Sacked: Ricky Nixon opens up about building an empire, his downward spiral and saving his relationship with his sons
Ricky Nixon spiralled after the death of AFL commentator and his “No. 1 client”, Clinton Grybas. But the late broadcaster taught former player agent Nixon a lesson which has helped him rebuild his life, as he details in the first episode of SACKED season two.
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Ricky Nixon was footy’s ultimate crisis manager.
As a player agent to the stars he handled scandals as deftly as his clients attacked their football.
He had a direct phone line in his Docklands office reserved solely for the game’s superstars.
His mobile phone was ON — day and night.
No other manager extricated clients from as many tight spots as the man who founded sports management agency Flying Start.
He managed everything from sex scandals to drug addictions, and high-profile issues surrounding mega clients including Ben Cousins, Wayne Carey and Gary Ablett.
But Nixon never considered he would have to traverse a way through his own downfall, in what he acknowledges was a mess of his own making.
That reached its zenith in February 2011 when a video emerged of him — in his jocks — in a hotel room with the schoolgirl behind the St Kilda nude photo scandal.
What followed would cost him his business and $8 million. The AFL deregistered him as a player agent for two years.
The personal toll was far greater. It cost him his marriage and, for a time, his connection with his two sons.
“I won’t go into huge detail here, but I went into a hotel room and I shouldn’t have,” Nixon told the Herald Sun’s Sacked podcast.
“I shouldn’t have done it. My (ex) wife has never asked me what I did wrong. She just said, ‘You stuffed up Ricky, do something about it’.”
Almost a decade on, Nixon has revealed the trigger point was a bolt in blue moment three years earlier — the shock death of broadcaster Clinton Grybas, aged 32, in 2008.
“My No. 1 client wasn’t Wayne Carey, it wasn’t Gary Ablett. Guess who it was? Clinton Grybas,” he said.
“I met Clinton Grybas and he was earning 30 grand on the ABC and I said, ‘Mate, I will make you 300’ and he said ‘I will sign with you now’.
“I got him a million dollars in six months. He was paying me 20 per cent of that, whereas Wayne Carey was paying me 3 per cent. That’s why I say he was my No. 1 client.”
Just before Christmas 2007, Grybas arrived at Nixon’s office looking as if he had been attacked.
“Half his ear was hanging off, (he had a) fractured jaw and I said, ‘Mate, what’s happened?’. He said, ‘I don’t know Ricky, I think someone bashed me last night’. I said, ‘No way’.
“(We) went back to his apartment and on the balcony the fencing had blood on it.
“I said, ‘Mate, you must have been sleepwalking, you must have tripped’. He said, ‘That’s funny you say that (as) they found me out near the lift three nights ago, sound asleep. I said, ‘Something is not right mate, you have got to go to the doctor’.
“I rang him the day before Christmas and said, ‘How did you go with the doctor?’ “He said, ‘Mate, they said there is nothing wrong with me’. I said, ‘No worries mate’. And I hung up and said (to myself). ‘He didn’t go to the doctor’.”
Grybas’s death on January 5, 2008 rocked Nixon. He said it triggered a descent into an alcohol and drug addiction.
“It’s not an excuse,” he said. “But it changed my life forever. You can talk about hotel rooms and girls … that’s not what happened.
“That’s not where it started.
“(After Grybas’ death) I started drinking, I had never done drugs in my life. I started doing cocaine, and I got addicted.
“I had got to a point where I was working seven days a week, 15 hour days. I wasn’t watching my sons play footy. I was going to eight games of footy every weekend. I felt that I just didn’t show (Grybas) the respect or management, I suppose.”
MOORE INTERVENTION
AS Nixon’s life slid out of control, he refused help from those willing to intervene.
Asked how much trouble he was in, he said: “I was probably doing nowhere near (as much drugs as) what most people in society were doing, but because it became public, I have got to accept that I made a bad decision.
“Wayne Carey said he had nine pages (in the Herald Sun); and I had 14 (after the video release).
“The police … said. ‘Before we start, Rick, you haven’t done anything illegal’. They did an eight-month investigation, it cost me $8 million, 29 staff lost their jobs and I did nothing illegal.”
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Then came a call from dual Brownlow Medallist Peter Moore — whose son Darcy remains the best mate of Nixon’s son, Mitch – that changed his life forever.
“I had 347 missed calls that day. I got this call from Peter (Moore) and when I think back (I wonder), ‘Why did I answer it?’
“I will tell you why, because he was above me.
“I was told in no uncertain terms by Peter Moore, ‘You’ve got to make a decision, Rick, what’s more important, your kids or the drugs?’.
“Peter changed me that day, he sent me to a doctor and I got out of denial.”
Asked if Moore’s call saved his life, Nixon insisted: “Absolutely.”
A FLYING START
NIXON’S 63-game career across 11 seasons and three clubs (Carlton, St Kilda and Hawthorn) was a story of broken bones, missed opportunities and an awesome network of potential clients.
Working at Carey Grammar, he went into business with 400m runner Michelle Baumgartner when he saw her repeatedly offered sponsorships that never eventuated.
He met AFL powerbrokers Ross Oakley and Jeff Browne, who were happy to expand the game and sent him to America to study the biggest sports leagues.
Nixon borrowed an idea from the NFL’s Quarterback Club and turned it into the AFL’s Club 10 — a group of up to 17 players sponsored by Mitre Ten.
