From left: Rhys Palmer, Lewis Taylor, Jaidyn Stephenson. Three Rising Stars for whom subsequent off-field issues have arisen.
This year’s AFL Rising Star Award, for the competition’s most brilliant young colt, appears a run race if you have faith in the odds being offered by the swarm of bookmakers that are now licensed to bet on the AFL.
The bookies all have Carlton’s Sam Walsh long odds-on to be this year’s winner. Whilst he certainly is the young man to beat, Walsh has a number of talented alumni ready to snatch the title from his grasp should he make any missteps.
Think Connor Rozee, Xavier Duursma, and Zak Butters of Port Adelaide. Those spelling bee named wunderkind aren’t exactly Smith, Jones and Brown, but they have enough talent to make at least as big an impression with the Power as that boringly named trio did with St. Kilda in the mid 1990’s.
The Swans rightly love Nick Blakey, Geelong’s Gryan Miers is a gem, and Richmond’s Sydney Stack has been the best thing about the Tigers’ season thus far. All have fine futures.
It keeps going. There’s no faulting the rookie years of Bailey Smith from the Bulldogs and Cam Rayner from Brisbane. Throw in more established payers such as Esava Ratugolea of the Cats, North’s Cameron Zurhaar and St. Kilda’s Josh Battle, all of whom are still eligible for the award, and you have one of the deepest Rising Star fields in memory.
The question of who will be the AFL Rising Star in 2019 therefore remains unanswered. It will be posed and pondered countless times before a winner is named in September, but there is a more pressing question that needs answering first.
Given the issues faced by a number of former winners, why would an AFL footballer want to be known as the AFL’s Rising Star?
Even though the issue needs exploring, it’s a question you won’t hear posed by the majority of football journos who worry more about keeping sweet with those who butter their bread than looking into what has become a worrying trend.
The reality is that since Nathan Buckley won the first AFL Rising Star award in 1993, a number of winners have had serious issues on and off the field.
It is easy to dismiss the problem, putting it down to coincidence or facetiously labelling it a curse.
The expression “curse of the Rising Star” isn’t new and had been jokingly bandied about long before Jaidyn Stephenson became the latest winner to make headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Unfortunately calling it a curse makes light of the issues facing the winners of the award, putting it in the same class of silliness as the Magpies grand final curse between 1958 and 1990 known as the “Colliwobbles”, and the curse of the Red Fox that has denied Melbourne a flag since the sacking of Norm Smith in 1965.
Those so-called curses were fun asides created by opposition supporters to needle fans of both clubs, but in reality had nothing to do with the premiership droughts endured by Collingwood and still being endured by Melbourne.
On the other hand, a sound case can be made that the AFL Rising Star Award has played a role in the problems suffered by numbers of footballers who have won it.
Award winners Stephenson, 2018 (gambling), Jesse Hogan, 2015 (drinking, missing training-sessions) and Daniel Talia, 2012 (receiving classified information about another club from his brother), have all been sanctioned or investigated by the AFL and/or their club.
They are hardly hanging offences, but disappointing behaviour from players that had been formally named as the game’s brightest young stars.
Far more serious are those winners who were charged with and found guilty of criminal offences that ranged from relatively minor to so serious that they incurred a period of incarceration.
Lewis Taylor won the award in 2014. Just over a year later he was charged with causing criminal damage and two counts of theft over what was described as a criminal rampage by Taylor and another individual. The pair ran amok in a privately owned car yard in a country town in Victoria’s west. Taylor was found guilty and received a hefty fine as well as being placed on a diversion program.
The 2008 winner Rhys Palmer faces a lifetime ban from all West Australian harness racing tracks after an incident earlier this year in which a pair of shoes were thrown at horses and drivers during a race.
Eye-witnesses said it was extremely fortunate that both shoes just missed the field of racing trotters as they charged down the Gloucester Park straight. Acting chief steward Rhys Chappell said it could have had dire outcomes if the shoes had struck a horse or driver.
Shortly after the shoes were thrown, Palmer was tackled to the ground by security staff who claimed to have witnessed the event. It should be noted that through his manager, Palmer has denied the charges. The matter is ongoing.
The incident at Gloucester Park occurred on the same weekend that Palmer and a female passenger were struck whilst riding a motor-cycle. The incident, which was in no way Palmer’s fault, almost claimed his life. Thankfully, he and his girlfriend are on the way to full recovery.
The most serious criminal matters relating to the winner of an AFL Rising Star Award involve the 1996 winner, Ben Cousins. His fall from grace has been well documented and doesn’t need re-telling in this article. Suffice to say, it has been as spectacular as it has been tragic, though in reality it is an all-too-common story in this country.
Not only have an inordinate number of winners of the AFL Rising Star Award transgressed both within and beyond the boundaries of the AFL, many recipients of the award have not gone on to be the stars of the game the award suggests they were destined to be.
It would be unfair for me, or anyone else, to publicly list players we didn’t think went on to have careers worthy of being named the AFL Rising Star for a given season. Singling out individuals would be wrong, but I’m sure we all agree that not all winners went on to be anything like a star.
So what role has being named the game’s brightest future star played in various individuals going off the rails or not fulfilling their potential as a footballer?
Of course, the answer is not a definitive one, but in the case of affecting the future careers of many winners, it is only natural that some players couldn’t cope with the added pressure, expectation and attention from the opposition that came with winning the prestigious award.
Some former winners would have been far better served to have been the runner-up. Those players had their names put up in lights in their first or second year in the AFL, only for it to be their undoing.
They may have had very different careers if they had been allowed to fly under the radar during their early years in league football. After all, who knows the name of the AFL Rising Star runner-up?
As far as individuals displaying anti-social and criminal behaviour as well as behaviour frowned upon by the AFL goes, it can be argued that the sense of entitlement felt by some footballers would only be enhanced by winning the award that recognises them as being the game’s Rising Star.
Experiencing a burgeoning sense of self-importance that comes with a boost in status could lead some players to believe that not all laws and rules apply to them, and that somehow their celebrity affords them a free pass to do as they chose in certain situations.
I’m certainly not suggesting that all the AFL Rising Star winners who have gone off the rails did so exclusively as a result of winning the award. There are a multitude of reasons for transgressing, with immaturity responsible for many of those contributing factors.
What I do suggest though, is that if immaturity plays a role in bad choices made by young adults, then it stands to reason that some winners of the AFL Rising Star Award, being young adults, were not mature enough to handle the increased status and higher profile that came with it.
Think Nathan Buckley and Nick Reiwoldt. Both were regarded as mature young men when winning the award and considered future leaders of an AFL club. In summary, they were well placed to cope with the superstar status that came with the award even though they were both under 21 at the time.
For Buckley and Reiwoldt, and many others, the AFL Rising Star Award proved to be a spur in achieving great things both in football and in life. For others, it has proven to be a poisoned chalice. Either difficult to live up to for the footballer, or overly ego-inflating for the person.
I am not for a minute suggesting that the award not be given, or that any of this year’s candidates would be adversely affected by winning it. What I do believe, though, is that the award has proven to be problematic for some winners in the past, and if we ignore that fact, it will continue to be so in the future.
