He had his first game of football for the primary school, donning its red and yellow jumper, and says he barely touched the ball.
He was named on a half back and was unfamiliar with the position. ‘Just go and stand over there, son,’ the coach told him.
Cook got more serious about football when he went to Footscray Tech. He could see that good players received kudos and credit from not only teachers and students, but the wider community. It set him thinking about the possibilities of the game. He started to sleep with a football. ‘If you played okay, you suddenly had a bit of clout around the place,’ he says.
On Wednesdays, Cook lined up for Tech and on Saturdays for amateur club Footscray Tech Old Boys, where he would be coached by 1954 Footscray premiership player Arthur Edwards. He tried out for the Old Boys Under 17 team as a thirteen-year-old and was rebuffed. The next year he was initially picked on the bench or asked to be goal umpire, but eventually he found a place in the team.
The Old Boys won a grand final at Windy Hill, but Cook was quiet. ‘I didn’t make a mistake — only because I didn’t get a touch,’ he recalls. ‘At the start of the last quarter the ball came over the pack and I grabbed it and I ran in to the goals. I kicked it right through the middle — of the points. There was no interchange in those days. I just got dragged.’
Cook senior went into the rooms and told his son he might as well go home, hammer a four-inch nail in the chook shed and hang his boots from it. ‘You’ve got to find a sport you can play. It’s not football,’ he said.
If that sounds harsh, Cook says his father watched every game he played and took pleasure from his many accolades and achievements. They were photographed together after Cook won the 1970 J. J. Liston Trophy after his mark-filled season for Yarraville. Fred Cook senior’s eyes shine with filial pride.
Fred junior’s football began to take off when he was sixteen. He grew six inches and his many kick-to-kick sessions with his mates on the streets of Yarraville refined his marking and kicking.
He won a club and competition best and fairest at Under 17 level. Soon scouts from Footscray were running an eye over him. It eventually led to an invitation to a training session. And there he was introduced to his idol, E. J. Whitten. Cook was so nervous he stammered, ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Whitten’.
‘Well, it was like going to church and finding God at the altar,’ Cook says. ‘He was a man amongst men.’
In his first year back at Footscray Tech, Cook was threatened with expulsion a second time after being caught smoking in the toilets. But because of his football ability he was encouraged to sign a sorry book and forget about it. ‘They didn’t want me to miss any games,’ he says. ‘Actually, we were in the Victorian Inter-Tech grand final at the number one oval at Albert Park. We won it.’
Ricky Spargo and Norm Mitchell, both destined to play league football at Footscray, played in the team, as did John Sharp, a future VFA player with Yarraville and star District cricketer with Footscray. Teammates carried Spargo from the ground as he showed off the handsome trophy.
Spargo says the team had a simple game plan: kick it long to ‘Freddie’ in the goal square.
‘We couldn’t go wrong,’ he says. ‘We were actually behind in that game, but Freddie took over. No-one could stop him. Game over. He was the best mark of a football you could see. Don’t think I saw the bugger drop one. Best hands I’ve ever seen in football.’
Spargo and Cook met at the Technical school and became great friends. They had a lot in common. ‘Freddie was like me,’ Spargo says. ‘He was a bit wilder than me, but he loved life. He was always up. He was always happy. And he had a big mouth!
‘You wouldn’t meet a better bloke. I would have killed for him. Geez, I’ve got some great memories of Freddie.’
Pam Cook says her brother was fortunate to discover he was an exceptional footballer.
‘Wouldn’t we all love to find that one thing in life that we’re really good at and can excel at? He found that.’
When his hands weren’t holding a football, Cook was known to put them to mischievous use, breaking into factories and stealing cars. He insists the vehicles were never knocked around and that he always dumped them outside police stations.
When he needed a few bob he stole soft drinks from the back of a local fish and chip shop, and took them around the front and sold them.
‘It was typical teenage-boy stuff,’ Cook says. ‘No harm done, really.’
But police took a dimmer view of his behaviour and more than once brought him home to his startled parents. They were dismayed by their son’s casual regard of the law. The indifference never left him.
He first appeared in court in June 1963 for ‘factory break and steal’ and ‘illegal use of motor car’, receiving probation for seventy-eight weeks. In March 1965, he was up for ‘larceny from motor vehicle’. He was given a good behaviour bond.
When he was about fourteen, Cook and his mates dug a tunnel in the soft, sandy soil of the banks of the Yarra River, covered it with railway sleepers and canvas, and went about filling it with stolen goods for which they ultimately had no use. When a security guard from an oil company came across the lair and reported it to police, The Sun newspaper dubbed the unknown gang ‘The River Pirates’.
A few years earlier, Cook and Rodney stumbled upon two children who had gone missing in Yarraville. The brothers had jumped the fence of the Tip Top factory to take the delivery vans for a spin. Climbing into the self-locking vehicle, they found the frightened youngsters, a boy, five, and a girl, four, huddling in the back.
When police arrived, the Cooks thought they would be in trouble for trespassing. But they were praised for rescuing the children.
‘If it wasn’t for my brother being mischievous, they would probably have died,’ Pam Cook says.
Under the headline ‘Children Trapped 30 Hours In Van’, The Sun newspaper reported the incident, quoting a ten-year-old ‘Freddy’ Cook as telling the boy: ‘You’d better get home. He told me faintly, “I think I’d better.”’
It was the first of many times that Fred Cook was held up as a hero.
4
WITHIN Fred Cook’s battered blue suitcase are a few large pages long ago torn from a scrapbook. Glued and stapled to the bottom of one is his registration form to play with Footscray. It is dated 11 April 1967 and signed by Cook, Footscray secretary Bill Dunstan and a Victorian Football League director.
Years later, Cook says it’s likely his hand was trembling as pen hovered over paper.
He had set his compass on the Western Oval ever since he had started to come through the ranks at Footscray Tech and the amateur club. At age nineteen he was signed and sealed to play under the coaching of the great Charlie Sutton and the captaincy of (in Cook’s eyes) the even greater Ted Whitten.
Throughout his teenage years he and a mate, Jeff Chapman, had gone to the Footscray ground once a week to watch the Scraggers train. They’d nick the occasional football, but Cook got a greater thrill stealing a glimpse of his heroes: John Schultz, Ray Baxter, Alex ‘Racehorse’ Gardiner, Graham and Barry Ion, John Hoiles, Ray Walker, Charlie Evans. And, of course, Whitten, who would ruffle
