Taylor Walker reflects on his journey to 200 games, being Adelaide Crows captain and coping with the knockers
In a week where his future was on the agenda, Taylor Walker found time to reflect on his past ahead of his 200th game in a revealing interview about the constant criticisms that have followed him and how he deals with them.
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Taylor Walker plays his 200th game on Sunday and all anyone seems to want to ask him about is his future. But he has stopped to think about the past.
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“And I’ve actually been a bit emotional the last couple of days,” he told News Corp.
“I just feel so lucky to do it for a great footy club, I grew up barracking for the Crows and I’m going to walk out of this game and footy club with good friends and great memories, and on the field is a bonus.
“It’s been 13 years so far and all the people involved have shaped the person I’ve become and I feel like I’m in debt to them.
“I wish this career would last forever and it won’t but it’s been so enjoyable.”
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With 437 goals, he needs just four more to break Tony Modra’s record at Adelaide and he has kicked more goals than anyone in Showdown history with 43 (Robbie Gray is next with 38).
As captain for five years he led the Crows to the 2017 grand final, during which he was twice voted the competition’s best leader, and Cameron Mooney and Jonathan Brown both rated him the best field kick of any big man in the league.
Yet throughout all of that, you never had to look too far or listen too hard to find someone who had a problem with him.
“He doesn’t chase”, they said while he was made to wait for his AFL debut at Norwood.
“He shouldn’t be having beers at the footy”, when he was out of the team in 2011, “he can’t turn”, “he can’t jump”, “he doesn’t hit packs”, “he’s out of shape”, “he shouldn’t have confronted Jake Lever”, or in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 Grand Final … ‘his speech was too short’.
His speech on the MCG lasted nine seconds that day, long enough to congratulate Richmond, thank the sponsors and apologise to Crows fans for the result.
“That was spoken about heavily. I remember being told all you need to do is thank the sponsors, the Richmond Footy Club and the Crows,” Walker said.
“And I thought it wasn’t my time to rant and rave, that’s for Cotchin and Richmond, that’s their time to shine, that was my thought.
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“But it just reiterated what some people in Australia are like, they always like to pick on the negatives of people, we like to look at the flaws.”
So Walker’s answer to the constant criticism or negativity which has followed his career is to think the opposite about others.
“I like to see the beauty in people and what they’re good at,” Walker said.
“The criticism certainly does get to my family but I just reiterate to them that I’m OK so others can have whatever opinions they want.
“It’s water off a duck’s back, if you start listening to it you become engaged in it and you might believe it.
“It comes back to the people you trust and like I said, I like to see the beauty in others.”
That might explain why Walker has gone out of his way to befriend 32-year-old Jacob Milbank, who lives with Down syndrome and has been working three days a week at the footy club for a decade.
Walker arranged a birthday cake for Jacob when he turned 30, along with the Crouch brothers and Darcy Fogarty they take him out for tea once a season and he encourages him to exercise to keep fit.
But it’s what he’s done this year when he hasn’t been able to even see Jacob that arguably says the most. Jacob was stood down in March when the Covid crisis hit and he is still not allowed back at the club because of the strict protocols.
So once a week Walker FaceTimes him to check in on how he’s going, to let him know the players haven’t forgotten him and they can’t wait to have him back whenever that may be.
“Jacob Milbank is a prime example of what makes our footy club, he brings a lot of joy to everyone,” Walker said.
Then there’s 11-year-old Lily Block who was diagnosed with leukaemia when she was three, and who in 2013 inspired Walker to shave his mullet on The Footy Show which raised $67,000 for the Leukaemia Foundation.
What many don’t know is that Walker then arranged a separate fundraiser through the Crows Children’s Foundation by calling sponsors and organising a lunch so that $25,000 could be raised for the family as well.
Walker remains in touch with the family so much so that they consider him part of theirs.
“Just the mention of Taylor brings a smile of joy to Lily,” Lily’s mother Italia Block said this week.
