Hamish McLachlan: What you didn’t know about Richmond Tigers star Ivan Maric
HE’S the Richmond cult hero who only started playing footy aged 16 and is president of his local soccer club. Meet mullet enthusiast, prankster and accidental AFL star Ivan Maric.
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IVAN Maric is a cult hero at Richmond. When he plays, the Tigers are a much better side. When he talks, he is quietly spoken and thoughtful. He talked about his Croatian heritage, being a soccer club president, taking up footy at 16, inserting olive pips in finger food and putting it back on the tray at club functions, racial vilification, his enormous cousin and what he looks for in a mullet.
HM: How does an AFL ruckman end up as St Albans Soccer Club president?
IM: It doesn’t sound a normal path for an AFL player, but the soccer club is like my home. My father was one of the guys who started the club 40 years ago, and as kids, we grew up there learning about life. The club has such a strong family culture, so when the time came to help and put something back in, it was an easy decision to accept the presidency.
HM: How many hours a week do you need to spend to be a good president at St Albans?
IM: I’ve never added them up, but it is a lot more than I thought. It’s a fair few. I knew it was going to be a commitment. Erin, my wife, was OK with it. I’ve tried to structure it so everyone’s sharing the commitments. It is going well. I’ve become very good at stocking the bar fridges!
HM: Did you grow up as a soccer kid or an AFL kid?
IM: Probably soccer. Because of school and some friends being involved in AFL, I had followed the Bombers, but I grew up going to soccer games and preferring to play and watch it than footy.
HM: As a kid you played basketball because it was easier for your parents to get you around because your siblings were playing basketball?
IM: Yeah, I loved basketball. I don’t know if you know much about the history of basketball, but in the ’90s, Croatia had a very strong team. So I played basketball, watched a lot of soccer and played at the club at St Albans, but ended up playing AFL for a living! Growing up in Australia, the footy thing was always there at school. I grew up in Keilor, and Essendon was a pretty good team in the ’90s, so it was easy to follow.
HM: When did you start getting into football?
IM: I started playing when I was 16. Before that I’d played a little kick to kick and lunchtime games with my mates. It was actually my mates from school who ended up getting me down to play a few games when I was 16 for Keilor.
HM: Two years later you’re at the Adelaide Crows?
IM: Yeah, two years later I got drafted by Adelaide. I remember adding up how many games I had actually played when I went over to the Crows, and I think I had only played 10 or 11 going into the first year of serious football. The other reason I didn’t start football until late was that Dad didn’t want me to play. He wanted me to focus on basketball.
HM: Forget that one of them is your current job, which of soccer, basketball or AFL would you choose if you were going to play the sport for fun?
IM: Soccer.
HM: Nice to be able to combine soccer with the Sydney win a few weeks ago. That ball was sitting there perfectly to put into the back of the net.
IM: Straight into the bottom corner. The only thing I regret is I didn’t do a celebration! Maybe there is a time for that in the future, we will see.
HM: When did your parents arrive from Croatia?
IM: They came out here separately, and met in St Albans. Mum came with her family of 12, including her parents, in 1966. Dad came over in the mid ’70s.
HM: How did they meet?
IM: All the Croatian migrants came to the soccer club. It was like a meeting place for the new Australians. Now this is complicated …
HM: We like complicated.
IM: My mum’s sister married my cousin on my dad’s side. My dad is the youngest of eight, his oldest brother had a son who is my cousin on my dad’s side but he is my uncle on my mother’s side of the family.
HM: I know two sisters from one family marrying two brothers from another family, but that’s a lot simpler than your set-up.
IM: I told you it was complicated. Because the age difference between my dad and his oldest brother is so large, they thought that his nephew and he were brothers.
HM: Confusing! Was St Albans, the soccer club, established as a way for Croatians to get together?
IM: It started off just as the guys playing there as a place to get together, but eventually the Croatians took over the club. It used to be a German club, and they were in huge debt, but the Croatians took it over and we are in good shape now. If you come down — you have to come down — we’ve got a huge hall that we built, we can hold weddings now.
HM: I am happily married, but if something changes I will certainly consider it as a venue. How did you fund it?
IM: Over four years we just kept chipping away. We got some grants and people kept doing jobs, we love jobs. Croatians are generally workers, and good with our hands, so we all just worked away at it. We are good at construction.
