‘Was almost out the door’: how Mason Cox scored Collingwood contract
Back in 2014 Collingwood Football Club star Mason Cox hadn’t heard of Melbourne or AFL - now he’s an Aussie citizen and has played more than 100 games, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing.
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Mason Cox hadn’t heard of Melbourne in 2014. He had never seen an AFL football at that stage either. He was asked to attend an AFL trial in LA. He only went because it was all expenses paid, and a chance to catch up with mates who lived there. Now, he’s played 104 games and is an Australian citizen. We spoke about soccer, basketball, an underwhelming combine, still not knowing the rules, agreeing to go to the Lions, and the brilliance of Craig McRae.
HM: High school soccer, university basketball, AFL from nowhere. How good a natural athlete are you?
MC: I’m probably decent at every sport, probably not phenomenal at one sport. My brothers are the same – we always had a decent amount of co-ordination so we could pick up things pretty easily and we played all kinds of sports growing up, so I think that helped. I made do with the talent I had, and just worked my ass off to try to be as good as I could.
HM: You played soccer in school, won the state championship. What position were you?
MC: Centre-back. That was a long, long time ago – I totally forgot that even happened. I got a little ring for that too, but I have no idea where that thing lives! I didn’t have any speed, so I just was a bully! And had the record for the most red and yellow cards in a pre-season! That was the most exciting thing about my high school soccer career, which led pretty well into the AFL, I think.
HM: Before we get to the AFL, in terms of your basketball, how handy were you? I read that you shut down Joel Embiid; is that true or is that Wikipedia spin?
MC: I think it was like a minute and a half, but I’m not going to get lost in the details. I was a bench player; I wasn’t even on the bench at times, I was behind the bench and knew I wasn’t going to play during some big games. It wasn’t until playing my last year that I got a call-up and went over playing in the University of Texas and had a few injuries, but I was able to get game time and prove myself. And from there I was just able to play legit minutes through the back half of the year and play in a few NCAA tournaments, which was pretty cool. I was the guy eating Skittles behind the bench and knew my warm-up top was never going to come off, so I didn’t really have to stress too much for most of my basketball career. I was a role player that was there for essentially practice but got suited up for games.
HM: At university you studied engineering. Is that something that you’re wanting to do?
MC: Yes. I finished my mechanical engineering and business management minor. I’m trying to open up as many doors as I can before I finish up. The media is probably the main thing I’m looking at doing, but it’s not a bad plan B, I’d say. I think the longer I’m away from it, probably the less I want to do it and the more I’m interested in doing stuff like you are, and commentating and the podcast and everything else. I’m trying to make hay while the sun shines and see what doors open once it all finishes up.
HM: So in the perfect world, you finish up in however many years and slide into the media or end up with a podcast like Pat McAfee. Do you do that from Australia, or where’s home now?
MC: I’m not really too stressed – there’s more opportunities and unique opportunities here in Australia now with being here for almost a decade. Going home is always an option – I have citizenship and everything and I can go whenever I want – but I just think there’s going to be so many unique pathways that I could do some different things that I never thought would be possible. I’d also love to do some representation for the AFL from the international standpoint. I’ll do the ambassadorship for the USAFL every year; they’ve got a tournament. Both the brothers play in it and then the whole family goes over there; it’s our family reunion and a few umpires like Razor Ray, Chris Donlon and others go over there. But if there’s a role I’d add to the AFL to help the exposure of it, overseas would be awesome. I think the more eyes on it, the more people would just absolutely love the sport. Everyone that sees it for the first time is like, ‘this is f---ing insane, what the hell?’ They’re just so intrigued by it. So I think if there’s a way of showcasing that in a better way than the AFL is to an audience overseas, then hopefully I can be a conduit to that.
HM: Eight years ago, what were the chances of you appearing on USA 60 Minutes with Jon Wertheim as an Aussie rules footballer?
