From an inquisitive Adelaide boy who loved basketball to an AFL superstar. How Brodie Grundy became a leading light for the black and white
He’s becoming a cult hero for the Collingwood Football Club, but, as some of the people closest to him reveal, his success is not the result of luck. This sports star has worked hard his whole life.
IT WAS a hot day in Melbourne on January 29, 2013, when an 18-year-old Brodie Grundy opened his laptop and started penning his thoughts in his “Diary of a First Year”.
The teenager from Hawthorndene in Adelaide’s southern hills had been in Melbourne less than three months, after being drafted by Collingwood at No. 18 in the 2012 National Draft, and in many ways he couldn’t believe his luck. But, Melbourne was going to take some getting used to.
“Traffic is a bit of a worry,” he wrote. “I’ve set my watch five minutes fast, but I hardly think that’s enough time.
“Parking is horrid, so I get public transport a lot. Being on the tram is like sardines in a can — it’s very packed and the hot weather only amounts to a greater hate of public transport because it brings out a greater volume of body odour after a long day.”
There could be another reason he found Victoria’s cramped public transport system so onerous: his sole mode of transport to and from trainings in Adelaide had been a pushbike, which he upgraded to a motor scooter.
He was famous for it. Speak to his old teachers at Cabra Dominican College or his former team-mates and coaches at the Sturt Football Club, and it’s the memory of Grundy’s hulking frame (at 16 he was a commanding 202cm and bench-pressed 130kg) riding off on a small bike that everyone recalls.
Former Sturt league player, Michael Bawden, was Grundy’s under-18 coach when the developing ruckman joined the Double Blues.
“I remember this big lad came up to me and introduced himself as Brodie,” he says. “I’m six-foot, but I just remember looking right up at this 16-year-old who was a very big boy.
“He used to ride his bike from Cabra, up to training at Urrbrae, train his heart out and then ride his bike to Mitcham train station and put himself, his bike, all his school gear and footy gear on the train to go back up to Hawthorndene.”
Sometimes he would cycle the whole way home — with those steep Belair roads ahead of him. When Grundy got his scooter licence, things got a little easier, but continued to entertain his team-mates nonetheless.
“I remember once when he’d just got all of his state (representative) under-18 gear had arrived at Unley and he had a little backpack and I remember him saying: ‘Oh man, how do I get all of this home?’,” Bawden laughs.
“Then he came back and had all his footy gear on and his brand new state suit on over the top and he put his helmet on and rode his motor scooter home; we were all having such a laugh at this massive guy on his scooter with his L-plates on heading up the hill to Hawthorndene with a dinner suit on.
“But it sums up a bigger thing about Brodie: there was never a reason to not doing something, if something was a bit hard, he always came up with a way to overcome it.”
Grundy is now 24 and with his long black hair and tall frame, is something of a cult hero at Collingwood. But he is still Jennifer Palmer’s “good egg” of a second-born son. He is her middle child, book ended by the eldest Kyerin, 27 — a PE teacher at a northern suburbs school — and the youngest Riley, 18 — who is not only an AFL draft prospect this year after impressing in the Sturt under-18s, but a Year 12 student who aspires to study medicine.
Palmer, who runs her own beautician business, misses her son — whom she says was a “cheeky, adventurous boy” as he was growing up — and still cannot believe she sees him more on television than she does in person.
“Brodie was just going along with life, he was going to go to uni and study physio and then suddenly he’s drafted into the AFL; it was a bit like: ‘What just happened?’,” she recalls.
“For me, though, it was pretty devastating because he was my best buddy … we haven’t had him in our family’s day-to-day life for six years now and the only time we see him, he’s on TV.”
AFL football was not the boyhood dream of Grundy, college basketball in the US calling. “He started basketball at age five,” Palmer says. “From then, basketball was our whole life.”
And Grundy was a star.
“In state competitions, coaches would come up and say to me: ‘Look your son nearly won that on his own’,” Palmer says.
This is a similar recollection of two of his former high school teachers. Grundy attended Cabra from Year 6 until Year 12. Robert Jarrad was the school’s basketball co-ordinator at the time. He recalls Grundy being academic and displaying values from a young age of respect and responsibility, with a distinct touch of larrikin. Grundy’s basketball talents were obvious.
“At times in a game, for a few minutes on the court, you would watch him play and think there is no better player for his age in Australia,” Jarrad said.
PE teacher Sharon Cibich taught Grundy in Years 11 and 12 and wasn’t surprised by his 91.5 ATAR result.
