Hawthorn used secret bank accounts to pay premiership stars outside salary cap, Don Scott says
Don Scott claims to have lifted the lid on salary cap cheating during Hawthorn’s golden era. But Hawks champ Dermott Brereton has rubbished the claims and delivered a withering assessment of his former board colleague.
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Hawthorn legend Dermott Brereton has rubbished Don Scott’s claims of salary cap rorting during the club’s golden era, labelling him “an idiot”.
Brereton, who played in five Hawthorn flags between 1983 and 1991, said the club had “self-reported” minor salary cap breaches to the league in the early 1990s.
But he said the club’s breach was “nickel and dime”.
Scott this week cast doubt on the Hawks’ historic run of premierships in the late 1980s and early 1990s by claiming the club had used a secret bank account in Tasmania to systematically cheat the salary cap.
He cited impeccable sources with full knowledge of the scheme.
“There is no secret bank account down in Tassie,” Brereton told SEN
“Hawthorn said, ‘Look we paid over in these and these years’ … because the league said, ‘Hey, everybody come clean’ and so everybody did. And there weren’t too many clubs that didn’t come clean, and the reason they didn’t is that they couldn’t afford to pay over — that was Fitzroy, Footscray, St Kilda.
“They were all broke. The teams that actually had a little bit of money paid — and we are talking about $30,000 or $40,000 over. Some of the bigger Melbourne clubs paid considerably more than that.
“But it was known and it has been reported 24 years ago. It was a story then, Don just decided to throw in a little one about a bank account in Tasmania, which no one knows about.
“I was on the board. I have no idea what he is talking about.”
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Brereton questioned the timing of Scott’s claims.
“Can I say that there is one person Don Scott will bow his head to and say, ‘Yes, Sir,’ and that is John Kennedy Sr,” Brereton said.
Kennedy Sr passed away in June.
“What do you think about the timing of this statement by Don? It says a bit more about Don. So, unfortunately, we love Don. Don is a different beast,” Brereton said.
The five-time premiership star added: “We as a club love Donald but Donald suffers from one classic symptom of men in their 70s — he’s an idiot.
“I served on the board with him and Don likes things to be about him and Don would like to think everybody believes that he’s the man who saved Hawthorn, well he’s the man who was sounding the trumpet like down at your local recruiting station in World War One.
“Donald did that by tearing some strips off a hybrid jumper between Melbourne and Hawthorn.
“Ian Dicker is the man who saved Hawthorn.
“The night Don went on the board and we spent most of the time thereafter trying to get him off the board.
“He was a fly in the ointment and he’s continuing to be.
“Don should be in the … Hawthorn Hall of Fame out at Waverley. He should be behind glass and it should have a little hammer next to it and it should say, ‘Break in case of emergency’.
“That’s where Don should be at the moment.”
Earlier, Hawks champion Jason Dunstall says he has no knowledge of salary cap cheating in his almost 30 years at the club.
“There’s no point me engaging in speculation, all I can do is tell you what I know,” Dunstall, who booted 1254 goals in 269 games for the Hawks, said on Fox Footy on Wednesday night.
“(As) a player I was there from 1985-98, (and I) was doing bits and pieces as part of the administration until 2014. In all my time there I know absolutely nothing about any of that.
“I’ve never even hear the merest hint of a whisper, so I’m not inclined to give it too much oxygen.”
Dunstall said he wasn’t thrilled to have Scott speaking out.
“It’s not a great look. I got a few texts on the morning the headlines came out in the Herald Sun, so that’s never great.”
Ex-AFL boss Ross Oakley says questions about Hawthorn’s salary cap in its golden years never came across his desk.
“I know nothing about them having a secret bank account and if we did, we would have done something about it,” Oakley said.
“I have absolutely no knowledge of it, so there’s not much I can say other than if we’d known they would have been penalised.”
EDDIE: ‘NO DOUBT’ SCOTT CLAIMS ARE TRUE
Collingwood president Eddie McGuire said Scott’s claims were “a massive story”.
“I don’t think there is any doubt at all that that was all happening in the ’80s, and it wasn’t just at the Hawthorn Football Club,” McGuire told Triple M.
“It was systematic right throughout the AFL or the VFL as it was then known …
“What Don is saying, I have no doubt would be correct, he’s putting a little bit of meat on the bones of all this sort of stuff …
“The whole thing was just a rort. It was a shemozzle …
“It might be an interesting week watching some of the TV shows … a lot of people who might have been on the receiving end will actually be in front of the camera.
“There might be a few squirming there.”
The AFL had a moratorium in 1995 allowing clubs to come clean and confess past breaches without the threat of punishment.
“Carlton owned up to it … they took advantage of the moratorium but another club didn’t and my memory was it was Essendon. And eventually they got hammered for it,” Oakley said.
Asked if Hawthorn had ever admitted to anything, Oakley said: “No. Never. Not in my knowledge.”
Scott said the league’s long-time salary cap officer Phil Ryan, president of Hawthorn from 1968-1979, warned Hawks bosses about their conduct after becoming aware of the Tasmanian payments scheme.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Oakley said. “He (Ryan) certainly didn’t discuss that with me. Has Scotty provided any evidence that was the case? No, well, Phil is dead now, so I just don’t think that guys should be talking about dead fellas because they can’t retort.
