBRUARY 2022 - THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper
In 1992, only months after winning former Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s federal seat of Wills, I made a short trip from my electorate office to Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison. Here, alongside a foreboding bluestone wall the legendary Port Melbourne footballer, Fred Cook, cut a tragic figure. Sixteen years earlier, in August 1976, I’d watched him cut a swathe through back slappers in the social club at the Coburg Football Ground where his imperious marking of the football and 10 riveting goals had mesmerised the crowd and belittled Coburg, the team I had played for and subsequently coached.
Tall, with luxurious brown hair and a cheeky smile that radiated from a broad face, he was as charismatic off the ground as he was, insurmountable on it. There was however nothing orthodox or politically correct about Fred’s approach to life. After 33 games with AFL club Footscray, a bag of cash was enough to induce 21-year-old Cook to turn his back on what would surely have been an illustrious AFL career and cross to the second tier Victorian Football Association. He first moved to Yarraville winning the league’s best and fairest trophy despite his team winning just one game. He transferred to Port Melbourne in 1971 and during a pre-season game the following year suffered a ‘heart attack’ after the first quarter, but played out the game taking 17 marks. In a Reserves match on his return months later he kicked 16 goals. In the coming years, with VFA football televised to large Sunday audiences, Cook amassed goal-kicking records, six premierships, and rock-star like fame. But one game, the 1976 Grand Final, stands above them all, and reads like a metaphor of his life. Port Melbourne was a raging favourite when it confronted Dandenong and all eyes were on Cook. The 32,000 at the ground and the huge TV audience were stunned when the cameras panned to him lying unconscious in the goal square. Apparently, the man who’d knocked him to the ground, Allan Harper, had told a teammate of his intentions. With 119 goals under his belt before the Grand Final, Cook was the difference between the two teams. Bleeding profusely from a deep cut to his mouth and semi-conscious, once he was lifted to his feet Cook waved his teammates and trainers away. Moments later, with characteristic speed and purpose he led and marked the football, a sign to the Port faithful that there was no stopping their hero. He would survive the assault to kick five goals in one of the most courageous and heroic performances in the history of Australian Rules football. At half-time Cook’s gaping wound had been stitched up by the club doctor, Lynn Madden, surely the first woman doctor in an Australian professional football club – football back then was a male enclave. A product of an old blokey world, Cook liked to regale his mates with stories about the spoils of “wine, women and song”, including a ‘night’ with the daughter of a well-known British MP. It wasn’t malicious but it was his achilles heel. Not surprisingly his marriages, three of them, came and went, but he always said Madden did a good job on his mouth. When his career 1984 amphetamines quickly replaced the euphoria of football. Murderous drug dealer Dennis Allen swished some speed in Fred’s Bacardi and Coke in 1985 at Cook’s Station Hotel in Port Melbourne, the die was cast. It wasn’t long before his mate, football identity Sam Newman, was offering him some serious advice. “Why don’t you apply the same principles that made you a champion footballer to your private life?” said Newman, as he stumped up the bail money at the Melbourne City Watch House, where Cook was being held on drug charges. On Tuesday, after years of tumult, Cook died peacefully in a nursing home in Bendigo, 154 kilometres north of the dockside suburb once synonymous with wharfies and gangsters, that had propelled him to legendary status. Cook wasn’t a fighter, a thug or a standover man, but nor was he an ordinary bloke. He still holds the record for most goals kicked in the VFA (1336) and was the first VFA player to reach 300 games.
When I interviewed him during an ABC football telecast 2007, his quirky sense of humour and sublime, unpretentious storytelling shone once more. Cook was easy to love. He didn’t need to boast about being an entertainer like Nick Kyrgios – he didn’t need to because the memories are captured so vividly in old videos, now transported to YouTube, and because he was “Fabulous Freddie” and he and we knew how good he was.
Tall, with luxurious brown hair and a cheeky smile that radiated from a broad face, he was as charismatic off the ground as he was, insurmountable on it. There was however nothing orthodox or politically correct about Fred’s approach to life. After 33 games with AFL club Footscray, a bag of cash was enough to induce 21-year-old Cook to turn his back on what would surely have been an illustrious AFL career and cross to the second tier Victorian Football Association. He first moved to Yarraville winning the league’s best and fairest trophy despite his team winning just one game. He transferred to Port Melbourne in 1971 and during a pre-season game the following year suffered a ‘heart attack’ after the first quarter, but played out the game taking 17 marks. In a Reserves match on his return months later he kicked 16 goals. In the coming years, with VFA football televised to large Sunday audiences, Cook amassed goal-kicking records, six premierships, and rock-star like fame. But one game, the 1976 Grand Final, stands above them all, and reads like a metaphor of his life. Port Melbourne was a raging favourite when it confronted Dandenong and all eyes were on Cook. The 32,000 at the ground and the huge TV audience were stunned when the cameras panned to him lying unconscious in the goal square. Apparently, the man who’d knocked him to the ground, Allan Harper, had told a teammate of his intentions. With 119 goals under his belt before the Grand Final, Cook was the difference between the two teams. Bleeding profusely from a deep cut to his mouth and semi-conscious, once he was lifted to his feet Cook waved his teammates and trainers away. Moments later, with characteristic speed and purpose he led and marked the football, a sign to the Port faithful that there was no stopping their hero. He would survive the assault to kick five goals in one of the most courageous and heroic performances in the history of Australian Rules football. At half-time Cook’s gaping wound had been stitched up by the club doctor, Lynn Madden, surely the first woman doctor in an Australian professional football club – football back then was a male enclave. A product of an old blokey world, Cook liked to regale his mates with stories about the spoils of “wine, women and song”, including a ‘night’ with the daughter of a well-known British MP. It wasn’t malicious but it was his achilles heel. Not surprisingly his marriages, three of them, came and went, but he always said Madden did a good job on his mouth. When his career 1984 amphetamines quickly replaced the euphoria of football. Murderous drug dealer Dennis Allen swished some speed in Fred’s Bacardi and Coke in 1985 at Cook’s Station Hotel in Port Melbourne, the die was cast. It wasn’t long before his mate, football identity Sam Newman, was offering him some serious advice. “Why don’t you apply the same principles that made you a champion footballer to your private life?” said Newman, as he stumped up the bail money at the Melbourne City Watch House, where Cook was being held on drug charges. On Tuesday, after years of tumult, Cook died peacefully in a nursing home in Bendigo, 154 kilometres north of the dockside suburb once synonymous with wharfies and gangsters, that had propelled him to legendary status. Cook wasn’t a fighter, a thug or a standover man, but nor was he an ordinary bloke. He still holds the record for most goals kicked in the VFA (1336) and was the first VFA player to reach 300 games.
When I interviewed him during an ABC football telecast 2007, his quirky sense of humour and sublime, unpretentious storytelling shone once more. Cook was easy to love. He didn’t need to boast about being an entertainer like Nick Kyrgios – he didn’t need to because the memories are captured so vividly in old videos, now transported to YouTube, and because he was “Fabulous Freddie” and he and we knew how good he was.