Source :- THE AGE NEWS
“ Drugsy” picked up the phone on the bench. “Rocket” had a message from the coach’s box.
“Go out and ask Jason Mooney why the f— he is kicking long bombs to the goal square,” Swans coach Rodney Eade told the runner, Brendan Riseley, known to all as “Drugsy”.
The Swans under Eade had a team rule not to bomb the ball long to the goal square, but to kick it to where the third umpire normally went inside 50. But this day Mooney, brother of former North Melbourne and Geelong forward Cam, was kicking it long to the goals. So “Drugsy” was dispatched to put an end to it.
“Jason, mate, why are you kicking long to the goal square? We kick it to the third umpire. Why are you going to the goal square?”
The reply came: “I’m kicking it to Tony [Lockett].”
Said the runner: “Jason, Tony’s not playing today.”
Mooney looked at “Drugsy” blankly. “Drugsy” looked blankly back at him, and encouraged him to go short with his kicks.
When “Drugsy” got back to the bench, he suggested to the doctor he might want to head out and check on Mooney. The player was off the ground soon afterwards.
This was just one moment that sticks out in Riseley’s mind from more than 400 games as a runner, for nine clubs over 24 years, finishing with as many stories as games.
While he mainly ran for Eade – at all three of the clubs he coached – Robert Walls at the Brisbane Bears and Denis Pagan at Carlton, he also did the running for Bernie Quinlan for a season at Fitzroy, Nathan Buckley once, Dean Bailey once, and Tony Elshaug in a North reserves game.
The source of Riseley’s nickname is not what you might think. He was once given something by doctors after a VFL seconds game that left him so out of it he was dopey. The “Drugsy” nickname stuck.
Riseley only became a runner after Walls’ regular man at the Bears, Jim Christou, was sent out with a message for the umpire: tell him he’s a cheat.
Unfortunately, Christou delivered the message. The umpire, channelling Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, looked around and said, “Are you talking to me?” Christou, unwisely, said yes.
When asked, Christou didn’t give up Walls for sending him out with the message. He was given a long ban from running, but having been a player at Fitzroy and Port Melbourne, he knew that was better than dobbing in a mate.
Initially, Riseley only did the running in Victorian games for the Bears. It was eye-opening. Walls could get a coach’s version of white-line fever on match day – coach’s box fever?
“Wallsy was tough. He’d send you out to some player and say, ‘Go and tell whoever that Tony Free is not to walk off the ground’. It was a different time, but of course, you didn’t say that to the player,” he said.
“Once we played down at Geelong and, before the game, Wallsy wound them up. Roger Merrett was the skipper, and he was like, ‘We’re just going to be f—ing physical. They’re f—ing soft, so we’re going to bash them right from the word go’.
“Anyway, it wasn’t really working, they were like five goals up in the first quarter. Halfway through the second quarter, Wallsy sent me out to Peter Worsfold, who was John’s brother and just a battler of a player.
“He was on Kenny Hinkley and Hinkley probably had 20 possessions already and was killing us. He sends me out to tell Worsfold he needs to take Hinkley to the goal square and slow him up. I go out and give the message, and I’m running back, and the crowd goes off. Turns out they had run for the ball and Peter has just knocked Kenny out – stretchered off.
“I was like, ‘Shit, did I do this?’ I was thinking, I’ve stuffed this up, he was supposed to drag him to the square to slow up his run and he thought I meant knock him out.
“Anyway, half-time comes around and before going to the rooms, Wallsy grabs the players and makes them do a slow lap of the oval between the boundary and the fence.
“We’ll give these pricks something to yell about,” Walls said.
So they shambled through a slow, provocative lap of the oval.
“The crowd was going off. Throwing everything at us – coins, bottles. Matty Rendell copped a pie in the neck.
“We go inside and Wallsy was like, ‘That’s the way, give them something to complain about. We’re gonna be harder and tougher’.”
None of it worked. The Bears were belted.
