Peter Gordon remains upbeat about Western Bulldogs despite two seasons of struggle
IT’S a question asked for the past two years; What the hell is happening at the Western Bulldogs? Yet president Peter Gordon is far from defeatist despite two horror seasons in the wake of the ultimate triumph.
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THE problems of today and the aspirations of tomorrow are linked to the seismic event of yesterday at the Western Bulldogs.
It’s impossible to ask what the hell is happening at the Bulldogs without pondering what the hell happened after the premiership in 2016.
Only 40 games ago, tears were shed across the western suburbs of Melbourne, tears over a miracle just witnessed and a belief that life was now complete.
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Supporters could die happy because they had seen their football club win a premiership.
It was another world compared to now. How could it fall away so quickly?
What has happened to the golden words and warm touch of coach Luke Beveridge?
Has the premiership hangover become a two-year hangover as the Bulldogs drown in 14th position and carry the tag of irrelevancy?
Bravely, president Peter Gordon says he’s not panicking.
“Whilst people are entitled to be critical of us, and members are entitled to demand better of us on the field, it’s inappropriate for me and the club to overreact to the past two seasons,” Gordon told the Herald Sun.
“There’s no panic. I don’t feel panicked. I have real confidence in the critical mass of people who are there. I have complete confidence in the coach.”
Gordon was sitting in his office high up at 181 William St in Melbourne’s CBD, casting back and throwing forward as he answered questions about the post-premiership struggles of the Bulldogs.
The past was all around. Gordon’s walls are adorned with memorabilia of his most important days in football.
There are framed articles and photographs of 1989, when the pugnacious lawyer who grew up down the road from the Western Oval rallied and saved the club, with a little help, and who, at 32, became the youngest president in AFL history.
There’s a Simon Schneider cartoon of Gordon the Bulldog chewing on a bone with former league chief executive and chairman Ross Oakley’s head as the knuckle.
There’s his Bulldogs Hall of Fame certificate. There’s a photo collage of Beveridge and Gordon at the 2017 season launch. There’s even a replica premiership cup, one of two made, glinting as the morning sun speared though the window.
And in pride of place is an enormous colour photo of Tom Boyd kicking the game-winner in the final minutes of the Grand Final.
With such backdrop, can there really be any conversation about the Dogs without it being about 2016?
Gordon said the Boyd photo was his favourite among thousands.
“First of all, it’s the standout moment in the Grand Final,” he said.
“Secondly, you think about the history of Tom, you think losing a captain and coach in successive days, the heat he came under, the whole club came under.
“It’s a picture which eloquently shows you can make a move, take a risk, gamble and cop any amount of s--- for it, but in a given moment in time, maybe you will have a moment like that. I love it as an image.”
A long time ago?
“Yeah, it seems like a long time ago, longer than two years.”
He paused.
“It was a profound event in the life of the club and in my life. I was completely panic-stricken terror right up to the last minutes of the game. You know, the days, weeks, months after that both personally and dealing with people, was quite unexpected.”
In his own world, Gordon was a messiah. People wanted to tell him every day what it meant to them and their families.
“People want to talk about what it means to their family and to people they had lost and who they went to the footy with,” he said. “They visited their graves the next day. People tell me they went to Altona Cemetery to share a moment and there were dozens of Bulldogs scarfs on graves.
“It had a funny effect on me. It was a reflective period and it took me a while to deal with it. I got some advice to write down how I felt. I ended up writing and writing and writing.”
Gordon has written 15,000 words. He’d thought he’d start at 2014, when captain Ryan Griffen quit the club and days later coach Brendan McCartney was sacked.
But he has now travelled back to the start — 1989.
The narrative of the struggling Bulldogs in 2018 mostly begins with the glory of September 2016 and quickly turns to the question: What’s happened?
The accusation is the Bulldogs were too satisfied, or were too overwhelmed, by a moment about which favourite son Bob Murphy has said: “Some teams reach the summit, we reached the moon.”
Gordon reflects fondly and proudly, but he admitted the post-premiership has been difficult.
He offered reasons for the club’s fall out of the finals: Injuries, one of the league’s youngest lists and the retirement of senior players.
“Our obligation is to keep on keeping on,” he said. “We are doing our best. We think we’ve got a good young list, we’ve got a great coach and we think we’ve got good people.”
Still, the Bulldogs have fallen badly and Gordon and Beveridge remain the public faces in this tumultuous post-premiership period.
There have been changes in the recruiting and list management staff, Ameet Bains was appointed as chief executive at the end of last year, and there has been a public spat between Gordon and former club vice-president Susan Alberti.
Amid this has have been further accusations that Beveridge flexed his power and Gordon flexed his ego.
Gordon added fuel to the claim of serious unrest when he said in a recent radio interview with Gerard Whateley that after the “tumult” of the premiership only the adults were left standing, a subtle dig, it was assumed, at those who had departed.