MC: Zero! It would’ve been in the negatives! He is a great tennis writer and commentator and was here at the tennis. He just hit me up and heard the story and we went for a coffee at the club and chatted for an hour-plus. He just said, “Man, it’s an insane story, I would love to be able to tell it if you let me.” I couldn’t tell you how many people have hit me up and been like, “Holy shit, you’re on 60 Minutes over here!” It just blew the minds of people that I grew up with.
HM: How was life growing up? Was it a perfect childhood? What was it like?
MC: I had an amazing childhood. My mum and dad had just worked their asses off. They’d leave the house at five and come back at seven most days, and us kids would walk home after school and take care of ourselves during the day, especially towards middle school and high school. They just did everything they could to provide for us. It’s pretty phenomenal what they gave up for us to have the opportunities in life.
HM: How often are they down in Australia? I see them on the TV, but are they here for long periods, or are they pinch hitting in and out?
MC: They come for a month during the season and then they’ll come back for finals for however long that lasts, so I think last year they were probably here for almost two months. The brothers come out maybe once every couple years, but they came out last year for the prelim and then they came out for the grand final back in 2018, so they’ve been intermittently here and there just depending on how we go. Mum and Dad have always blocked out a whole month of their life during the year to be able to come over here. We went to Perth and they went down to Margaret River. They travel a bit of Australia while they’re here, just while we’re going to games, and being able to watch those interstate. So they’ve seen quite a bit of the country too and just absolutely love it.
HM: Just going back to the 2014 International AFL Combine, who actually called you? Did you apply, or is some random guy ringing you out of the blue and saying, “Hey Mason, there’s this weird game they play in a small part of Australia, there’s a tryout, do you want to come over and try?” How does it actually play out?
MC: From the NCAA standpoint, there’s a lot of rules and regulations about who you can talk to from a professional standpoint, but as it was my last year I could talk to whoever I wanted. A guy called Jonathan Givony, who was like a scout, had put together this mock draft for the NBA. He would watch all these games in college and he would try to figure out what the top 20 would be. The AFL somehow got in contact with him and said, “Hey, can you give us some people that you’re watching that are not going to play in the NBA but might play overseas or might have a unique story?”
HM: Why you?
MC: He’d been watching one of our games against Gonzaga, as there were six guys that were potentially going to go to the NBA that were playing across both teams. He had heard that I was playing soccer and transferred into basketball and thought those are two sports that would probably transfer into AFL the best, and he hit up our media guy. I was just the gangly white dude that was the plus-one and happened to be in the right place and right time!
HM: Where did it go from there?
MC: I was coming back from spring break and the guy from the AFL just said, “I’ve got this weird opportunity for you. There’s this game called AFL.” We googled it, I just sat there for like an hour, and then he essentially just Facebook-messaged me and we went through the whole thing.
HM: From there?
MC: He said, “There’s a combine in LA in a few months. We would love you to be there.”
HM: Was the combine impressive?
MC: The combine was very, very basic stuff! No offence to the AFL, but it was pretty poorly put together. A white unmarked van picked me up from the airport, and I just had no idea what was going to happen. We ran around a track that had an adult league soccer game being played at the same time in the middle of the field. At the same time as that, there were “Karens of Brighton” walking around the track with their strollers and their dogs, while we were doing a 3km time trial on the track. Funny looking back at where it started!
HM: It was that agricultural?
MC: Yeah, there was nothing really booked, it seemed. They did have one testing area that was in a gym, which was out the back of a factory garage, to do jumps and stuff. The football skills work was all just done in a random park.
HM: Had you ever seen a match or seen a footballer touch a football? Did you know the sport existed?
MC: No, I’d never heard of it. I’d never even heard of Melbourne at that point. All I knew was Sydney because Sydney was one of the first places in the world to go into the New Year – seeing the iconic bridge and the fireworks and all that. I knew what a rugby ball was because of the All Blacks in New Zealand and the Haka. I’d never seen or touched an AFL ball in my life.
HM: You must have been impressive running around in between Karens. That was in LA in March 2014. There was another combine in May in Australia. Were you thinking at this point that you could actually make a list?
