Sacked Podcast: Former Port Adelaide coach Mark ‘Choco’ Williams on his famous 2004 Grand Final ‘choker’ photograph
It’s an image every footy fan knows. A victorious Mark ‘Choco’ Williams lampooned the choker moniker by pretending to string himself up with his Port Adelaide tie after the 2004 Grand Final. Here’s why he did it. LISTEN
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.
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The Port Adelaide side he had built from its foundations was behind at half time against 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.
“At half time we were down and people were calling me a choker again and us chokers,” Williams tells the Herald Sun’s Sacked podcast.
Sixty minutes of football later, Port Adelaide had derailed the seemingly unstoppable Brisbane steam train.
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.
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“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’.”
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Originally published as Sacked Podcast: Former Port Adelaide coach Mark ‘Choco’ Williams on his famous 2004 Grand Final ‘choker’ photograph