Sport is littered with tales of lives gone wrong after careers end, writes Andrew Rule

From the player who robbed a bookie to the wannabe coach whose brazen celebration cost him a job, Dean Laidley is the latest in a long line of footballers to stumble after the spotlight dims. Andrew Rule reports.

Former Kangaroos coach Dean Laidley was arrested recently.

“After you’re the champion,” said the late, great Willie Pep, “first you lose your legs, then you lose your reflexes, and then you lose your friends.”

Pep was a boxer, one of the greatest that ever slipped a punch, but his hard-won wisdom on how hard top sportsmen can fall applies to plenty of fallen footballers.

From Fred Cook to Ben Cousins, “Bomber” Thompson to “Mad Dog” Muir, Jimmy Krakouer to James Hird.

Then there are the ones that everyone knows but who are harder to name.

The truth is, Dean Laidley is just the latest of a long line of former players to stumble while coping with the comedown after years in the pressure cooker of adulation and adrenaline.

There was the admired premiership ruckman who stole anything from anybody, even friends, to feed his gambling.

There was another fearless player who later coached but is still remembered for a truck load of stolen tyres.

Dean Laidley shrugs a tackle in 1996.

Laidley, who coached North Melbourne, was arrested recently.

Racing people swear that one of Tommy Hafey’s players pulled an armed robbery on a bookmaker who has pretended ever since he didn’t recognise the man behind the mask.

Then there’s the all-time great who thought he wouldn’t be caught cheating with greyhounds. When the police came he was hiding in a wardrobe.

And what about the champ who went for a coaching job interstate and, told he had the position, pulled out a bag of cocaine and proceeded to “rack up a line” on the board room table to celebrate? Horrified club officials swiftly reversed the decision and the bloke’s already shaky reputation was in tatters.

There is the sad case of Jimmy Krakouer, the champion North Melbourne player who went to jail for ferrying drugs for a syndicate run by convicted killer John William Samuel Higgs.

Boxers and jockeys are notorious for falling far and hard, possibly because of the enforced starvation they suffer to “make the weight” plus the extremes of heightened emotion and physical danger they face. The fabulously wealthy and freakishly talented heavyweight Mike Tyson ended in jail. Phar Lap’s jockey Jim Pike died broke and alone. Sport is full of stories like theirs.

None has been more famously flawed than terminally alcoholic soccer genius George Best, although Diego Maradona and “Gazza”, the superstar Paul Gascoigne, come close.

They were human wrecking balls who became human wrecks.

Australian football’s casualty list grows longer every season.

The dark side of elite sport preys on those who cannot fill the hole in their lives when they no longer get their fix of the most addictive stimulant of all: applause and adrenaline.

Champion player Jimmy Krakouer was jailed for drug trafficking.

Fred Cook, legendary VFA full forward, is still alive, no thanks to the outrageous way he has abused his body and his mind since the peak of his career in the 1970s.

Cook was a rock star footballer and a likeable rogue, but underneath the jokes and hair-raising scrapes, his story is grim. Herald Sun colleague Jon Anderson once abandoned “ghosting” a book with Cook because he found the details of his decline too sordid and depressing. The working title of the book was Scoring, and not only because Cook kicked record goal tallies.

Another News Corp colleague, Paul Amy, pulled together a lively account of the extraordinary life of the good-looking lair from the western suburbs who went from hero to zero in a decade that should have killed him, and almost did.

The public finally got to hear what the football rumour mill was beating just before Christmas in 1991. Cook’s luck had run out. Police led him into Frankston Court handcuffed and dishevelled.

Ben Cousins won a Brownlow Medal before drugs took over his life.

Cousins after a 2016 court appearance. Picture: Danella Bevis, The West Australian

In recent Channel 7 documentary Cousins he discussed his drug-fuelled spiral. Picture: Channel 7

“Sweat beaded on his forehead,” Amy wrote. “He wore jeans that needed a wash, a similarly grubby white shirt and running shoes on their last legs.”

It wasn’t Cook’s first time in court. Less than a decade earlier he was the most captivating and colourful player in the VFA, where he’d played most of his career because the cash was better than playing for Footscray in the “big league”.

Supporters called the glamorous Port Melbourne goalkicker “Fabulous Fred”. He was the rock star of the competition. But to police, Frederick William Cook soon became known as a crook who couldn’t help himself.

“Fred Cook? Can’t stay out of trouble. He’s a pain in the arse,” a Frankston policeman once commented when asked about the former champion.

He might have kicked big scores to win six Port Melbourne premierships during the club’s most successful era. And he might have transcended the suburban competition in a way no other player had before or since.

But, in the end, he chose bad company ahead of people who would have helped him. They don’t come much badder than Dennis Bruce Allen, alias “Mr Death”.

It was Allen, massive drug dealer and ruthless killer, who introduced Cook to amphetamines, stirring some into his drink when the big man was suffering from a cold at a sportsmen’s night. It was love at first taste. Cook fell hard.

Until then he’d relied on strong coffee, sweetened with five sugars, to stay “up”. But, with his days and nights crowded with work and social commitments, he leaned on “speed” until it leaned on him. It was a way of replacing the adrenaline rush of football.

Fred Cook was a top VFL player who began using speed after the rush of footy wore off.

Fred Cook in 1980.

He fell so hard that he slid deeper into crime to pay his drug debts. It started with running illegal sex shows at his Port Melbourne pub and descended to straight-out theft.

He was a kind-hearted crook, who apparently once accepted a contract to kill someone, took the offered money and then warned the intended victim to make himself scarce. All done over a few drinks.

Cook was never sure exactly how many children he had from a string of relationships, some of them simultaneous. He was once watching a junior football game at Rosebud and noted how well one local kid played.

The boy’s mother looked at him and said drily, “He should be able to play, Fred … he’s yours.”

Drugs eventually addled his brain until he found it hard to fold a thought or finish a conversation. He has lost everything except his sense of humour, and still laughs at Willie Pep’s quip about being married six times.

“My first five wives were good housekeepers,” Pep once explained, deadpan. “Each of them kept the house when she left.”

Cook was everything in the late 1980s and 1990s that Ben Cousins has become in the last decade: a shell of his former self, the shocking contrast of past and present made sharper by the good looks and athletic skill that each brought to the game at their peak.

Some footballers climb out in time.

David Schwartz has become a poster boy for a quiet family life after almost destroying his life with a gambling addiction that controlled him for years and potentially cost millions. Brendan Fevola, as amiable as Fred Cook and as naturally gifted as perhaps any player of his considerable size, has also tiptoed back from the precipice of self-destructive behaviour just in time.

But for every high profile example, there are others who have drifted into semi-obscurity and then somewhere worse.

Until a week ago Dean Laidley was one of them.

Friends begged him to sign up for rehabilitation before it was too late, but it seems he could not see himself as others did.

The player the fans once admiringly called “the junkyard dog” has had a tough week. But don’t write him off yet.

READ MORE:

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DENNIS ALLEN: RISE AND FALL OF MR DEATH