Geelong defender Tom Stewart is determined to make most of AFL opportunity of a lifetime
IN 2013 Tom Stewart was just a local footy player who had just won a grand final with South Barwon. Fast forward five years and the dashing Geelong defender is one of the emerging stars of the competition in All-Australian calculations.
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TOM Stewart is just a skinny kid with a 100-watt smile in the South Barwon premiership photo of 2013.
It’s hard to spot him because your eye is immediately drawn to the man holding court in the middle of the jostling crowd.
There is South Barwon co-coach Casey Tutungi, trucker hat on his head and Geelong Football League premiership cup perched fittingly in his lap and, to his right, Matthew Scarlett, yahooing with his premiership teammates, a wide grin on his face and another flag on his stunning resume.
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In his stirring pre-match address that day, Tutungi had implored his team to “take the opportunity”, his own chance to do so taken from him.
In June that year he had been made quadriplegic in an on-field tackle that rocked the close-knit club.
Five years on, Tom Stewart, now 25, sat in the Geelong football club cafe this week, reflecting on his stunning rise to AFL stardom.
This was supposed to be a story about how he had become All-Australian candidate, and the many strands of his journey, which are captivating enough.
There was his decision to leave Mansfield at 14, after a decade living with his mother, to pursue his football and schooling in Geelong with his father, whose back fence bordered South Barwon’s playing fields.
Then his stunning transformation from dour VFL defender to Cats star playing in the mould of Corey Enright, whose No. 44 jumper he inherited.
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The fast-tracked football education, battling and sometimes beating megastars like Nathan Fyfe, Dustin Martin and Robbie Gray.
And his bond with this town, a former St Joseph’s schoolboy engaged to Sacred Heart girl Emma Richards as they plan the renovation of their new house in nearby Belmont.
As it turned out, a question about that remarkable 2013 premiership revealed everything you need to know about Stewart, the former carpenter and last-line defender who has been reunited with Tutungi, who now works a day a week at Geelong in opposition analysis.
GFL premiership teammate Scarlett, who, as a teammate at South Barwon urged Stewart to seize his chance to push for the AFL, now is his defensive coach.
“That 2013 premiership is the ultimate day in my life, to have what happened with Casey and his accident and to still win that premiership,” Stewart told the Herald Sun.
“We could have shied away from it because it was a pretty traumatic incident. He was our playing coach and it was a couple of rough weeks.
“A lot of blokes weren’t sleeping and were at the footy club every day, taking days off work to get around each other.
“I was only 21 at the time and didn’t really understand what had happened on the field. It was really, really scary.
“The fact it was someone so close, one of your leaders, it was traumatic but to win that premiership is easily one of the best days, if not the best day of my life.
“I look back now and can’t help but smile. I look back on that day and love it. I watched the replay a couple of weeks ago.
“And it was more so when Casey got given the (premiership) cup and was front and centre. It was a fantastic day.”
Tutungi continues to fight, working hard on improving his range of movement and mixing work for Geelong with time with his wife and daughters, Asta and Louttit.
He told the Herald Sun that Stewart had never changed his attitude.
“Whenever I see him, he is always asking how I am and how my family is — you genuinely feel like he cares,’’ Tutungi said.
“It’s a nice gesture that he said those words. We started playing senior footy together when I started at South Barwon.
“Tom was pretty young and you grow a bond together when you share success. I knew those guys wanted to do it for me (in 2013) so it would give me the biggest possible boost. And it was a huge.”
“When I was coaching Tom probably started to really mature and apply himself, and then Scarlo took over coaching at South and he realised he could really play the game and take it to a new level.”
Stewart’s extended family is based in Mansfield, at the foot of the Victorian Alps. The town’s sports achievement award is named after his grandfather and his mother, Vanessa, is one of six siblings in the family.
She and Stewart’s father Darren split up when Stewart was young, and Stewart remained living with his mum.
