Choker.
It is football’s most cutting expression, a savage insult about the capacity to step up when in the middle of a sporting firestorm.
And as Mark Williams walked through the MCG crowd at halftime in the 2004 Grand Final, no one was about to let him forget it.
The Port Adelaide side he had built from its foundations was trailing the marauding Brisbane Lions, and if they let this slip he knew they might never come back.
The famed Williams name, synonymous with sporting success in Port Adelaide, might have had a legacy with forever failing to get it done.
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“People reflect on Port Adelaide not achieving what they might have, but look at how many interstate clubs have finished on top three years in a row. If you are in the EPL, you win. That’s it,” Williams tells the Herald Sun’s Sacked podcast.
“We won the most games for five years in a row, we won more games than Brisbane, we beat Brisbane more times than they beat us, but no one cares …
“For them to get the accolades of three premierships, we needed to win in 2004 when we had the chance.
“At halftime we were down and people were calling me a choker again and us chokers.
“You guys have never lived in a two-team town. You walk around town with 80 per cent that really hate you and (20 per cent) that doubt you.
“It wasn’t an easy time to work, for your kids to go to school, all those things.
“In the scheme of bullying it was the highest of highs. You just had to cop it.”
His Port Adelaide side had lost a 2001 semi-final after a 16-6 season and copped successive preliminary final beltings to Brisbane and Collingwood despite finishing minor premiers with an 18-4 record.
Sixty minutes of football later, Port Adelaide had derailed the seemingly unstoppable Brisbane steam train.
MORE THAN A FLAG
In preventing a 2001-04 four-peat with a 11-goal second half, Williams had done more than just win his first AFL premiership.
He had proved his fleet of indigenous footballers in Shaun and Peter Burgoyne, Byron Pickett and Gavin Wanganeen could perform on the biggest stage.
He had lifted the proverbial middle finger to club sponsor Alan Scott, who famously declared the club would never win a flag under his care.
And he had exorcised the demons of the 1981 Grand Final, when he was one of Collingwood’s better players in a side run down by Carlton, despite having a 21-point lead late in the third term.
To suggest his emotions overflowed in the minutes that followed might be one of Grand Final day’s great understatements.
In one of football’s iconic images, Williams hit the MCG turf on his victory parade down to the ground and lampooned the choker moniker by pretending to string himself up with his Port Adelaide tie.
“If you look at the video moments before, I turned around and saw Matthew Primus in the (coaches) box,” he recalls.
“He was such an inspirational captain and he brought the group together. To turn and see the tears in his eyes, the admiration he had for the team and the idea that he missed (through injury), it nearly broke my heart walking down.
“I am thinking about that and I don’t know, all the choking bit had built up for a long, long time.
“To think I had any (premeditated) thoughts of doing that (the choking gesture) ... Nup, that’s just raw emotion.
“It just happens. It was a direct reference to everyone that was calling us chokers and nothing more than, ‘You can stick this right up your bum’.”
ALLAN SCOTT, YOU WERE WRONG
The MCG premiership dais has witnessed many great moments, from Shane Crawford’s “That’s what I’m talking about”, to Tadhg Kennelly’s Irish victory jig, to Paul Roos’ “Here it is!” to the success-starved Sydney faithful.
None of them top Williams’ guttural, “Allan Scott, you were wrong” war cry.
Scott, a major club backer, had founded freight company Scott’s Transport from his Mount Gambier base but had made his declaration about Williams’ failures only months earlier in 2004.
Williams scoffs at the suggestion the retort was pre-planned.
As with most of Williams magical moments across what is now 43 years in SANFL, AFL and VFL football, it was part madness and part genius.
“I promise you not one second was pre-planned,” he says.
“There is no chance I would pre-plan a speech before a Grand Final and the idea of sponsors came into my head somewhere.
“On the national coverage Allan got on TV to say we would never win a premiership with me as coach. You just had to cop it and I probably carried it for a fair time. I didn’t say anything critical of him, I just said he was wrong.”
Remarkably, despite the premiership success, Scott went to his grave in 2008 with the multi-millionaire refusing to acknowledge he had erred.
“After the (flag) we went down to Mount Gambier for the follow-up community camp and we did a lot of clinics and meetings and he and I signed a ball and had a photo taken. We agreed to disagree,” says Williams.
So he apologised?
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not Alan.”
A COSTLY SACKING
Fast-forward six years and Williams sought AFL intervention to chase unpaid money owed to him by Port Adelaide, but was told it could push the Power into bankruptcy.
Williams revealed for the first time extraordinary details surrounding his shock departure in late 2010, when the club not only sacked its only premiership coach but reneged on a deal to pay him his full entitlements.
That agreement had been reached when the club asked him to coach one final game — against Collingwood in Round 15, 2010 — as well as to lead people into believing his exit was by mutual consent.