HM: Why Australia for your parents?
IM: Mum’s family had to get out of Croatia. It was hard for my grandparents to support 10 kids. They ended up having another one in Australia, so 11 in total. Lots of Croatians ended up leaving home to try and find work and a new life where they can prosper. Dad initially wanted to go to Germany for work, but that didn’t work out, so he decided to give Australia a go.
There was word getting around Croatia that there is this country a long way away, with great opportunities and a better life, that sort of thing. When my mum’s family left, everyone in the village thought it was a joke because they hadn’t heard of Australia, so they all gathered at the train station to see if they would actually leave. There’s a good photo of it. I can’t remember how it was described, but it was sort of government funded. My grandfather got these tickets, and off they all went.
HM: Like the Griswolds. What did your parents’ tough upbringing teach you?
IM: There was a lot of what I call “invisible learning” through seeing my parents work really, really hard to pay our school fees and put food on the table. We watched them earn everything for the kids. If we wanted something, we just had to work just as hard to get it. If I wanted a new pair of basketball shoes, I had to do chores. My sister would be cooking dinner, while my parents were off working trying to make sure everything was paid for.
HM: How old was she?
IM: She would have been in Grade 4 or 5 at the time. Those skills of discipline and also standards were taught to us early. And doing things for yourself. As kids you have messy rooms, but Mum would always tell us to clean them ourselves. Same with the dirty dishes … why should they all be left up to her? It’s a family thing, so everyone just chipped in. Those things she ingrained into us without us really noticing, and now that I’m older, I’m realising it.
HM: There was footage on Friday Night Football a few weeks ago of you cleaning the changerooms after the game — grabbing all the old tape and empty cups and putting it all in the bin. Seemed pretty natural.
IM: I try to be neat. As a leadership group we don’t want to be seen as people who think they are better than anyone else. I saw David Attenborough live, I’m a huge fan. He was talking about how we all have to look after this planet. We are always trying to control animals and plants instead of trying to control our own population. I care for this planet and don’t think we should pollute it, and it is important everything is always looked after. Changerooms, rubbish — no different. Everything needs to be looked after and taken care of.
HM: Why David Attenborough?
IM: I love documentaries, and found his the most interesting, even when I was a kid. I’ve got all his DVDs. Amazing voice.
HM: Have you had any relatives caught up in the recent conflicts in Croatia?
IM: Yes, lots of Dad’s family and I’ve got some cousins and that sort of stuff who were close to the war. It went through Dad’s village. No one died which was lucky. It gets complicated over there.
HM: You’ve got parents who emigrated. Bacher Houli is the first Muslim to play AFL. Do you have a special relationship with him on the back of that, or is it the same as with any other player?
IM: I think we do have something a little special, we are so alike in the way our cultures are. When we hang around each other we can feel very normal, and relaxed. The bond is very strong between us. It’s hard to explain, I grew up in Australia but my first language is Croatian, his first language is Arabic. He ate Lebanese food his whole life, I’ve eaten Croatian. I went to a Croatian church, he went to a mosque. We did things that normal kids from our backgrounds would do in those countries, we just did them in Australia. That’s why we feel comfortable around each other.
HM: Is there still vilification on the field?
IM: I’ve never seen it or heard it on an AFL field. I played basketball for a long time and never had anything directed at me. My first year of footy at Keilor, there were a few comments directed at me, got called the “w” word. I got it at SANFL level as well. Initially, the first reaction is anger, but there are wars in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia that are about race and religion. There is no need to bring that hate here, so I just let it wash over me. I feel sorry for people who do that, and who are filled with anger and hate. They just need to be educated to be better than that. Your family has either always cooked food here, the indigenous people, or a recent generation of your family was cooking food in another country. That’s how I see it. People need to realise where they come from. We are all here together now, so let’s just get on.
HM: Are we getting on top of racial vilification?
IM: I think a lot of it has to do with how people were brought up. Racial vilification doesn’t make any sense to me. Hopefully, in time, we will look back at it and be proud of it being a thing of the past. Hopefully.
HM: You’ve got a cousin at the footy club — Big Ivan Mach 2 (Ivan Soldo). He is on the list at Richmond. Apparently he’s lost weight and is starting to understand the game a bit.