MC: Shit no. I just saw it as free trip to LA. I told them I’d only go to LA for the combine if I could stay an extra day to go out with my mates that live in LA because I could never afford to fly there. All my expenses were paid so I went out for one more night in LA before I went back to uni!
HM: How did you get convinced to go to Australia?
MC: After the combine was finished, Derek Hine from Collingwood approached me and we sat out the back of this like Holiday Inn and talked. Derek tried to take up as much of my time as possible before anyone else could talk to me, so he sat with me in a gazebo for an hour just talking shit with me about opportunities in Australia. He said, “It’s crazy, but you could make the list. What are you doing tonight?” And I was like, “Well, I’ve got a friend picking me up from here, and then we’re going to shoot off for drinks.” He said, “Well, come back with me, we’ll book your flight at the counter, we’ll fly to Australia.” And I was like, “I’ve got two days worth of clothes, man, like there’s no f---ing chance.” I was just blown away because a free trip to LA turned into a free trip to Australia!
HM: You left a few weeks later, and you took your “agent” to Australia.
MC: Derek offered me to fly to Australia essentially that night. I went back to school for two weeks, and I had my brother became my “agent”. He was taking calls from the AFL and sorting out things with a few of the different teams. I got focused on finishing up with my final exams and then essentially the AFL said, “We want to fly you out … so you can go and see everyone else.” At that point I was just like, “This is insane – I know nothing about Australia!” I said I’d come if my agent could came with me! They agreed, so I got a free trip for myself and my brother to Australia to go and check out what AFL was and see if it was a real sport.
HM: Which brother have you taken at this point?
MC: This was Nolan – he’s the MVP of the USAFL every single year. He actually just won the MVP of the local tournament he was in! This guy texted me yesterday, and was like, “Your brother’s a freak!” I was like, “If he was 10 years younger, he’d probably be able to play in the AFL.”
HM: He plays the Austin Crows, is that right?
MC: Yeah, he’s the one that plays for the Crows.
HM: Like Vinny Chase and Turtle. Neither of you had any idea what you were doing, but it must have gone well. What were you thinking you were doing post uni?
MC: I had a job at ExxonMobil and it was a six-figure job! And now I was contemplating moving to Australia!
HM: Were you excited or worried?
MC: I’d never heard of the AFL so I was cautious. I thought this might be a two-bit Eastern European basketball league! I’ve had friends of mine that played basketball that just had terrible experiences of getting stuck in Serbia and not being able to get out, so I had that mentality probably going into it, but my brother and I just said, “We’ve got nothing to lose”. Worst-case scenario we fly to Australia, have a great time, then we just fly back and just take the same jobs we had. There was not really any trepidation around it, it was just “let’s see what the world’s going to throw at us”. Then the AFL pulled out the red-carpet treatment and we got to see what it legit was and I think the first game I saw was North Melbourne versus Geelong down in Geelong. I had to learn what getting it through the sticks was and all the umpire rules and pointing in the wrong direction and all that stuff. Then I had my first meat pie, all on the same day, so it was a unique experience to say the least.
HM: So then you finished the second combine in May. Derek’s obviously got you in a corner, but what other clubs came hunting?
MC: So Collingwood, Richmond, Port Adelaide, Fremantle and North Melbourne were the five. The AFL only allowed me to talk to them because those were the five that went to the US combine. They were the ones who got access as they made the effort to go to the US. Fremantle flew over their recruiter to Melbourne. I thought, “If I’m going to come over here, I want to live in the centre of football, I want to be totally entrenched in this thing.” It was essentially between Collingwood, Richmond and North Melbourne. Those were the three that by the end of the trip were keen to throw a contract at me and see if I would bite and sign it.
HM: You sign with the Pies and start working on the rules. How long did it take you before you actually knew the rules?
MC: I mean, to this day I’m still trying to figure it out at times!
HM: Are you still grey in some areas?
MC: Oh dude, 100 per cent. The other day I learned that whenever someone kicks it and it hits the point post, I always thought it was a throw-in, but no, it could be out on the full too!