“On the Monday, Wallsy rings me and says, ‘Listen, I completely lost the plot. I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have to put up with that’,” Riseley recalled.
It was a common refrain. Pagan would be unsparing for two hours of the game but afterwards it was all, “heat of the battle, son”.
Eade’s reputation for savage comments was not misplaced.
Riseley learnt very early on that the message you leave with is not always the one that gets to the player.
“‘Rocket’, when he was coaching the Swans, sent me out with a message for Tony [Lockett] this day about not giving away free kicks for running into blokes sitting in the hole. And ‘Rocket’ said to me, ‘I’m watching you. I’m watching you. You make sure you f—ing tell Tony what I said.’
“I ran out, and I was like, ‘OK, Tony, how you going? Yeah, just keep it going’. I was not gonna go and tell Tony Lockett what to do.
“Tony hated blokes dropping in the hole [the space in front of him that he would lead into] and he came flying out this day into blokes who dropped in the hole, and he missed them and took out Micky O’Loughlin and Dale Lewis. And ‘Rocket’ just loved ‘Micky O’, and ‘Plugger’ had cleaned him up.
“Go tell Tony, ‘You just killed two of our blokes’,” Rocket said.
So out runs Riseley to “Plugger”, a man with the delicacy of a bricklayer and the body of a brick.
“‘Hey, Tony, you know, like, just, there were a couple of our blokes there.’
“You only ever went to ‘Plugger’ about once a year so he always looked at you strangely when you spoke to him.
“He just looked at me and said, ‘You go and tell ‘Rocket’ to go f— himself’.
“‘OK, yep, OK, no worries Tony’.
“So I go back. ‘Rocket’ goes, ‘What did he say?’ [I said] ‘Oh yeah he understood, you know, he was OK with it’.”
For some players, it did not matter what message they were given; they only heard what they wanted to hear.
Brian Lake (when he was at the Bulldogs, having not yet changed his surname from Harris) was one of those for whom it didn’t matter what the message, or even what the coach’s plan was.
Playing the Brisbane Lions one day, Lake was told to play tight on Jonathan Brown, right on his backside. On the Lions’ first foray forward, Brown marked metres ahead of Lake and goaled. Riseley ran out to remind him that he needed to stick tight to Brown.
“Brian said, ‘Yeah OK, but ‘Boydy’ [teammate Matthew Boyd] wasn’t in the hole [blocking space] in front of Brown’,” Riseley said.
“[I said] ‘All right, but don’t you get on the leg rope, you play right up him’. And he goes, ‘Yep, but you tell ‘Rocket’ about ‘Boydy’.”
In the second quarter, Boyd broke a team rule about not giving first option to dispose of the ball, was caught, and Brown kicked a second goal. Riseley went out to remind Boyd to always take the first option and not hold on to the ball. As he turned to run back to the bench, Lake waved him over.
“That’s two for ‘Boydy’,” Lake said. “He’s only kicked two, Brown, and they’re both Boydy’s.”
Riseley got back to the bench and ‘Rocket’ was on the phone. “What did Brian want?” he asked.
Riseley replied, “Brian said, ‘Boydy has cost him two goals, and he should give off the first option’.”
Eade: “That’s what Brian f—ing said? You tell f—ing Brian that he can tell ‘Boydy’ at f—ing half-time.”
Riseley didn’t go out with Eade’s message, and Lake didn’t pass this on to Boyd.
Another day, this time against the Saints, Lake was due to line up on Nick Riewoldt while Tom Williams was to play on Justin Koschitzke.
“After five minutes Riewoldt comes flying out, leading Tommy to the ball and takes a mark on the half-forward flank,” Riseley recalled.
“I ran out to Brian to ask what happened because he was supposed to be on Riewoldt. He said, ‘Yeah, but Tom’s a better athlete than me, so I just thought he could run with Riewoldt, and I’ll sit back here with Kosi’.”
