AFL finals 2021: How Simon Goodwin responded after the most embarrassing moment of his life
In 2007, Simon Goodwin’s gambling addiction spiralled out of control. But 14 years later, he’s on footy’s biggest stage. Here’s how he turned his life around.
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Simon Goodwin couldn’t sleep.
It was 5am on a warm February morning in early 2007 and he was lying on his living room floor in Adelaide fully aware his world was about to be turned upside down.
The then esteemed Adelaide Crows star had been caught by the AFL betting on a game the previous year.
He was reported to have successfully placed about $2000 on West Coast to win the 2006 grand final against Sydney at the odds of $1.75.
The Eagles won by a point after beating Goodwin’s Crows by 10 points in the preliminary final.
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The news was about to break in the Sunday Mail in Adelaide and all he could do was wait for what he would later describe as “the most embarrassing moment of my life”.
“I remember waking up at five o’clock that morning and the paper hadn’t arrived yet,” he told the Herald Sun in 2008.
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“I was just laying on the lounge room floor waiting for the bang.
“It landed and I went out and got the paper, opened it up and thought, ‘Ouch’. We had word it was going to be front page.
“It was a tough time, a very tough time for not only myself but obviously family and friends.”
Goodwin admitted to a gambling addiction and learned during an intensive eight-week rehab stint about multi-generational addiction that is passed down through families through trauma.
His grandfather was an alcoholic until beating the bottle later in life, and Goodwin’s parents separated when he was four.
He has since overcome his gambling vice, but to this day still won’t even buy a raffle ticket.
“If I hadn’t hit rock bottom, who would have known where it could have taken me?” Goodwin said in 2008.
“I feel fortunate that it occurred when it did. If it hadn’t, in two or three years’ time, when I’m not playing footy and I’m in the real world, I’m not sure where I would have ended up.
“These things can actually spiral further out of control when you haven’t got something in your life that you’re really passionate about.
“I feel like I’ve turned my life around a little bit.”
Goodwin, who played 275 games across 14 seasons with the Crows, could on Saturday night become Melbourne’s first premiership coach in more than half a century.
Former Adelaide coach Neil Craig, who coached Goodwin for a large chunk of his illustrious career, said he was proud of Goodwin’s redemption story.
“I think it’s a great case study in terms of how he handled adversity and his capacity to respond to adversity,” Craig said.
“That brings in resilience and asking for help, being open minded, having the capacity to change and to think things through and to be strategic in what you do.
“All those elements are on show with Simon and they’ll continue to be, because high performance sport is a really tough environment because of the demands and the public scrutiny.
“He’s developing some really good behaviours and traits and habits for the role he’s in, and he’ll continue to develop because he has a degree of humility.”
Goodwin the player
In A football sense, Goodwin had achieved the ultimate by the age of 22.
He had back-to-back premiership medals after his 10th and 31st AFL games in his first two seasons in the big league.
In a way, there was nowhere to go but down.
He didn’t go down — he developed into an elite player, three-times best and fairest winner and club captain — but he never again played in a grand final despite three further preliminary final appearances.
“That’s why I was never totally fulfilled,” Goodwin said in 2017.
“You get greedy. You want everything you can possibly get.
“I had success when I was young and then I learned just how hard it is to win premierships.
“My drive, my effort, my perseverance to win another premiership was there throughout my career as it went on … but I was unfulfilled.”
On Saturday he gets the opportunity to fill that void, but this time as a senior coach.
Goodwin loved the training track as a player, and he was known at Adelaide for always being the first out for training and the last to leave.
To this day he’s a fitness fanatic, and he’s has been spotted by Demons players pacing around the car park at Perth’s Joondalup Resort the past last couple of weeks.
“Goody has always taken a personal pride in his physical condition and his wellbeing,” Craig said.
“He learned how to read his body.
“He had a lot of injuries to start with, but it’s interesting when you look back on it because all those experiences probably helped hold him in good stead in terms of where’s he ended up and where he’ll continue to go.”
