Source :- THE AGE NEWS
Since bowing five years ago to hamstrings he swears are made of paper, Easton Wood hasn’t deliberately distanced himself from football. Yet in metaphorically passing the baton to wife Tiff he’s carried on being a good teammate, and felt the lifting of a guilt known to many professional sportspeople.
“To be successful as an athlete you have to be inherently selfish, and there’s a cost to that,” the 36-year-old says. “Tiff was always gracious knowing that football had to come first … so many times she went to weddings on her own. I was always really grateful for the support she gave me, but I always felt there was a debt too.”
They were at school together but didn’t get together until their early 20s, by which time Tiff was already a seasoned traveller. While her future husband was tackling the first of his 14 seasons at Whitten Oval, she spent a gap year in Asia and living in London. A book in the works draws on a traumatic experience in Africa, exploring stress, anxiety and early motherhood.
When they teamed up a commitment was made to spend a month at the end of every season travelling somewhere neither had been. “I’d been to Bali and America – which was big for a Camperdown boy! – but Tiff had been everywhere.”
Lonely Planet guide in hand, they explored Madagascar one year, Turkey and Jordon another, Cuba and Mexico, Chile and Brazil, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland.
Wood thinks his wife has a shark-like trait – “she has to keep moving forward”. Living in an AFL COVID-19 hub, with daughter Tilly not yet one and pregnant with Freddy, Tiff Wood leaned on her consulting and marketing background and started her own business. She taught herself to code, created a mother and baby’s matching swimwear brand, sold out the first run, then packaged it up and sold the business. “It was like her own best uni course.”
At the end of 2021 they made a family decision to retire from football with a year still to run on his contract. He’d endured three hamstring injuries that season, taking his career tally into the 20s.
Working with Bulldogs psychologist Lisa Stevens on the delicate dance between commitment and cost, Wood realised he was done. “So we made a call to end it, and went and lived in Bali for five months.”
They rented a villa in Canggu, and while Tiff worked on transforming her consulting business into 10-person-strong content creation agency Loft Social, Easton shifted down a few gears. “The kids alternated in daycare so I’d be one-on-one with either of them. Otherwise I’d go gym, cruise, cafe, decompress.”
When, after a few months, he found himself getting bored, it was a relief. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got space again!’”
He played a game of Monday night basketball with people he’d never met, and was asked back for a drink at “The Bench” afterwards. “I thought it must have been a gastropub – it was a bench on the road outside a mart!” There were eight of them; eight of the coldest, best beers of his life later he’d made eight new mates and his Monday nights were filled.
Freddy won’t remember the sabbatical, but his father will forever cherish plonking him on a scooter and heading off into the rice fields, his little boy yelling, “Tuck! Tuck! Tuck!” each time a truck rumbled past.
He laughs now at the rose-coloured glasses the experience imbued, leading to the Woods buying a block with visions of splitting their time between their lifelong and new homes. “I don’t know what we were thinking!”
Back in Australia, the next phase gathered pace. Home dad during the week, he fulfilled a promise to his oldest mate to play a game of cricket with Pomborneit, and stayed for two seasons. He thought he’d put shoulder, ankle and wrist reconstructions behind him, but the latter rendered him a shadow of the teenager who earned a cricket and football scholarship and bowled so often and fast he suffered back stress fractures in Year 12. In comeback mode, a bowler’s all-important wrist abandoned him.
“I thought it would be just time and rhythm, but I got worse – and worse, and worse! I bowled a 10-ball over, got the yips completely – the wides were going everywhere.”
After a second waist-high full toss, which should mean disqualification from bowling for the rest of the innings, he copped the worst sledge of his sporting life.
“The batsman reminded the umpire I should be off, and he said, ‘It’s OK – it wasn’t dangerous!’ I was so offended. I didn’t use any of my learnings from my entire career, I just completely crumbled and said, ‘Ah, $%@! it, I’m never playing again!’”
