Footballer, fighter, friend: The Jake King enigma
Jake King was tiling a roof when he heard Richmond had drafted him and went on to have an outsized influence on Tiger fans and teammates across an unlikely career. Now he’s in the tattoo business and runs with one of the city’s most colourful characters. This is the Jake King enigma: Footballer, fighter, friend.
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There are fighters and there are footballers and, in Jake King’s case, players who are a bit of both.
His best friend from his Richmond playing days says King played like “a pit bull”, and it’s a compliment.
It was what coaches wanted from the rugged little plumber from North Heidelberg via Coburg. His “bite” and blood loyalty was a throwback to the pre-video replay age when toughness was valued the way athleticism is today.
Tiger fans loved the size of the fight in the dog who set an AFL record of 303 push-ups at a training camp.
In his seven seasons and 107 hard-won matches, King was almost a cult figure, one of those that aren’t stars so much for football ability as for behaviour, looks and personality.
The game has always had a handful of these crowd pleasers and crowd teasers alongside more conventional match winners.
Professional sport’s hierarchy is as rigid as anything outside prison, where the price of upsetting the pecking order is more lethal than being delisted or booed.
At the top are superstars who transcend the game. At the bottom, fringe players lucky to scrape a few matches before fading back into anonymity. In the middle are the “good ordinary players” who are like the rhythm section in a band: vital but not box-office.
Then there are showmen and scallywags who attract attention.
Some are gifted players and some are not, but it’s their persona that appeals to (and sometimes appals) the audience.
They are larrikins, and Australians have a weakness for larrikins.
Ted Whitten was as much larrikin as champion. Mark Jackson played only 82 games for three clubs, yet his cartoonish persona — half menace, half madcap motormouth — is remembered long after his sharp goal kicking is forgotten.
Paul Vander Haar looked and acted like a Viking berserker, took screamers and sometimes won games but is revered for training on pies and beer and smoking at half time.
Brendan Fevola’s strength and skill unravelled as he partied and punted his way out of the game like a latter day Sam Kekovich. But people still like them.
Every team has harboured a few larrikins, less so in recent times.
Every club wants players as talented as the doomed Darren Millane and Ben Cousins, but boardroom “suits” and wary sponsors don’t fancy the risk that comes with the reward.
As the game has changed and players become bigger and faster, genuinely small players have become more rare.
That’s one reason King stood out when Richmond took a chance on recruiting a 23-year-old who’d resigned himself to earning enough “on the tools” to buy a house.
King was tiling a roof when he heard he was on Richmond’s 2007 rookie list.
It was a long-odds shot at something he’d dreamt of as a teenager.
How he used that tiny toehold is a tribute to self belief and effort that compares with Tony Liberatore turning himself from reject to Brownlow medallist.
Players that small have to be quicksilver fast or willing to batter their bodies against bigger opponents. King was both.
In his first season, he won the Grand Final sprint.
He also won the hearts of coaches who saw they could switch the tough small defender into a tough small forward who could make life difficult for rivals because he knew all their tricks plus some he’d brought from Coburg.
In his first year, King was literally a cleanskin: not a tattoo on him.
That changed. For someone who boasted he never read newspapers, let alone books, he got to love ink.
By the time injury ended his AFL career in 2014, he had more of it than the New York Times.
It has been a long time since tattoos have betrayed much about those who get them.
Timid bank clerks and millionaire poseurs have them, along with half the police force and tuckshop ladies.
So the fact that King is as densely tattooed as most outlaw bikie gang members doesn’t mean he is an outlaw gang member.
But he is staunch friends with Bandidos boss turned Mongol mature-age recruit Toby Mitchell, whose top-to-toe body art has several bullet holes in it, thanks to an underworld feud that might not yet be over.
King’s relationship with Mitchell has become shorthand for an innuendo that he runs with outlaws.
That impression, which exasperates King’s lawyer John Gdanski, was underlined when he took over the lease of Mitchell’s former tattoo parlour, City Of Ink, in South Melbourne while Mitchell was taking what he called “long service leave” in prison in 2016 on serious drug charges.
