If there’s a legal stoush somewhere in Adelaide, chances are Greg Griffin is involved

GREG Griffin is no longer chairman of Adelaide United but that doesn’t mean one of Adelaide’s most controversial lawyers has no more fights to pick.

Adelaide lawyer Greg Griffin is trying to win compensation for former football players living with the after-effects of multiple concussions. Photo Calum Robertson

GREG Griffin laughs and talks about “very bad Greg”. It’s a version of himself that seems to appear at regular intervals. The high-profile Adelaide lawyer is not the type of bloke to let a confrontation pass unmolested, not a man afraid to deliver what you would call frank character assessments to those who annoy him.

It’s an approach that tends to polarise. Not that he cares about that either. For all those who dislike his confrontational approach there are plenty who reckon he’s a good bloke to have on your side in an argument. Any argument.

“Very bad Greg” received an outing recently when the lawyer was called to a meeting with his friend, the multi-millionaire businessman Rob Gerard and a man called Piet van der Pol, who was fronting a consortium that wanted to buy Adelaide United soccer club, of which Griffin was chairman.

Soccer was something of a late-blooming love for Griffin

There were other lawyers in attendance, financial advisers. These things are usually pretty serious, sober affairs. There are millions of dollars involved. Niceties are normally observed.

“I only went to one meeting in the entire process and that was with Gerard’s financial team, with lawyers, me and Piet as the purchaser,” Greg says. “And there was ‘good Rob’ and ‘very bad Greg’. I made it very clear that I had no intention of selling, I didn’t appreciate anything about it, and was basically pretty negative. I wasn’t invited to the next three meetings.”

And the club was sold anyway.

But this has always been the life of Griffin. The 59-year-old runs his own law firm, but at different times has owned Adelaide United, as well as nightclubs, has run an ATP tennis tournament and, for a time, was one of the biggest player agents in the AFL – and found arguments in all of them.

Griffin is fighting the AFL again, trying to win compensation for ex-players living with the after-effects of multiple concussions, including former Hawthorn and South Australian champion John Platten.

And just to prove he is code-agnostic, he also seems to be in a permanent state of war with Steven Lowy, the billionaire chairman of Football Federation Australia.

He represented Nicole Cornes in her defamation action against comedian Mick Molloy, Freelee the Banana Girl when she was sued by “Bikini Girl” Kayla Itsines and waste company Veolia in its High Court battle to overturn the former Labor government’s land deal at Gillman.

“Adelaide is a small town and if there is a nasty piece of litigation I am a reasonable chance to be somewhere in it, because I don’t look for the soft answer and I don’t sell out,” Griffin says.

Griffin’s wife Sandra admits he’s not “afraid to pick a fight” but says it’s because he sticks to his beliefs.

“I think the people that hate him don’t really know him or the reasons behind what he is doing. Rarely does Greg do things for self-interest,” she says.

Two months after selling United for an undisclosed sum, Griffin is missing the involvement with the club he bought in 2010. It’s clear he didn’t want to sell. But when he and Rob Gerard bought the financially troubled club from Football Federation Australia, which had assumed ownership from Nick Bianco, they made a pact. We go in together, we leave together. Griffin says Gerard did give him the opportunity to stay on at Adelaide, but told him he would have to buy him out. Either way, Gerard was gone and he wanted his money.

“I didn’t have the desire or the capacity at that stage to hand over the sort of money he ended up with,” Griffin says. “I wasn’t being railroaded but I could step up to the plate or we could get out together.”

He got out.

Soccer was something of a late-blooming love for Griffin. At Sacred Heart it was all footy and tennis. He says he was a reasonable footy player and a “very, very competent tennis player” but a sporting career was never an option.

His father was a bank manager and his mother was a keen golfer and a dedicated captain of the Blackwood Golf Club, a fact which he mentioned while giving his speech at his 18th birthday party, just to prove not even his mother is beyond his acerbic tongue.

“I actually thanked my mother for driving home from Blackwood for the night,” he says. “I thought it was funny, but very few others did.”

His class at the all-boys Sacred Heart produced seven lawyers, a legacy, he says of the fact they spent a lot of time arguing. He did consider becoming a journalist, but a careers officer told him no one was employed at The Advertiser unless they were a family member.

“I did law because I thought it was the only course I could pass,” he says. “I couldn’t see myself doing engineering or medicine and I thought law involved a lot of writing and reading. That’s what I was best at, so I did law.”

He was admitted to legal practice in 1981 and worked at well-known Adelaide firms Ward and Partners, and Phillips Fox before establishing Griffins Lawyers in 1996.

His introduction to both sport and Rob Gerard came through the North Adelaide Football Club. He would do tribunal work for North players who had been reported during a weekend game.