“He was smart and articulate and keenly interested in exercise physiology and found it relevant to his sporting contexts,” she says. “Brodie was an independent person who was driven to follow his own path. He showed perseverance even when situations became tough. Although sometimes the teachers had to remind him that footy shorts were not part of the school uniform.”
It was 2010 when Grundy was convinced to try out football. He is now one of a legion of star AFL players who have made the transition from basketball courts to footy ovals.
“Right from the start, you could tell that young Brodie was an intelligent, friendly lad and you could tell that he was going to succeed,” Bawden says.
“He’s got fantastic natural ability, however he was never prepared to rely on that … he always pushed himself to be the best version of everything he could be.”
At the time, he may have only played a handful of games after transitioning from basketball, but from the start Grundy impressed the Double Blues’ hierarchy. His kicking needed improving so he kicked and kicked and kicked until he got better. He was tall but skinny, so he set to work in the gym.
Bawden remembers countless occasions when he was asked by a 16-year-old Grundy to spot him in the weights room even on non-training days.
“Brodie really pushed himself to get strong … there were league footballers in there who were looking at him going: ‘This kid is amazing’.
“I used to point it out to others in the team who thought they were working hard. I’d say: ‘Guys, if you think you’re working hard, take a look at what Brodie’s doing’.”
The other thing Grundy was good at, Bawden says, was taking constructive criticism. “A lot of kids will ask you for feedback but they only want to hear good stuff,” he says. “But Brodie was prepared to hear the whole lot and then act on it.”
And it’s this reason Bawden is not at all surprised by Grundy’s success, particularly this season’s. This year Grundy hit the 100-game milestone at the Magpies, won the Herald Sun’s Player of the Year award and was selected on the interchange for the All-Australian team.
“I’m not surprised by his success,” Bawden says. “But it is the result of eight or nine years of really hard work. It’s not through luck. I would have been surprised if he wasn’t at the level he is now.”
This sentiment is echoed by his mother, who says Grundy would have been chuffed by his All-Australian selection. “When he was first drafted into the AFL he had post-it notes all over his bathroom mirror of the achievements he wanted to reach and gradually he would tick off the achievements he’d strive for and All-Australian would have been one of them,” she says.
“I’m sure he’s very honoured to be in that class. But that would just be one, this is just the start … he’d be ready to get onto the next. He’s never one to sit on his laurels. He’s always pushing himself forward.”
Despite the horrid parking and the packed trams, Palmer says her son is enjoying Melbourne life: his South Australian physio girlfriend, Rachael, has joined him there and he’s studying health sciences part-time through La Trobe University.
“He’s got his uni mates and he finds it really important, to have interests and friendships outside of football for that balance,” she explains. “We don’t even talk to him about football because he is so flooded every waking moment. Every store he goes into everyone’s wanting photos with him.
“I wonder how he does it. But he does it graciously. So, I can understand that when he speaks to us, he doesn’t want to talk about football.”
Palmer says, instead, she talks to her son about his artwork — he has a passion for graffiti artwork and is working on his own creations under the guidance of a local artist — and his garden. “I’m always the proud mother from day dot … but his achievements in life and the person he has become as a human being are what I’m most proud of.”
Palmer jokes that it seems bizarre that Grundy is playing for a Victorian club because of the South Aussie versus the Vics mentality he grew up with.
“We were always competing against them in basketball, so it’s very bizarre that he’s on the other side of the fence,” she says.
So, of course, supporting Collingwood has taken some getting use to.
“It’s not easy … it’s going against the grain. But of course, we do.”
And it will be all black and white come next weekend’s second qualifying final between West Coast and Collingwood in Perth. Palmer thinks the Magpies are capable of winning this year’s premiership.
“Brodie is very much a when-the-going-gets-tough, the tough-get-going person,” she said.
But does she secretly hope that one day Grundy will be traded back home to the Crows or Power?
“Well, yes I do, I really do, I’m not hiding that fact and I’m a bit annoyed they didn’t draft him in the first place,” she says with a devilishly kind of laugh. “We’d all love him to come back home one day, but at the moment he’s flourishing.”
And the likes of Bawden are loving it. When Grundy debuted in round 18, 2013, Bawden was sitting in the stands of the MCG watching on as Grundy’s team defeated GWS, thrilled for his former player.
“If any of my sons are complaining that something’s a bit hard, or they’re coming up with a reason not to do something, I might make an example of how Brodie would have approached it and how he would have found a reason to be able to do it,” he says.
And there’s something of a life lesson in that for everyone really, footballer or not.