Melbourne star Clayton Oliver had overcome weight issues but has become a star of the AFL
DEMON Clayton Oliver has gone from the fat kid who was told he’d never make it to one of the best players in the AFL. Scott Gullan reveals his early struggles, his rise and how he got his nickname.
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THE cafe has Chapel St hipster written all over it. So this is who Clayton Oliver is?
“Nah, never been here before,” he says.
The hipsters haven’t blinked. They have no idea the best young player in the AFL is in their midst.
He’s taller than you think. The official AFL Media Guide has him at 187cm but it looks like they’ve shaved a few centimetres off.
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The location of the catch-up was organised by Melbourne’s media department and it turns out Oliver isn’t even a local, he lives in nearby Elwood.
Coffee?
“I’ve already had three today so I better not as I won’t sleep tonight if I do,” he says.
He apologises for being late, he got held up at the surgeon’s office. What the? Given Melbourne is on the cusp of a finals campaign and premiership tilt …
“It’s all good, just getting the shoulder done at the end of the season,” Oliver explains.
All most people know about Oliver is he’s a ball magnet who handballs a lot and in the space of just a couple of years has become one of the best players in the competition.
You don’t win club best and fairests in your second year by 184 votes if you’re not a special footballer. Chris Judd didn’t even do that.
All of this doesn’t seem to faze the 21-year-old, who enjoys the routine of AFL football and doesn’t shy too far from that.
While his day-to-day existence might sound a tad boring, the Oliver story is anything but.
You need a quick geographical lesson about Victoria’s north as a starting point.
Oliver grew up in Echuca but went to secondary school 40 minutes away in Shepparton at Goulburn Valley Grammar School.
He then started playing for Mooroopna, which is 10 minutes out of Shepparton, because he couldn’t get back to Echuca in time for training.
Being from Echuca meant Oliver was in the Bendigo Pioneers zone for the TAC Cup. He played three games for them in 2014 before remarkably being told he “wasn’t good enough”.
By this stage the 16-year-old was battling osteitis pubis. He ended up having the debilitating groin problem for 18 months and in his own head figured it had already ruined his AFL dream.
But before the start of the 2015 season Murray Bushrangers coach Darren Ogier got in touch and said he’d give him a game.
One of his best mates from school, Josh Schache, was playing there but the only issue was he had to live in the Bushrangers zone, although that was easily solved with Mooroopna falling nicely inside their boundary.
Given he was about to start Year 12, being closer to school made a lot of sense to Oliver and his parents, Stephen, who is a plumber, and Michelle, so they made the move.
While everything was hunky dory off the field, on it there was a problem … he was fat.
It soon becomes apparent that Oliver is quite used to talking about his fluctuating waistline and certainly doesn’t hold back with his descriptions.
“I’d had osteitis pubis, I didn’t do any of the pre-season and I came back fat because I’d done f--k all,” he says.
“I only played in one practice match but he (Ogier) still played me in Round 1.”
Around mid-year he went down to Richmond for two weeks and played in their VFL team. When he returned something clicked and Oliver became an unstoppable force.
In the final nine games he polled 14 votes — he’d only polled one vote in the first half of the season — which won him the Morrish Medal for the best player in the TAC U/18 competition.
“I don’t know what happened,” he says. “I started playing all right and then a few teams started talking to me and for the first time I thought I might get drafted.
“It was pretty weird because I thought I’d missed the boat. I always thought you have to be in the Vic Country team and the AIS Academy to get drafted.”
Melbourne assistant coach Simon Goodwin made the trip to Mooroopna and issued Oliver with a challenge.
“He said he was going to bring scales to the AFL Combine and that when I weighed in my weight had to be 86 or 85 kilos. I was about 90 or 91 at this stage, so I had to lose five kilos in six weeks.
“I went on a pretty strict diet and cut everything out. I didn’t eat too much and lost heaps of weight. My skinnies (skinfolds) were 110 which is big, but I got them down to 54 for the Combine.
“I thought that was unbelievable but the other boys were 35 or 40, so I was still fat but I felt 100 per cent better.
“I know it should have clicked earlier but it didn’t. I was still stuffing around. I thought footy was just footy, you play and then do whatever. There are so many things which go into footy that I just didn’t realise.”
Essendon rang the day before the draft and he thought he was going there but Melbourne, who had the pick before them, got him at No. 4 after they’d made a bid on Callum Mills which forced Sydney to take their academy star at No.3.
He describes his first season as a “whirlwind”. He made his debut in Round 1 against Greater Western Sydney and racked up 22 disposals, which included 17 handballs.
After being dropped for the final round — he played 13 games for the season — he was then a member of Casey’s VFL finals campaign which saw him fall back into old habits.
“I was only doing what I had to do,” Oliver says. “Whatever the coach said I did but I didn’t do anything more than I had to.
“Through the VFL finals we were all just having a bit of fun, we were playing and doing well. I was just eating whatever and it felt like I was back at the Bushrangers just having a bit of fun.”
In the Grand Final against Footscray, Oliver tipped the scales at 94.9 kilos. Chips, soft drink and nachos had been central to his diet and he admits to recently seeing a photo from the game and being genuinely horrified.
