‘Eternally grateful’: Newest AFL legend reveals nearly joining rival club that ‘never called back’

Four-time Hawthorn premiership player Jason Dunstall has been awarded the highest possible accolade on Tuesday night, after being elevated to Legend status in the AFL Hall of Fame.

Selected in the league’s most recent AFL Team of the Century, a four-time best-and-fairest winner, three-time Coleman Medallist, the Hawks’ club captain between 1995 and 1998 and the owner of the third-most goals in VFL/AFL history – Dunstall’s on-field resume is just about as good as they come.

The 32nd recognised legend in the sport, Fox Footy’s own was cheeky, grateful and humble throughout his incredible 17-minute speech alongside Gerard Whateley.

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Dunstall has joined the likes of Ron Barassi, John Coleman, Jack Dyer, Graham ‘Polly’ Farmer and former teammate Leigh Matthews as a Legend.

The most recent legend to be inducted before the Hawks Hall of Famer was Port Adelaide hero Russell Ebert in 2022.

Below reads the transcript of Dunstall’s acceptance speech on Tuesday night for his elevation to legend status:

Gerard Whateley: You have been one of the night’s most loyal attendees over 22 years, you’ve seen so many of the people present inducted – how does it feel to be back up on stage 22 year on?

Jason Dunstall: Really weird, really weird. Look, first and foremost, congratulations to all the other inductees; what you do work out very quickly is that this is the best night bar none on the AFL calendar, it’s a special night that we just keep coming back to.

GW: You’ve had a little bit of time to work out where the legend fits and how you feel about it. How does it sit with you?

JD: Not great, at the moment. It was interesting listening to (Gary) Ayresy’s words. There’s a lot of work that has gone into Gerard, I must admit. I didn’t exactly knock everyone over with my athletic ability when I came down. I think our very first session, the first time I started the club was ‘85. We did a 5k time trial, which was 12 and a half laps of a 400-metre circumference at Glenferrie Oval. And I got lapped, by everybody. And half a dozen of them lapped me twice.

Which meant I was immediately in the extra running group side that would have extra groups on the weekend; so back then, pre-season you would train five nights a week, everyone worked or did something else. Monday Wednesday, Friday, it’d be running groups and Tuesday, Thursday you’d work on your skills. But for those that missed a session, you’d have to do an extra running station on the weekend, (and) I immediately got put into that group, despite the fact that I was doing the five during the week. We would go down to Sandringham and run through the bushes, trails up on the cliff and do sprints down the ramps and back up. (On) the first time I went there, I got lost. I had to actually work my way back to the road to get back to the car park where we started. Everyone had gone except Allan Jeans, who gave me an absolute bake for wasting his time. So, it’s fair to say I was coming from a long way back.

In fact, I can actually tell you in 14 years in the club. I only ever beat two people in any form of endurance. One was halfway through the tenure. I remember we had a young man come down from the ‘Top End’, by the name of Willie Rioli. I don’t think Willie had done a lot of conditioning; he looked like an 18-gallon keg with legs. Yet over that 12 and a half laps, he led me for the first 11 and a half, but I looked up – I would always be at the back, that where I was expected to be, you’d put your head down and try and work your way through the run. I looked up with a lap to go, and I got the shock of my life – I could actually see someone. And he wasn’t that far in. front, and I got the scent of my first kill – it was invigorating, let me tell you; when you’ve never, ever beaten anyone, it was invigorating!

And I started to reel him with 200 to go, I was about to collar him! The unfortunate thing is, all my teammates who had done the run and had a stretch and a warm down and a drink, saw what was happening and they yelled out to Willie – and he took off like a startled cat.

And the people there, they swear to this day … that last 200 was neck and neck. I put my neck out on the line and I got him, and a week later, he was back in the ‘Top End’, poor old Willie. And the other one I really like to talk about, because I got John Kennedy one day up at Xavier (College) where we were doing some endurance running, and I ran past him – and in sheer embarrassment I’m sure, he collapsed to the ground and claimed he had a heart issue. He took it so far as to actually get in an ambulance, went to hospital and come back and said I’ve got a heart murmur!’. But the bottom line is, I felt strong that day and I got him – at least that’s the way I see it.