When asked how he would best describe Goodwin as a person, Craig said: “I find him accountable.
“First of all I find him to be a good person and he’s good company,” Craig said.
“You can have a serious conversation with him, you can have a joke with him and he’s got some humour about him.
“I find him a good person, and an extension of that is he’s prepared to be accountable for his own performances and take responsibility for his performances and also the job that he’s in.”
Craig said he did not see Goodwin as a future senior coach until the Crows star was getting towards the end of his playing days.
“That’s when I saw it more,” Craig said. “And that’s only natural when players start getting towards the end, whether that’s one year or five years away.
“I saw a change in his thinking in that he became very inquisitive as a captain and a senior player, as in wanting to know from a genuine place about why things happen.
“Then we started to see a guy who was thinking slightly differently to the majority of the players that were just concerned about playing the game.
“So he became more curious about the game.”
Goodwin the coach
James Hird could see it in Goodwin almost immediately.
After Goodwin’s retirement at the end of 2010, he was announced as an Essendon assistant coach just three days after Hird’s appointment in the senior job.
In his time at Tullamarine, Goodwin was well regarded for strengthening the Bombers’ midfield group, and to a broader extent the football program when promoted to senior assistant.
When Goodwin was appointed as Paul Roos’ successor at Melbourne at the end of 2014, Hird said at the time he was not surprised.
“From the moment he walked in the door at Essendon you could tell he had the ability and skills set to be a senior coach,” Hird said.
By the time he arrived at Melbourne, Goodwin had already coached a senior game after being appointed caretaker coach for the final round in 2013 following Hird’s 12-month suspension as a result of the supplements scandal.
He was senior assistant to interim coach Mark Thompson in 2014 before winning the job at Melbourne.
Goodwin was at Essendon right throughout the club’s messy supplements saga, but he was never tainted and his reputation didn’t suffer for it.
And when the Demons were looking for Roos’ successor, they knew straight away they’d found their man when Goodwin opened his mouth.
What they wanted to hear was coaching philosophy rather than game plans, and they got that from Goodwin.
“We were looking for someone who had that sort of language and approach. In the room were Roosy, Josh Mahoney, Todd Viney and myself and we were all looking for the same thing,” then Melbourne chief executive Peter Jackson said on SEN.
“He came into the room, he gave the spiel and then started talking about his philosophy as coach and I could have been listening to Paul Roos or myself talk. When we compared that to what we heard from other applicants, we just all looked at each other and said, ‘He’s the guy’.
The Demons wanted a coach who could build relationships with players and Goodwin was the perfect fit.
Melbourne forward Charlie Spargo said Goodwin was a much-loved figure among his players.
“I love him as a coach and think he’s a really good coach personally for me,” Spargo said.
“He’s very good at recognising people who probably don’t get the attention from the media or from the outside.
“He’s very honest with me and makes it very clear to me what my role’s going to be each week, so I thank him for that.
“This year he’s done a really good job of being really consistent in his approach to day-to-day coaching and how we review games.
“Monday we come in and whether it be a win or loss he’s always looking for us to learn and get better.
“As soon as that finishes, it’s straight on to the next one. He’s really process-driven.”
There’s no next one this year after Saturday night.
If the Demons can salute, the front page of the Sunday papers will feature Goodwin once again, but this time with a beaming image as he holds the premiership cup aloft with skipper Max Gawn.
From the “most embarrassing moment of his life” 14 years ago to what would be one of his greatest.
Inside the quirky coaching genius of Williams
— Simeon Thomas-Wilson
Mark Williams pushed Dean Brogan the first time they met. Not figuratively speaking. Literally.
The then Port Adelaide coach walked up to the young NBL champion who was contemplating a code hop to AFL and gave him a shove.
“We were having a kick at Alberton,” Brogan recalls.
“He came up to me and sort of pushed me. I had just met him and he just wanted to see what my reaction would be if someone came up and pushed me.