The tipping point came in the off-season when he was back home in Mooropna and got busted for drink driving. While he was only slightly over the limit, given he was a P-plate driver he was supposed to have a zero blood alcohol reading.
Oliver was nervous about the club’s reaction when he sat down with Goodwin and football manager Josh Mahoney.
“Goody just said, ‘Look, everyone f--ks up. I’m not too harsh on you now but if you do it again, if you don’t learn then I’ll be angry’. That was literally it, he showed a bit of faith in me which was pretty good.”
A sit-down with the rest of the coaches was like an intervention. They kept asking: “What do you want to do with your career?”
He came away with one instruction, to follow Billy Stretch around for the entire pre-season. He was the most professional player at the club so Oliver needed to learn the meaning of the word.
The two became inseparable. Whatever Billy did on the track or in the weights room, Oliver was there. The extra touch sessions (which is something he’d never done before) became part of his routine.
He’d even text Billy to see what meals he was eating before and after training as he overhauled his diet with the help of the club’s dietitian.
The results were stunning and set him on a path that today has him the poster boy for professionalism at Melbourne.
He can often be found at the club at 1am after games jumping in and out of an ice bath or swimming laps.
Over the pre-season he set a goal with teammate Sam Weiderman of swimming 100 kilometres. He’d record each session on his phone from day one of pre-season training to the day before the last JLT Series game and finished at 137km.
“It keeps my weight down, now I probably do 15-minute sessions three or four times a week during the season,” he says. “Plus I don’t like running. You do enough of that in a game and it’s not great with my groins.”
He also does a recovery session every day now either in an ice bath, the pool or on the bike.
“It would be funny for people who were at the club and saw me in my first year and then left. If they saw what I do now they’d be shocked. They wouldn’t believe it. It’s just crazy.”
So that how’s he got here but we ask again, who is Clayton Oliver?
His nickname Clarry comes from his Bushrangers days.
“One of the coaches was reading out the team and said Clarence. He kept going and got to the end and everyone was like, ‘Who is in the middle?,” Oliver explains.
“He said it’s Clayton. He didn’t even realise he’d said Clarence so everyone started calling me Clarry.”
His father’s nickname is even better — Pirate.
“He’s got a lazy eye. I think he wore the patch as a kid maybe but only one eye really works. He was a pretty handy footballer, he played seniors at Echuca when he was 16 or 17, then played in Cairns, Perth and Melbourne.
“He was a midfielder, a left-footer because his lazy eye was his right side. He couldn’t guide it down on his right foot so he had to change to his left which is pretty funny.”
He has an older brother, Mitch, who is studying to be a teacher at Latrobe University and has a kick on weekends with the school team for a bit of fun.
His football idol was Michael Voss and he barracked for the Brisbane Lions growing up.
“They used to win all the time. I was a pretty competitive as a kid so I picked a team that won a lot. Vossy was a gun and I just loved watching him play.”
He lives with three other teammates — Angus Brayshaw, Dion Johnstone and Aaron vandenBerg.
“It’s actually a tiny house for four people. Vanders is a bit of a neat freak so the house is clean. He thinks he’s Dad so he runs everything which is actually pretty good. If he wasn’t there the house would be a pigsty.”
His girlfriend, Sophie, hails from Dookie, near Shepparton. She lives in Camberwell, is a university student and an excellent cook.
“I can’t cook to save myself,” he says. “She keeps me grounded and she knows the fat and skinny Clarry.”
He doesn’t drink beer, prefers spirits but can’t remember the last time he went out or had alcohol. He didn’t even have a drink for his 21st birthday last month.
“I can’t really be bothered, it’s too much effort. I’d rather sit at home and chill out. I’m usually too tired to do anything.”
He is a gamer and was an elite level player of Fortnite until he quit two months ago.
“It was addictive and I played it way too much that I wrecked it for myself. I got sick of it.”
He no longer uses Twitter after a spat with Australian Test cricketer Damien Martyn last year who accused him of “diving” in a game against West Coast.
Oliver sent back a tweet referencing Martyn’s infamous false shot in 1994 which lost a Test match for Australia against South Africa.
“I was texting my mate at the time and I sent him a screen shot of what I was going to say and he thought it was funny so I did it,” he explains.
“He said it won’t blow up. Then when I got home from the airport and checked my phone, I had missed calls, texts and notifications. I thought, ‘What have I done?’.
“That was about the only thing I have put on Twitter ever, it was a bad start and I don’t really know how to use it.”
He has always loved football and considers himself “lucky” to have playing AFL as his job.
Last week he didn’t move from his couch, watching every game from Friday night through to Saturday night.
The Round 23 loss last year which saw Melbourne miss the finals still haunts him. It’s why he doesn’t get any joy out of his best and fairest win.
He’s nervously excited about what is ahead over the next couple of months although all he’ll say about his team’s premiership hopes is: “It’s good to be a little bit higher than last year”.
And one last thing … he’s not a hipster.
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Originally published as Melbourne star Clayton Oliver had overcome weight issues but has become a star of the AFL