Wood knew he wasn’t going to work in football, but what to do? He enjoys building relationships and is a good communicator. Tiff suggested he spend some time at Loft to get an idea how an office works. His trophy haul now includes an All-Australian jacket, Charles Sutton and AFL premiership medals, and a sparkly blue duck awarded to Loft’s 2022 Social Intern of the Year (he may have been the only contender).
He landed at boutique recruitment firm Hassett Group, working across accounting and finance and learning plenty. He likes their ethos of going “a mile wide but three inches deep”, a broad lens that can see him bounce from clients in childcare to chemical manufacturing to agriculture to financial services.
He likes that it shares football’s bipolar rhythm, where one day can be champagne and celebration and the next doom and gloom. “You can’t control outcome, which is the same as footy – you can only control process. So invest in the process and then give yourself over to whatever the outcome is.”
The Woods have followed family and close mates to Geelong, and are revelling in a new, tight-knit community of young parents within walking distance of their local primary school. Behind a high fence on a busy road, they live with a trio of chooks named Chickeny, Aimme and Pearl who’ve taken over the front garden, and a border collie named Murphy – after Bob of course, alongside whom he famously hoisted the 2016 premiership cup.
He doesn’t miss having the platform football afforded him, but is happy he took a late-career stance against the AFL’s hypocrisy around gambling after yet another compulsory player education session proved one box-ticking exercise too many.
“I was just sitting there fuming – you’re telling us how dangerous this is, and you’re also promoting the proliferation and growth of this industry? But hey, it’s no good, don’t do it!”
He’s proud, too, of Tiff speaking about the body dysmorphia she struggled with while being objectified as a footballer’s partner. Seeing how she naturally disarms people, owns every room she enters, and especially how young girls idolise her, his pride swells.
“Through the football period it was always difficult for her – she’s very strong-willed and driven, but in that football environment she was treated as a subsidiary of me and my success. So this change in her level of confidence and of her being where she’s always viewed herself, that’s very cool. She’s a weapon.”
In Tilly and Freddy’s generation he hopes for a disconnect from the “brain soup” of social media and is already sensing a subtle shift back to analogue.
He understands the football media’s cycle, its need to be bipolar to hold attention, but views the Bulldogs’ first half of 2026 as further proof of the grim place we’re at.
“After four weeks it was, ‘We’re gunna win the flag!’ Four weeks later it was, ‘We’re done.’ Neither were true. I think we’re getting dumber.”
The 10-year premiership reunion was a joyous love-in, and he was touched at the effort people made – Josh Dunkley, Dale Morris and 2016 property steward Jayden Shea flew down from Brisbane, Jake Stringer came from Sydney, Melbourne coach Steven King was there, and others like Caleb Daniel and Jack Macrae who no longer wear red, white and blue.
“Within 30 seconds it was 2016 again. It’s really special to have a stamp in time to come back to.”
He idolises older brother McLeod, an Australian Army lieutenant colonel whose star is rising, and ignored another hammy tweak in June to fulfil duties as playing-coach of McLeod’s Norforce football team at the annual Barunga Festival, east of Katherine. “I jogged around.”
He watches the Dogs with great interest, and with the empathy that marked his rise to the captaincy when Murphy went down early in 2016. Watching Adelaide pile on goal after goal in round 14 he felt for the players, wondering how they would feel and respond in the ensuing days. “I go more to the people than the outcomes.”
He likes that he can put football down now and come back to it later. “Or not.”
He went straight from school into a professional sporting environment and misses the relationships and the purpose. “That razor-sharp, moment-to-moment, decision-to-decision world where you wake up and know exactly what you’re doing and why. That was invigorating.”
He misses the butterflies and the message they carried – that this could be the best game of your life, or the worst, but most often somewhere in between.
“I miss that alive feeling of playing your hand, and just being all in. You don’t know what you’re going to get, and you say, ’All right, what are you made of? Let’s go!”
The Woods are tackling life after football the same way. Come future Bulldogs’ premiership reunions, where might they be? “Hopefully travelling.”
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