Jordan Lewis finds peace with Hawthorn after trade to Melbourne
HAWTHORN champion Jordan Lewis reveals the resentment and sadness at being traded to Melbourne has dissipated, even though he hasn’t been back to clear out his locker.
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ALASTAIR Clarkson tells us there’s nothing to be offended by.
The culture is strong at Hawthorn and it is a no-brainer to off-load Sam Mitchell and Jordan Lewis.
It is best for the two champs more than it is for the Hawks.
Lewis concurs. Clarkson is honest and upfront and that’s all you can ask for, really. No hard feelings, no resentment. It is what it is.
So why do people feel sorry for Lewis? Is this the way to treat two champions of the club?
“I don’t know why you say people are feeling sorry for me,’’ Lewis said.
“I’m happy. Ninety-five per cent of the texts said, ‘Congratulations, good luck with new club’. None have been, ‘We feel sorry for you’.”
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Every Tuesday night throughout the finals series, when Lewis and Jack Riewoldt appeared on AFL360, there were always discussion in the Fox Footy kitchen about trades.
And every Tuesday night, the questions were directed at Jack. Would he stay? Were the Tigers shopping him? What would he do if they were? What were his thoughts?
Riewoldt would say he was Ricmond through and through and going nowhere
“Isn’t it funny?” Lewis said.
“It was all about Jack and not once did we discuss me ... and it ended up being me.”
Riewoldt, and plenty of others, have wondered how this possibly could have happened.
“Maybe I’m stupid, but I don’t see it like that,” Lewis said. “In my head, and this has been throughout my life, I’ve always tried to focus on the positives.
“(Negativity) is a waste of time, it sucks energy out of you. My dad has got the ability to say, ‘Oh well, s--- happens. Move on’. I’ve got that from him.”
At Lewis’s Glen Iris home, it was two weeks to the day, and near enough the hour, since he and Clarkson sat on the couch to talk.
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Lewis was sitting in the same spot as baby boy Freddie explored everything on the floor.
There was a clarity around Lewis. There wasn’t two weeks ago.
Lewis put on a brave face when he faced the media this week, but two weeks earlier there was resentment, sadness and trepidation.
His ticket had been punched — and not by him.
“It probably was sad in a way because I knew it was the end of that journey,” he said. “It’s hard to come back to a club when, in the back of your mind, you know they have moved on in a sense.
“I suppose the thing that made my decision easier was the fact Mitch (Sam Mitchell) had gone as well. That’s sounds funny, but I didn’t want people, and Hawthorn people, to look at it as if I was, not jumping ship, but leaving on bad terms.
“When Mitch left, and he obviously had the same conversation with Clarko, I didn’t feel as guilty leaving.”
Why the guilt when the club told him to look around?
“That’s how I justify it with myself,” Lewis said. “You love the players and the people involved in the club and the club has been my life for 12 years, and there’s a lot of love there ... you know, it’s an emotion you can’t describe.”
Lewis got a text message from Clarkson two weeks ago, asking whether he would be home all day. That was 9am and Clarkson arrived at 3pm.
“I started thinking straight away, your head just spins wondering what’s it about. I just tried to occupy myself,” he said.
So, he rang Jarryd Roughead.
“I said, ‘Roughie, you never know, I might be a trade option’ and he said, ‘No, no, no, that won’t be happening’.”
It happened all right.
Clarkson stayed for about an hour and when he departed, Lewis rang Roughead again.
He didn’t call his wife, Lucy, who is a teacher, because he didn’t want to startle her at work. He waited until she got home.
And he waited a day to call Luke Hodge.
“I didn’t know what my mind was doing that first day. The next day I met my manager Liam Pickering; the day after I spoke to Todd Viney.”
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Whatever Clarkson’s motivation — salary cap space, re-tooling his team, looking out for his senior soldier, or all three — his conversation with Lewis was incredibly difficult.
Lewis achieved so much for him, starting as a hot-head punk and becoming a four-time champion and, to many, an extension in attitude of the coach himself.
“He didn’t come in here and go bang straight away,” Lewis said.
“He sort of ... you know those big moments in your life and you tend to forget the finer detail? You just know, OK, we had that conversation and now I have to think about potentially exploring.
“I did wrestle with what he said. Do they actually want me? I didn’t ask him directly. I’m a bit, not gutless, but I hate confrontation. I hate it. Even a simple thing like buying the wrong thing at a supermarket, instead of taking it back with the receipt, I’d just throw it out.
“But that night ... I don’t think I slept that much, I reckon I had a couple of hours. It goes through your head, ‘S---, can I actually be playing for another team? What will people think?’.
“Initially it hurts the confidence because you do feel that sense that nobody wants you.
“But then I spoke to Melbourne.”
Not then, and not since, has Lewis become emotional.
“My wife hates that about me, how I’m very neutral,” he said.
“I don’t really get emotional about anything. I’ve got a lot of love, but once I’ve made a decision, I’ve made a decision.”