Griffin became a central player in one of football’s greatest controversies, Port Adelaide’s attempt to join the AFL in 1990. Griffin acted for three SANFL clubs which won an injunction to stop Port entering the AFL. Ultimately the stoush would lead to the formation of the Adelaide Crows and Port didn’t join the competition until 1997.

All these years later he is still keen to point out it was the clubs and not the SANFL which took the decisive action to stop Port in its tracks. “The SANFL, they were doing nothing, they were in a state of toxic shock,” he says.

Football was to take up more and more of his time. As a player agent, he represented some of the bigger names in South Australian football, including old tennis partners Chris McDermott, Tony McGuinness, Tony Hall and Stephen Kernahan. Others would include St Kilda star Gilbert McAdam and Crows premiership player Darren Jarman. He represented Adelaide ruckman Shaun Rehn in his battle for injury compensation with the AFL.

By his own reckoning, at his height, he was the third-biggest player agent in Australia. But he decided to give it away about the time he and wife Sandra had their first child Adrian. “I did that because you are always away, leading the life of Riley. You were going off to matches, talking to players, it was a very, very good job to have.”

But with a young family and a law firm to run, he had a decision to make.

“I thought this might be the time to make the call – do you want to be a football manager or focus on the law? I think very wisely I stuck with the law.”

He also went into business with McDermott, former Australian cricketer Tim May and ex-tennis professional Darren Cahill in a variety of nightclub ventures including Players and The Planet, both of which were highly successful for a time until they decided to get out of the game in 2004.

Griffin and wife Sandra. Photographer: Emma Brasier

He says he could see the way the nightclub scene was going and he didn’t like it. “Towards the end it was just getting ugly,” he says. “The drugs, the bikies. I managed somehow to keep the drugs and the bikies out for eight or nine years then I just stopped it.”

But a dispute over The Planet with the building’s landlords developed into one of Adelaide’s longest-running court cases, only finalised in March, with a hearing in the High Court. Much to Griffin’s obvious bemusement, he lost.

“I don’t think I spoke for two days. Very disappointing.” Given the length and complexity of the case, it’s also likely to be very expensive.

Griffin’s interaction with the soccer world started with his kids. He has two sons, Adrian and Antonio, and a daughter Amelia, who is a taekwondo champion with Olympic aspirations. One of the coaches at a school soccer team needed a hand. Griffin was volunteered by Sandra. Then the coach left and he took over.

He says he has always been a fan of the game – Fulham is his team in England – and he has studied for coaching qualifications and guided under-age teams at National Premier League club White City for years.

The Adelaide United involvement in 2010 was not planned. It started with a phone call from Gerard. Gerard had just received a call from Frank Lowy, who at that point was the richest man in the country and also chairman of Football Federation Australia. The two knew each other from their days as board members at the Reserve Bank of Australia. This is how business is done in Australia. Mates reaching out to mates.

Gerard was calling Griffin from the Old Lion Hotel in North Adelaide. It was late in the afternoon and Griffin was concerned a few libations had been sunk.

“‘It’s 4 o’clock’, I said, ‘are we talking sensibly?’” Griffin recalls.

They were. Gerard told him he wanted due diligence done on a potential takeover of Adelaide United. After two weeks, Griffin told Gerard it was no good, they weren’t getting the information they needed. He said ‘that’s OK, I trust Frank’. That’s Rob.”

A meeting was held at Gerard’s headquarters in Cavan. Griffin assumed he was just doing the legal work for Gerard. He was to receive a surprise. On a whiteboard, Gerard had written “Gerard 30, Griffin 30” and asked who should take up the remaining 40 per cent.

“And I said ‘where the f ... did I come from?’ He said, ‘no you’re in’. And I’ve gone, ‘well, it could be fun’.”

The decision came as an even bigger surprise to his family. He told them the day it was to be announced. The kids were thrilled – Sandra, not so much.

“My wife, without doubt, is the most forgiving human of all time, but she told me if I ever bought anything again without referring it to her I would be in a caravan park,” he says.

In fact, Sandra Griffin says she only found out about the purchase after taking Amelia to taekwondo training, where a coach told her he had heard about it on the radio.

“Spontaneous,” is the word used by his wife, but there is a suspicion a few more fruity ones have been used at other times.

But Sandra Griffin also bought into the club. She became heavily involved in the youth and academy side of Adelaide United, taking teams to places such as Barcelona, sometimes paying for players to travel at the Griffins’ expense.

After the Griffins sold out, Sandra was inundated with text messages thanking the family for their help.

The soccer world has always been a volatile one. For much of its history, it’s been marked by corruption, cronyism and incompetence. Westfield founder Frank Lowy had used his enormous political and business clout, to put the game on a more professional footing.

The A-League came into being in 2005 and Australia’s qualification for the 2006 World Cup gave the game an enormous filip.

