time.’
Forty-six years later, Dempsey recalls Cook’s marking as his outstanding skill. ‘He was a shocking kick, worse than me, which is saying something. And he was a worse kick than Barry Round, which is amazing. He couldn’t kick it over a jam tin,’ Dempsey says. ‘But he was a good player. Centre half back. Great hands. Great mark of the football.’
Cook didn’t soar to the heights of, say, Carlton aerialist Alex Jesaulenko. But he’d watched the former Australian high jumper Tony Sneazwell train a few times and worked out a method in which he would leap for a mark at the last possible moment, then throw his arms skywards. It worked for him. ‘That’s one thing I could do, catch it,’ he says, remembering that the great football writer Alf Brown once bracketed him with Dempsey, Peter Knights and David ‘Swan’ McKay as the best marking men in the game. Brown asserted that Cook wasn’t as spectacular as Knights or Malcolm Blight ‘but he pulls down big ones more consistently’.
Footscray improved marginally in 1968, winning five games, losing fifteen and settling tenth on the ladder, above only Fitzroy and North Melbourne. Sutton finished up as coach at the end of the season and was replaced by Whitten.
In an article in The Sporting Globe, Sutton said business pressures and the time needed to coach at VFL level had prompted him to step down. He called Dempsey a ‘real up-and-comer’. And he had good things to say about Cook, declaring that he should develop into one of the club’s best players. Sutton described him as a ‘big, strong dasher’ who was unafraid to get in front for a mark and could turn defence into attack.
Cook earned seven Brownlow Medal votes, behind only three other Bulldogs: Schultz (eleven votes), George Bisset (nine votes) and David Thorpe (eight votes). He was judged Footscray’s most improved player. And by that stage he had youngsters carrying his bag into the ground. One of them, he says, was Doug Hawkins, later to break Whitten’s games record.
Hawkins chortles when the scenario is put to him. ‘I may have. I can’t honestly remember. But it’s a bloody good story anyway.’ Referring to his own rise, Hawkins adds, ‘But you can say this: twenty years later, Freddie Cook wasn’t fit to carry my bag into any football ground!’
The 1969 season didn’t begin well for Cook. On a pre-season jaunt to country Victoria he messed with bags on the bus, swapping players’ gear around. It was harmless stuff, but five minutes later he himself couldn’t see the humour in it. Officials, he says, took a dim view of his antics and ‘filed it away for a later date’.
He played the first six senior games of the season, then was dropped.
The way Cook tells it, Sutton, trying to maintain spirits around the club after five consecutive defeats, arranged a get-together at his home the day after the Round 6 defeat against Collingwood. Collins, he says, heard about it and, fearing a booze-up, asked players not to attend. Those who did might be disciplined, he warned.
But Cook went along and was dumped to the reserves the following week against South Melbourne, as were Laurie Sandilands, Gary Merrington, Ivan Marsh and Len Cumming. He stewed.
‘Of course I was shitty. I didn’t see any harm in going to Charlie’s place. It wasn’t like I was going there to drink the joint dry,’ he says. ‘I’d learned to stand up for myself, see, and I wasn’t going to let Jack Collins tell me what I could or couldn’t do.’
As he slummed it in the reserves, growing more annoyed by the week, Cook got talking to Martin Duggan, who ran the Bluestone Hotel and also supplied beer for a social club, The Grafters, attached to VFA team Yarraville.
Duggan told Cook that Footscray was treating him shabbily by keeping him out of a senior team in which he’d established himself the previous season. How about going to Yarraville for the rest of the season? he asked. You’ll be looked after. And you can always go back to the Bulldogs once heads cool. They know you can play. They’ll take you back any day.
Cook says Duggan offered him a sign-on of $4000 and a house of his choosing. He would also receive weekly match payments of $90. All he had to do was play out the season at Yarraville and then all of 1970. Where he went after that was up to him.
‘My head started spinning. That was a massive package,’ Cook recalls. ‘And I couldn’t say no. I needed the money.’
By that stage Cook was twenty-one, but already married with a child. He’d met Bernadette Dewan at the Hampton Hotel. They wed at St Paul’s Catholic Church in Bentleigh in 1968, not long after their daughter Jacqueline was born.
The young family was living in a flat in Hyde Street, Footscray, made vacant when the Bulldogs’ South Australian recruit Peter Anderson went home. Cook was working at Walpamur Paints.
‘I worked out I had to start looking after myself,’ Cook says.
‘In 1968 I played twenty home-and-away games, three night games and I was paid $875 for the whole season.’
As he wallowed in the reserves, Richmond came calling. Tigers official Alan Schwab phoned Cook and said the club was keen on him. Cook remembers talk of a swap with Mike Perry.
Footscray’s secretary at the time, Bill Dunstan, told Footscray Advertiser reporter Roy Jamieson, ‘A Richmond official phoned me late last week. We talked about Sunday football and then about other things. Then he asked me, “What is the position with Fred Cook?” I told him, “You have got to be joking.” I said that Cook had been dropped to the reserves because he had lost a bit of form, but it probably would not be long before he got his form back and was returned to the senior team.’
But Cook was less convinced of his senior prospects. He was no fan of Collins and believed his spell in the reserves had to do with issues other than football. He thought he’d played well in one reserves match, only to be deflated when a member of the match committee assessed his performance as ‘just fair’.
He made up his mind: he would buy the house Duggan had dangled and he would go to Yarraville. He and Bernadette took a fancy to a three-bedroom weatherboard with nice gardens in Pitt Street, West Footscray, clinching it for $9700 from the Farnbach Burnham real estate agency.
‘All of a sudden at twenty-one years of age I’m sitting in my own home,’ Cook says. ‘Even the rates were paid for me. Hey, I’m on Easy Street.’
On 6 June, The Age and Sun newspapers reported Cook had walked out on the Bulldogs and was headed for the VFA without a clearance.
Cook told Age man Peter McFarline he’d played poorly against Collingwood, but his earlier performances had him leading the club voting on Channel 7’s World of Sport program.
He mentioned the Sunday get-together at Sutton’s home, pointing out that nine of the eleven players who attended had been dropped.
‘I received a very good offer from Yarraville. It helped my wife, child and myself into a home, and it was too good to turn down.’
In an interview with The Footscray Advertiser, Cook said the committee had told him he had to ‘curb my “mannerism” around the club and to direct it in a way that would help the club’. He said, ‘But it has always been my nature to speak to people as I find them. I would rather say something to a man’s face than go behind his back and tell someone else.’
Shortly after Cook’s walk-out, Collins declared that Sutton was ‘not very welcome at the club’. He said the 1954 premiership coach ‘had something to do’ with the defender