“It was something like, ‘The grown-ups are left to pick up the pieces’,” Gordon said. “I wasn’t intending to have a dig at people.”
Contrary to opinion, he said there wasn’t a hangover and a disregard for the future. Instead, there was an avalanche of emotion.
“This concept of a premiership hangover creates (the image) that it’s party central at the Bulldogs,” Gordon said.
“Who cares how we go this year because we won the flag? It ain’t like that. It’s a wrong perception.
“There’s no playbook to how you deal with the emotional and cultural issues of being a club like ours, with the troubles we’ve had, nearly going out of existence and then achieving sudden, unexpected, ultimate success.
“It was a difficult job trying to deal with the tumultuous, emotional and logistical issues of a premiership.
“To be frank, I could have left at the end of 2016. I’ve got a fair record as president, but I wanted to stay to deal with those problems. They weren’t fun. Chris Grant, Bevo … we were left to deal with a whole series of problems and we shoulder those problems.’’
Have they succeeded?
“We will succeed,” Gordon said.
“We haven’t succeeded yet. I probably regret making the (“adults”) line. But I will say this, if you’ve got the idea that all the people are leaving and we don’t care, that we just open another can of Bundy and Coke, then that’s not the situation.
“It was a difficult environment and these were unique circumstances. But someone’s got to be left in charge to deal with it and that’s what we’re doing.”
The obvious and constant critique of Gordon is that he is as a dictator, a micro-manager who ruffles the authority of his administrators.
All dictatorial types smile at the assertion ... Gordon, too.
“I’m certainly not,” he said.
“I have it written about me a lot. I was certainly hands-on in 2015. I had an office at the club and I haven’t had an office since 2015. The best people to answer that question are the people who work there. You should ask Ameet. He’s not a shrinking violet.”
What if we asked the officials who departed?
“Well, you know, they’ve go their own agenda to push I guess, some of them,” Gordon replied.
So, not true?
“I took a strong role when Ryan Griffen announced he was going and that uncovered a whole series of things which I thought required some strong leadership,” he said.
“You can weigh that up as strong leadership or you can weigh it up as dictatorial and it sounds awful.
“It’s amusing to me people will now gravitate to calling strong leadership autocratic behaviour, because there’s any number of examples where people in my position, presidents of AFL clubs, have shirked hard decisions. No one accuses them of being autocrats.
“We are the only competitive-balance recipient club in the 21st century to have won the flag. It hasn’t been easy and some of it has required some bold and adventurous calls.
“I don’t think my style of leadership suits everybody, but I reckon I was the right man at the right time, both times I came into presidency.
“I think of it in another paradigm. I’m a lawyer and my approach to life is to work the problem. I see a problem and I think, ‘How can I help to fix that problem?’. I will engage in the problem.”
Gordon said he had stepped back from the club in the past 12 months.
“But in my time, and I’m about to enter my 14th year as president, it hasn’t been like running the West Coast Eagles or a club that has got $30 million in the bank,” he said.
“For a lot of my time we’ve been saddled with debt, unable to pay the salary cap, unable to find major sponsors and, for at least half of the time I was president, with a hostile AFL who didn’t want us in the competition.
“Most of my time leading the Bulldogs has been much more in the style of Ho Chi Min running the North Vietnamese resistance to the US than it’s been being the Queen of England.”
Gordon’s self-confidence is exceeded only by his confidence in Beveridge.
The coach is contracted until the end of the 2020 and Gordon told the Herald Sun he will be chairman until at least 2021.
Gordon’s belief is Beveridge was not only the perfect coach for that moment in time, but also as a long-term coach for the Dogs.
“He was a beautiful coach for that moment,” Gordon said.
“You get a person like Bevo who comes in and in a sense the players had been yearning for a guy like him. The time suited him.
“There’re a lot of great coaches who come in with a bit of unique IP. They’ve got an idea. And Bevo had an idea. And sometimes that’s the end of coaches … they disappear pretty quickly.
“The better coaches adapt and change because they’ve got both the confidence and emotional intelligence to reinvent themselves.
“I’ve never met a guy with greater emotional intelligence than Luke. That’s in my career as a lawyer and in my experience with footy and with life. He’s going through a period where he’s learning what it’s like.
“In 2019, he’s going into his fifth year as a coach and there have been some good times and bad times, but I have total confidence in his ability to understand people, listen to people and think about the way he does things himself.”
Gordon and Beveridge are a curious, engaging and combative pair, not unlike the Bulldogs team of 2016.
And as much as Gordon said he was changing, and that Beveridge was challenging himself and developing, the young Bulldogs team is undergoing the same.
“Our fans are entitled to know we wake up every morning, thinking about how we can make the place better and working out how to create that sustained success,” Gordon said.
“Our fans are entitled to know that every bit of the disappointment they feel, that’s how Bevo feels, that’s how I feel.”
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