“I think he was a bit impressed because normally if someone pushes you and they are the senior coach you don’t react but he could see in my reaction as he kept pushing and pushing me, saying “what if someone does this to you on the footy field” and I think he was pretty impressed with my answer because it wasn’t a back down sort of answer.
“So I think I got some runs on the board early days when he tested out my
toughness
“But that was the sort of coach he was, he put it on you, he wasn’t afraid to see what you were made of
“And you always knew where you stood with him because of that and I think a bit of that old school toughness is coming through with Melbourne.”
One out of the box
Williams’ name has been synonymous with Melbourne’s rise to the top this year.
He arrived under Simon Goodwin at the end of 2020 and immediately went to work on the group’s skillset.
Former Docker and hard-running wingman Ed Langdon was one to reap immediate dividends.
“It’s nothing technically speaking, I have always kicked the same way, but what Choco instils is a sense of calm when you are kicking,” Langdon told the Herald Sun earlier this year.
“There is a lot going on in AFL footy, and for that split second when you are kicking, you need to be as calm as you possibly can be.
“He puts you under so much pressure at training, he starts yelling at you to put you in that position you could be on in the field, but the implication is that you are still calm and still manage to hit a target.”
Williams — now 63 who played with West Adelaide, Port Adelaide, Collingwood and Brisbane — has long been perplexed by professional footballer’s inability to hit targets. He still runs a “kicking school”.
During his time at Alberton he would ask assistant coach Stuart Cochrane to drive around the oval with the car sunroof down and instruct players to kick the football into the moving target.
“He was always thinking outside the traditional square with things,” Brogan said.
“And he is not afraid of trying things really differently such as kicking school and imagine you are trying to kick the ball in a car sunroof when it is on the move.”
Because of Williams’ emphasis on kicking, it was big if he wanted to do some one-on-one with you.
“You knew when he went out of his way to find you on the track and do some
kicking with you that you had made it so to speak,” Brogan said.
“He just eats and breathes footy and he just got the best out of you.
“I came from basketball … and I had a lot of things I needed to change and without his hardness of coaching and his ability to teach I probably wouldn’t have made it in the game.”
This year at Melbourne Williams hired cranes to hold up tackle bags for training drills.
Williams’ sister Jenny, a sports performance psychologist, said it was “funny” that a former cross-town rival in Crows great Simon Goodwin had taken a chance on her brother to join him at Melbourne.
“If you want to get to the top you find experienced but still hungry people who want to fight and give an edge,” she said.
“It’s funny because people will say it (Melbourne’s success) is all Mark, and then someone will say oh it’s all because of this person but the truth is in between it all.
“Mark makes a difference because of what he is like, his knowledge and who he is but at the same time you have a senior coach (Simon Goodwin) who is just really good at getting all he needs out of the players.”
Changing with the times
The son of Port royalty Fos, Williams coached the Power to its only AFL premiership in 2004.
He then lost his job less than six-years later, with the 119-point drubbing in the 2007 grand final the beginning of the end.
He went to Greater Western Sydney as part of a Kevin Sheedy succession plan but lost the role to Leon Cameron.
After three seasons at Richmond he found himself out of the system again.
Jenny says he has changed considerably over the years.
“It is probably interesting, the main thing and one thing that I think people don’t really realise about Mark is that he is always learning,” she said.
“But unfortunately for a lot of reasons he didn’t get another chance and he is so grateful to Melbourne and he is loving it so that is so good.”
Jenny said Williams’ love of footy and being back in the system would rub off on Melbourne players and coaches.
“I think people underestimate the impact of a joyous person around the place and that was probably the thing that he suffered the most, when things went wrong from 2007 to 2010,” she said.
“There was a rebuilding but he wasn’t really given much of an opportunity because the press really bit his head off, he mustn’t relate to players and things like that.
“And I know my brother quite differently so that’s why when that was happening I said, that’s not actually Mark”.”
Earlier this week the comedy show Ted Lasso, about an American coach trying to make it in English soccer, claimed multiple awards at the Emmy’s.
