Australian Football Hall of Fame 2024: Hawthorn great Jason Dunstall elevated to legend status
Legendary goalkicker. Legendary AFL media personality — Jason Dunstall has done it all in football. JON RALPH remembers the Australian Football Hall of Fame legend’s playing career and transition to TV and radio star.
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Jason Dunstall’s journey to football immortality and Hall of Fame legend status was shaped by a return call from his beloved Carlton that never eventuated.
Before he was a goalkicking god and four-time premiership star, and then footy’s most versatile media performer, he was a Carlton fan with a dream.
In 1984, as he made waves kicking 73 goals for QAFL side Coorparoo, the 20-year-old’s eye-catching state debut for Queensland against Tasmania had VFL clubs jumping onto planes heading north. The contenders for his services? VFL powerhouse Hawthorn, perennial struggler Fitzroy and Carlton.
The great Allan Jeans was even spotted in the Coorparoo rooms witnessing Dunstall’s breathtaking speed off the mark and sure hands leading from the square.
And yet for Dunstall the choice would have been easy … if only Carlton hadn’t gone cold.
“There was no draft back then. Basically each club could sign an interstate player on a form 4. And I only spoke to clubs after playing that state game for Queensland in 1984,” Dunstall recalled this week ahead of his induction to legend status.
“I spoke to Hawthorn, Fitzroy and Carlton. Hawthorn was the more stable club, Fitzroy didn’t have the stability and Carlton never came back to me. I would have picked them as my No.1 choice easily.
“Our jumper at Coorparoo was the same as Carlton’s jumper and all my mates had grown up Carlton supporters. Hawthorn worked out well. The timing was good. I had one year with Leigh Matthews (playing full forward) and then he retired and there was a hole up forward.”
Dunstall filled that hole with such command and authority that by the end of his 14-year, 269-game AFL career only Tony Lockett and Gordon Coventry had topped his 1254-goal tally.
That career dripped with superlatives and achievements – those four flags, three Coleman Medals, four Peter Crimmins Medals, 12 times Hawthorn’s leading goalkicker.
Dunstall exploded like a cannonball off the mark, had a vice-like grip, kicked set shots like a dream in such a manner he was feted by the Cooodabeen champions for this monotony.
“I can play the Jason Dunstall! Oh! Lead out chest mark, Kick a goal kick a goal, Lead out chest mark, Kick another goal,” they would sing.
And, yet, as Dunstall said this week, his lack of endurance might have ended his career before it started had he found his way to Fitzroy.
“Sliding doors mate, sliding doors,” Dunstall says.
“They were doing the 100 x 100m sprints at Fitzroy and I don’t think I could have done it. Wallsy (Robert Walls) was doing 100 x 100s on the minute and you had to run them in 18 seconds. I would have played twos. If you didn’t complete it in the pre-season you couldn’t play until you got through. I would never have got through. I might never have played if I went to Fitzroy.”
For Dunstall all those magical moments and epic achievements tend to blur into one – he is no scrapbook keeper, he has few specific memories of the celebrations or triumphs.
And yet it doesn’t mean it was ever easy.
He was dropped multiple times in that first season of 1985 before a breakout eight-goal display in round 16 that Dunstall says instilled some trust in him from his teammates.
And, yet, in the 1985 finals series amid four and five goal tallies against Footscray in the qualifying and preliminary finals he kicked a single goal against Essendon in the semi-final then went goalless against the Dons in the 78-point Grand Final defeat.
The following season as the Hawks reached the Grand Final again, breakout performer Dunstall had 71 goals and yet the critics were circling after Bruce Doull had kept him to two points in the semi-final a fortnight earlier.
He would respond with six goals straight in Doull’s final game, quietening the doubters and starting a run of Grand Final performances that saw him kick 6.0 (1986), 7.2 (1988), 4.3 (1989) and 6.2 (1991) in his four premierships.
“Bruce was one of my heroes growing up. I used to idolise him. So it’s a very strange feeling when you play on a player you genuinely idolise. He never said anything. He was never a grunter. ‘86 was important, particularly after failing in ‘85. And we were a club that expected success and the players demanded it of themselves. There was a hunger to make up for ‘85 that year,” he says.
And with that, Dunstall was off.
He would kick 94 goals in 1987, then a remarkable 132 in 1998 including seven in the Grand Final win over Melbourne then 138.76 in the 1989 premiership defence.
On a day that will live in AFL folklore, as Dermott Brereton battled broken ribs, John Platten concussion and Robert DiPierdomenico a rib injury and punctured lung, Dunstall still remembers how close the Cats came in the 1989 decider.
