Jesaulenko, you beauty!
Alex Jesaulenko didn’t kick a football until he was 14. Within a few years, ‘Jezza’ was a genius. A four-time Carlton premiership player, he kicked a phenomenal amount of goals for his size, had breathtaking skills and balance, and could take unbelievable hangers. Forever remembered for his ‘mark of the century’ in the 1970 Grand Final, he was the last captain-coach of a premiership team in 1979. In 2008, Jesaulenko became the 22nd Australian Football Hall of Fame Legend.
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I was born in Salzburg, Austria, just a few months after the end of World War II. My father was Ukrainian and my mother is Russian and they had a very tough time of it during the war. They both lost family members and were forced to leave their homeland and ended up in Austria. When I was three, we migrated Down Under to Canberra. Thank goodness for that!
I didn’t play Australian Rules until I was 14. I went to a Christian brothers’ college, where we had to play rugby. You didn’t have the option of playing Australian Rules. But they eventually relaxed the rules at school so that we could play the game – and I’m forever grateful they did. I loved the freedom of it; you had no restrictions – you could just chase the ball – whereas in rugby you always had to get yourself into a particular position to be part of the game. I was also drawn to the spectacle of players jumping on each other’s backs. I thought: ‘I’d love to be able to do that’.
I made a goose of myself in my first game. I’d finished playing a game of rugby for the school when some mates of mine came up to me and said: “We’re a bit short, ‘Jezza’. Can you help us out?” I said: “Yeah, no worries”. All they told me was: “There’s four sticks down there; if you kick it between the two big ones, it’s a goal”. Sounded easy enough. I started around the centre somewhere and at the first bounce the ball landed in my arms and I took off. The opposition was coming at me but I palmed them off rugby-style and kicked a goal. I felt 10-foot tall. But when I turned around, all my teammates were yelling at me: “You stupid idiot – you’ve got to bounce the ball every 10 yards!” I thought: “Well, why didn’t you tell me that before?” I don’t think I got another kick that day – I was probably too worried about stuffing it up again.
The late start was actually an advantage. Playing other sports like rugby and soccer helped my football immensely. Soccer improved your balance and evasive skills, while rugby improved your tackling and toughened up your body to general body contact.
I practised my ball-handling for hours on end, often on my own. I’d bounce the ball against a wall and catch it on the rebound. By doing that, you get a real feel for the ball and you learn how it reacts when it bounces a certain way.
The only kick I knew was a drop-kick, because that’s the only kick we used in rugby. A mate and I would stand five metres apart and drill drop-kicks as hard as we could at one another and try to mark them. It was very simple and repetitive, but very effective in developing marking skills.
I’d dream about taking screamers. That’s the first part of it because a player has to want to do it. Then I loved trying to do it, and once I mastered it to an extent, I loved actually doing it. I’d get to training very early and during kick-to-kick I’d just jump on some backs. When there’s only one ball and 20 players up each end, the only ways to get a kick are to either jump over them or stay on the ground and try to fight 19 other guys for it. I wasn’t a big fella – a lot of blokes who like to take big marks aren’t – but you can use the hips, shoulders and backs of other players to get up there with the big fellas.
Clubs don’t do any of that kind of kick-to-kick stuff now. The game was set up for high marking in my day. It was one handball to someone flying past, then a long kick to a key position, so blokes who could jump and take big marks were always going to prosper in that environment.
I modelled myself on (St Kilda superstar) Darrel Baldock. ‘The Doc’ was my hero. I’d race home to watch him play on TV. He had sensational skills and was such a competitor; rarely beaten. For some reason, I also barracked for Fitzroy.
I signed with North Melbourne just to get them off my back. I’d played in four premierships in a row with Eastlake in the ACT – one in the under-19s and three in the seniors. I played at centre half-forward and even in the ruck. But the ACT was a developmental area and no player from there could be signed. North Melbourne was on an interstate trip and they kept pestering me. The advice I received from an independent source was: “Just sign the form and they’ll leave you alone. It’s null and void anyway”. That’s what I did and North didn’t get anywhere. But that pricked my attention for the first time. I thought: ‘What are these North Melbourne blokes interested in me for?’
Soon there were about five clubs knocking on my door. My wife Annie has an uncle, Jack Dorman, who was the president of the ACT Football League. I went to Jack and asked him: “Which club do you think I should go to?” He was a mad Essendon supporter and he said: “I’d love you to go to Essendon, but they’ve got (Ken) Fraser at centre half-forward, Geoff Blethyn at full-forward and you’ll find it hard to break into the side”. Then he looked at Fitzroy and St Kilda and dismissed them. Then he said: “There’s one club there that you might break into straightaway. If you’re interested, I’ll do a deal with them where you get the first six games and if you’re any good you’ll stay, but if it doesn’t work out you can leave”. I said: “Well, that’ll do me”. He said: “The club is Carlton. They’ve got a good backline but they’ve got no forwards”. We did the deal and I joined the Blues in 1967.
