Brownlow medallist reflects on football violence, personal tragedy, and career after VFL retirement

Templeton, 69, doesn’t even remember if he told his family about his unusual stay at his Latrobe Valley home.

“I don’t know if I ever told them… I mean, I thought it was really weird. I wasn’t happy about it.”

Templeton’s memories of that period are vivid, as is the drinking culture among the players and the casual attitude towards on-field violence.

“I had to think it through because you either portray it as it really is, be honest about it, or exaggerate it… maybe people won’t like to read it because that’s the way things were and that’s the way football was.”

In Templeton’s first novel, these key elements of his period are described in brutal detail: CollisionGoing back to 1975, the same year he lived in an immigrant dormitory, the film tells the story of fictional teenage football star Joshua Shamrock, a goalkeeper on his way to greatness when he suffers a career-ending injury.

Templeton played in the 1975 match in which teammate and South Australian Neil Sachse was paralyzed after an accidental collision with Fitzroy’s Kevin O’Keeffe; also the story of Bulldog player Stephen Boyle, who lost one eye in a match against St Kilda (his son Timothy Boyle played for Hawthorn and wrote excellent articles for this magazine after his retirement), and Robert Rose, the great cricketer-footballer (and son of Collingwood great Bobby Rose, who coached the Dogs from 1972 to 1975). he knew; car accident.

Joshua Shamrock’s story bears little resemblance to that of Sachse, Rose or Boyle (the former pair have passed away), but Templeton, who, like Joshua, was a goalkeeper, acknowledged that his knowledge of players who were brutally injured informed his novel. “They are kind of an inspiration.”

So, as well as being the only Brownlow medalist and one of the last key forwards (1980) to be housed in an immigrant hostel by his club, it is safe to say that Templeton is the only living Brownlow winner to have written a novel, unlike the phantom autobiographies that abound.

“Really bad things could have happened. It was a dangerous match,” he said about his youth playing.

“I often say it’s a very casual attitude towards violence. So it’s not surprising that really bad things happen, and it happened to these guys, and it could have happened to me, it could have happened to any player. It’s just luck.”

Inside Collision – Published by Wilkinson Publishing – the story really unfolds when the hero realizes he will never play league football again and is forced to find a way to move forward into adulthood when his childhood dream – essentially an extension of his childhood – disappears.

“From a very young age, he had all his eggs in one basket,” Templeton explains.

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“The main theme I want to play with is one of the oldest stories we have – the long road from loss to redemption.

“The main character has to go through the journey of finding out who he really is, work on that, and develop a sense of his own identity.

“He’s trying to find his feet again.”

No spoilers here, except to say there’s a mysterious subplot and Shamrock’s story isn’t all despair. With football players being well-paid, full-time professionals without day jobs, a post-football identity should also resonate with former players struggling for their careers; This is probably a more common problem today.

Football is less prominent in the second half Collisionbut Templeton’s descriptions of the ancient football universe stemmed from his varied experiences in the game. He left the dysfunctional Dogs in 1983, moving alongside another Brownlow medalist, Peter Moore, to Ron Barassi’s equally unsuccessful Melbourne, and later served as managing director of the Sydney Swans (from 1995 to 2002) when Tony Lockett’s magic helped revive the code in NSW.

“Nothing that happened to this character had anything to do with me,” he said, explaining that he of course drew on the emotions he felt as an actor. “He plays a great game, you know I can tell how I feel.”

Templeton suffered his own personal disaster: the sudden death of his beloved wife, Kerry, from a heart attack in Abu Dhabi when his daughters were nine and seven. This tragedy followed his tenure as Swans CEO.

“It was a disaster, an absolute disaster. He was 50 and the girls were nine and seven. I was starting a new business in a foreign country. Disaster. And we ended up back in Australia.”

But Templeton and her daughters soon returned to the UAE and spent six or seven years there, as Sheikh Mansour set up a business that involved working with sports teams (which now includes Manchester City).

When Templeton’s younger daughter, Kiki, returned to the UAE, she asked her father: “Does this mean we won’t have fun anymore?”

“I’ll never forget that statement. And I thought, ‘Yes, I’m actually going to turn this around.’ Templeton and her daughters became avid travelers, hopping on planes to Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Morocco and Jordan.

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I wonder what motivated Templeton, who had previously been interested in painting as an amateur and had an MBA from Sydney University of Technology, to write a novel?

“Because I’ve been an avid reader of fiction all my life… if you’ve read as much as I have, at some point you think, I’ll try it myself.”

Templeton says his literary models are the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson, the Americans James Salter, and the classics of Richard Yates Revolutionary Road.

Collision was launched last Wednesday at an eclectic gathering in South Yarra symbolizing Templeton’s peculiar mix of art, business and football. Steven Smith, Melbourne’s new chairman and a former teammate, spoke fondly of Templeton to a crowd that included two other Brownlow medalists, Moore and Gerard Healy, former Bulldogs and legendary Australian broadcaster Hilary McPhee, who helped launch the novel.

We can say that it was the collision of some parts of Kelvin Templeton’s extraordinary life.

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