“My dad’s house backed onto the South Barwon footy club and I was down on school holidays with my dad. I had an interleague game the following weekend so I trained with South Barwon,’’ he said.
“They asked me to play for them and the Falcons said, ‘We want you to try out for the under-15 squad’ so I decided to move down here permanently.
“I wanted to get out of the small country town. It was my football career, but it was also my schooling.”
By his draft-age year he was in and out of the Falcons side, so he went back to South Barwon.
His life unfolded like so many other young men — a carpentry apprenticeship, work from 7.30am to 4.30pm, train a couple of nights a week, play Saturdays, beers on Saturday night.
Scarlett visited South Barwon as the returning hero now and again.
“I had seen him around the traps,” Stewart said. “He had come to some grand final celebrations with ‘Boris’ (Enright), but I never had the guts to say g’day.
“My first ever memory was in pre-season when we were doing one-on-one drills and I stepped up and he smashed me about four or five times in a row.
“I kept going back and trying and that may have shown him I was a competitor and wanted to have a go.
“It wasn’t so much a kick in the bum, it was that he saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself at that stage.”
In 2014 Stewart was blossoming into an attacking fullback playing interleague, but he wanted more.
“I was living with my mates in a share house, living that life and enjoying footy, but I thought I was wasting my time,” he said.
“I looked at myself and said, ‘Do you want to be remembered as a local footy legend or someone who tried at the next level?’.”
Asked by Geelong’s Troy Selwood to play VFL in 2016, he thrived while Cats recruiter Steven Wells watched on.
“He realised before it was too late, which was pretty important,” Wells said this week.
“Another year or two and it might have been too late for him. He had a good, solid year and showed improvement along the way.
“And I must admit there were times when I was hoping he wouldn’t play much more football. I had seen enough and I was hoping no one else would get the chance to see him.”
Despite a shoulder reconstruction that kept him off the track until Christmas, Stewart played three JLT games in 2017 then was told the Tuesday before Round 1 — by Scarlett — that he was in.
He describes the past 33 games as a blur of surreal moments mixed with the realisation he is good enough, followed by savage reality checks.
In his Round 1 debut he outmarked Fremantle Brownlow medallist Fyfe.
“I took a mark on him and nudged him out and I was like, ‘This is nuts’,” he said. “I remember it vividly.”
In Round 10 his last-line stand in a marking contest against Port Adelaide’s Robbie Gray helped Geelong hold up in a fighting win.
In Round 21 he soundly beat Richmond’s Dustin Martin at Geelong, coach Chris Scott noting this week he had relished a contest some would prefer to avoid.
Stewart entered their rematch in the qualifying final brimming with confidence.
“I thought I had played really well on him down there,” he said. “I relish the opportunity to play on those gun mids like Dusty and Fyfe.
“But when we played them in the qualifying final he touched me up. I realised how quickly footy can change and how quickly you can be brought back to earth.
“I think I had worked myself up, more than anything. I was probably too intense and that was a learning curve.
“I still look back on the qualifying final and the prelim against Adelaide as my two worst performances last year. You want to be remembered as a big game player.”
Those finals book ended a semi-final win over Sydney, in which Stewart’s 120m, repeat-effort sprint down the wing captivated commentator Bruce McAvaney.
“I was knackered,” Stewart quipped. “I should have picked the ball up.”
Humility comes naturally for Stewart but Geelong’s stars of past and present guide his journey.
Scarlett watches his edits with him, guides him on footwork and aggressive positioning and could scarcely be a better mentor.
He runs out behind Joel Selwood as second in line, not the first Cat to walk tall behind him.
Enright is the forward coach and the only name on his locker as a premiership player and 100-gamer.
“His number is a driving force,” Stewart said. “He told me something very early on in my career before I had played a game. He said, ‘We rent the jumpers from the footy club, they are not ours’.
“So if I can do my part with that number on my back I will be very proud.”
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