Not all lawyers like all their clients. But it is clear that Gdanski sees qualities in Jake King that many of King’s friends do: unswerving loyalty, unthinking generosity, genuine warmth.
Gdanski insists that his client is not Mitchell’s partner in the tattoo business or anything else, that King leased the City Of Ink premises because it was set up for tattooing.
“There is no legal relationship between them at all,” Gdanski told the Sunday Herald Sun this week.
“While (Mitchell) was incarcerated, Jake said, ‘I am going to do this’ and moved in as a tenant’.” End of story.
But there are many Jake King stories, mostly to his credit.
A lawyer who knows him well was interstate with his wife when their daughter, at home in Melbourne, became ill.
She was rushed to hospital with a life-threatening complication.
Her grandparents were too frail to help, and her parents could not get home until next day.
The lawyer called King, who dropped everything, went to the hospital and sat with the sick girl all night until her parents returned.
This does not surprise King’s friend and former teammate, Daniel Jackson, other half of the odd couple they made around Tigerland.
Jackson was and is the picture of the clean cut modern athlete: a polished, polite private school graduate from the inner eastern suburbs, with a Melbourne University degree and a life plan in which football was more stepping stone than career.
A stranger seeing the pair together might mistake them for client and barrister having an informal chat, which shows how wrong stereotypes can be.
A coach spying them at a cafe together once quipped, “This is bad for someone’s reputation — but which one?”
Jackson (who is known to one writer of this story) is as robust as you have to be as a 200-game defender, but probably as well-behaved as any Richmond player since the gentlemanly Francis Bourke.
He has worked and studied in Canada and the UK and now has a player welfare role with the Adelaide Crows.
Jackson recalls that the one player less susceptible to peer pressure than himself was King, who impressed him by declining to drink with teammates after a game in Tasmania. “He said ‘Things don’t go well when I drink’ so he didn’t.”
King left school at 15 and was running his own plumbing business at 21, which made him a more mature team player than his age implied.
“Bachelor of Street,” is how Jackson describes his friend.
“This guy has got values. He’s the one mate in the world who would drop everything to help you without question.”
Jackson once called him from Canada, worried his grandmother was going to be overcharged for a hot water service.
King sacked granny’s plumber, found a cheaper unit and installed it himself.
In a searching television interview with footy guru Mike Sheahan, King admitted: “My biggest strength is that I care. My biggest weakness is that I care too much.”
It was an oblique reference to his loyalty to people the AFL disapproved of.
He said he’d never been handcuffed, charged or convicted of anything.
That changed.
A year later, in 2017, King and another former teammate, Ty Vickery, were arrested over extortion claims.
King was charged with making threats to kill. That King put his neck on the line for a friend who believed he’d been defrauded of $143,000 didn’t surprise those who know him.
After the carefully-recorded and expletive-filled threats were played in court, lawyer Gdanski explained: “He lost his temper. He’s from Heidelberg where they tend to swear a lot.”
The “Heidelberg defence” worked: King avoided conviction after pleading guilty to making threats and to possessing testosterone.
It seems the bad comes with the good in a man who defends family and friends, no matter what.
A friend quotes a US coach who said of a brave player: “The only way to stop this player is to shoot him.”
That, unfortunately, is a distinct possibility in the tattooing business, which seems to attract trouble.
City Of Ink was sprayed in a drive-by shooting in 2018, presumably by people ignoring the fact it has no legal link with Mitchell or Mongols.
Interestingly, at least one bona fide criminal shares Jake King’s view that having his picture taken with gangsters doesn’t make him one, too.
In 2017, jailed underworld hardman Gavin Preston gave King some advice via social media.
“Lately, I’ve been hearing rumours about you being gangster about town,” Preston wrote. “Just some friendly advice little man. The rules are very different to the game you’re used to. There’s a lot more on the line than four points. Injuries are a lot more significant than a shoulder reco. If you don’t believe me, just ask your mate.
“So buddy, stick to the footy shows and radio interviews, premieres and all that other shit ex-players do … You thinking you’re a gangster is like me and my mates having a kick on the MCG after the game and then thinking we’re AFL material.”
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