HM: Seriously?
MC: Yep! So some things that happen, I’m just like, “Oh, OK, cool, didn’t know what that was!” It rarely happens – you don’t cover every single little thing, you just figure it out.
HM: Did you pick up a rule book or did you learn it just through listening, watching and observing?
MC: No, just watching, observing. The coaches obviously walked me through the basics of holding the ball and stuff like that, but all the little knick-knack things I just had to figure out on the run. There’s too many little oddities. Like, I remember I was playing Frankston down in Frankston – Darcy Moore tells the story hilariously – but I had no idea I had to give the ball back to someone after giving away a free kick. So I’d like given away a free kick for something and I just left the ball on the ground – I just had it in my hand and dropped it and gave away a 50, and I was like, “What the f---’s that about? The guy’s like looking at me like, ‘You f---ing prick, give me back the ball!’” I was like, “Why would I hand it to you, dick? You get it yourself!”
HM: That’s unbelievable.
MC: One training session, about a month after I had got there, I had no idea I had to bounce the ball. I’d taken a mark and just started sprinting for 100m and kicked the goal. Everyone had stopped like 50m back, pi--ing themselves laughing and everyone’s like, “What are you f---ing doing?” I was like, “What do you mean? I just kicked an amazing goal!” I ran 100m and just embarrassed the shit out of everyone, and they just looked at Nathan Buckley, who was the coach at the time. They’re like, “Have you mentioned what bouncing the ball is?” He said, “We will need to get onto that!”
HM: Your kick now seems to be pretty bulletproof. Was it beneficial that you never learned to kick prior to being at the club? Or are you just naturally good at picking up technique?
MC: A lot of people like to say it was taught to me, like at an older age so “he picked it up and didn’t have any bad habits”. That is true because Craig McRae finetuned the details of just being able to ball drop, and I’d walk around with the footy and just ball drop kick to myself all day. That was my life, essentially, for the first two, three years here.
HM: Your first kick in the AFL just happens to be in front of 90,000-odd on Anzac Day. It’s pretty hard to script this stuff.
MC: It’s pretty hard to describe it, too; there’s no way to explain it properly. If you ask me whether I knew all the rules going into that game, I definitely didn’t! There were quite a few I was still a bit grey on, but I was fortunate enough to get the call-up. Travis Cloke was dropped for an inexperienced American who barely even knew what the sport was. It was just chaotic. Darcy Moore presented my jumper to me and then he ended up being the person that kicked it to me to kick the first goal. So it was a pretty cool full-circle moment, that’s for sure. We’ve been forever connected since then.
HM: When you say you didn’t really know the rules – you were legitimately going out nervously because not only was it a big moment to debut, but you actually still didn’t completely know the rules of the game?
MC: I’d had a full season of VFL, so I knew most of them, but it wasn’t natural per se. I guess you learn by learn by example, learn by experience, and it was a sink-or-swim kind of moment and I was thrown in the deep end.
HM: What’s the best game you’ve ever played?
MC: A lot of people will say the prelim against Richmond. Prelims are big games. I kicked three in the prelim, but I look at other games – I’ve kicked five on Queen’s birthday. The biggest game for me in terms of career direction was at the end of 2017. I’ve never spoken about this game. We played Melbourne. If Melbourne won, they’d go into the finals. I’d been in and out of the team the whole year. It was my last year of my contract. I’d already kind of verbally committed to another team to go somewhere else. Essentially I knew that it was kind of my last hurrah as a Collingwood player. They weren’t coming to the table with a contract at that point, so they weren’t really interested – I was almost out the door, essentially.
HM: Gone?