Football wasn’t the be-all and end-all to me back then. The VFL was an adventure more than anything. I had a new wife and a new life in Melbourne, but my attitude was: ‘I could take or leave this VFL business. It’s not that big a deal’. After two practice matches, I thought: ‘These guys are no different to the guys I’ve been playing against up in Canberra. They might be a bit quicker, but that won’t be a problem once I do a bit of work on my pace and fitness’. And so it was – I had a pretty good first season. (Jesaulenko finished third in the Brownlow Medal in 1967.)
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(Carlton coach) Ron Barassi got me thinking seriously about the skills of the game. He not only demanded excellence, he demanded perfection, and that’s how we trained. I knew that if I didn’t take the game seriously and want to be the best, I’d be in big trouble. Strangely, ‘Barass’ didn’t give me many sprays. For some reason, he generally left me alone. But when he did, I didn’t take it personally.
Some people might have thought I was a casual trainer. I only ever did what I had to do. I was never a long distance runner – I was a sprinter – but I’d work on my fitness in the summer. Without anybody knowing, I’d run up to 10 kilometres up and down the hills. That ensured I was in reasonable shape by the time pre-season training came around. You have to work harder as you get older, otherwise the niggles will catch up with you and you won’t stand a chance against the younger, more athletic players.
My captain, John Nicholls, gave me some sound advice about retribution. On an interstate trip, we were having breakfast and reading the papers when big John casually said: “I’ll give you some advice, Jezza. If an opponent hits you unfairly, do not retaliate straightaway. Bide your time. The opportunity might arise to square up that day but, if it doesn’t, wait ’til next season, or the season after that, or the season after that. If the player isn’t around then, well apparently he wasn’t good enough. But if the opportunity does arise, hit him fairly. And when he picks himself up and asks: ‘What was that for, Jezza?’ tell him: ‘Remember three years ago at the MCG, at the 15-minute mark of the first quarter, when you knocked two of my teeth out? This is payback time, baby’.” And that kind of situation arose plenty of times.
I felt I could do it all in 1970. It was probably my best year. (Jesaulenko kicked 115 goals and remains Carlton’s only century goalkicker.) I set myself for a big year by doing a lot of boxing training away from the club over a period of about five weeks. That really built my aerobic fitness. Everything seemed to come easy – my marking was spot-on and so was my kicking for goal and, if it was off, it came back very quickly. I played most of that season at full-forward, but the ball didn’t always get down there, so I still had a few spells at centre half-forward and on a flank. Training wasn’t drudgery – it was actually enjoyable – and we had a good finals series.
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(Television broadcaster) Mike Williamson still says he made me famous. He reckons that by saying those famous words (“Jesaulenko, you beauty!”), he ensured people would remember me. After the game, I couldn’t even remember taking the mark. It’s become bigger as the years have gone by, because it was a Grand Final and people try to make things bigger than they are. People have the wrong impression that it was the turning point of the game. It happened just before half-time when we were still 44 points down. But because we came back and won the game, it gained a life of its own and was built up to be bigger than the reality. It’s a good thing to be remembered for. I feel a bit sorry for (Collingwood ruckman Graeme) ‘Jerker’ Jenkin but he says: “You don’t know what you’re talking about – it takes a lot of skill to back into a pack so that someone can jump onto your back!”
I thought I took a better mark in the last quarter. The fact it happened on the far wing probably goes some way to explain why that wasn’t as well remembered – it was too far away from the cameras! We were still about 10 points down at that stage and I kicked it into the forward line, so that was a far more important mark.
I aimed for two kicks and a goal each quarter. Four goals a game. When Geoff Southby first came down to Carlton (in 1971), I kicked four goals on him in a practice match in Bendigo, but he was rated best-on-ground. After the game, I said: “Geoff, if I kicked four goals on you every game, I’d have 88 goals. Who would be the better player for the year? Your job as a full-back is to make sure your opponent doesn’t kick a goal. Force him out wide to positions where it is difficult for him to kick goals. He might have 10 shots at goal but if he kicks 1.9, you’ve won”.
You can’t teach instinct – either you’ve got it or you haven’t. I could feel players around me. I could sense where everybody and everything was. I knew where the goals were, even when I had my back to them. I could read a player’s kick before the ball left his boot by looking at where he was running and how he was dropping the ball – and that applied to opposition players as well as my own teammates. That’s in-built. It can’t be taught, no matter how many times you practise it.