“It was a surreal experience at the time. They just went the man so hard. They were just trying to kill everyone. We just focused on the ball and built up a score but the longer the game went, the more telling it became on our lack of fit players,” Dunstall says.
“And there was a lot of clockwatching in the last quarter. We didn’t know how much time there was on the clock, you weren’t getting messages from the bench saying there were X minutes to go.
“Your heart is in your mouth and we were hanging on for grim death and (Gary) Ablett was kicking them from everywhere and we just had to find a way to crawl over the line.”
The fourth premiership came in 1991, but it is the 1992 season that Dunstall credits as his most dominant.
“I think 92 was the best, because of how much ball I got,” he says of his 145.84 tally.
“I didn’t kick particularly well, I kicked more than 80 points, I had 230 shots for goal.
“That kind of gives you confidence you are going to have 10 shots for goal every week, you’ve got something to work with.”
In round 6 of that stunning season, he would kick 17.5 against Richmond and yet as a boy from Queensland he had no idea how close he came to Fred Fanning’s VFL-AFL record of 18 majors.
“It was a day where everything went right. I even got a free kick or two from the umpires. I was scragged so much back then, Jeansy would talk to the umpires and it always fell on deaf ears but I got one or two free kicks that day and the ball came my way a lot,” he says.
“I got introduced after it to Fred Fanning. He said, “You were inaccurate because I kicked 18.1. I said I kicked 17.5 which is pretty good conversion but he said, ‘Nah, you were inaccurate’. He just laughed.”
In his final seven seasons, Dunstall would play in only four losing finals as the records were accumulated and he battled injuries including an ACL tear and the fractured skull that saw him famously wear that leather helmet so relentlessly mocked by The Footy Show’s Sam Newman.
He still remembers being cleaned up by Collingwood’s Darren “Pants” Millane, minutes into his return clash and realising that he had lived to tell the tale.
He could get on with the business of kicking goals again.
He ignored a $2 million, 10-year offer from Brisbane with life membership in sight from Hawthorn and, as his career drew to a close, he wondered where life might take him.
Channel 9 media man Eddie McGuire was waiting with an offer.
“I recruited him to be in the original The Footy Show, there the first night,” McGuire said this week.
“Dermott Brereton was in Sydney (as his former Hawthorn teammate) and I said, ‘Let’s get Jason Dunstall’, and the guys at Nine said, ‘What, the boring one?’
“I said he’s anything but boring. To me he’s one of the most intriguing characters in football.”
It would set Dunstall on a 25-year media journey through Nine’s The Footy Show and Channel 7’s ‘Living and Kicking’ and finally Fox Footy’s broadcasts, including The Bounce, where he has turned himself into a modern-day Lou Richards.
To watch Dunstall effortlessly make magic as The Bounce’s host without the aid of an autocue or turn an ailing Fox Footy segment into something captivating is to realise his rare gift.
Dunstall has never suffered fools and, yet, if he says his famously testy on-air relationship with Sam Newman was mostly an act, we are now seeing him as his most charismatic.
“It’s 90 per cent theatre,” Dunstall says.
“All the stuff with Sam was just playing roles. I don’t care what people think but it was amusing the way they would stereotype me as cranky and not liking people. I was getting a life out of the media post-football so it didn’t bother me. As long as the bosses think you are doing OK it doesn’t matter.”
McGuire says of that cutting wit: “He was no-nonsense with his humour like he was with his humour. Right on target every time.
“You didn’t want to be on the losing side of a Jason Dunstall tirade or quip. But he was this really smart, acerbic but genuinely funny guy. He was well-read, a devotee of music and sport trivia, he understood business. He was one of the naturals.
“People underestimate the work he did for Hawthorn and the Melbourne Renegades. I think Jason Dunstall is one of the great success stories of Australian football as a player, administrator and media personality.”
Says Dunstall of his wonderful career: “We played hard, trained hard and celebrated hard. There was always something going on. It was a fantastic time. There were colourful champion players putting on a show week in and week out. How could you possibly have a regret?”
“I was lucky enough to last 14 years in the game and won four flags.
“The 20-plus years I have spent at Fox Footy has been amazing. I wasn’t setting out to make a career in the AFL. I came down a bright-eyed bushy-tailed guy from Queensland. This was all a new experience …. And I am still here 40 years later.”
Originally published as Australian Football Hall of Fame 2024: Hawthorn great Jason Dunstall elevated to legend status
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