“She remembers him instead of some of the bad during her darkest times throughout her last eight years of treatment.
“Lily loves cheering him on and cherishes gifts he has given to her along the way as she watches.
“Being heavily immunosuppressed has stopped us being able to watch Taylor play in person but one day she will get there, that’s the aim for Lily.
“But Taylor checks in often and we sent gifts when Hugo (Walker’s son) was born, he is like a part of the family.”
In 2018 Walker organised a fundraiser for his mate Jake Borlace who was fighting melanoma, right down to ringing around to borrow mannequins from a clothing store so he could display the rival club captains’ guernseys which had been donated for auction. And last November when a punter asked whether he’d consider doing a ‘happy 90th birthday’ message for a long-time Crows supporter who he’d never met, Walker apparently replied 24 hours later with a video of him and newborn son Hugo hamming it up for the camera at home.
When he plays game number 200 on Sunday, nine-month-old Hugo will be attending his first.
“The (covid) restrictions and bed time because we’ve played a few night games it hasn’t really fitted in, but it will be good to have him and Ellie (wife) there on Sunday,” he said.
Walker the 200-game former captain and father is a far cry from the skinny teenager with long hair who won a senior flag with Broken Hill before he was drafted in 2007.
Mark Ross was working in recruiting under James Fantasia at Adelaide in 2006 when he was sent to Griffith in search of a player the club could sign as part of the AFL’s NSW scholarship program.
“There were no other AFL clubs there but I noticed him (Walker) straight away,” Ross recalls.
“Then three weeks later we went to a carnival in Sydney and all the recruiters were there but he couldn’t play because he’d fallen off his motorbike and broken his pelvis.
“But I spoke to James and Kinnear Beatson (fellow recruiter) and said he’s as good as any kid I saw in Sydney that week.”
Seven years later Ross – who was by then working at Norwood – got a call from the late Crows coach Phil Walsh.
“Walshy said ‘tell me why I shouldn’t make him captain?’” Ross recalls.
He couldn’t answer that.
The Crows signed Walker as a scholarship holder, but the day he learned he would graduate to Adelaide’s primary list in the 2007 draft is among his fondest memories.
“I was sitting at the Broken Hill airport with my late nan,” he said.
“Nan took me to the airport because I was about to come down and do some training with the club, and they rang and told me they were going to take me.
“Things like that I reflect on and think ‘how good was that to be able to share that with her, sitting at the airport with a big smile on our faces’.”
Despite his potential which led to him kicking seven goals in Norwood’s SANFL elimination final in 2008, Walker was made to wait until 2009 for his AFL debut, and worked closely with the likes of Darel Hart and Alan Stewart behind the scenes.
“I still chat to Alan Stewart if not every week then every second week, he watches all our games, and Darel Hart helped me out when I was first on the scholarship,” Walker said.
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Neil Craig was senior coach and resisted calls from fans and the media to play Walker until he got his defensive game right.
“The criticism of myself or the narrative of ‘why aren’t you playing him or playing him continuously?’ I remember a range of conversations with Taylor about his defensive actions,” Craig said this week.
“Was I too hard on him in those days? I don’t know, in reflection maybe, maybe, but that’s in hindsight.
“I remember him sitting in the players’ room and I can still see it in my head as if it was yesterday.
“He was a very skinny lad from Broken Hill compared to what he is now, but some of his movements, his feel for opponents and teammates was exceptional.
“The way he’s matured, he’s captained the club, played some outstanding footy, he’s had a sensational career.”
Walker remembers the early days as a steep learning curve.
“I was impatient, all I wanted to do was play and early on I couldn’t understand what he (Craig) wanted, and then you start to play and understand what it takes, so he taught me so much without me knowing it at the time,” he said.
Walker’s best season in front of goal was in 2012 when he kicked 63, but he also kicked 59 in 2015, 47 in 2016, 54 in 2017 and 43 last year.
“From 2012 to 2017, throughout those years I felt I played some pretty good footy and that was off the back of our team playing good footy,” he said.
