Sacked: Gavin Crosisca reveals how he eventually turned his life around after a football career addicted to drugs and alcohol
Gavin Crosisca had it all planned out. While carrying $60,000 in cash from TAB takings, he would run into a wall and knock himself out. Then claim to be have been robbed. These were some of the darkest days of his addiction.
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Rock bottom isn't difficult to navigate when searching for a trigger point in the extraordinary life and times of Collingwood premiership hero Gavin Crosisca.
It came when he was cast out of the AFL assistant coaching system at the end of the 2008 season.
By that stage, Crosisca had been an addict for 25 years, something he had largely kept from his wife Nicole and their three children, and from those he played with and coached.
His addictions – drugs, alcohol and gambling – were consuming him.
"The addiction component … (is) like a split personality," Crosisca told the Herald Sun's Sacked podcast.
"If you saw me at a footy club and said Gavin was snorting speed daily, you’d think you had the wrong Gavin.
"It was the mask I put on.
"So I would have the mask for Nicole and the kids … have the dad's mask on … go to the footy club and put the assistant (coaches') mask on, and I couldn't wait to take all those masks off just to be the junkie druggie I was at the time."
It's a stark self-assessment, but one that still drives him after almost a decade clean.
As the founder of Sober Living Rehab – a private residential drug and alcohol addiction treatment service – Crosisca deals with the addiction of others almost daily.
Having restored his once-crumbling life, he has also reconnected with Collingwood, and was working in past player welfare two days a week before the coronavirus shutdown.
How Crosisca was able to work his way through a lifetime in football without anyone realising the extent of his troubles remains a mystery.
It came to a head in late 2010 after he took on a 25 per cent investment in his brother-in-law's hotel, complete with a Pub TAB.
His financial issues brought on by his addictions – and the realisation a pay cheque in the AFL system was no longer an option – brought an alarming plan.
"I wasn’t quite robbing the bank … (but) I was going to rob my own pub," Crosisca said.
"I used to go to the bank with 60 grand ($60,000) of TAB money every Monday.
"So I had the back carpark worked out. I knew where I would be, I know where I would stash the money, I knew the wall I was going to run into to somehow knock myself out and then wake up and call the cops and say I have just been to the bank, I have been robbed."
Asked why he didn't follow through on his ill-conceived plan, he said: "Courage."
In the end, it was courage of a different kind – and the support of Nicole – which forged Crosisca's fightback.
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PEACE IN DRUGS
He now knows he comes from “a long list of Crosiscas” with a predisposition for addiction.
As a kid from a broken family in Queensland, he resented his alcoholic father for not being there.
With a hindsight borne out of his own experiences, he is now less judgmental about his father, who died from organ failure brought on by alcoholism in 2010.
The pair never reconciled.
Gavin was deep in the grip of his multiple addictions when his dad died.
“Until I got into my own recovery (in 2011), the resentment I had for my father was ingrained in me,” he said.
“I guess the trauma I experienced (was with) a father who had no connection with me as a son and never really watched my footy games.
“Mum was the pseudo father … Dad was too busy drinking. I could relate to that, because that’s where I was at the end of my using and drinking. I was completely isolated and drinking was more important to me (at that time) than going home and seeing my wife and children.
“My dad was the same, he was just enslaved by this illness.
“I know that feeling … when you wake up every morning thinking ‘I’ve got my wife and my children in a nice house, I’ve got a good assistant coaching role’ and I remember thinking ‘what the hell I am doing calling my dealer first thing in the morning to make sure I had a gram of speed … to get through the day’.
“It’s a horrible way to live.”
The only time Crosisca felt completely free was on the football field.
“I was that uncomfortable, disconnected, awkward, shy, low self-worth and low self-esteem kid,” he said.
“The only time I didn’t feel that way was when I started playing footy as a seven-year-old with the Moorooka Roosters up in Queensland.
“I was free on the footy field. The next time I got that peace was when I picked up drugs.”
Crosisca started smoking cannabis at 16, the year before he moved to Melbourne to join the Magpies.
His mother took over running of Collingwood’s Coventry House, where they shared lodgings with teammates Mick McGuane, Mark Orval, Brett Gloury and Greg Faull.
“A couple of years later, (mum) died of a sudden heart attack,” he said.
“I was 19 (with) that feeling of abandonment, even though mum didn’t abandon me. Being a sensitive soul, that’s how I would have taken it at that stage, and I relied on drugs to get through.”
A LOST SOUL
By the age of 22, Crosisca was a Collingwood premiership hero.
He kicked two goals in the drought-breaking 1990 Grand Final win and seemingly had the world at his feet.
