The Brownlow medallist and his widely publicised international battle with drug addiction became one of the biggest stories across the nation in 2007 and, for the AFL, set the tone for the season, a tone Fitzpatrick insists was largely media-driven.
The multi-layered drugs issue encompassed the dispute with the Federal Government over the three-strikes policy, the Daniel Kerr tapes, the investigation into the Eagles, the botched drug testing at Hawthorn and the battle with Channel Seven over stolen medical records — all of it punctuated by Cousins and his meandering, disintegrating football career.
Fitzpatrick’s leadership was questioned. The AFL was criticised for being indecisive, too soft on illegal drugs and too soft on West Coast. The clubs muttered that the competition was crying out for the late Ron Evans and his firm, fatherly hand.
The new AFL chairman never seemed to waver — not that he would ever show it — and he did not waver this week when he sat down for an interview with The Age, only his second since taking on the job and not something he intends to do often.
"Look," said the chairman at one point, in the stylish boardroom on the first floor of his boutique office building at the top of Collins Street, "if this interview is only going to be about drugs, then we are wasting our time. I mean it. We are wasting our time."
The other issue that weighed down the AFL in Fitzpatrick’s debut season of chairman was the failed attempt to convince the North Melbourne Football Club to relocate to the Gold Coast and the chairman, keener to look forward than reflect, does not beat around the bush regarding his plans.
Revealing his intention to oversee an 18-team competition in time for the next broadcast rights agreement in 2012, Fitzpatrick agrees rugby league has stolen a march on the AFL but said: "I’m not sure it was a failure of our intelligence. It took place for them (the NRL) in a very short space of time and they were lucky the way that the stars — the government, the region and various other crucial aspects — suddenly aligned.
"I don’t believe we’ve got any choice now. If you can’t get a team to relocate on the basis that North was offered, then I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. In a sense it has solved a problem for us because had North gone — and we were disappointed they didn’t — there was always the question of introducing a 17th team into western Sydney."
An intriguing mixture of Carlton ruckman and Rhodes Scholar, Fitzpatrick still bears scars of resentment over his own share of unwanted media attention over a personal situation in 1976, a time he now regards as a social precursor to what he now laments as a "collision between journalism and trashy magazines" that has hurt the game and those in it. It is an incident he refuses to elaborate on.
"I understand the media interest in football," he said, "but think at times it goes right over the top and turns into a frenzy. I had a time when I was playing when I had media camped outside my home and while it didn’t really have an impact on me, it did have a real impact on the people around me. I thought it was over the top then and I still do."
Fitzpatrick’s public style can be blunt, often aloof and even arrogant. Privately he is more effusive, enjoying his own dry sense of humor, blended in with an affability that comes when least expected.
Despite his lofty social and economic position in life (Fitzpatrick is a non-executive director of Rio Tinto, which is trying to fight off a bid from BHP, which, if successful, would be the biggest takeover in Australian corporate history) his old lockerroom ties from Subiaco and Carlton appear equally binding.
FITZPATRICK is an advocate for equal opportunity who laments the lack of a woman on the AFL executive and his board room is adorned by a beautiful photograph of a young indigenous Australian. But he is not always politically correct.
At the end of our interview he mentions a recent visit from his former Blues teammate Warren "WOW" Jones and cracks a new mildly ribald gag regarding Jones’ famous nickname and THAT tattoo.
"When you talk about leadership issues — whether it’s my leadership or the role of the commission as a whole — I think that there is a general misapprehension regarding the governance of the AFL. One of the issues was with some journalists who I believe enjoyed a good relationship with Ron (Evans) and would talk to Ron from time to time about issues.
"I don’t have those relationships. The competition has an executive, which is paid to run the competition, and Andrew (Demetriou) and his executive who oversee that are there to comment on the issues.
"There was a situation where those journalists would ring me to discuss those issues and try to drive a wedge between me and Andrew, which wasn’t going to happen."
Since Fitzpatrick took over as chairman, a second woman, Family Court judge Linda Dessau, has joined Sam Mostyn on the commission. But there are no women on the AFL executive, which Fitzpatrick said was "a pity".
"When you look at an executive team and the mix and see that there’s no women, then obviously that’s a shortcoming. The challenge now is to find the right woman or women," he said.
WITH the competition expanding, looking to reschedule the Brownlow and still considering a night grand final and Good Friday football, Fitzpatrick, despite his traditional football heritage, names only one AFL tradition as sacrosanct — that of the last Saturday in September.
Fitzpatrick’s arrogance is appealing in that his stated opinions are not overly careful nor laced with insecurity. In his one expansive interview last year he offended Channel Seven by describing its AFL coverage as "rusty". And when asked whether he — and not Wayne Harmes — should have won the 1979 Norm Smith Medal, Fitzpatrick replied "probably".
He backs away from neither comment now, insisting that Seven’s Ian Johnson later agreed with the description, even adding that the year he was truly stiff regarding the Norm Smith was 1982 — the year Maurice Rioli won it.
"Graeme Richmond said to me about six months later: ‘You cost us the premiership’. That was better than a medal."
Unlike Evans, he has no moral or social opposition to the Good Friday question and says the commission ultimately rejected it this year because the economics did not justify it.
Wealthy beyond any need for a career, having sold his Hastings Funds Management Group several years ago in two packages worth $120 million and a former chairman of the Australian Sports Commission, Fitzpatrick sits on several other boards including the Prostate Cancer Foundation and basically faced a choice between football and politics when it came to a public life choice.
He is glad he chose football, having always mixed his spectacularly successful business career with the game, having served on the Carlton match committee and the board since retiring as a player in 1983. It is what he knows, he says.
