Source : ABC NEWS
Playing VFL football for Footscray and Melbourne during the 1970s and 1980s, Kelvin Templeton had the type of career most players can only dream of.
He won the Brownlow Medal as the league’s best and fairest in 1980 after taking Coleman medals for most goals in the 1978 and 1979 home-and-away seasons.
He kicked almost 500 goals for Footscray between 1974 and 1982 then played two seasons for Melbourne, where he finished his career.
After retiring, he served as the Sydney Swans chief executive for seven years and in 2024 was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame.
Now 69, Templeton has turned to writing, releasing his first novel, Collision, which tells the story of the violent world of 1970s VFL football.
After his playing days, Kelvin Templeton was chief executive at the Sydney Swans then built a successful business career. (Supplied)
A footy journey started in the regions
Growing up in Tyers, in Victoria’s south-east, in the 1960s, Templeton revelled in the immersive, transformative power of stories.
An avid reader all his life, he played senior football in the Latrobe Valley after moving to Traralgon as a teenager.
He moved to Melbourne aged 17 to play for Footscray, now the Western Bulldogs, while attending university.
“If we go back to 1974, there were fierce tribal loyalties between teams. At Footscray, quite a lot of players in the team were from the local area or the Latrobe Valley,” he said.
“You played on often-muddy suburban grounds. It was very localised.
“There was a very casual attitude to violence on the field. It happened a lot, as it was regarded as just as part of the game.“
He said fights were common and, while there was spontaneous violence, some players were assigned to “fix up” an opponent.
Kelvin Templeton with his debut novel Collision. (ABC News: Rachael Lucas)
“The era that I played in was quite a dangerous one and there were a number of players that got injured badly,” Templeton said.
He recalled the shortened careers of fellow Footscray players Stephen Boyle, who lost sight in one eye while playing, Neil Sachse, who became a quadriplegic and Collingwood’s John Greening, who suffered a cerebral concussion.
“It was a bit of a wild time. There was a pretty active partying and drinking life off the field at the same time,”
he said.
The rough and reckless nature of VFL football wouldn’t change until the mid-to-late 1980s when the AFL commission was formed and running the game became more of a corporate style of governance.
Lifelong scars, transformative trajectories
In an exploration of the formative years of 1970s VFL football, Collison follows the fictional story of 20-year-old goalkicking prodigy Joshua “Clover” Shamrock.
Self-focused and self-absorbed, he exists in a vacuous realm of vanity and status, where training, games, goals, injuries, big nights out, cars and predatory women frame his entire being.
But when an injury brings his shining career to an early and tragic end, Shamrock’s self-worth, which has been tied to his victories as a sports star, is shattered.
He finds himself ill-prepared for life after football, having to reinvent himself and navigate his relationships.
Kelvin Templeton is a Brownlow Medallist and won the Coleman Medal twice. (Supplied: AFL Photos)
Curious about such “sliding doors” incidents and the impact they have on someone’s life trajectory, Templeton drew on emotions he felt during the era for his novel.
It was a challenge that would take him 10 years to complete.
“I’ve found that the best way to write fiction is to write the emotions but not any of the facts of your life,” he said.
“In the case of my character, it takes away the dream he has always had and he has to fashion a new life, and for a lot of the time he’s not very good at doing that.“
He describes Collision as an exploration into the stoicism of Australian masculinity and the quiet anxieties that come with it that can present as arrogance.
“I see the book as a journey, a transformational story,” Templeton said.
“What Joshua finds is that the same characteristics that helped him be very good at sports — being stoic and not showing pain, refusing to give up, etc — these things are like a two-headed coin.”
“His initial reaction is that he has to tough it out, he has to be brave and strong, but of course all that does is push his partner away from him. He then comes to the realisation that he has to think in a different way.”
Mental health and modern football
After retiring from playing and running the Sydney Swans, Templeton did postgraduate studies in the US.
He ran a successful consulting firm in the Middle East for 15 years, living in Abu Dhabi and Iran.
Kelvin Templeton is inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 2024. (Supplied: AFL Photos)
He has little to do with football these days, but notes that the modern game is much faster, with more handballing than punch-ups.
With national teams and rule changes over the years, he says there is less of a premium on key player positions and more holistic support available when it comes to injuries and mental health.
“If someone disclosed that they were feeling down or depressed it would be seen as a weakness. You had to overcome that. People dealt with that with stoicism, not tapping through it, and not talking about it,”
he said.
“We now see players that are going through rough periods actually have time off, even during the season, where they have time to sort out whatever their personal problems might be.
“Back in my era, you probably would have got tossed out of the club.”
