gatherings, he wandered through the throng like a film star.’
Women loved him, and he them. He had a legion of ladies, including the daughter of a country’s Prime Minister and a television soap star. His great mate Sam Newman’s reputation as a ladies’ man endures. But he says he had nothing on Cook.
With the popular Station Hotel in Port Melbourne (home to Melbourne’s most glamorous strippers, all cherrypicked by Cook) and newspaper, radio and TV gigs, he had the wealth to go with the adulation. But the famous footballer with the larrikin streak who mixed with Melbourne’s sporting and entertainment elite became infamous for his drug use, his association with some of Melbourne’s most notorious criminals and his spells in prison. He went from hero to zero in three years.
Cook had a gun put to his head. He was badly bashed when his associates thought he’d turned police informer. Newman was there to save him, and calls it the scariest day of his life. Cook witnessed violent assaults. He himself struck women. He went to his mother’s funeral drugged to the eyeballs. He would inject himself in school yards ahead of lectures to students about the perils of drugs and alcohol.
Sitting in jail in a period of sobriety, he reflected on how far he’d fallen and how much he’d hurt his family. It was Christmas and he was aching to see his kids. He thought about killing himself.
Cook can pinpoint the start of his slide. One night he was battling the flu ahead of a sportsman’s night alongside the St Kilda Brownlow Medal champion Neil Roberts and English fast bowler John Snow.
Hardened Melbourne criminal Dennis Allen, who’d started hanging around the Station, whipped out a bag of white powder and a pen knife and tipped some amphetamines into his drink. Cook immediately felt a burst of energy, and was ready to fulfill his engagement.
Up until then he’d relied on strong coffee (sweetened by five sugars) and cigarettes to stay ‘up’.
But, with his every day crowded with work commitments, he began to lean on speed, and eventually his life fell apart. He admitted the drugs were a way of replacing the adrenaline rush football brought him. Cook lost everything he owned, and resorted to drug pushing and petty crime to get by.
Where once he featured in the sports pages for his deeds on football grounds, he now filled headlines in the news section for his court appearances. ‘Footy star on drug counts’. ‘Drugs bring down footy great’. ‘Cook on bond over drugs’. ‘Drugs nearly killed me — Cook’. ‘Footy hero Cook jailed’. They piled up like rubble around a wrecking ball. In May 1989, he went before the Victorian County Court for drug trafficking and deception.
His legal counsel, Bruce Walmsley, told Judge Hanlon that Cook had ‘demonstrated himself to be a pathetic figure’.
The judge released him on a bond and suspended sentence, commenting: ‘In the end I have come to the view that the pathetic mess you made of your life by the use of the drug in which you trafficked is clearly a sufficient example to the community.’
Flanked by his de facto wife, Sally Desmond, Cook stood outside the County Court and declared he was going clean.
He’d lost his business and the respect of his family and friends, he said.
‘Have I learned a lesson? Is the Pope a Catholic?’ he said to reporters.
‘If anything, it’s a lesson to young people. If it isn’t a lesson, I don’t know what is. I certainly will not be dabbling in any more drugs.’
He said the same in an extended interview in the Sun newspaper with his pal and television colleague Newman the following year. ‘I can’t help anyone else until I help myself, but the life I lead is now way behind me and will never happen again.’
But it did, again and again. His list of convictions would eventually extend to twelve pages.
Newman, and many others, pleaded with him to apply to his life the discipline he showed in his football career. Cook was unable to act on the advice. He had believed he could use drugs to his advantage, squeezing a few extra hours into his busy days, but they took a sinister hold on him. He kicked hundreds of goals, but he couldn’t kick his drug habit.
In April 1990, he was sent to prison for twelve months after breaching the suspended sentence by swiping cement and timber. He was working as a handyman and needed the materials to finish a job and provide for Desmond and their two-year-old son. The man who once put $10,000 a week into his pocket as a publican was now scratching to pay for nappies and milk.
After serving his time at Morwell River Prison Farm, Cook again swore he would stay out of trouble.
But old drug habits die hard. A few months later police searched his home and found amphetamines and cannabis.
Then came his appearance at Frankston Magistrates’ Court. Police had performed another raid and found more amphetamines and $10,000 worth of stolen goods, a booty they called an ‘Aladdin’s Cave’.
Hooking up with young crooks, Cook had been swapping drugs for stolen gear for a month, stockpiling it in a unit. He was running it like a small business, keeping a ledger of the comings and goings.
It led to another stretch in prison. By that stage there was nothing fabulous about Fred. The champion spearhead who a few years earlier was surrounded by famous faces and adoring supporters had only four hard walls for company.
2
FRED Cook is back in Frankston Magistrates’ Court in late March, 2014. But, having shaken his drug addiction a few years earlier, he is in far better shape than during his appearance there in 1991. At age sixty-six, he is looking pretty well for a man who has subjected his body to years of abuse. He carries a few extra kilos around the stomach, but nothing a few strolls around the block wouldn’t fix.
He thinks he will be walking soon enough. Cook is in court for driving while disqualified. Twelve months earlier he’d been given a four-month jail term, suspended for two years, for the same offence and his long-time lawyer, Bernie Balmer, is warning him that he is facing prison. Cook’s list of prior convictions for road-related offences runs to five pages.
Before mention of his case, Cook sits on the steps outside the court. He sucks on a cigarette as he flicks through the Herald Sun newspaper, settling on a photograph on the Confidential page of Sam Newman hamming it up with Footy Show colleague Shane Crawford.
He is sitting in sunlight, perspiring. ‘I’ve got a headache and I’m worried,’ he is saying. ‘I mean, Christ, there were times I should have done time and didn’t. They could have locked me up and thrown away the key. But I shouldn’t do it over this.’
His mobile phone rings. It is his son Jordan wanting to know how he is getting on.
‘What do you mean “old man”? I’ll give you old man! Yeah, good, good, good. Haven’t gone in yet. Just sitting outside having a smoke. Bernie’s already in there. Let’s hope he can work his miracle, hey? Come on Bernie, work that miracle.’
A short time later a middle-aged woman approaches. ‘What are you doing, you silly old bastard?’ she asks, laughing. Cook explains the driving offence. The woman replies that her partner, answering a charge of making threats to kill, had been arrested with trafficking marijuana as soon as he arrived at court. The woman and Cook go back a long way. He knew her husband, who had died of a heroin overdose about twenty years earlier.
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