He conceded Wayne Carey’s burgeoning fame was the key to all of that power.
“I went into player management and if I played at one club I had access to 50 players,” Nixon said. “I had played at three so I had access to 150 players.
“I went and saw Michael Jordan (in America) and I thought, ‘Australian needs a Michael Jordan’. Then I had this guy come to me and his name was Carey, brother of.
“And this guy (Dick Carey) said, ‘My brother will be the best player of all time’.
“People think I was a genius, but I was lucky at the time. I was doing handball clinics at shopping centres for $400. The three players would get $100 and I would get $100 and it would cost me $70 in petrol, but I signed 90 players in a week. Why?
“Wayne would go back and say, ‘Ricky got me $100’. Back in 1993 that was a lot of cash.”
He found ways to circumvent the AFL’s salary cap rules – bending but not breaking them to his client’s advantage.
“So I requested Wayne’s intellectual property and it was owned by Wayne Carey Ptd Ltd and he licenced it to me for $2 so I could sell it to North Melbourne for marketing rights of $700,000.
“He was getting paid $300,000 from North Melbourne and $700,000 went to me and I gave Wayne $400,000. People said it was cheating, but it was absolutely within the rules.
“They brought me into AFL House and said, ‘You can’t do this’, and I said, ‘I run the competition, not you’.”
GARY ABLETT SR
NIXON made Gary Ablett Sr a very rich man, but also offered him lucrative opportunities he was stunned to see the Geelong megastar decline.
It was only when Ablett retired that he realised why he said “no” to many of the media opportunities.
Ablett’s signature fell into Nixon’s lap.
“I had a private (phone) line only for players. So I knew if it was ringing it was Wayne Carey, so I said, ‘Hello’. ‘It’s Gary Ablett’, the voice on the line said.
“And I said, ‘Sure it is’, and hung up. I didn’t manage him. And it rang again and he said, ‘Rick, it’s really Gary Ablett’. I said, ‘Oh, OK, what do you want?’
“And he said, ‘I heard you earned Wayne Carey $100,000 last year. If you can earn me 100 grand I will sign up with you for 10 years’. I said, ‘Gary, sign with me today and I will earn you $200,000’.
“And I hung up the phone and said, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to do this?’
“The phone rang five minutes later and he said, ‘It’s Peter from Lombards, do you manage Gary Ablett?’. I said, ‘Yeah I have been managing him for 10 years’.
“He said they wanted to do life-size cardboard cutouts of him. Would 50 grand be OK?
“I said, ‘It’s Gary Ablett, what about $100,000?’ He said, ‘Done’.”
Nixon believes Gary Ablett Sr shares similar personality traits to Dustin Martin, thrilled to entertain the masses but not be among them.
“He rang me after he retired and said, ‘Rick, I need to see you, we are going fishing’.
“He stopped the boat in the middle of the bay and I had a contract for $150,000 at The Footy Show and 20 per cent of that for me. He said, ‘Do you understand that I don’t want to be like everyone else’.
“Gary values his privacy. I didn’t realise it until he explained it. Dealing with players in the 1990s onwards, most of the best players in the game have got massive anxiety problems.
“One day I was sitting with Gary and Wayne and I said, ‘If I had 10 tickets to watch you, who would I use them on?’ Duck goes, ‘You would use the lot on me’, and I said, ‘No, I would use them all on Gary’. Duck is by far the greatest player who ever played the game … but Gary Ablett is the most freakish and entertaining player who ever played the game by a mile.”
I WANT MY DAD BACK
THE thing that gives Nixon the most pride about his recovery has been his repaired relationship with his sons.
“My son Mitch went through hell and back,” he said. “(He) was 15 at the time. My other son was in Queensland at uni, so he wasn’t subjected to the same scrutiny.
“Mitch basically hadn’t spoken for eight months because he goes to school each day and (other kids) say, ‘What did your Dad do?’
“Mitch sent me an email saying: ‘I lost my dad, I lost my footy coach, my heart is broken’. I went ‘wow’. He was sitting at the dinner table and I said: ‘Is there anything I can do?’
“He said, ‘Nothing’.
“This will live with me until the day I die. He said, ‘All I want is my Dad back’.”
His other son, Lewis, sent him a message after his stint in rehab and it said, ‘Dad, we did it’. “That was eight years ago, and it’s still the screen saver on my computer. What he meant was, we did it as a family.”
Nixon said his ex-wife Jude was “the greatest human on the planet” for supporting him through his woes.
He doesn’t hide from the mistakes he made, but wants to use those experiences to help others.
He founded Kicking For Cancer last year, an organisation aimed at granting wishes to kids with cancer, with the help of ex-AFL footballers.
He also developed a mobile health clinic — Vital Health Checks — which provides 20-minute physical and mental health check-ups for employees from businesses, including Racing Victoria.
“We found a kid before Christmas — who was 22 — (he had) melanoma on his arm. He was going to be dead in 18 months. His mum rang me and said, ‘Ricky you have saved my son’.
“I said, ‘I didn’t save him … Racing Victoria saved him’.
“I guess I have learnt my lesson. So if I identify something (wrong) with a staff member at the Benalla Race Club, I don’t stop until that kid goes to the doctor.
“Because Clinton Grybas planted that into me.”
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Originally published as Sacked: Ricky Nixon opens up about building an empire, his downward spiral and saving his relationship with his sons
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