Canadian picked No. 1 to make Aussie rules football history
TORONTO Mike Pyke works at a bank in Sydney, Australia. He’s 32, went to the same high school as Steve Nash and used to play Aussie rules football. That’s how he made history.
Pyke was a rugby star in his hometown of Victoria. He signed as a pro in France and streaked 90 yards for a try in New Zealand against the legendary All Blacks. That was in June 2007. By the next summer, he was a Sydney Swan, trying, at age 24, to jump from rugby union to the uppermost echelon of Aussie rules: the Australian Football League.
“He was light years behind the rest of the ruckmen,” Pyke’s old coach Stephen Taubert told Australia’s Daily Telegraph earlier this year.
He didn’t understand the nuances of the game: how to follow the run of play, how to give himself a chance in jump balls — the ruck. His odds mirrored his wingspan: long.
Now, Andrew McGrath becomes the second Canadian to play Aussie Rules when he was selected first overall in the AFL draft on Friday, an achievement in itself and especially when you account for where he came from: Mississauga, Ont. That’s how he made history.
In Canada, Aussie rules mostly lives in the nether regions of televised sports: on TSN at 3 a.m. or another hour some would reasonably deem ungodly. It is difficult to love or excel at something you’re never awake to see. McGrath and his family visit Canada once a year, but his home since the age of five has been Melbourne, where he was raised on cleats, not skates, and where he rose to national prominence as a halfback for the under-18 Sandringham Dragons. After turning 18 this year, he’s seen as a can’t-miss prospect.
There is an anecdote at the fore of a profile on McGrath, published by Melbourne’s The Age a few days before the draft. McGrath, years ago, is toddling on skates in the dark of a Canadian winter, tumbling and rising more than a few times over. Eventually, he figures it out. “He’s always had that perseverance,” says his mother Sandy. Perseverance and a wealth of natural talent, that is, mostly when it comes to his legs. McGrath can run 100 metres in less than 11 seconds. He was a national youth champion in the 200- and 400-metre hurdles and high jump, too. They call him The Jet because he can fly.
Fly, pass, defend, hit, lead and play multiple positions: The consensus is that he can do it all. Football punditry is as much of an Australian industry as a North American one and the AFL’s in-house “draft guru,” Callum Twomey, has hailed McGrath as a professional captainin-waiting, prepared to start from the outset of 2017.
He will do so with Essendon FC, a club founded in 1871 on the northwest flank of Melbourne. Essendon has done well over the years, better than any AFL team in history, measured by its 16 league championships, the most recent in 2000. But Essendon finished last in 2016; 12 of its players, embroiled in a years-old doping controversy, Mississauga, Ont.’s Andrew McGrath can run 100 metres in less than 11 seconds. were banned for the season. They now have a player — a saviour? — who still lapses into Canadian twang around his family.
“A lot of people say (the AFL is) going to be a huge step up and that pre-season is really demanding, but I wouldn’t play footy if I didn’t enjoy all the things it entails,” McGrath told The Age.