You need to remain alert for the whole 6000 seconds. You’ve got to stay involved in the game, even when the ball is down the other end of the ground, otherwise you might miss an opportunity. It might take 20 minutes for the ball to come down to the forward line, but you can’t just stand there and wait for it to come to you. If you stand still, it makes it easy for the backman because he doesn’t have to think. You have to stay on the move to keep him guessing and to take his mind off the game and start worrying about you. You might sprint 20 metres in one direction, jog 10 in another, and sprint 20 in another direction again. He’ll be struggling to keep up because you’ve got the initiative.
After I lost my pace and spring, I reinvented myself as a defender. I loved playing in the forward line but I realised I was no longer capable of it any more, and I found the easiest position to play was the half-back flank. I thought: ‘How long has this been going on? Why didn’t I start my career here?’ I found it easy because I could read the play. I could leave my opponent – I’d invariably be 10 or 15 metres off him – because I knew where the ball was going.
I was tagged by two Hawthorn players on the half-back flank (in 1975). I’d been in good form but I couldn’t believe it when (Hawks coach) John Kennedy sent these two blokes over to me. I thought: ‘How bloody stupid is this? What’s going on here?’ I looked up at our coach’s box and I didn’t receive any instructions from them, so I decided: ‘Bugger it; if they’re tagging me, I can do whatever I like’. I just took off and played the game like a ruck-rover. I didn’t have to worry about my man – or my men – because they weren’t worried about the ball; they were just worried about me. I don’t know what they were trying to achieve. I mean, they were obviously trying to stop me from getting a kick, but it had the opposite effect – it actually freed me up. Another time ‘Tuddy’ (Des Tuddenham) was coaching Essendon and he put himself on the boundary line to try and drag me away from the play. I thought: ‘What’s that got to do with anything? I’m not going to give him what he wants’, so again I just played my own game. I couldn’t have cared less if he got a kick out there – he wasn’t going to do any damage from that position. Tuddy abandoned that plan very quickly.
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I wanted to play in all positions, and I virtually did. I played in every position bar the ruck and the wing. It helped me later as a coach because I could relate to players who played in each position. I was coming from a position of experience. I could say: “Listen, I’ve played there; I know what you should do”. They couldn’t really argue with you then.
I came close to leaving Carlton a couple of times. It was over money. I never signed a contract with the club – I only ever had handshake deals. When Mike Fitzpatrick came over from Perth in ’75, rumours were flying around that he was getting all this money, so I decided: “If he’s getting that, I want a piece of the cake too”. They knocked me back, so I said: “See you later”. I wasn’t bluffing – I was ready to leave. Then they came to the party. There was another similar dispute in ’77. I just wanted what I thought I was fair.
I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when (Collingwood’s) Stan Magro crunched me in 1979. I was running with the flight of the ball and, unbeknown to me, Stan was coming the other way, and the moment the ball landed in my arms it was lights out. The era was such that if Stan didn’t do what he did, people would have been saying: “What a weak so-and-so”, and he probably would have been dropped the next week. I was never in Stan’s position, but if I had been, maybe I would’ve done the same thing. I was the one who woke up in hospital, but maybe that whole thing hurt Stan more than it hurt me.
I was virtually forced to take over from Ian Stewart as coach early in 1978. (Carlton president) George Harris said: “Just get out there and do it, will you”. It was a tough assignment because the club had been through a lot of turmoil. We were a bit of a rabble. I tried to get the players to change their attitude to start taking the game seriously. I took them back to basics and emphasised: “Let’s just get the thing first, then do something constructive with it and, if the opposition has it, let’s get it off them as quickly as we can”. We also got them fit and made sure they enjoyed what they were doing.
I tried to instil in the players an absolute hatred of losing. Each time we lost in 1979 – only three times – I kept them out late on the track and told them: “If you don’t want to do the things you have been shown and told to do, we will practise them, and practise them, and practise them, and we will train later and later and later, until you do them properly”. That was enough reason in itself to hate losing! They developed that mindset.
I was a much better playing-coach than a non-playing coach. If I was out on the field, I was right on the spot and I could deal with things immediately. You could probably see more from the coach’s box, but I felt strange sitting in there because if you wanted to get a message to a player about a mistake he’d made, by the time the runner got out there the player was in another situation, and often he’d done something good and you were giving him negative feedback.
I gave a lot of ownership of the team back to the players. I thought: ‘Rather than do the whole lot myself, I’ll appoint a few assistant coaches’. A lot of coaches use ex-players for those roles, but I used present-day players. I told Bruce Doull and Geoff Southby: “You two can coach the backline”; Mike Fitzpatrick had charge of the rucks, rovers and centreline, and Mark Maclure was the forward coach. They were the leaders who were doing the bulk of the work in their areas of the field, so I wanted to give them the responsibility they deserved. I felt that players make the best coaches because you need to make decisions very quickly out on the field, and the coach can’t make those decisions for you.
