Port Adelaide’s players will feel emotional - rather than jilted - in watching Jarman Impey find new love for football at Hawthorn
IT is Port Adelaide’s turn this weekend to deal with facing a valued former player - Jarman Impey, now at Hawthorn. It will be an emotional reunion on both sides of a heated AFL game.
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CHAD Wingard admits it will be difficult to look at Jarman Impey in a Hawthorn guernsey on Saturday.
“Sometimes,” says the Port Adelaide forward-midfielder who repeatedly knew Impey as a rival in training at Alberton for five years - and today as an opponent at Launceston, “you just have to understand why ...
“Family will always come first. But it is still difficult off the field for us without Jarman here (at Port Adelaide ) ... and it definitely will be tough seeing him in another jumper.”
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Impey was traded to Hawthorn in October in a deal that reaffirms sentiment can still exist in professional sport - and family must always come before football.
Impey’s father Glenn died of cancer shortly after the end of the 2016 AFL season, almost six years after the first challenging battle with the cancer appeared won. He played the last three games of the 2016 season wondering if the match would be the last Glenn saw.
“It was a lot to take in, knowing it could be the last time your father got to watch you play,” Impey said. “There was a lot of emotion going through me.”
Impey’s mood - and football - continued to work through an emotional wall last season when he played 18 games with the Power - and the trade to Hawthorn in October was engineered with Port Adelaide wanting Impey to be happier in life and then football.
“I left on good terms - and (it was for) personal reasons why I left,” Impey said.
“There is no grudges against (Port Adelaide),” adds Impey, who maintains his links to Alberton, in particular with second-year midfielder Sam Powell-Pepper.
Impey intends to be silent on the field - it is his way.
“I’m not good at trash talk on the field,” he said. “I play my role; I do my thing; I’m not a trash talker on the field. But I’m sure there will be a few comments that will come my way ... and I look forward to it.”
Wingard will eagerly hug Impey before the game - and after. But in between ...
“When that ball bounces,” Wingard said. “no-one (from the opposition) is your mate.
“After the game - and even before - we will show Jarman our love and how we miss him. And we do because he is such a good dude. But when the game starts ...”
Impey’s reunion with Port Adelaide is tied with the game in Launceston being part of the AFL’s Indigenous Round. Impey’s Aboriginal culture is drawn from his mother - and the Yorta Yorta people along the Murray River at Shepparton, Swan Hill and Echuca.
It is layer upon layer of emotion that confronts Impey in a game that is critical to both Port Adelaide and Hawthorn in the race to September’s top-eight finals.
And the celebration of Aboriginal culture in Australian football this weekend leaves Impey with stronger gratitude for his time at Alberton.
“I didn’t know a whole lot about being an Aboriginal person until I was drafted to Port Adelaide, who are a really strong club culturally,” Impey said.
“I learnt a lot while I was there; the things they do in the indigenous space are just amazing. Chad Wingard was the main driver among the players, and (the Power’s director of Aboriginal programs at Alberton) Paul Vandenbergh was the one who brought it all together. They opened my eyes a lot, and I’m grateful.”
Impey, 22, returned to Victoria - his home base is Shepparton - with the hope of a new environment closer to family would rekindle his passion for football.
“I could not be happier at the moment,” he says.
It is a major shift - in mood rather than location - as Impey still deals with the death of his father. That adjustment may never leave Impey. Nor does his gratitude to Port Adelaide that made him a second-round call in the 2013 AFL national draft.
“I was lucky that I was drafted to a good club in Port Adelaide; and I met a lot of close friends inside and outside the football club that I’ll cherish forever,” Impey says.
“Everyone had a great understanding of where we were at as a family, there was a lot of help there. That made changing clubs such a big thing, leaving good people behind.
“But when Dad was gone, it was in my best interests to be closer to my home and the people I’d grown up with.”
Impey joins the chain of former Port Adelaide players - in particular Stuart Dew and Shaun Burgoyne - to move to Hawthorn, not always by the coincidence of Hawks coach Alastair Clarkson being a former Power assistant coach.
Impey’s path to Hawthorn was paved by Burgoyne.
“Part of what drew me to Hawthorn was Shauny Burgoyne’s influence,” Impey says. “I chatted to him before I made the decision - and he’s taken me under his wing.”
IMPEY STILL PART OF PORT FAMILY
JARMAN Impey left one “family” to be closer to his own in October when he cleared his locker at Alberton.
Those who remain at Port Adelaide - and face Impey as a rival with Hawthorn today (Saturday) in Launceston - still have a strong link they intend to keep with the Victorian-born Impey.
“He is still family to us,” says Power midfielder-forward Chad Wingard. “And we’re happy for Jarman that he has found great form at Hawthorn.
“We know how tough it was for him to leave. We saw how tough football had become for him (after the death of his father Glenn at the end of the 2016 AFL season).
“But it is good that he can be closer to his family - that he is happier and he has found his love for football again. Everything becomes easier from there.”
Impey, 22, has been on an emotional roller coaster since 2010. He was 14 when he first learned of how his father’s repetitive back pain - originally from a wall falling at a work project - was actually a pointer to cancer that was ravaging his body.
At 17, as Port Adelaide made Impey a second-round draftee with grand hopes, the battle against cancer appeared to be working in his father’s favour.
“Dad was in remission,” recalled Impey of his move to Alberton. “and everything was kind of back to normal. He was always super fit, he loved training hard and feeling strong, and he got back into that. I’d speak to Dad pretty much every day when I was in Adelaide, and when he was well he came to all my games.”
Impey found his father waiting for him outside his school at Shepparton in 2010 - an unusual moment considering his work demands - when he first learned of the impending tests, surgery and chemotherapy that came with the first battle with cancer.
Impey learned of his father’s second fight at the end of the 2015 AFL home-and-away season - one of disappointed for the Power as it did not follow up a preliminary final appearance in 2014 with a third consecutive finals series. Glenn had kept the fall from remission secret for weeks.
This time Glenn was waiting for his son at a Melbourne airport - rather than a school - as Impey returned from his end-of-season holiday in Bali.
Impey recalls: “On the drive back to Shepparton he said, ‘I’ve got some news for you – (the cancer) it’s back’.
“Then he broke into tears. He’d known it had come back before I’d left for Bali, but didn’t want to ruin my holiday. That’s the person he was.”
michelangelo.rucci@news.com.au
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