It’s why Lewis hasn’t been back to Hawthorn. He asked Roughead to clean out his locker, which was scheduled for Friday.
“I just feel like I’ve moved on,” he said.
“Maybe I should change my mind and go out there and do it myself. But for me, I’m a Melbourne player so it would probably feel weird going there. Is that weird? I don’t think Mitch has gone back to clean out his locker. Neither has Brad Hill. Maybe it is weird.”
There’s a cold and matter-of-fact disposition about Lewis. And that’s not a criticism. Football for him was training two nights a week back in Warrnambool, a few beers maybe on a Thursday night, a lot of beers certainly on Saturday night. The sense of community runs strong.
“That was football,” he said. “For me, country footy is great.”
As an AFL player, adapting to the professionalism of the job kind of stamped out the emotion, he said.
The Clarkson conversation was the home run in that regard.
One moment Lewis was a fabric player and a leader, the next he was a lump of meat that would look sumptuous on another club’s menu.
“What you build over time in playing AFL is you can take the emotion out of it,” he said. “Whether it’s a big game or whether it’s a loss, you learn to deal with the emotional side of the game. That prepares you for big decisions in life.
“At the end of the day you understand everyone in football is tradeable, whether it’s form, a misdemeanour, your age. I probably expected myself to be Hawthorn player for the rest of my life, but opportunities in football and in life present themselves. That’s how I’m treating it.
“Maybe it’s easier to leave because I do so fulfilled. Maybe if you had not played in premierships you would leave the club feeling empty. Is that weird again?”
Was it possible Lewis had talked himself into being happy with the decision?
“Maybe,” he said.
Asked to describe loyalty, he replied: “Loyalty is being true to yourself and being upfront and honest with people. Hawthorn absolutely is loyal to me.
“If they went behind my back to try to orchestrate a trade and then came to me, that would be disloyal. The whole process has been upfront and honest and that’s why it’s gone so smoothly.”
Clarkson was the first of several major conversations.
Lewis spoke to Roughie, to Lucy, to his old man Shane and to Lucy’s parents Carly and Ross, and Hodgey. There was his manager, Pickering. Then Viney, a former coach at Hawthorn and the list manager at Melbourne.
“I basically said to Todd I’d had a meeting with Clarko, Clarko said potentially if there is a deal out there at another club, they’re happy if I explore that. So I asked Todd if they would be interested. He said, ‘We didn’t plan on this happening, but absolutely. I’ll talk to Goody (coach Simon Goodwin), Josh Mahoney’. And they came back to me that same afternoon.”
The trade done on Tuesday, Lewis was required at Melbourne Football Club for formalities and to front the media.
He didn’t know where to go, so he rang Viney to ask where to park and how to enter the footy club.
“I said to my wife the other day, ‘This prepares you for life after football. You’re automatically out of your comfort zone’. I don’t know what pre-season will look like, I don’t know how the players are going to perceive me. How the supporters are going to receive me.
“I turn left on the freeway instead of turning right. For 12 years, I’ve turned right and gone to Waverley. Just little things. I don’t know when our breaks are. I don’t know what times we are training. Everything is new.
“I kept telling himself every football club is the same. Good people. Want to get better. Want to win.”
For 12 years, Lewis did it the Hawthorn way. Call it culture or standards or behaviours, but the Hawks had it and Lewis helped drive it.
It developed over time and because of experiences. Every training session. Every defeat. Every comeback. Every backs-to-wall situation you could ever imagine. Every bloody premiership.
Can Lewis transfer that culture?
“You can’t replicate that by starting at a new club, you need to have those experiences as a group,” he said.
“That’s probably the challenge for me. Melbourne last year had some really good wins, one against us, and that would have built resilience around their group.
“I suppose what I’ve got to find out is where I fit in that. Do I try to lead and create that environment or do I go in and find out these boys actually know what they’re doing? I would imagine I’ll go in there and they will suck some information out of me.
“That’s when I’m at my best. When people are relying on me and people want to be around me.”
And what if he sees poor behaviour and catches saying: “We don’t do that at Hawthorn”?
“I’m very aware of that and I hope to God I don’t come in and start doing that,” Lewis replied.
It has been a week of closure for Lewis.
He didn’t go to Hawthorn yesterday and, on Tuesday night after the formalities at Melbourne, he said goodbye of sorts to a bunch of teammates.
Roughead, Hodge, Grant Birchall, Jack Gunston and Lewis had a few beers at a pub in Hawthorn. It wasn’t a sad night and he was home by 11pm.
“It felt like nothing had changed, it was fun in that sense,” he said. “It wasn’t really football talk, it was everything else. We did acknowledge it was going to be weird when we come against each other.”
As for Clarkson, any animosity was fleeting.
“He’s deeper than a coach to me. Our relationship will get even closer as time goes on.”
Did Clarkson cry when they spoke?
“No, he didn’t cry,” Lewis said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him cry. He’s probably like me.”
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