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I can’t take all the credit for our success in 1979. The move of Wayne Harmes from the back pocket to the centre was a turning point in the Grand Final, but that was none of my doing. I was the cause of it, though. We were five goals down and I wasn’t playing well in the centre and the message came out from the match committee: “We want you to go to the backline so we can put ‘Harmesy’ in the centre”. I trusted their judgement because things just weren’t working, and Harmesy helped things going.
I’m probably the only premiership coach not to have seen the last 10 minutes of the Grand Final. I hurt my ankle in the last quarter and had to come off because I wasn’t going to be any good to us out there. I was taken into the rooms and by the time the pain-killing injection started working, the game was over. A trainer ran in and was screaming: “We’ve won! We’ve won!” I said: “Oh, beauty!” It was a great feeling, but a bit of an anti-climax as well. I wish I’d seen it. I didn’t even get to see Harmesy tap the ball back from the boundary line to Ken Sheldon for the winning goal.
Clubs are only made special by their people. I wasn’t one for blindly following a club. If the right people are in the club, everything’s fine; but if the wrong people are there, you’re well within your rights to move on. (President) George Harris was a big part of our success in ’79. Even though I trusted the match committee, I didn’t trust them as much when it came to doing things to help players with their off-field circumstances, because I knew it would end up in the newspapers. I’d go straight to George and say: “We’ve got a problem here with this player”, and he’d say: “Don’t worry about it, Jezza, I’ll fix it”, and it was as good as done. Nobody else knew about it, except for George, the player and myself, so it didn’t cause any friction, and the player would thank me very much. George and I had a special relationship, so when he was challenged by other people within the club, I naturally remained loyal to him after all that he had done for me. Unfortunately, that resulted in both of us leaving the club (in February 1980). I virtually cut all ties with Carlton for a while and got on with life. The bitterness didn’t last long, though. I would do the same thing again. But I don’t hold any grudges against anybody.
It came down to a choice between Essendon and St Kilda. Both of them were playing positions only. I liked the way ‘Foxy’ (St Kilda president Lindsay Fox) went about things, so I went to the Saints. It was a challenge for me at my age – I was 34. Then the challenge became bigger when (coach) Mike Patterson was sacked and I was given the job.
“If you train harder off the field, then it must become easier on the field.” That’s what I told the St Kilda players. My training regime was a shock to their system at the start, but they tried very hard. Their fitness and endeavour wasn’t the problem; they just didn’t have enough skill. The more I asked them to lift their skills, the worse they got. When I left, players like (Danny) Frawley and (Tony) Lockett came along. I wouldn’t have minded having them!
Carlton got me back as coach midway through 1989 (after the Blues sacked Robert Walls). I had to bring back blokes like (David) Rhys-Jones and Jimmy Buckley, serious competitors with a bit of hardness, even though they were at the end of their careers. I didn’t understand all this zoning and handballing backwards – I wanted them to run forward and accept a handball – and that’s probably where I lost the players. It didn’t work out and it was another case of: “See you later, Jezza”.
Each of the four premierships have a special significance for me. People expect that I would single out ’79 because I was captain-coach, but the other three were just as special. The ’68 flag was the club’s first in 21 years; ’70 was important because we came back from so far behind; ’72 was great because we hadn’t beaten Richmond all year and we kicked a record score in a Grand Final (the Blues kicked 28.9 .177 to Richmond’s 22.18.150).
CAREER
Born: August 2, 1945.
THE PLAYER
Carlton 1967-79: 256 games, 424 goals.
St Kilda 1980-81: 23 games, 20 goals.
Total: 289 games, 444 goals.
Honours: Australian Football Hall of Fame Legend; 3rd Brownlow Medal 1967, 1970, 1975 (equal); AFL Team of the Century (half-forward flank); Carlton Team of the Century (half-forward flank); Carlton best and fairest 1975; All-Australian 1969; Carlton leading goalkicker 1969, 1970, 1971; Carlton premiership sides 1968, 1970, 1972, 1979 (captain-coach); Carlton captain-coach 1978-79; St Kilda captain 1980.
THE COACH
Carlton 1978-79 (captain-coach), 1989-90: 76 games, 53 wins, 22 losses, 1 draw, 70% winning percentage, premiership 1979.
St Kilda 1980-82: 64 games, 13 wins, 49 losses, 2 draws, 20% winning percentage.
Total: 140 games, 66 wins, 71 losses, 3 draws, 47% winning percentage.
Champions: Conversations with Great Players and Coaches of Australian Football - Ben Collins and Dan Eddy, second edition, published by Slattery Media Group and available at slatterymedia.com.
by Dan Eddy and Ben Collins
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