Draft Special: Brodie Smith and Tom Rockliff recount their draftee horror stories on The Lowdown Podcast
From a teammate’s threatening note on his locker to clashing with Scott Thompson in the gym and locking the boss’s keys in the car on day one, Brodie Smith and Tom Rockliff recount their draftee horror stories.
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Brodie Smith was quietly going about his business in the gym in his first season at Adelaide when he got back to his locker and found a note stuck to the door.
Nicknamed ‘Humphrey’ because he barely spoke, Smith was doing everything right when he was wrongly blamed for a prank on teammate Matthew Jaensch.
On a special episode of The Lowdown Podcast this week, Smith and Port Adelaide’s Tom Rockliff have recounted some of the horror stories which they can now laugh about from their first year in the AFL system.
“Someone put detergent in someone’s coffee and blamed it on me, so I was in the gym at the time going about my own business and came back to my locker and there was a note saying ‘you mess with the bull, you get the horn, check the pool’,” Smith said.
“And the whole contents of my locker was floating on a GPS box on the pool, clothes, phone, everything, so I had to jump in and get it, so that was a good prank.
“It was Matthew Jaensch … he was a serial pest and went for the weak targets.”
Smith’s other run-in with a teammate was a physical one when he accidentally collected Scott Thompson in the gym.
“Scotty Thompson spent a lot of time in the gym being the massive man that he is, and I was walking through the gym with my dumbbells and he bent down to pick up his and I was a bit close to him and put my dumbbell through his temple and it rocked him a bit.
“You can imagine, I’m 70kg and big Thommo has fired up, it actually hurt him a bit, I was a bit scared and Brent Reilly came and grabbed me, he looked after me early days, and said ‘mate, just get out of here, I’ll calm him down’, and I spoke to Scotty a month later and apologised.”
Smith said his first day at training started badly and he went behind a shed to vomit when no one was looking.
“My first year was Craigy (Neil Craig) as coach so he was known to be pretty hard on the training track and I remember the first day getting an extra large yellow training top, I was about 67kg at the time, so I walked out and the guys looked at me as if to say ‘what is that?’” Smith said.
“My first training day we went on camp and we went down the Murray and had to do a run, jump in the river and swim down to the next point, get out and run again.
“They were dishing out life jackets to a few guys who weren’t great swimmers and I thought ‘day one, there’s no way I’m putting a life jacket on in front of these blokes’ so I jumped in the river shoes on after a quick run and found out very quickly that I’m a terrible swimmer.
“It didn’t go well for me, I was right at the back and had a quick spew behind the shed when no one was looking so a good introduction.”
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Rockliff arrived at Brisbane just before Christmas in 2009 after being overlooked in the national draft and the Lions took him with Pick No. 5 in the pre-season draft.
“Vossy still talks about my first time trial. First day off the plane we got picked up by Craig Lambert who I stayed with for a couple of nights and the next day was a 3km time trial,” Rockliff said.
“I think I ended up running close to a 13-minute 3km time trial and he says there was this fat kid who turned up, had long skins on down to his knees that had weathered away and weren’t even tight anymore and he thought ‘what have we got here?’.
“I didn’t speak too much in my first four or five months at the football club and there were superstars everywhere – Simon Black, Jonathan Brown, Luke Power – you just sit there and try to find your place and they reckon after that they couldn’t shut me up and that hasn’t changed since.”
Rockliff got off to a rocky start when he locked Lambert’s keys in the car at the airport.
“I’d spoken to Craig Lambert a few times on the phone and didn’t realise at the time how much of a stresser he was, I’d got off the plane and thought I had a bit of a relationship with him,” Rockliff said.
“So I threw my bags in the back and closed the boot and turned to him and said ‘mate, I’ve just locked the keys in the boot’ and I’ve never seen a bloke just stress so hard, but it was really good for our relationship and it broke the walls down straight away.”
Originally published as Draft Special: Brodie Smith and Tom Rockliff recount their draftee horror stories on The Lowdown Podcast