“Phil Ryan was a fine, upstanding man. He was considered to be one of the shining lights at the Hawthorn footy club and certainly at the VFL.
“I would think, frankly, that if Phil knew that there was something going on that wasn’t right, it would have come to light. And that’s because I know Phil would be a very upright and very honest man.”
In 1992, Brisbane Lions coach Robert Walls named Hawthorn as a club that “went beyond the limit”.
“Well, there were suspicions about any club that was going well at the time,” Oakley said.
“They all thought that they were going well because they’d breached the salary cap in some way or another. It certainly wasn’t my knowledge.”
Asked if he was surprised by Scott’s allegations, Oakley said: “Knowing what we all know now about what was going on behind the scenes, I’m not particularly surprised. There are all sorts of stories that come to light now, some of which may well be true, others are just fiction and not much can be done to justify them.”
Even if historic claims could be proved, Oakley said it would be too late to impose penalties.
“Oh yeah. It’s just not a possibility now I would have thought to do anything about it. It’s a totally different era and totally different circumstances,” he said.
“It’s pretty easy to do now when most of the so-called protagonists are dead.”
EXPLOSIVE DETAILS: HOW HAWKS CHEATED SALARY CAP
Hawthorn great Don Scott has cast doubt over the club’s historic run of premierships in the late 1980s and early 1990s by claiming the Hawks systematically cheated the salary cap.
Scott said club chiefs used a secret bank account in Tasmania to pay some of team’s biggest stars under the table.
He has cited impeccable sources with full knowledge of the scheme.
The Hawks won flags in 1986, 1988, 1989 and 1991 after the league began to properly police total player payments.
“Hawthorn were breaching the salary cap,” Scott declares in an explosive podcast to be released this week.
“The only reason Hawthorn held all those star players and had success was that they were paying under the lap. They had a bank account down in Tasmania and they were paying the players that way.
“They were contravening the salary cap and that is why those players stayed at Hawthorn because of the money they were receiving.
“So consequently there has got to be a day of reckoning and that came for Hawthorn.
“They were cash strapped.”
The ‘No Merger’ podcast, exploring Hawthorn’s narrowly aborted merger with Melbourne in 1996, introduces Scott’s allegations by declaring: “What doesn’t quite add up is how could Hawthorn attract and retain such quality players with major financial problems and a meagre membership base.”
The Hawks boasted some of the game’s greatest players through the golden era, including Jason Dunstall, Dermott Brereton, Gary Ayres, John Platten, Chris Langford, Darren Jarman, Robert DiPierdomenico, Gary Buckenara, Michael Tuck, Chris Mew and Andrew Collins.
Scott, the Hawthorn Team of the Century ruckman who saved the club from the proposed merger, gave News Corp an expanded account of the salary cap scheme.
“They were paying wives, they were paying girlfriends. They were doing a lot of things back then,” he said.
“It was like the Roman Empire (at Hawthorn). It was decadent. It is (cheating). But everyone cheats. Everyone was doing it. It was rife through the AFL.”
Scott revealed the league’s long-time salary cap officer, Phillip Ryan, president of Hawthorn from 1968-1979, had warned club bosses about their conduct.
Ryan was the league’s player payments commissioner from 1980 until 1992.
“The late Phil Ryan went out to Hawthorn and said, ‘Listen, you blokes are paying over the salary cap. I’m giving you a warning, but you’re doing it’. But nothing ever came out,” Scott said.
“And the way they were doing it was through Tasmania.
“They put money into an account down there. They (the players) would get a cheque from something that was unrelated to the footy club. Back in those days you could do a lot of different things with bank accounts.”
Asked to reveal his source, Scott said: “No. I can’t. But it’s a very reliable source. Not Joey next door. I was friendly with the people who would know. Someone very, very responsible told me.”
He said the scheme was masterminded by multiple “former Hawthorn administrators”, who have since passed away.
“And that’s why I am talking to you, because they are all dead. None of them are alive,” Scott said.
Scott said he was not sure whether the Hawthorn players involved knew they were pocketing money outside the cap.
“I really don’t know. They probably just put a price on their head — ‘I want $100,000’ — and they wouldn’t care where the $100,000 came from,” he said.
In 1992, Brisbane Bears coach Robert Walls described the salary cap as a joke and named Hawthorn as a club which went “beyond the limit”.
Then Hawks’ president Trevor Coote denied that the club had abused the cap.
“Totally untrue, quite out of order,” Coote said at the time.
Coote was Hawthorn president from 1988 to 1993, taking over the role from Ron Cook who led the club from 1980 until 1987.
The VFL/AFL salary cap was enforced for the first time in 1985.
A moratorium 10 years later allowed clubs to come clean and confess past breaches to the league without the threat of punishment.
*Scott’s claims were originally aired on the No Merger podcast. Episode I is available from Tuesday on iHeartRadio or on your favourite podcast app.
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Originally published as Hawthorn used secret bank accounts to pay premiership stars outside salary cap, Don Scott says