But as the years went by the clubs grew frustrated at a perceived lack of transparency and support from Football Federation Australia. In the early days of the Griffin ownership, United was losing $3 million a year. The finances have been much more stable in recent years, with either small losses or small profits the norm.

But the search for greater revenue and independence for A-League clubs led Griffin into some epic arguments with the game’s rulers. Griffin objected to Frank Lowy’s son Steven becoming chairman after the old man stepped down in 2015 and hasn’t become any more complimentary since.

Greg Griffin feature.Greg Griffin as coach of U-15 side at White City. Photo: Sam Wundke.

Here’s a selection: “The FFA is a second-rate organisation. It is terrible. It stumbles from poor decision to poor decision.” And “Steven Lowy runs a great shopping centre enterprise, but really he has to go. No ifs, no buts, go.” Then there’s: “I am just waiting to meet Steven’s next child so I can meet the next chairman.”

And he’s not a lot nicer to FFA chief executive David Gallop – a man he claims to like.

Both Lowy and Gallop were asked to comment on Griffin. Both declined.

After he left Adelaide United, the FFA tried to have him turfed from the Australia Professional Football Clubs Association, the body which represents the 10 A-League clubs, but instead he was appointed chief executive.

It means he will still be involved with the FFA and the ongoing discussions about the structure of the game in Australia and a restructured, independent and expanded A-League. Which should be fun to watch.

Griffin knows people don’t like him and he doesn’t seem to care all that much.

“A retiring judge once told me ‘I don’t know if you are the smartest bloke in the room or the dumbest bloke’. I said, ‘I’m not sure either’. I couldn’t care less (about making enemies). I literally couldn’t care less.”

He has a supporter in Melbourne City vice chairman Simon Pearce.

Pearce is a big wheel in football circles. He is on the board of English premier league champions Manchester City and strategic communications director for Abu Dhabi. With Griffin he has led the fight against the FFA.

“I think the mistake people make about Greg is that they assume there is an ego there,” he says. “There isn’t an ego, it’s just basically he believes in right and wrong. I believe he is the most allergic person to dishonesty that I have ever met and that produces the outcomes we sometimes see.”

Griffin has another ally in Melbourne Victory chairman Anthony Di Pietro, who is also pushing for change within the game. He says it is actually possible to disagree with Griffin without it ending up with a declaration of war.

“There are certain things we have disagreed on, but I can say hand on heart we have never fallen out,” Di Pietro says. “We have had plenty of disagreements but I have always found Greg someone that you can disagree with and within 30 seconds he has moved on and you have moved on. It’s not personal.”

Griffin’s latest fight is with the Australian Football League, another organisation that likes to fight back.

Griffin is leading a class action against the AFL on behalf of former players whose lives have been badly affected by concussions they incurred during their careers. Over several hours of conversation with Griffin, he is mostly in pugnacious, fighting mode. Smashing his enemies, delivering terrible judgments on those he sees as getting in his way. This is different. The stridency drops, the wicked smile disappears.

“It’s a very difficult case for me personally because I know a lot of these guys and it’s just horrible,” he says. “Honestly, it’s terrible. A lot of these guys have been badly hurt and what is going to come out will be very, very disturbing. How they (the players) weren’t cared for by their clubs. It was gladiatorial Melbourne in the 1970s and 1980s, it resembled Circus Maximus.”

To illustrate the brutality, he tells the story of two ruckmen. “At the end of the training session (the coach) threw the ball in the middle and said ‘whoever brings the ball into my office plays on Saturday’. My bloke won. Well, I think the other bloke won actually. He won in the long-term.”

John Platten - fighting for athletes’ health. Photo: Simon Cross

The number of players who will eventually join the class action is unclear, but Griffin expects it to be between 60 and 100. He says many are worried about joining in case they are seen as soft or owning up to a weakness.

But the case will open later in the year with around half a dozen lead plaintiffs. So far Hawthorn Brownlow medallist John Platten, Essendon and Geelong ruckman John Barnes, and Melbourne high-flyer Shaun Smith have signed up.

“Some of these guys are really brave,” he says. There has been a welter of research and information coming out of the United States in recent years about the adverse effects that repeated concussions can have on an athlete’s future health.

It has become a huge issue in the National Football League, where a long-running lawsuit ended with a $US1 billion settlement.

Griffin believes the AFL will fight the case hard as well. “The AFL is unlikely to say ‘It’s a fair cop guv, let me write you a cheque’,” he says. “We anticipate it’s going to be pretty hard fought. I know how they litigate and they will play hard ball and deep pocket.”

But in many ways, hard ball is the best way to describe Griffin himself. He is a man who doesn’t like to sit still. He sleeps three or four hours a night. It’s a life of constant motion, of constant irritation.

And that’s the way he likes it.

“I don’t take a backward step if I think I’m right and undoubtedly if I had taken a more conservative path I could have been a lot more popular in certain circles – but you are what you are.”