Shattered! Funny thing was, apart from one bloke who played about 12 games, I was the only one who made it. The State School Team to go to Tasmania, they picked 25, and I was 26, first emergency. We played in that zone, then in combined teams together. A number of them surfed and played footy. My surfie mates, the parties, the music, it was a great way of growing up. And it probably saved me from getting bashed. That was the first time I realised what football can do for you. When I mentioned I played footy, they all wanted me at their club. They were thinking, who the fuck is this idiot? The only thing that saved me was being made to get up in front of the class and tell them about myself. But at Hollywood High they were all surfies-the white T-shirts, Bermuda shorts. Coming from Dalkeith, I was wearing a pink shirt and cream flares, the latest fashion in Cloverdale. Mum split up with the Naval person and started going out with Alan Robertson, a famous bloke who found a lot of shipwrecks on the WA coast, and we moved to Dalkeith, which was very flash. It was one of those lessons, an eight-year-old going out into the big wild world, trying to live his dream. He wasn’t overly mean, he simply thought I was too young. I’d sneak on to the bus, and try and get back before he returned from work. The closest team was Carlisle, which was four to five mile away. I basically had to do it behind his back. My stepfather at the time wasn’t overly keen on me going to training. I started playing footy when I was about eight. Working class, at the lower end of the income stream. My mum married a Naval person, and we moved to Cloverdale, a relatively new estate near the airport in Perth, a pretty sort of tough area. Him and my mother split up when I was two. I was born in Derby, which is up in the north west of WA. Here’s an extract featuring Ken Hunter who played 147 games for Carlton 1981-89: The book will be launched at the Footy Almanac/Odd Friday Lunch at the North Fitzroy Arms on July 19. The table of contents can be found at the end of this post. We don’t always use the front and back covers when introducing a book, but we wanted to do justice to Jim Pavlidis’s art work. Called Heart & Soul, it is published by Geoff Slattery.

A new edition of Matt Zurbo’s book of player interviews has just been release.

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