GW: There were so many days Jason, just to pick a few – so, the ‘86 Grand Final, which is significant on a few fronts, one of which – is in your heart of hearts, you hoped that this was going to be a Carlton story didn’t you?

JD: 100 per cent, a hundred per cent. So, I played a state game for Queensland in (Tasmania) in the end of ‘84. I spoke to three clubs; all the selectors came down to Tasmania. The recruiters and I spoke to: Hawthorn, Fitzroy and Carlton. (I) trained for a weekend with Fitzroy on the way home with Scotty McIver, who ended up being a very good play for them and for Brisbane. Reports were that the skinny kid was good, but the fat kid was no good, so I didn’t get a gig there.

I barracked for Carlton. My mates and I all played for a club called Coorparoo back in Queensland, which had exactly the same jumper; a navy blue with a CFC so we were all Carlton supporters. I would have crawled over broken glass to play for them, but they never called me back, so in the end it ended up being Hawthorn and (I’m) eternally grateful for it.

GW: So that day. You’re playing against Carlton, you’re playing against Bruce Doull–

JD: One of my heroes.

GW: What does Allan Jeans say to you to get you up for the occasion?

JD: Yeah, he pumped me right up – he said ‘make up for last year.’ I’d had a horror in my first year, we got thumped by Essendon, I reckon I touched it three or four times – didn’t hit the scoreboard, and he never mentioned it, until the grand final next each year. And as we were about to run out on the field, he just tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘make up for last year.’

When you think about it, it’s probably not the greatest motivation, but he was a very simple man and his words, ‘Yabby’ (Allan Jeans). To play on an idol of mine, like Bruce, who who’d beaten the soundly in the semi-final, was a great thrill – he never said anything Bruce, you’d just hear the odd grunt from him, but ever professional, and it was a thrill to play on him, and a greater thrill to win a premiership, of course.

GW: Who were the great full-backs that you duelled with across the journey?

JD: There were a lot of them. It’s impossible to go past SOS (Stephen Silvagni). You know, the full-back, the century for a reason – he was incredibly quick, and strong and agile, and could whinge with the best of them and scrag with the best of them. But, there were lots of great ones; Danny Frawley was another one, Mick Martin, there were so many. It was a great era where you got to have a lot of one-on-one contests; a very different game to today. But I still enjoy today’s game.

GW: And your contemporary was Tony Lockett; was he always the point of comparison for you?

JD: He was. Bloody annoying, ‘Plugger’ was. You’d come off the ground having a good game, where you’ve kicked seven or eight, (and) because all the games were played at the same time back then, and you’d check the score and you’d know that St Kilda had been flogged by 70 points, and had only kicked 12 (or so) goals for the game but ‘Plugger’ had kicked 11 of them – so you’d actually fall further behind (in the Coleman Medal leaderboard). It became frustrating, but it was a very healthy rivalry I think which hopefully drove us both on.

GW: And then there was a moment where you both got to play for Victoria, which you might’ve been more open to than he was?

JD: Yeah, well it was a thrill for me because I’m not a Victorian, and then they kept changing the (State of Origin eligibility) rules. And all of a sudden, I’m eligible and I got picked and I’m at Victorian training with Tony Lockett at the MCG, thinking ‘how good is this?’. And ‘Plugger’ says ‘I’m going to have a chat to them, they’ve just got to pick one of us – there’s no point both of us playing. And I thought ‘that’s not exactly the repartee I was looking for from my great man Tony.

But something happened between the training session and the dinner we had afterwards, because EJ (Whitten) must’ve got in his ear. After we had dinner, EJ got up and said ‘Tony Lockett’s got a few words that he’d like to say to the group,’ – and he got up and said: ‘I’m so looking forward to playing alongside Jason, we’re going to make it work and it’s going to be fantastic’. I thought, this can’t be the same bloke I was just talking to a couple of hours ago, but it was a great day. We flogged South Australia at the MCG and we both kicked a few goals and had a lot of fun playing together.

GW: It was an age where the full forwards job was to kick goals; it wasn’t to bring it to ground or bring others into the game. Would kicking the bags and then taking the tons (100-goal seasons) a right a passage?