Jenny has put Williams onto it, saying he reminds her of two of the characters.
“A mix of coach Beard and Ted Lasso,” she said.
“Anyone who knows him, they know he is silly, they know he wants the best for people.”
Brogan said he was so pleased for Williams that he got another chance in the AFL at the age of 63.
“Choco has mellowed somewhat in his old age,” he said.
“I think he has a really good relationship with some of those old Port boys now and I know he is really proud of what they have achieved on and off the field.
“And at the same time we are just so rapt that he back in the system and having another crack at a flag
“I was worried for a while that he might be lost to the game at the AFL level so
just really pleased that Simon Goodwin and Melbourne have seen his value and I bet you that they are loving their decision.”
Williams and the players that played under him at Port are in a WhatsApp group chat.
Whenever one of the members has a milestone or achievement, it is Williams who starts the group chat.
“I wouldn’t say he was difficult to get along with but he was just different when he was a coach and you were a player,” Brogan said.
“But now you can always pick up the phone and have a good conversation with Choc.
“I think it is a full credit to him to get to his age and change a lot of things. It takes a lot for a coach who has had a lot of success doing things the one way to change and adapt to footy and footy players today.”
“It’s a perfect role for him”
Josh Bruce will miss the grand final with a knee injury. Among those to offer support has been his former GWS development coach.
“Obviously Choco Williams is coaching with Melbourne this weekend but he was my initial head coach at the Giants and I had some really tough times at the Giants and probably wasn’t developing as well as I should have, my professionalism wasn’t definitely wasn’t up to standard in my first few years I didn’t really know what it took and he sent me a really beautiful message about how much I’ve developed as a person and as a player,” Bruce told SEN.
“Just to hear that from some of the guys it’s really humbling to know it’s not all doom and gloom.”
But the way Williams coached at the Power at times was almost the opposite.
“You could be a bit scared of him,” Brogan said.
“He was quite old school and he was really hard as well. If you weren’t doing something right he would let you know and call you out.”
However the players would still run through walls for him.
“But he was very fair as well, if you were doing all the right things he would give you an opportunity,” Brogan said.
“And one thing he was very good at he was a very good motivator so before the game we would want to run through a brick wall for him.
“Choco has a bit of an aura about him … he just got the best out of you.”
It’s why Brogan thinks Williams’ head of development role at Melbourne is perfect for his former senior coach.
“He was always thinking of different things to improve people’s games and that’s why I think he is in the perfect role now for where he is at in his life and career,” he said.
Could he coach again?
At one point when coaching vacancies arose Jenny stopped asking her brother whether he got an interview.
After Williams left Port in 2010, and then didn’t get the GWS job the AFL went through a phase with younger coaches.
The success of Chris Fagan at Brisbane has prompted clubs to again consider experience when it comes to their coaches.
It is why Williams was considered as a candidate when Collingwood looked for a replacement for Nathan Buckley.
“I think Choco would love to be a coach again but he has really found his niche as a head of development and we are starting to see what he has done as Melbourne,” Brogan said.
“Also at Richmond, the work he did with a lot of their players before they won their flags and they are all elite now.
“He is such a great teacher. Look at all the players who played under him at Port Adelaide and how many have gone into coaching now.”
After finishing at Port Brogan went to the Giants and saw Williams as a developer of players at GWS.
“I think that was the start of Choco being more understanding and having a lot more empathy for the new generation coming through,” he said.
Jenny said he was just thrilled to be back in the system.
“It’s quite funny that a former Crows guy in Simon Goodwin took a chance on Mark,” she said.
“He is loving the opportunity and the main thing is that he takes such joy in watching people get better.
“He hasn’t had the second bite at being a head coach again but he has had a
second bite of deciding whether he likes developing players, at GWS he loved it and at Richmond he loved it.
“And I get so much joy in him telling me what they have done and how much they have enjoyed doing it.
“It is just giving him an opportunity to be a part of a joyous day again.”
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