as his second father.
‘Old Man Goss? Wonderful man, wonderful man,’ he says. ‘I’d nodded to him a couple of times, but I’d never met him before he asked me to play at Port. Soon saw what a great human being he was. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he was a good Catholic, he had about twenty-seven kids! He ruled that club very firmly — you couldn’t push him back an inch, even with a bulldozer — and his word was everything. By geez, it was. I had a handshake deal with him. That was enough for me.’
Brice says Goss was not only a great administrator, but a fine spotter of talent. Careful not to pay more than the club could afford, for years he did most of the recruiting, assessing the needs of the team and finding players to strengthen it.
His mere presence on the interchange bench during matches was enough to motivate the Borough. ‘He was respected so much that it was often about not just winning, but trying to do the right thing by Norm,’ Brice says.
When Cook was entrenched at full forward, Goss would approach him before the game. If it was muddy and wet he would say Port would win if he could manage four goals. When conditions were better he would set a target of eight. Cook, never wanting to let him down, set his mind to it.
‘That was his way of geeing me up, setting me a benchmark,’ he says. ‘If I did my job he might give me a nod of approval. He was a hard marker. If I kicked ten he might say, “You did okay today, pal.”’
Norm Goss junior says his father thought highly of Cook, who was a regular visitor to the Goss home, often dropping in for a cup of tea and a chat before training.
‘The old man and Fred were pretty close,’ Goss junior says. ‘Good mates, you could say. Fred was always himself around the old man. He was a character, a huge personality. Confident.’
Norm Goss could be pleased with his prized recruit’s first season at the North Port Oval.
Cook, playing mostly in the backline, had a season haul of 433 kicks (and only twenty-six handballs!) and 219 marks. He also kicked twenty-three goals, an appetiser for the feasts that followed. Four came against Prahran. After one, he was photographed raising both hands in triumph, a Two Blues defender dropping his head in disappointment. It became a familiar sight at VFL grounds.
Bonnett, now eighty-one, says he played Cook forward occasionally, and would have done more often but for his desire to ‘be in the play all the time’.
‘Because he was such a good mark, a wonderful mark in fact, he was always going to be dangerous in front of the goals,’ he says.
But Bonnett, twelve times Port’s leading goalkicker, could not have imagined that the player he laughingly remembers as a ‘lazy bugger who loved the limelight’ would surpass his tally of 933 goals. They were kicked, it must be pointed out, in more congested eighteen-a-side football and a low-scoring era.
When Port named its team of the century in 2003, Bonnett was in a forward pocket and Cook at full forward.
‘Fred wasn’t the best kick in the world, but he never went far from the goal square,’ Bonnett says. ‘There he could take his marks, and go back and put them straight through.’
That was all to come. A strong first season in Borough blue and red behind him, Cook looked forward to playing under Collins in the 1972 season. But a heart attack flattened him like no opponent could.
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