THE BETTS OF TIMES
A DRUNKEN Eddie Betts was locked in a jail cell, thinking his AFL career was over.
“Someone else was in the corner, laying on the hard bed,” Betts said yesterday. “He had a blanket on him and he was shaking.
“I was thinking to myself ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ At that point, I thought ‘My career is going to be over’.”
He now considers his 2009 arrest not only a turning point in his footy career but his life.
He had a gambling problem. Much of a wild childhood had been spent boozing and stealing. He did not have much of an education.
“I really didn’t go to school,” Betts said. “I could read and write, but it was just, I reckon, about a Year 7 level when I was 18.”
But he had always had footy.
“AFL footy basically saved me,” he said.
But his 2009 bender with teammates at Carlton, the club that drafted him five years earlier, threatened everything.
Betts was arrested about 2am on a Sunday in Melbourne’s central business district, jailed for a short period and fined $234 by police. Carlton fined him $10,000 — the maximum allowed. A newspaper splashed a photo of Betts, cigarette dangling from his mouth, on the front page.
“I looked at that and said, ‘That’s not me’,” he said. “It kind of slapped me in the face a little bit because I don’t want people to see me as this person on the front page.
“I had to get my life on track. And I guess that’s where I started to snap out of it.” His wife Anna was pivotal. “She’s my rock, Anna, she is the most important person in my life,” Betts said. “We set some boundaries down, just to try to be a professional athlete.
“And she guided me and told me that I’m a role model and I had to start growing up and start taking responsibility for my actions.”
Yet three years later Betts fell out of love with football.
“I just really hated coming into the changerooms and meetings and doing all that,” he said.
In October 2012, Anna and Betts had their first child, Lewis, who changed the footballer’s outlook on his sport.
“Going home, win or lose, just to see the smile on Lewi’s face … it really brought the joy back into footy,” he said.
Adelaide soon began circling Betts, who supported the Crows while growing up in Port Lincoln.
At the end of the 2013 season, he accepted Adelaide’s offer and left Carlton.
“I didn’t want to leave — I cried for two hours after,” he said. “Then I went home, sat down with Anna and said ‘Am I making the right decision?’”
Now a father of four, Betts believes he would have burnt out after two more seasons in Melbourne had he not moved.
Instead, on Sunday, he will play his 300th AFL game.