MC: Yeah. That game was one of the first times we played myself and Brodie Grundy in the same team. We smashed them, kicked Melbourne out of finals. We played really well and I think Bucks and the rest of the crew was like, “Holy shit, we might have something here where we could play two talls in the same team”. This was back in the days when Richmond were playing without a ruckman, essentially. We played really well together and just dominated, then after the game, I was with Lynden Dunn. I said to him, “It’s been great playing with you, I appreciate all the love and support over the years.” I thought that was it, sung the song for the last time, and I remember Eddie McGuire came out to me at one point and he said, “Great game”. I said, “Thanks for everything, I appreciate it, you’ve been an awesome figurehead for me, and the support and everything else.” He was like, “What are you talking about?” I was like, “I’m not going to say anything yet, but I just want to say thank you for everything you’ve done.” And he’s like, “You’re not leaving!” I said, “Well, look man, this is what it is, I’ll let you get all the details but things are in and you know, the wheels are in motion.”
HM: What happened?
MC: Eddie told me the story that he goes home that night, throws his jacket on the couch, he’s furious about the fact I’m not staying at Collingwood. Carla and his kids are losing their minds saying, “What’s wrong?!” I don’t know if there were calls made, but magically within the week there was a contract on the table for Collingwood.
HM: Magic.
MC: I ended up having some other issues around my visa where I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to play because at that point the Australian government was going to change the permanent residency rules where if you were an athlete, you wouldn’t be able to apply for citizenship, you’d only be able to sign whatever contract and that was it. And I was out! Collingwood offered me a contract to stay with the club, therefore I could continue to live in Australia and not have to change employers. So I had to tell the other club I was talking to that I couldn’t go because I essentially could only play those three years and then I would have to go back to America after that. This all happened within a week. Then three weeks later I got permanent residency and was essentially able to take whatever team I wanted to, but at that point the hand was forced to stay at Collingwood. So it all worked out for the better, but it was a pretty intense three weeks. Back to the question though: I think of that game as probably the most important trajectory in my career, but no one really knows about it, you know?
HM: Can I ask you where you were going?
MC: I was going to Brisbane. I met with Chris Fagan and the GM here in Melbourne. Like I said, I was in and out of the team at Collingwood. There was Jarrod Witts and Brodie Grundy in front of me, and playing two big men in the same team was not a thing at that time. So that was before Oscar McInerney came to fruition, and Stefan Martin didn’t want to stay up there – he was looking to change to the Bulldogs and they wanted to get that deal done, and to be able to do that, they needed to cover his position so they were looking at me. Chris Fagan was awesome; he’s an absolute legend. Dale Tapping was up there, who had coached at Collingwood before so I knew him. Chris was super nice and his family was lovely and I met them all and got to go chill at his house and have a coffee and talked through the way he saw the club going and everything else and was fully committed.
HM: That’s unbelievable. When you knocked your eye, was there a chance that you were going to lose vision or remain blurry full time?
MC: My vision’s gone down as far as clarity. I used to be like 20/20 if not better. I wouldn’t know what it is now, but essentially my left eye from the damage will forever be changed.
HM: What did the surgeries do?
MC: The surgeries were to put the eye back together just to be able to get vision, and then from there I had to get cataract surgery. They essentially take out your lens and put a fixed, focal length into your lens. Because of the surgery, there were some issues around it and I had this milky substance start coming into my vision and it just made it extremely cloudy. So they take out that lens that’s been affected, they put in a fixed lens, so now my left eye is long distance and it can’t change shape to be able to see short distance. It’s like a fixed hard lens in there, so if you look at my eyes, one actually kind of glistens a little bit and has a bit of a shimmer to it. That’s because it’s not real – it’s an artificial eye essentially, like an eyepiece, an artificial lens. So that eye is essentially just going to be buggered for life. I can’t really read books anymore, just because the depth perception gives me a headache because my brain’s trying to see shortsighted, but my eye doesn’t allow it because of the fixed lens. So I do a lot more audio books and stuff now. But the right eye is not as bad, just had a U-shaped tear, which has just got a band over it now.
HM: Which do you use to play?
MC: I can still see really well out of my right eye, but my left eye is not very good. The way the brain works is just insane – nowadays my brain somehow just cancels out the vision out of my left eye. It’s a weird thing to say – I never quite understood until I went through it – but the brain’s essentially rewired itself to ignore the shitty vision out of the left and then focus on the right. My peripheral vision out of my left eye is not very good, so if someone comes at me and hits me from the left, I probably won’t even see it, but my brain just takes over and just makes the right eye focus on the vision, the clarity of that. That’s what I see mentally through my brain: whatever comes out of my vision from my right eye.
