Brandon Jack - 28

Praise for 28

Brave, raw and repeatedly shocking, Brandon Jacks memoir breaks new ground for sports writing in Australia. It feels like we have been waiting a long time for such openness from the inside of professional sport. Like Andre Agassis Open, this is a transformative book; it is going to change our way of seeing.

Malcolm Knox, journalist and author of Bluebird

I was fascinated and shocked by the stories in this memoir, but what really surprised and thrilled me was Jacks fearlessness as a writer, and his compelling voice. It takes so much skill and diligence to make storytelling seem this effortless. It requires courage to take such risks. Brandon Jack has talent and daring in abundance.

Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap

Brandon Jack is a force for good. The kind of writer you want every young manwait, no, every manto discover and read.

Michelle Andrews and Zara McDonald, hosts of the Shameless podcast

Brandon Jack is a great writer and this is a searingly honest, unflinching account of a common side of sporting life that we nevertheless rarely get to see. It tells the real story about the guts and pain it takes to play sport for a living and the even greater courage it takes to carve your own path to be the kind of man you truly want to be.

Peter FitzSimons, journalist and author of Breaker Morant

Brandon Jack has turned a deeply reflective and unflinching aesthetes eye within to write a startlingly candid, moving and elegant memoir about masculinity, family, the compulsion to winand living with yourself when you dont.

Paul Daley, journalist and author of Beersheba

Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

First published in 2021

Copyright Brandon Jack 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Email:

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 76087 677 7

eISBN 978 1 76106 210 0

Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Cover design: Luke Causby/Blue Cork

Cover photograph: Alex Vaughan

For blurred edges and Grace

Of uglinessTo me there is just as much in it as there is in beauty

Walt Whitman, Thoughts in Leaves of Grass

After signing my first publishing deal, I locked myself away and spent every waking moment writing a manuscript. Then, upon submission, I was overcome by an inescapable emptinessa dread that did not befit the amount of work I had just done.

For months the feeling persisted, and gradually I accepted that this was merely the reality of being a writer.

Then, while preparing to move apartments, I came across my old football diaries at the bottom of a taped-up cardboard box, tucked away in the back corner of my garage.

In my initial manuscript I had made it clear that I did not want to talk about football. I summarised my lifelong relationship with the games I had played to a series of dot points no longer than half a page. I had also made the request to my publisher that we keep references and images of my footballing past away from the promotion of the book. But re-reading the diaries from my years spent as a professional footballer, I saw something I had tried to escape. In the months that followed, I started writing again, and this book is what poured out of me.

As you read, please know that I do not intend this to be a direct comment on the games I have played nor the organisations I have representedboth of which bring happiness to many people and which cannot be defined by a single perspective. Rather, see this is an attempt to understand my relationship with football.

Writing this book has been a significant step for meIve achieved clarity I was unsure I would ever find.

So, persevere. There is joy. I promise.

Prologue
GUTTER

Im standing in a gutter, stomping down on a premiership cup with the flat block heel of my scuffed black boot. Im using my right foot out of spitemy sadistic way of saying that I dont need the left, the one that I spent all those hours trying to perfect.

Momentum, alignment, follow-through.

Dont bend your arm like that.

Dont jump when you kick.

Dont turn your hip.

Laces towards the target.

Fingers along the seams.

Cars driving past swerve to avoid me like Im some sort of rabid dog foaming from the mouth. My teammates watch on from the entrance of Bar Cleveland in Sydneys Surry Hills, unsure whether to laugh or pull me away.

Its the very early hours of a Sunday morning. Bouncing off my chest is a medal engraved with AFL Sydney Premier Division Premiers 2019 as the forcibly malleable metal of the cup my team has just won caves under the force of my boot: Crack. Crack. Crack.

This is what we play for, is it? Crack. Crack. Crack.

I wont be satisfied until its smashed, broken, unrecognisably snapped in half.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

Come on you fucker. Break.

The road below is a dead treadmill upon which tin flashes of colour float. People yell at me, but their words are dulled as though hands are covering their mouthsmy hearing is fucked from the six months Ive spent between a crash cymbal and an electric guitar amp in an underground storage locker soundproofed by thin canvas. Still, I can hear my name being called: BJ, come on, dont! BJ

BJ. BJ is my football name. Hearing it perks my ears up and invokes a readiness from the cells of my body. It cuts through and makes Brandon feels foreign. Who even calls me Brandon? Yeah yeah yeah BJ BJ BJ! a teammate would yell, their palms facing outward as they called for the ball. Then, from behind, the next in line cries, Got your back here BJ! Sometimes I think that this BJ and me are separate people. Hes the ego, the projection, and Ive mostly just let him take over because its less effort. But I dont know if thats true. I really dont know. That feels like the easy way out.

The final siren of the Grand Final sounded hours ago. We sang the club song twiceonce on the ground, once in the sheds. I knew the first line but after that I had to look around, my mouth opening and closing to match the cadence of the verse and chorus for the rest of the song. I avoided eye contact so that no one noticed what I was doing.

The rooms then emptied and we sat on the ground in a circle with the score still on the board, lighting up the night sky, and drank. Then we piled onto the bus where there were more drinks waiting in an esky on the front seat. I grabbed a bottle of wine, which I finished by the time we arrived at the bar. Ive been ordering double-shot vodkas since, snatching the ice out of the glass each time, throwing the cubes on the ground, and sculling the residual liquid in two gulps.