JD: They were, I mean we stayed at home; we didn’t travel a lot out of our zone (the forward 50 metres). When the game was first becoming scientific – I’ll never forget it – they did a study on one of our games, and they clocked how far John Platten was running during the game; it was about 18 kilometres. And they also clocked me, and I ran 1.2 kilometres – my greatest fear was that may have included the warm up! But what people don’t understand, is there was an incredible intensity that I attacked that 1.2 kilometres. But we never left the 50-metre arc; it was just a completely different game. You stayed at home, you got your one-on-one opportunities and you had some amazing players kicking the ball to you.

GW: There was a day where you gave the record of Fred Fanning a great shake; we saw it up there (on the screen), 17 goals. Did you know what you were chasing?

JD: No, I didn’t! Because I wasn’t steeped in the history of the game coming from Queensland, but it was just one of those days where the ball bounced into your hands – I got a couple of free kicks from the umpires, which we never, ever got back then, and, and things just went really, really well. I remember the scoreboard at (Glen) Waverley flashed up when I got to 16 and said it was a Waverly Park record, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s nice,”. But I didn’t realise that 18 was the actual record; not that it would’ve have any difference, because I was completely rooted by the end of the game and I couldn’t have run another yard if need be.

It didn’t quite pan out, but they did bring Fred Fanning during the week to have a chat at training. He said ’17.5, that’s not bad – geez, you’re inaccurate though!’ He kicked 18.1, now 17.5, I think if you’re kicking more than three goals per behind, that’s 75 per cent success rate which is pretty elite – and he’s just potting me for kicking 17.5, which I found amusing. It was a great thrill, but we didn’t play for records, we played for premierships – and I was fortunate to play with a great club at a great time.

GW: ‘89 (Grand Final) holds such a place in footy folklore, does it for you as well?

JD: Oh absolutely, yeah. That was just one of those classic games where they went incredibly hard at the man to be physical early, and we just played the ball as much as we could. We built up a good early lead, but I’ve got to tell you, that last quarter there was a lot of clock watching going on. You didn’t get signals from the bench (on) how long to ago or anything like that. And the longer the guy went, the more trouble we were in. We had a few that were down, a couple that were hanging by a thread, and the (Geelong) Cats were coming hard. It was a classic game on all fronts, and you had Gary Ablett doing Gary Ablett things, which was just ridiculous. But when the siren went, it was a great thrill. It was a classic game, and one that we’ll never forgot.

GW: Did Yabby’s (Allan Jeans’) words live with you from that day?

JD: Yeah. It’s funny when you talk about ‘Yabby’. He used to tell us stories all the time, and in the cold light of day, if you look at the stories, they’re pretty rubbish stories. But the way he could tell them, made them special. And the one that he told that day at half time was about ‘little Johnny’, that was given $100 to buy some shoes. And Johnny thought ‘If I buy the cheap ones for $50, I can $50 in my pocket’. But then the shoes gave way before he was finished with them, because he didn’t buy the good ones – and Yabby’s message was all about paying the price.

Now that sounds like a really crappy story, I get it. But when he’s in there thumping his hand into his fist yelling ‘pay the price’ at the players and the hairs on the back of your neck are standing up – you’ve seen a couple of blokes KO’d and bowled over, it was very, very powerful. He had a great way of relating to the players when he needed to.

GW: The ‘merger match’ – the last game of 1996 (Round 22, Melbourne v Hawthorn), must be one of the most emotion-charged and eventful games the code’s ever seen, which includes surprisingly, (the) 100th goal (in the season) for you, and the great uncertainty around what was going to happen next?

JD: Yeah, there was a lot going on at the time. You know, we could very well have been looking at the two teams that were going to be one the following year, and we needed to win that game to make the finals. I think I was nine short of a hundred (goals), and there was a lot of talk about the financial state of both clubs and what was going to happen. We ended up winning by a point, it was an incredible game.

There were some special acts in it but the most poignant part of it all, was to see Chris Langford, as we walking off, take the jumper up and hold it to a crowd of 63,000 there that night for a night game between Melbourne and Hawthorn, who were both basically outside the (top) eight, which was a lot more than you would ever expect for that game.

It was enormous, and mind you – if I looked like ‘Langers’, I would have taken the jacket off and waved it to the crowd too. It was really, really powerful – we made the finals, went out the next week but that was the beginning of a turnaround for the club.

