Brad Fittler and Greg Alexander visit Lismore to spend time with a community that’s hurting
Brad Fittler and Greg Alexander have paid a visit to Lismore to help a community struggling to come to terms with the death of two teammates from a local footy team.
NSW
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It’s just after 2pm on Friday — 52 hours after the NSW Blues lost the “unlosable” State of Origin series.
Disappointed NSW coach Brad Fittler and Blues senior adviser Greg Alexander could be anywhere else. Hiding under a doona. Gone bush. Their phones switched off.
Instead, they’re standing in front of almost 200 Year 11 and 12 students from St John’s College Woodlawn, on the NSW north coast.
“This is the best way to face it,’’ Fittler tells The Sunday Telegraph.
“Go and face your audience. They’re the best people to talk to.
“I want the fans to know we’re hurting, it’s on me, I need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. But footy is one thing. Hopefully saving just one life is why we’re here.’’
The two most influential men in the recovery mission of the NSW Origin side have jumped on a plane from Sydney because of two teenagers they never met: Eddie Allan and Jaylan Stewart.
Both just 17 years old, the talented under-18 Marist Brothers Rams rugby league teammates were recently killed in separate car accidents, only 19 days apart, not far from Lismore.
The funeral of both boys were held on their local footy ground and, before the Rams used the spirit of their mates to make the grand final last month, Fittler and Alexander spoke to “Australia’s bravest footy team” via a Zoom call, about using footy as their therapy.
The gut-wrenching story, the deaths of Eddie and Jaylan so incomprehensibly close, have forced a shattered community to band together to try to help fill a well of emptiness so deep that the Allan and Stewart families fear they will never be able to recover.
Before hanging up on the Zoom call, Fittler and Alexander made a promise to visit the town and the Rams footy club immediately after this year’s Origin series.
“Sorry we couldn’t bring the Origin shield with us, but we thought this was more important,’’ Fittler says.
Fittler and Alexander made the vow to visit the town because they have both felt the same sickening pain before.
And they’re still hurting today.
Fittler lost his best mate, and Alexander his brother — former Penrith player Ben Alexander — in a car crash 28 years ago.
Ben was 20 — just three years older than Eddie and Jaylan.
And so the two close mates don’t want to be anywhere else but here, inside the school auditorium.
Eddie and Jaylan’s best mates sit in the front row.
For the next half-hour, not a single student fidgets in their seat, speaks or asks to leave the room.
Pushing aside the pain that still exists today, Alexander and Fittler launched a campaign last year, with Transport for NSW and the NSW Rugby League, to try to change the driving behaviours of teens and young men. It is called the Knock-On Effect.
“The knock-on effect of one decision can rip families and communities apart,’’ Alexander said.
“My family had the knock on our front door by the police — and our lives changed from that moment.’’
At a footy clinic and barbecue with the under-18 Rams late on Friday afternoon, Michael Stewart, the shattered father of Jaylan, sat watching on from inside the small Crozier Oval grandstand.
Fittler and Alexander decide to let the clinic begin as they sit quietly beside Stewart, a highway patrol officer, who is still struggling to find his words.
The Blues legends do little more than listen to a grieving father.
It’s what is needed
“I don’t want any father or family to feel what I’m feeling,” Stewart said. “The lift that ‘Freddy’ (Fittler) and Greg gave the boys from that Zoom call was important for the team and the town.
“They said they would come back after Origin and now they’re here you can see what it means.”
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