Asked to clarify if he had been sacked, Williams said: “Yep, no question.”
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“The board came and said, ‘You don’t have the full support of the board’,” Williams said.
“It was on a Thursday. We were playing Collingwood in a Friday night game and I said, ‘OK, what do you want me to do? I will coach until the end of the year’, which would be the right thing to do. They said, ‘Oh no, we want you to just coach this one game’.
“The hardest thing for me was what are you going to do with a contract. They said, ‘We are going to pay you until the end of this year and next year … we are going to pay it all out within the month’.
“(I said) ‘If you don’t want me, I am going to go and coach somewhere else … You are going to pay me all the money now’.”
His sacking came during a difficult 2010 season — three years after he had led the club into a Grand Final, and six years after he had landed the Power’s only flag.
He left with a 55 per cent winning record from his 274 games as Port Adelaide coach.
Port Adelaide insisted Williams front a media conference on game day, just hours before his team was due to take on the Magpies at Football Park.
“We were in front of Collingwood who were a powerful side at three-quarter-time … it was an emotional day for the supporters,” he said.
But a few days after the Power went down by 26 points, Williams received a phone call with bad news.
“I am out of there, but I got a call to say, ‘Listen Mark, we won’t be able to play you like we promised’,” he said.
“This podcast is the first anyone knows about this.
“Eventually, I had to talk to the AFL. I was told if I fought this, I would bring the club into bankruptcy.
“I did the right thing by the club, which I always have.”
Williams had options to leave Port Adelaide long before his departure but believed in the club, even when AFL rivals poached the Power’s staff and resources following the 2004 premiership.
The club’s tight financial squeeze meant he also was unable to secure recruits such as Luke Ball as well as Geelong’s famed recruiting manager Stephen Wells.
“Even when we won a premiership, we didn’t have money,” he explained.
“All the time we were fighting the SANFL to get more money.
“The Crows were very self-sufficient. We were the small fish in the pond but there was a shark going around.”
FAINT HOPE
It was far from the only dramatic moment of that contest, as Williams spun the magnets in the coaches box to try to kickstart a lifeless Power team
Unbeknown to him, his wife Pauline simply couldn’t handle the final frantic moments having lived every moment of those unrequited seasons with her husband.
“It was a difficult game, it went down to the wire. Everyone expected us to win, we were on the top of the ladder (after successive preliminary final losses) and there is an amazing amount of pressure and there was only one player playing for Port Adelaide in that first 10 minutes and it was Roger James.
“If he wasn’t there we would have been 10 goals down, that’s how important he was.
“The best player I have ever coached is Gavin Wanganeen and he didn’t touch the ball. I gave Gavin a burst and he kicked the last two goals to get us over the line.
“People wonder how good Shaun Burgoyne is as a Hawthorn player, watch what he does in the final moments.
“It’s 27-and-a-half minutes in and the ball goes over the back of the pack in St Kilda’s goalsquare and it gets out to Brent Guerra who was a Port Adelaide player and Shaun dives and (smothers) and Guerra only has to soccer it off the ground and misses.
“Most people don’t know this but my wife faints in the grandstand. She doesn’t see the last part of the game. It’s not like she’s ever fainted in her life before. That’s what she’s carrying and I don’t didn’t even know she was carrying that. It’s real-life drama and it turns out to be a good result for us.”
THE HARDSHIPS
Williams’ life has been shaped and defined by a series of tragic events that he realises also could have ended his own life.
His twin brother Anthony passed away in 1988 in a building accident while renovating a house, dying in younger brother Stephen’s arms.
“Most people don’t know I had a twin brother but as far as I can remember he and I did everything together, and my competitive nature was definitely because of him.”
“I owe so much to him and my older brothers and sisters … it broke my heart and it breaks my heart today. I still get very emotional about it.”
Williams and Phil Walsh were coaching comrades and close friends. His son still visits Cy Walsh in his psychiatric facility despite him stabbing his father to death in 2015 on one of football’s darkest days.
Williams and his wife have five children spanning 18 years of age — Marcus, Georgie, Isaac, Louis and Isabelle.
He was rocked by a shock cancer diagnosis in November 2014, suffering a form of lymphoma that needed immediate treatment and six-monthly check-ups before winning his health battle a year later.
“A person that never drank, never smoked, was very athletic and trained the house down … to get cancer was like, ‘What the hell, this is not supposed to happen’. A huge smack in the face for me and my family and all my friends.
“I had such support, to go through radiation where you can’t taste anything and you can’t swallow anything. I would go in there, and (media identity) Stephen Phillips was in there.
“We were going through cancer treatment in Moorabbin and Stephen Phillips tells me he is coming good and within two days he dies.
“Bloody hell. Who am I to worry about what I have got? I look at all these other people and see the trauma and the heartache, how hard it is and the confidence of believing that you can get out of it, it’s important.”
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