An approach from Senator Stephen Conroy to stand for ALP pre-selection became complicated by a leadership challenge and Fitzpatrick reflects now: "I think I was considering it out of a sense of obligation more than really wanting to do it. It went back to school and people suggesting to me I should do it.
"I’m not sure I was suited to that way of life. I don’t have a union background or a party apparatchik background. In politics I think you need to be in the system for a long time and I think that’s an issue Malcolm Turnbull is finding now.
"I’m not sure the lifestyle would suit me either. I’ve spent time in Canberra during parliament and you wander through that building and hear the bells and watch them run."
Fitzpatrick expected the drugs question first and he got it. The AFL has met the new Rudd Government and is investigating new testing methods including hair and oral sampling but has not reached a conclusion on the three-strikes policy it undertook to review in the middle of last year.
THE issue remains a particularly sensitive one for Fitzpatrick and the AFL given its occasionally difficult relationship with the Howard government and the reliance on federal and state government funding to improve the game’s facilities as well as expand the competition. As well, it works closely with indigenous programs.
"There was a perception we were left-wing and one of my issues when I came in was that we didn’t have the relationship with government that we should have and other codes were organising themselves quite successfully around us," Fitzpatrick said.
"That was one of my tasks and then we had a difference with them over the drugs policy. I also know the view of some people was: ‘Why don’t you jump in and whack them’ where West Coast was concerned but I believe we were very tough on that club and there have been changes because of that.
"You always reflect on how the year went and what worked and what didn’t. I have seen the (Justice William) Gillard report into West Coast and the commission will review those findings on Monday.
‘‘With Cousins, he was suspended by his club, he didn’t play until round 16 and now he’s been suspended by us for a further 12 months. End of story.’’
Fitzpatrick does not hope to fix what he believes is a distasteful tabloid intrusion into footballers’ private lives, but he does have big ambitions for the game. Those ambitions cover three areas. The first is the radical expansion of the game into NSW and Queensland, the second is the development of football infrastructure.
Having just signed a deal which insiders predict will finish up costing $1.5 billion with the Western Australia Government to build a new stadium alongside Subiaco and move the Eagles from that precinct, Fitzpatrick has pledged to upgrade facilities from the purest grassroots level, through the clubs and all the way to South Africa — a promised land in terms of game development to which the AFL has sworn allegiance.
He describes his third ambition as ‘‘the broader issue of governance’’. It has taken some years but the AFL is finally about to establish a new players’ code of conduct.
‘‘The players must understand that with the privilege of playing comes a responsibility to act in a responsible manner,’’ Fitzpatrick said.
‘‘I want to make it clear that most players — the vast majority of players — do that and understand that responsibility and do the right thing.
But as with any policy there will be a few that don’t get the message.
‘‘We will be pushing a lot of responsibility for the clubs to deal with these matters appropriately in the first instance — where they don’t, the AFL will step in but it is primarily the role of the clubs to deal with any misbehaviour.’’
Fitzpatrick, who recently turned 55, took over as chairman of the AFL one year ago in circumstances that could literally be described as the best of times and the worst of times.
The AFL was also about to embark upon the richest television deal in Australian sporting history, with channels Seven, Ten and Foxtel having finally come to terms over the five-year agreement worth a total of $750 million.
It was a massive deal that left a bitter taste in several network executive mouths. It also secured the short-term futures of several Victorian clubs, but the unfortunate by-product for financially struggling football fans was that Foxtel bought an extra game, meaning that half the weekly round of games now cost money to watch.
This reality has never truly troubled the AFL. Fitzpatrick said this week that the drugs crisis on several levels might have dominated newspaper coverage but ‘‘on all objective parameters we had a successful season; record club memberships of 532,000, our TV audience went over 7 million and free-to-air TV and pay was split 4-4 and Foxtel doubled its audience’’.
His ascendancy was no surprise. By his own admission the long-term plan had always been thus, but the role was thrust upon him earlier than expected following the death of Evans on the eve of the 2007 season after a brief but brutal battle with cancer.
Evans had left the game in good shape. Pushing aside the outpouring of grief that accompanied his passing, few would dispute that he had achieved his stated aim of leaving the game he loved better than he had found it.
In symbolic terms, Evans looked and acted like the game’s father figure. In reality the late chairman’s belief in the football family was never more strongly demonstrated than during Andrew Demetriou’s affectionate anecdotal eulogy to his friend and mentor at St Paul’s Cathedral.
The younger Fitzpatrick, by contrast, did not boast a paternal image, especially where Demetriou was concerned. In fact the expectation was that a Fitzpatrick-led commission would hold the autocratic Demetriou and his AFL executive more accountable.
In 2006, Demetriou had been gently but firmly rebuked for his handling of the division of spoils to the clubs from the new broadcasting millions.
The previous year the executive’s initial recommendation on draft changes and the priority pick system was rejected on the basis that more work was required. These small incidents were expected to set the tone for the new regime.
That expectation was fuelled by Fitzpatrick’s tribute to Evans after his death, which included the observation that during his chairmanship he ‘‘controlled Andrew, who is not always that easy to control’’.
Demetriou and Evans enjoyed an exceptionally close relationship and the prevailing view from the clubs and the industry as a whole was that Fitzpatrick was more likely to challenge his outspoken chief executive and that the pair would clash.
But one year on, Fitzpatrick said he has been pleasantly surprised by his working relationship with Demetriou, observing that the best thing about the year was that Demetriou did not spring any surprises on the commission.
‘‘Working with Andrew was more enjoyable than I expected,’’ he said. ‘‘Nothing came up that we weren’t expecting. I enjoyed his ability to predict outcomes, to see an issue and not look to where it’s playing at present but where it will play out upon completion.
‘‘Maybe it had something to do with the change of chairman (Fitzpatrick smiles, not without mischief). Maybe he’s become softer — I’m not sure.’’
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