Young Dustin’s secret plan to be an AFL star
DUSTIN Martin’s mum Kathy knew he was going to be a champion, with her box of Dusty’s keepsakes including a strategy he penned as a young footballer on how he was going to become an “AFL star”.
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DUSTIN Martin was always destined to be an AFL star.
A handwritten note from when he was a young footballer shows just how determined he was to make the grade.
Now he’s hot favourite to be crowned the league’s best-and-fairest player at the Brownlow on Monday week.
“My fitness routine to be an AFL star,” the note reads.
Monday was 90 minutes of footy training, Tuesday push-ups, sit-ups and running.
It reads like a list a young English Premier League soccer player might have when plucked as a teenager to join a club academy. But this is a solo effort, written in black pen on blue-lined school paper.
He was fuelled by Nutri-Grain and Vita Brits for breakfast, a salad roll for lunch and dinner was a question mark. He drank water and orange juice.
Mum Kathy found the note again when she was going through his memory box recently.
FROM CASTLEMAINE TO THE MCG: WHERE IT ALL STARTED FOR DUSTIN MARTIN
“As soon as he put a football in his hands, I knew he was going to play AFL,” she told the Herald Sun in a face-to-face interview this week.
“I was positive he was going to play AFL when he was five.”
She said that Dustin and her boys were always health-conscious. “They always looked after their health, my boys ate good food.”
Kathy, 51, has a treasure trove of Dustin’s trophies. She hopes he will add the Brownlow after taking out the AFL Players MVP award.
“I sent him a text message before the start of last season and I said to him this season or next you’ll win the Brownlow,” the proud mum said. “I call him my warrior, that’s what his name, Dustin, means.”
Dustin often gives his mum his trophies for safekeeping. Kathy is hoping for one more.
“When he wins them, he brings them straight to me,” she said.
“He knows they’re safe with me. His room was full, it was chockers, and his wall was covered with all these framed photos and medals galore. He’s got trophies right back from under-12s, best-and-fairests.
“We all knew he was born to play AFL. He’s just getting better and better and better, and he’s only going to get better again next year.
“He blows my mind away, he really does.”
Kathy’s home in western Victoria is filled with family photos, with her boys, Tyson, 28, Dustin, 26, and Bronson, 24, taking pride of place.
Tyson, an electrician, lives in Barcelona, while Bronson now lives with Dustin in Melbourne after finishing his time in the Australian army, including a tour of Afghanistan in 2014.
They’re all mad Dustin supporters and anxiously, but confidently, hoping Richmond can take the next step this year, and break the Tigers’ 37-year premiership drought.
“They’ll be in the Grand Final,” Kathy said. “I think they can win the premiership, after that last quarter against Geelong, they’re hungry for it.”
Dustin and his brothers grew up on three acres in Yapeen, about 10 minutes’ drive out of Castlemaine.
They turned one of the paddocks into a football oval, with proper goalposts at one end and pine posts for goals at the other.
Kathy said that often the three boys would have friends around and a scratch match happened.
DUSTY MARTIN’S BROWNLOW DATE REVEALED
“The boys had their own football oval, that’s why we brought that property,” she said. “It was on three acres so they could play their football and their cricket, motorbikes, all that kind of thing, boys stuff.
“They’d have all their mates around and they’d make up their own football teams and I’d let them write their football numbers on their old T-shirts and they used to run out off the back veranda and run out onto the field.
“Dustin’s younger brother, Bronson, was the umpire, he’d dress in white and they’d have a football match and then I’d feed them all up after the football match.”
The footy didn’t stop when it was colder.
“When it was winter I let them play football in the house, in the hallway,” Kathy said. “I didn’t care about the walls, they can be fixed, and boys have to burn off some energy.”
The Tigers took Dustin at No.3 in the 2009 national draft, but when he was a kid, he was a Saints fan.
His mum painted his room red, white and black.
DUSTY’S 2009 DRAFT INTERVIEW WITH MARK ROBINSON
“He used to live in his Saints hat, he would sleep in it,” Kathy said.
Seven-year-old Dustin was wearing that hat when he met Saints legend Nicky Winmar.
A picture of Winmar with his hands on Dustin’s shoulders is among one of Kathy’s favourites in the photo album.
There are many photos of Dustin throughout his career at Kathy’s home, one commemorating his 50 games for the Tigers, another for his 100-game milestone.
Above the bookshelf is a picture of Dustin when he was nine months old. On either side is a picture of his brothers at the same age.
It’s just a trick of the way his hair has been brushed, but the makings of his distinctive haircut already appear to be on show.
Other photos show a younger Dustin, with far fewer tattoos.
DUSTIN MARTIN OR PATRICK DANGERFIELD: WHO WOULD YOU PICK FIRST?
Kathy had to learn to adjust to the neck tattoos.
“I was depressed for a week when he got the neck tattoos, he’d just turned 18,” she said.
“I just keep telling myself that they suit him.”
Kathy calls Dustin a team player, on and off the field, who doesn’t really like the limelight. “When I got flooded out six years ago, I came home and there was a new dining table and a fridge with a note saying, ‘Love Dusty’,” she said.
“I called him and I was in tears. He said, ‘Don’t forget it was from Tyson and Bronson too’. He didn’t want to take all the credit.”
That nature has been on display in public recently.
Martin turned the Tigers’ qualifying final where he set up six goals.
He had many chances to take a shot at goal himself, but kept passing to players in better positions.
And he gave up $2 million to stay with the Tigers, signing up to a seven-year deal on the cusp of the finals despite receiving the biggest offer in AFL history from North Melbourne, to stay with his mates.
Kathy was rapt that Dustin stayed at Richmond.
“It made my day,” Kathy said. “I didn’t want him going to another club, I knew he was happy at Richmond.
“He was just at home there, they’re his family.”
Kathy is hoping now that he can help the Tigers to a premiership.
A sign on her lounge room wall says: “Faith, if you believe, all things are possible.”
MORE:
FROM CASTLEMAINE TO THE MCG: WHERE IT ALL STARTED FOR DUSTIN MARTIN
DUSTIN MARTIN TOLD MARK ROBINSON AT AGE 17: I WAS BORN TO PLAY AFL
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