the move. ‘He said to me, “You’re not getting a go here, you’ve got a top offer from Yarraville, you might as well go.” Mind you, I had hundreds of advisors. But I couldn’t see them picking me again. They dropped me to the seconds as a smartener-upper. They left me there rotting.’
Cook remains adamant he was in contention to play for Victoria, saying a selector had told him it would be embarrassing for all concerned if the state centre half back was plucked from the reserves.
‘I was probably the third cab off the rank,’ he says, ‘but I could have ended up the first because of injuries to others players, namely Peter Walker of Geelong and Peter Steward of North Melbourne.’
Did he put his grievances to his coach? It would have made no difference, he says, because Whitten wasn’t picking the side.
He went to Whitten’s house in Altona and told him he was going. Whitten said he was disappointed, but understood. ‘He actually wrote me a letter and told me to pull my head in because I was captaincy material,’ Cook says.
Even as he took off to Yarraville he was thinking about a return to league football. But what was shaped as a long and successful career was over.
Sandilands cannot remember Cook’s run-in with Collins, but says he wasn’t alone in clashing with the secretary. Sandilands also had his differences with Collins. ‘Jack was a very hard man to get on with, particularly if he’d had a drink,’ he says. ‘Freddie had a drink and I had a drink and we weren’t Jack’s favourite people.’
Sandilands says Cook certainly created an impression at Footscray. ‘He was there for 1967, 1968 and a bit of 1969. So the time he spent there was brief, but everyone remembers it.’
Cook’s school mate Ricky Spargo finished with sixty-four games for Footscray from 1966 to 1971. He still laughs about the time he was twentieth man in a match and Cook was the nineteenth. Cook had turned up in a terrible state after a night of ‘wine, women and song’. The trainers did their best to rouse him for the match ahead. As they watched the play in the second quarter, Cook called over a pie seller and said to Spargo, ‘Now, what are you having, a pie or a pastie?’ Spargo said he couldn’t possibly stomach either. Cook gulped down a pie and washed it down with a can of Coke.
‘True story,’ Spargo says. ‘That day they actually found him asleep at the club. The bugger hadn’t been to bed from the night before.’
John Schultz says it was a shame Cook’s time at the Western Oval ended so suddenly, believing Footscray could have used him for many years.
Schultz chuckles as he recalls kicking and marking practice that pitted he and Murray Zeuschner at one end and fellow big men Cook and Dempsey at the other.
Zeuschner was a dedicated footballer and desperate to prove himself a senior player. He made Schultz fight for every mark. Schultz figured that if he could get through such spirited training sessions on Thursday nights, he could get through matches on Saturday afternoons. But there was no such fierce competition at the other end. The new chums waxed.
‘Here we are going very hard indeed and the other two were taking it in turns to take marks!’ Schultz says. ‘They were lackadaisical, both of them. They were just going through the motions. They had so much talent, but at that stage they didn’t realise it. The penny dropped with Gary and he became a real star, won his six best and fairests. But maybe Fred didn’t understand what he had.’
Yarraville, then coached by 1958 Collingwood premiership player John Henderson, quickly understood what it had: an exceptional player. Cook helped the Eagles to a 9–9 season, being named in the best in ten of his eleven games. In his first match in the VFA, he lined up in the ruck and slotted five goals in a narrow defeat against Dandenong.
Jim ‘Frosty’ Miller played in the match for Dandy. By the time they finished their VFA careers Cook and Miller had more than 2000 goals between them — and lasting fame in the Victorian game.
5
THE voting for the J. J. Liston Trophy, the award for the VFA’s best and fairest player, reflected Fred Cook’s impact at Yarraville in 1970.
The Eagles had a poor season, winning only one game, finishing on the bottom of the ladder and being relegated to Division 2. Yet Cook won the Liston. Well, he didn’t win — he streaked it in, polling forty-one votes to defeat the runner-up, Williamstown’s former Footscray player Kevin Jackman, by fourteen in the count at VFA House. He was overlooked for votes in only four games.
Cook celebrated his victory at the Yarraville clubrooms, where teammates were photographed hoisting the sideburned and suited star on their shoulders. Footscray great Charlie Sutton, driving home from his Yarraville hotel, dropped in to offer congratulations.
Cook had paid for the shindig using money won in player awards tallied by the local paper. ‘That was the done thing. Any coin you picked up you put towards a piss-up for the players.’
Cook turned up late, not wanting to leave home until he found out he’d won. His father phoned to confirm his victory.
He had entered the count as one of the favourites after a season in which he averaged almost twenty-seven kicks and fourteen marks a match. He was credited with forty-one kicks against Dandenong and he had between twenty-seven and thirty-seven in nine other games.
His performance against Dandy had football scribe Wal Bright praising him to the skies. Cook ‘practically took Dandenong on single-handed only to see his team well beaten by 63 points,’ Bright wrote in an article headlined ‘Cook gets 41 kicks — but Eagles downed’.
‘Cook had the phenomenal tally of 41 kicks and 20 marks,’ Bright wrote. ‘He spent the four quarters at the wind-assisted end of the ground. He was the loose man when Dandenong had the breeze, then spent the other two terms in the forward zone.’
Bright also watched a 35-kick effort against Port Melbourne. Cook took on his future teammates Vic ‘Stretch’ Aanensen and Brendan Behan, and brought in eighteen marks.
John Heriot, a fine backman for South Melbourne over 153 games and full back of its team of the century, coached Yarraville in 1970. Now seventy-four and a lifelong resident of Spotswood, Heriot says Cook was the stand-out player of the season, and the Liston could have gone to no-one else. ‘Freddie wasn’t the strongest kick, but he was the best mark of a football you’d ever see. Wouldn’t find a bloke with a better pair of hands,’ he says, echoing the words of Gary Dempsey and many others.
‘I played him on the ball,’ Heriot says. ‘I always agreed with the theory that if you’ve got a good player you stick him on the ball, not in a position, and let him run around. That’s what I did with Freddie, gave him his head to win the ball as much as he possibly could. And he really dominated some games. It’s just a pity we didn’t have too many other good players around him.’
Alan Bongetti, who played at Yarraville from 1967 to 1971, remembers being taken aback at the news that Cook would be joining the club from Footscray. Bongetti immediately thought the Eagles had themselves an outstanding player — and Cook exceeded his expectations.
‘Beautiful footballer,’ he says. ‘As far as marking the football, just tremendous. Every time the ball went near him he’d just mark it. It was a joy to play with someone who had that ability, really.’
Cook quips that every time he kicked the ball at Yarraville he knew it was coming back ‘quick smart’. The club had some good