“I didn’t touch the (1990 premiership) cup … I didn’t feel worthy,” he said.
Hard and unrelenting, his flint-edged footy honesty earned him the nickname ‘Bagger’ and he worked extremely hard on his craft.
He played 246 games across 14 seasons, was placed in three separate Copeland trophies and earned a reputation for absolute commitment to the team.
Privately, though, he was in pain. Alcohol and drugs took only part of that away.
He smoked cannabis the night before most of his matches. He drank excessively and moved to Ferntree Gully to ensure his after-hours activities didn’t draw attention.
He tried amphetamines for the first time at a one-day international at the MCG in 1989, though it didn’t become his drug of choice until after his playing days.
“I didn’t know I was addicted; I just thought I was smoking dope to relax myself at night,” he said.
“I worked my a--- off at the footy club, so I felt like I deserved it.”
His most stressful moments came on Collingwood’s interstate trips.
“I took a huge risk (going) interstate,” he said.
“Talk about panic with the (sniffer) dogs at the airport … even when I was one of the leaders at the club, I’d have four joints, tucked into my toilet bag.
“I was paranoid.
“You would see the beagles jumping around and sniffing the bags. I used to s--- myself. It probably took me three or four years into recovery to realise those dogs were the fruit sniffing dogs, not the drugs ones.”
COACH & ADDICT
Such was his footy nous, Crosisca beat teammate Gavin Brown to an assistant coaching role at North Melbourne when the pair retired after the 2000 season.
He had stints at the Kangaroos, Hawthorn and Carlton; each ending after a senior coaching change.
The pressure of being in the AFL coaching system took his addiction to a dangerous new level.
“(Speed) was something I would go to once I had retired,” he said.
“It wasn’t just a social thing, it wasn’t just the big nights.
“It was a daily thing from the minute I retired. It was medicating the discomfort.”
He would have “a little wizz fizz” (amphetamines) on match days, ensuring he was always the last assistant coach out on the ground after halftime.
“I could have a nose full of speed in my nose before you even turned around.”
He was an assistant at Hawthorn to Peter Schwab, but Alastair Clarkson brought a new team in.
Then, after working with Pagan again at Carlton, and one year with Brett Ratten, he was moved on.
Crosisca’s drug use escalated when coaching gigs dried up.
“(I thought) ‘Oh my God, I am out of the AFL system, what am I going to do?’ I didn’t work for about seven or eight months, so I was probably using a gram a day.”
One day at the hotel, a staff member found a drug pouch, and handed it to him to give to the police.
He kept it.
“I opened it and there was this huge big bag of crystal,” he said.
“I had never used ice per se, but there was this pipe and I knew it looked like ice.
“What did I do? Call the police? No way, stashed it and started working my way through it.”
“Thank God that was cutter (a cutting agent). If that had have been meth or ice I wouldn’t be sitting here now.”
FIGHTBACK
Crosisca plans to get a tattoo depicting May 5, 2011 – a day his life changed forever.
After being kicked out of home by his wife and moving in with his drug dealer, his life reached its lowest ebb.
“She knew I drank excessively, she knew a little bit about the gambling but not the full extent of it,” he said.
“The drugs were the real killer.
“She basically booted me out of home and said ‘I can’t do this anymore with the kids’.
“The only place I had to go was my dealer’s place. I went and moved in with him for a month or so.
“I was completely miserable and depressed … not wanting to live, but not wanting to die.”
Crosisca found his dealer’s “stash” and “started thieving off him”.
His descent was now free-fall.
Thankfully, the woman he fell in love with refused to give up on him.
On May 5, 2011, Nicole told him she needed to pick him up for a meeting at their children’s school.
“(I realised) we weren’t going to Carey Grammar; we were going in the opposite direction,” he recalled.
“She dropped me off at a treatment hospital. I thought ‘can someone help me live without the use of drugs and alcohol?’, and they showed me.
“I swallowed the pride and embarrassment and shame.”
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Crosisca went through a 28-day program, then spent three months in a residential facility similar to the ones at Sober Living Housing.
Asked where he would be without his wife, he insists: “At the end of a bar somewhere.
“It would be really, really messy and I could even be dead.”
The 51-year-old won his family back nine years ago next month, and is now working to help others.
“Men of our generation don’t ask for help and they don’t get themselves checked out.
“We die well before women do because women go and get the help and support they need.
“The awareness around mental health and general health is there now, so let’s get out and do it.”
Crosisca’s legacy to Collingwood was assured by his playing career; his legacy in helping others is proving more important and just as fulfilling.