Riseley told Lake he reckoned he’d better get on Riewoldt. When he got back to the bench, he told Eade what had happened.
“What hope have I got?” Eade said.
Riseley could sympathise. Another time, “Rocket” sent him out to get Ryan Griffen off the ground and en route, ran past ruckman Ben Hudson, giving him a few words of encouragement.
When he got back to the bench with Griffen, he found Hudson sitting there.
“Rocket” was quickly on the phone. “Put Hudson on.”
“What are you doing on the bench?” Eade asked.
“‘Drugsy’ told me to come off,” said Hudson.
Riseley, listening in, interjected. “No I didn’t,” he said. “I said, ‘Well done, keep it going’.”
Hudson looked at him curiously. “But you never talk to me. Whenever you do talk it’s for me to come off … Oh, you’ve f—ed me up now, I’m not in the game. Just don’t talk to people out there.”
Pagan, a man with an amusingly colourful turn of phrase, was responsible for the most famous quote from a coach to a runner.
The North Melbourne runner was sent out by Pagan to get the diminutive Peter Bell off the ground. He came back without Bell.
“I couldn’t find him,” the runner said. Players were known to run and hide from the runner when they sensed they might be dragged.
“You couldn’t find him? Two missionaries found him on the side of the road in three feet of grass in South Korea and you can’t find him in the middle of the f—ing MCG?!” was Pagan’s reply.
“He’s the only five-foot-tall Korean out there.”
Riseley was not the runner that day, but he found Pagan very amusing.
Such as on the day that Pagan, then coach of Carlton, sent him out immediately after a game had started to get Ryan Houlihan off the ground. They arrived back, and Pagan asked Riseley what he was doing taking Houlihan off.
“We changed that message. You could cost people their job, son, this is amateur hour. When you run out, you’ve got to look back just to make sure we haven’t changed our mind,” Pagan said. Riseley nodded and agreed.
“Denis was very funny,” he said. “A couple of weeks after that, something stuffed up and he goes, ‘Listen, mate. I think next week we might get Snowy from the trams to do the running because it doesn’t really matter who does it because you’ve got no idea’.”
One day at the MCG, Riseley had to switch the full-back and full-forward. Mindful that the defence couldn’t be left exposed, he tried to move Setanta O’hAilpin first and then Bret Thornton. But it all had to be done quickly, so after sending O’hAilpin first, he started waving and yelling to Thornton from the middle of the ground. The move complete, he got back to the bench.
“What the f— was that? You might as well be a traffic cop out there; you might as well be on the corner outside Flinders Street Station waving your arms around. Why don’t you just run upstairs before you go out there and just tell Mick Malthouse what we’re doing first?” Pagan said.
On another day at Princes Park, Riseley was sent out to tell Heath Scotland not give the ball to Luke Livingston to kick. “You’re a good kick, Livo’s not. We want you kicking it. We don’t want ‘Livo’ kicking the ball.”
Scotland looked at him, perplexed. “Why is ‘Livo’ in the side then?” Riseley couldn’t answer.
Against Adelaide, when Brendan Fevola kicked a goal from the boundary to put Carlton in front with a few minutes to go, Riseley was sent out to get the forwards to flood back behind the ball and protect the lead. He got to all the forwards but hadn’t reached Digby Morrell before he was waved back to the bench.
The siren went and Carlton won.
After the celebrations, Shane O’Sullivan and Pagan were standing there, asking how it was that Carlton ended up with Digby Morrell isolated in the forward line.
“Digby Morell!” they said.
Riseley explained he didn’t get to him.
“Denis looked at me and goes, ‘You’re a f—wit’. I saw Denis at the airport later and he said, ‘Great win’. I said ‘Yeah, but I’m a f—wit.’”
“Heat of the battle, son, heat of the battle,” Pagan laughed.
Go back to part one of our series on runners to read more tales from those who witnessed some of the game’s most famous moments – and characters – up close and personal.
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