Eddie Betts: retiring AFL star simply too good on the field – and off it
Eddie Betts is too good. To survive and prosper as an AFL footballer he had to be. He was too good for the countless defenders who dared think they could match his unthinkable talents. He was too good for the bigots and the haters who failed spectacularly to bring him down to their level. Ultimately, he is too good for a game that has taken more from him and his people than it has returned.
Betts was even too good for himself, too good for a destiny that might have engulfed him as it had others before him. As an adolescent Betts was on a road to nowhere, happy to be anywhere but school and doing most things but staying out of trouble. With the right people on his side, Betts found he was too good for a life of self-destruction wrought by drug and alcohol abuse.
His could have been a familiar and anonymous tale of woe. But on the eve of his retirement from the AFL, Betts isn’t a story of wasted talent. Instead it is a glorious one of triumph in the face of adversity – an adversity brought by lack of privilege, the decadence of his formative years and then a workplace that still cannot find a way to protect Indigenous footballers from racial vilification.
Back at the start, it was a line ball Betts would be good enough at anything. Fearing the worst, Betts’s mother removed her 15-year-old son from Port Lincoln and sent him to Phil Krakouer’s Indigenous Tafe program in Melbourne. There he got on the straight and narrow and there the footballer was born.
“I was one of those kids. Growing up I was into that stuff and mum shifted me away,” Betts said of his turbulent upbringing, which was divided between the Eyre Peninsula and Kalgoorlie after the break-up of his parents. “Every week, every day I thank what she did for me, got away from that environment.” Betts showed promise for Calder Cannons and for Vic Metro in the Under-18 championships, but was overlooked in the 2004 national draft. Given a lifeline by Carlton in that season’s preseason draft, Betts couldn’t yet read or write and was anything but the finished product as a player. But he was on his way.
Now, 17 years after making his AFL debut, the story of Eddie Betts the player is almost over. This weekend, the Wirangu and Kokatha man will make his 350th and final senior appearance, becoming just the 19th player – and third Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander – in VFL/AFL history to achieve the feat. Betts will leave us with many cherished memories and hard lessons learned. But before the monkey chants, before the hurling of bananas, before the online vilification, there was a boy with a ball. And could he play.
Sit down to a highlights reel of Betts’s career and you’d swear blind you were watching the greatest player to ever lace a boot. A wizard with a bottomless bag of tricks, at times it seemed he was running a magic show with passages of play running to a script known only to him. He was electrifying, enchanting, capable of the seemingly impossible when given even the slightest sniff near goal. While there have been better, more decorated players, with 638 career goals Betts rates as one of the greatest small forwards the game has seen.
His Carlton career bookended a sixyear spell at Adelaide, where Betts played his best football. At the Crows he would claim three AFL goal of the year awards (he won a record four in total), be the club’s leading goal kicker four times and in three straight seasons (2015-17) win All-Australian selection. Betts’s thrilling play and daredevil feats of creativity brought a smile back to a club rocked by the death of Phil Walsh. They even named an Adelaide Oval pocket after him. It is hard to think of an Adelaide player more loved and many Carlton fans will likely feel the same way.
But Betts was too good, the colour of his skin too black, for some to stomach. His time in Adelaide was pockmarked by the worst racial abuse he suffered as a player, dovetailing with the turmoil and subsequent self-exile of Adam Goodes and the accusations of Héritier Lumumba against his former club, Collingwood. It was a scandalous and definitive period for the AFL, which sat on its hands for years and is only now rousing to the insidious racism that pervades Australia’s indigenous game.
It is almost a disservice to Betts that any discourse on his wonderful career must document his struggles with racism. It should be just about the football, but it is not. He cannot escape its connection, just as Goodes will be remembered as much for the disgusting end to his career as his two Brownlow medals. But rather than hang like a millstone around his neck, Betts uses injustice as a catalyst for a better world.
“We each have a responsibility to ourselves and each other. To continue to listen. To learn. To educate,” Betts said. By countering the ugliness of others with the beauty of his own life view, Betts became the accidental poster boy of the AFL’s battle with racism. He transcended his sport by marrying sublime talent with an ability to shout down racism with a smile and a dash of optimism. Now a children’s book author and active advocate for change and education, Betts is father to five but a role model to many.
He is even too good for some people he thought were his friends. Betts played alongside Taylor Walker at Adelaide, the pair forming part of a deadly forward line that took the Crows to a grand final in 2017. Perhaps Betts was taken aback by the racial slur that has Walker at the crossroads of his career. Perhaps it came as no surprise. Either way, Betts didn’t condemn, not even after Walker’s scripted video apology in which he positioned himself as much victim as villain. “Taylor’s on a journey. I know Taylor and he’ll go on this journey 100% and he’ll educate himself and he’ll educate people around him,” he said.
Betts is going out on his terms. No doubt scarred, tired and a little jaded, but on his terms. “It hurts and it’s draining. It just keeps happening, I’m sick of it,” he said of the AFL’s inability to eradicate racism. But it won’t beat Betts. He is too good for that. “I believe I’ve got a bigger role to play now,” he said. “My journey is only just beginning. I want to stamp out racism in Australia.” Betts has kicked some amazing goals in his time, but that would trump them all.