“As a forward you’re the product of the way the team plays.”
He has had to overcome a ruptured ACL in 2013 when he hyperextended his knee attempting to spoil Carlton’s Brock McLean in the MCG pocket.
There is vision of him sitting on the bench, red sub’s vest on, and as medical staff are strapping ice to his leg he is animated, clapping and shouting encouragement to his teammates from the boundary.
“Early on I thought ‘f***, why did this happen?’, but I focused on not what I can’t do, but what I can, and that attitude helped me immensely.
“I couldn’t run outside or kick the footy, but I could do touch upstairs, I couldn’t play but I could help the younger guys, I couldn’t train but I could learn and develop.”
So while it caught many off guard when Walsh named him skipper ahead of Patrick Dangerfield and Rory Sloane for the 2015 season, it really shouldn’t have.
“He thinks not what is best for himself but what is best for the team,” Walsh said at the time.
Walker still thinks about Walsh, who died in July, 2015, often and talks with his wife Meredith.
“I was only just talking about it with Ellie yesterday, she said she can still remember the day I came home and told her Walshy wanted me to be captain,” Walker said.
“She reckons she couldn’t explain the look on my face, and for her to say that means a fair bit.
“I stay in touch with Meredith, we text and a phone call here and there to touch base.”
Walker was one game away from forever being known as a premiership captain in 2017 when the Crows blitzed the regular season but had a nightmare on Grand Final day against Richmond, which he still thinks about but is circumspect.
“Things come up, you play Richmond or there are highlights and things that remind you of it,” he said.
“I think what an experience it was. Individually and as a group we didn’t play the way we wanted, we got there and we gave it a crack, it would have been nice to have a premiership medallion but it wasn’t to be.”
Two years later he stepped down as captain leaving his good mate Sloane to do the job in his own right.
He floated the idea of playing on the wing this season and coach Matthew Nicks trialled him in the ruck, but Walker has remained forward and is still the club’s leading goalkicker – albeit with 11.6 in a miserable season for the rebuilding Crows which has put his position in the 22 again in the spotlight.
With the team 0-12 and Walker forced to defend his spot, this is not how he envisaged spending the twilight of his football career but he insists it’s not getting him down.
“You wouldn’t know we’re 0-12. The attitude of the young guys coming in and trying to grow is what keeps bringing you to the footy club every day,” he said.
“It’s an experience for us as well, I haven’t been in this position before and at some stage we will come out the other end.”
He remains contracted to the Crows for next year and at 30 wants to see it out and remain a one-club player.
“I’ve got the attitude that because I’m closer to the end I just want to enjoy every moment – whether that’s doing weights, or in meetings or on the field,” he said.
“I’ve got one year left on my contract, I believe you honour your contract if you can, so that will mean chatting to the club at the end of the year.
“Number one (priority) when I do finish is I want to be the best dad I can be, and I’ve always said to my best mates I want to play a year back home (in Broken Hill), so I will endeavour to do that.
“I’d love to do some radio stuff, Bernie (Vince) and I have spoken about doing our own show – that’d be interesting.
“The longer my career has gone I’ve thought about coaching, and I finish my business studies at the end of the year so that will give me some options.”
But right now Walker is living in the present. Which brings us back to Modra’s goalkicking record which is there for the taking.
“I look at Tony Modra and even now he calls me or we have a chat and I think ‘how lucky am I talk to someone like that?’” Walker said.
“I used to try to take speccies like him as a kid but I couldn’t jump over a tally-ho paper, so I couldn’t have his number on my jumper.
“I don’t think I had anyone’s number on my jumper when I was growing up, I think I loved all the players and just loved the club.”
Two decades on, nothing and yet everything has changed.
His childlike love for the club remains but the number on his jumper has become so ingrained in the Adelaide conscience that whoever wears it in the decades to come will forever be referred to as “playing in Tex Walker’s number 13”.
Originally published as Taylor Walker reflects on his journey to 200 games, being Adelaide Crows captain and coping with the knockers
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