IM: The weight is down ... it was about 120kg, he’s down to 103-104kg. That shows he has got discipline and good values. We got that from our parents, I think. He is a cousin on my mother’s side. The part of Croatia where his father is from is close to the part where my father is from … and everyone in that area is tall. Must be something in the water.
HM: How did he end up at Richmond?
IM: I think it was in 2012. He and I had a photo together on the Gold Coast at a soccer tournament, and I looked at it and thought, ‘You’re big enough to tap the ball to smaller people”. I sent it to the recruiting manager at Richmond, and told him he was my cousin, and he’s only 15, and he might make a footballer. They had a few meetings together, and he was told to lose weight and practise kicking and all that sort of stuff. They were willing to give him a shot.
HM: I sense that given how hard you have seen your parents work and how hard your community works, you realise how lucky you are to be playing football for a living.
IM: Oh yeah! After school, I liked the outdoors and that sort of thing. Maybe if I didn’t get drafted I’d have ended up as a bricklayer, something like that. It’s in my genes ... work hard and lift heavy things.
HM: Your mum cooked for the club last year.
IM: It was a great lunch. It was around Multicultural Round. We did a luncheon with a few different foods from around the world. There was a map there where we all put down where we were from all, where our families were from. Mum loves cooking and she is very good at it. She cooked cevapcicis.
HM: Where did you meet your wife, Erin?
IM: In Adelaide, Chris Knights (teammate) and I were living together, and we met through him, Chris met a girl who was friends with Erin, and they introduced us. It worked out pretty well.
HM: I’ve heard rumours you and Chris Knights have a game involving food. Care to enlighten me?
IM: We’ve got some amazing stories. We hide things in finger food as it is being handed around at club functions. One of our favourites is hiding olive pips in the pies and warm pieces of food and putting them back. We’ve got the quick insert and hiding of them down pat! Then we watch the tray get offered around. Good fun.
HM: Didn’t someone crack a tooth once?
IM: When we tell the story, we tend to talk it up a bit, but no broken tooth, though. We got Nathan Gordon about three times in one night, which is one of our great achievements. He kept biting into different bits of finger food and hitting the olive pips and other debris. He thought the catering was terrible! I think it’s a game that everyone has a laugh with, unless you’re the one getting done.
HM: You and Taylor “Tex” Walker decided to grow your hair — mainly out the back — during your time at Adelaide. How did the “mullet-off” come about?
IM: I can remember being in the changerooms and a few of us were just sitting around. Someone made a joke about growing mullets and wondering where they had gone, they had sort of disappeared from society. We decided we would try and bring them back, so we decided to grow one starting from Round 1. Tex kept growing his, so I kept growing mine, it was all a bit of fun.
HM: I heard that whoever lasted longest without getting it cut would get to name the other one’s first child?
IM: I honestly can’t remember. I don’t know if Tex was saying that for the sake of a good story. I won, so I guess he has to name his child after me, boy or girl.
HM: Ivan, or Ivannette Walker?
IM: Just Ivan, boy or girl.
HM: That’s a firm stance. What do you look for in other mullets when assessing them?
IM: Length and general hygiene. I look to see if they are grooming it nicely and it’s neat and tidy, and they are caring for it. The neatness — it’s ingrained.
HM: It keeps coming back to your mum’s standards.
IM: That’s right.
HM: The Tigers have won 20 of the past 28 matches. Have we undersold the Tigers? Mid-year last year, things were pretty dire, what changed?
IM: I think it’s easy to have a review and tell each other how we feel, and what we were doing, and what everyone needed to be doing. But to actually then stick at it, and maintain it, is another thing. We did it and for four weeks, and we weren’t winning, but we were getting better. We played St Kilda last year, and we got that first win, and then we just kept maintaining those standards and won nine in a row. I can’t put my finger on exactly what changed, but we essentially agreed to not drop below a level, and if we could do that, we gave ourselves a real chance of winning more than we lost. It had a fair bit had to do with Deledio, Riewoldt, Rance, Jackson and Cotchy just being sick of losing, and that was driving them. Hating losing. You need that, you need to want to win more than the other team, and have pride in everything you do.
HM: If you make the finals and happened to go all the way, how many tickets would you need for St Albans for the last game of the year?
IM: Heaps, a couple of hundred at least, maybe more.
HM: Good luck for the rest of the year, here’s hoping you need to find those tickets.
IM: That would be amazing wouldn’t it. Thanks.
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