HM: Are the glasses prescription, or protection, or both?
MC: It’s both. It is essentially threefold: there’s prescription, there’s a tint and then there’s protection from it. So if I get poked in the eye again, that left eye, I’ll just lose the eye. That eye’s just not going to be there. So last week Ben Keays ripped off my glasses and he swiped at my eye – after the game I had to go straight to the doctor and say, “Is there anything glaringly wrong?”
HM: After the surgeries, for 45 minutes of every hour, you had to be in darkness in your bedroom?
MC: Yeah. 45 every hour for two weeks straight, lying on my back, facing the ceiling. They stitched it up, put this heavy liquid in it, and the heavy liquid has to sit in your eyes a certain way so the stitches heal up correctly. I lay there for 45 minutes of every hour for two weeks straight in a dark room. No family, a few friends and stuff came through; had just broken up with the missus of the time, so that was impeccable timing! I just sat there on my back for two weeks – lying there not knowing if you’re going to have a job the next year because you can’t see, not knowing if you need to retire, if you’re ever going to play football, if you’re ever going to see again or any of that stuff.
HM: Scary.
MC: You just put full faith in the doctor’s hands that your vision will come back. It was crazy. I would never want anyone to have to go through anything remotely close to what I’ve had to go through. I couldn’t see anything – everything was a blur. I had five bottles of medicine, so I had my friends paint the bottles, so you have one that was highlighted blue, one that was highlighted yellow, black, and whatever it was. Black was four times a day, yellow was three times a day and blue was five times a day. That was the only way I could figure out what medication was what and be able to do it on my own. It was some dark times, man. Why am I here in this country? Playing this crazy sport? All that shit plays in your mind. It was the most depressing part of my life.
HM: I’m glad it’s all worked out. What makes Craig McRae so brilliant in his role?
MC: There’s plenty on there. I would say his personal relationships. I’ve obviously had a really good one with him over the years, but I think as a coach you can do the Xs and Os and all that stuff perfectly, but if you don’t have a team that wants to play for you and wants to win for you, you’re never going to be successful. Craig’s really good at being able to have those relationships with every single player and he’s very caring, kind and respectful of everyone and their families or whoever it may be. If something happens, he definitely gives them the time to figure it out. He just puts so much effort into each individual and that comes out on the football field because we’re not sitting there playing for ourselves, we’re not playing individually to have a good game or anything like that. It’s a real team atmosphere and a real family feel, and not only from the players but also the staff and everyone else included. His ability to get everyone on the same page and in one direction towards one goal is phenomenal. He’s so humble about the whole thing. You keep telling him, “What you’re doing is incredible”, and he says, “Oh yeah, thanks man, but we’ve got so much further to go.”
HM: So he just focuses on the positives. Positives, positives, positives.
MC: Yeah, I’m pretty sure Craig, whenever he clips up my tapes, does not put anything that I screw up.
HM: Is that right?
MC: I’ve never said it, but I think whenever I look at my review tapes, he refuses to put me dropping a mark in there – he will not do it. There’s always like a hype reel before we go to every game and he goes through all the different moments in the season that have been impactful with big contests. He just knows how to handle people’s emotions.
HM: Amazing. Segue … where does Trump end up?
MC: Hopefully jail.
HM: OK, let’s just park that. Have you and Christian Petracca made up?
MC: I haven’t talked to him since! I’ve been making a few enemies in the league lately, that’s for sure. We got caught up in the moment and just talked a bit of shit, he came back and apologised 30 seconds later, but of course TV didn’t pick it up, so everyone thought we had beef. It was funny because I had no idea it would become a story. I was on a plane to Bali by the time it became a story! I landed and it was a thing. Unlike the media to blow something up!
HM: That doesn’t happen …
MC: Never!
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