made it to league football. The club had been rich recruiting territory for the Bulldogs. In 1967, Cook was photographed alongside three other Tech talents kicking on at the Western Oval: Noel Fincher, Rod O’Connor and Gary Dempsey.
‘I was probably the happiest young bloke walking the earth, the day I joined that club,’ Cook says. ‘Excited, elated, achievement, words like that. It was a big thing for me.’
Yet not three years later, after thirty-three senior games and the ability to play many more, he walked out, never to return. A spat with officials turned into a saga played out in the newspapers, and in a huff he made off for Yarraville in the VFA. At twenty-one he’d played his last game of league football. His Old Boys teammate Dempsey went on to captain the club and win the 1975 Brownlow Medal during a glittering 329-match career.
Dempsey says Cook was ‘bigger than life even then’ and ‘didn’t like too much discipline’.
‘He wasn’t that keen on doing everything other people’s way,’ Dempsey says.’ He wanted to do it his way, and when he left Footscray and went to the association he was allowed to play his own footy. At Footscray he had to play a team game.’
Dempsey has no doubt Cook could have been a long-term league player. He considers him a wasted talent.
Another of Footscray’s Brownlow Medal-winning ruckmen, John Schultz, agrees. He says league football caught only a glimpse of Cook’s ability.
‘When you think of how much he had going for him, he should have played many more games,’ Schultz says. ‘Nothing frightened him. He was rugged and tough. He’d get the ball at centre half back and go straight down the centre and head for goal. No pussy-footing around. He was the sort of bloke you wanted in your team.’
He recalls Cook as a ‘loveable larrikin’ and ‘personable bloke’ who was ‘always smiling and joshing around’.
Schultz was fond of the youngster. When he retired at the end of the 1968 season, he gifted Cook his aluminium shinguards. Cook never forgot it; when he thinks of John Schultz, he thinks of the shinguards.
Laurie Sandilands, who made his debut for Footscray in 1966 and went on to captain the club, saw a ‘larrikin’ young player who struggled to handle authority, was a non-conformist and had a ‘different attitude to life in general’.
With the amateur season over, Cook and Dempsey first turned out for Footscray in 1966, in a night match against South Melbourne and a reserves game against Collingwood at Collingwood. Cook remembers club secretary Jack Collins dropping by the family home with papers, most probably for a permit, to sign.
Fred Cook senior was initially reluctant for his boy to commit, believing he needed another twelve months in the amateurs. But Collins tempted him with a fistful of finals tickets. He changed his mind.
‘I said to the old man, “Hey, I thought you said I wasn’t ready for it.” And he said, “Fred, you’re never too young to play league football. You’ve got to get in and mix it with them.” Tickets for the finals game were like gold that year. You couldn’t get them anywhere. But Jack Collins had a few and the old man was happy to take them off him.’
Cook was taken aback at the step-up from amateur to league football. A ball hardly hit the ground at training. Leads were honoured with accurate passes that arrived at speed. Players scooped up balls from their boot laces with ease. Cook soon found himself doing the same.
‘Coming from the amateurs, it was like going up three steps in the quality of your football,’ he says. ‘Early doors, I was overawed. I was. But what happens is, you lift yourself to the standard of the players around you. They dragged me along. You say, “Right, this is how league footballers train,” and you get carted along. You eventually get the confidence.’
His time at the Bulldogs began promisingly. Footscray had a wooden-spoon season — fourteen losses crowded out only four victories — but the well-built whipper-snapper played seven senior games, mainly as a defender.
Handed jumper No. 29, he was there for Round 1 of 1967, against reigning premier St Kilda at Moorabbin. A crowd of 28,564 watched the Saints collar the Dogs by eighty-one points. Cook started on the bench. He stood next to Verdun Howell when he went on the ground.
‘Howell flogged me. Stood on my head, all those sorts of things,’ he says. ‘I learnt quickly. You had to.’
But his talent attracted good notices in the newspapers.
‘If the performance by nineteen-year-old Fred Cook on Saturday is any criterion, Footscray’s worries about finding a regular centre half back have been erased,’ kicked off one match report.
‘Cook, 6.2 and 13.10, did an excellent job against an accomplished centre half forward in [North Melbourne’s] Bernie McCarthy, a feature being his superb overhead marking. He also showed dash and aggression.’
As he rose, Cook encountered for the first time those ubiquitous sporting figures, the hangers-on.
‘How you doin’ champ?’ people would say to him, patting his back and digging fingers into his arms. Suddenly he had a lot more friends. He couldn’t pop into the Bluestone Hotel without drinkers coming over and wanting to talk football and buy him a beer. ‘Wherever you went everyone seemed to know you,’ Cook says.
Suddenly he wasn’t Mr Fred Cook. He was Mr Popular. Youngsters asked for autographs. He wondered if he should sign ‘Fred Cook’ or ‘Freddie Cook’ and if he should prevail ‘best wishes’ upon the recipients.
His profile got bigger in 1968. Cook played every senior game that year and stood some of the league’s most brilliant forwards, including St Kilda’s Darrel Baldock. He remembers Sutton telling him that Baldock was an explosive player and a champion of the game, but he could be frustrated with close checking — and a few kicks in the heel as he set off for the ball. ‘So that’s what I did, booted him with each and every alternating step,’ Cook says. ‘What a prick of a thing that was to do.’
Cook worshipped Sutton. ‘He encouraged the way I liked to play football,’ he says. ‘In those days you could put the ball under your arm, run down from centre half back and swing your other arm like a club, a mallet. That was legal. Charlie told me that was the way he wanted me to play. I did.’
That encounter against Baldock was in Round 7 at Moorabbin. Both were named in the best. The great Saint was credited with twenty-four disposals and three goals. Cook had eighteen possessions and seven marks.
In the return match in Round 18, Cook again did well in a match St Kilda again won comfortably. In his round-up for The Footscray Mail, Gary Sargeant said Cook was ‘the best of a handful of good players’ and that his marking was ‘the turning point for many St Kilda attacks, but he lacked sufficient support from his fellow defenders to make much difference’.
‘In view of the fact that he was carrying a sore elbow his strong marking is even more praiseworthy.’
Sargeant had hailed Cook’s performance against Fitzroy three rounds earlier. The Roys’ winning margin of five points, he wrote, would have been far greater ‘only for the relentless defensive work of Fred Cook at centre half back’.
‘Cook was in dazzling touch, scorching around the half back line like a two-year-old. His pace and vigour frustrated Fitzroy thrusts continually. The outstanding feature of his play was undoubtedly his brilliant overhead marking. In the air he was