GW: And your farewell game a couple of years later, how do you reflect on that these years on?

JD: Not well, I’d broken a collarbone in the last game – I missed the last eight weeks and Ken Judge was coaching, came to me and said, ‘Mate, you want to play on, do you want to retire?’. I knew how bad my body was, and I would sit during games earlier that year – you would have ice packs on both knees sitting there, saying: ‘Make sure you remember how bad you feel right now, because this should influence your decision.’ And so, I said to him: ‘Mate, I need to retire – I’m done. I’ve got nothing left in the body.’

And he said: ‘Well, you better play a send-off game’. Now I hadn’t trained for eight weeks; I’ve already told you how good my fitness was, so after eight weeks of not training at the end of the season, I was no good. But we were playing Freo out at Waverley, and that’s a game that would’ve attracted about 15,000 people. Some incredible Hawthorn fans – about 40,000 of them – turned up which was great. I kicked the first goal of the game, because I had only just recovered from the stitch I got in the warm-up. Didn’t touch it for the rest of the game. In actual fact, we weren’t winning the way we should have and I said to Ken Judge at three-quarter time ‘don’t be afraid to take me off,’ because I knew how badly I was going. He just grabbed me and put me in front of the others and said: ‘We’re not going to let that happen’, and the boys kicked (11) goals in the last quarter and it was a fantastic win. It was a great way to go out, just the show of respect from all my teammates; it was brilliant.

GW: In recent years, we’ve been able to look at the ‘1000’ goalkickers, and you’re there at 1,254 behind Lockett and Coventry – what pride do you feel, or what sense do you feel when you see that list and what your place is in the goalkicking history?

JD: First thing that comes to mind Gerard, is third’s no good. There are two ends of Marvel (Stadium); one’s the Lockett end, the other’s the Coventry end – there’s not a third end to be named after me, so you’ve got to finish in the top two. I’m just chuffed that I got to play a great game, in a great era with and against so many great players.

GW: You’ve given so much to footy, when you think about your whole journey, what’s footy given to you?

JD: It’s given everything, it’s given me a life I never dreamt I’d have. I stumbled into this 40 years ago, and I’m still here. So, I’m incredibly thankful for that – I never expected it, I wasn’t aiming to do that, it’s just something that happened along the way. I hope I’ve given as much as I’ve taken from the game, but it’s been an enormous part of my life.

GW: A few thank you’s to finish?

JD: Absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, to all the other inductees – congratulations, fantastic achievements. To family and friends. I’ve got a couple of brothers that came down from interstate. Mum couldn’t make it, doesn’t travel particularly well but to have Nick and Harry here, the three nephews Josh, Joel and Jessie who are so keen to dump me and hang after this is done with (Dane) Swanny after hearing him talk – so you’re going to have a bit of weight on your hands Swanny. And a couple of special mates who have come down from Queensland, to be able to celebrate it with them makes it more special.

To my junior club, Coorparoo Footy Club who I played under 7’s through to seniors, to all the coaches, all the teammates, all the great people that make a club what it is – thank you. To the Hawthorn Football Club, again, to all the coaches, to all the teammates, to all the volunteers, the great people, the trainers, old Charlie Cheesecake the property room manager … you just meet so many great people that do so much work; I’m incredibly thankful to all of them. To my teammates, especially at Hawthorn – any success that I may have enjoyed is entirely due to their efforts further afield and I played with some of the very, very best the game has ever seen.

To the people at Fox Sports, Foxtel, Fox Footy, my employers – I’ve had 20 plus years out of the game, I’m still working in a game that I love, with people that I love; it’s incredibly special. I asked (Sarah) Jonesy not to steal the thunder tonight, but in that stunning gown it’s impossible; she’s a great colleague of mine, it’s great to have her MC’ing the evening so that’s a great thrill as well.

Finally, I must say, to Richard (Goyder) and Dills (Andrew Dillon) and to everyone at the AFL, as I mentioned I’m living a life I never dreamt I’d have. To the selectors who deemed me worthy to sit in the esteemed company of the gentleman who’s banners you see around the room – I’m privileged, it’s an honour, it’s a little confronting, overwhelming (and) almost to the point of embarrassment, but it’s an honour for which I’m eternally grateful – and I thank you.

*ends*