IN THE first week of a two-part Beer O’Clock, RUSSELL BENNETT sat down with former St Kilda footballer, and one of the Kooweerup sporting scene’s favourite patriarchs – Geoff Miller.
Q: Let’s start at the beginning, Geoff. Where did you grow up?
We grew up in Wendouree West in Ballarat, in the ghetto as we called it, just the same as Mick Malthouse. It was a tough, housing commission sort of area. You shouldn’t pigeonhole things, but being a commission it was a low socio-economic area with a lot of tough guys. Most of the families did it hard, there was no money, but you made the most of what you had. My parents were fantastic – five kids lived in a 10-square commission home but we never wanted for anything and never missed out. It was a really good grounding, but it was tough.
Q: How old were you when you first started playing footy… were you just a little fella?
Yeah, Wendouree West – where Mick started. I started in under-12s. They then disbanded and we all went to Wendouree, Mick went to North Ballarat. I had some ins and outs. I played for a couple of years and then stopped playing because I was too small, so I played soccer.
Q: Who got you first involved in footy mate?
My dad. We had a recreation reserve behind our house with Little Aths, so we had that, footy and cricket. That’s all we did. Sport provided that way of staying off the streets and my parents promoted it.
Q: Did you get your sporting ability from your old man?
Dad was handy – he wasn’t great. He was a good footballer but he retired young because of bad knees. He played in Adelaide, where he’s from, and I think he trained with Port Adelaide but didn’t play with them. His family was Port Adelaide through and through. If they ever got beaten it was because somebody poisoned their food or something!
It wasn’t until I started playing senior footy that I realised I was ok at it. Cricket was my game. I just loved playing with my mates and having a good time.
Q: Who were your footy heroes back then?
Oh mate – from a young age it was (Kevin) Cowboy Neale, who I later got to know.
He was a big favourite, as was Stewie (Stuart) Trott and Ross Smith, Trevor Barker was brilliant and fortunately I got to play and train with him. Carl Ditterich early on was another. He was just a behemoth – even when he went to Melbourne I loved him. I couldn’t help it.
Q: So the way it all panned out with St Kilda would have been a fairytale for you…
Absolutely. I was 19 and had a year in the reserves for Wendouree – just on the wing playing around – and in the last two games they put me at centre-half forward and I did ok. The next year the club got a new coach and he asked me where I played, and I said centre-half forward in the seniors! That’s how my senior career started.
In 1982 we were on the bottom and in 1983 Howard Lockett – Plugger’s old man – came across to be our president and got the club going again. He brought a few players with him and we won the flag. I kicked 80-odd goals for the year and had a good finals’ series. I kicked nine in a prelim and that day Stewie Trott was there and John Beveridge. They got hold of me from that and then a week after the grand final they came around to my place.
Q: So what happened next?
My mum was beside herself! She loved Stewie Trott! They came to the house and we just spoke about footy. I had a good set of hands and I don’t want to pump myself up but I could run the 100 in even time. They picked that up. I wasn’t a big person – I was quite slight – so I didn’t think I’d be the type but they said I was so I started training two weeks later.
Q: So that was literally a dream come true. What was the over-riding feeling mate?
It really was a surprise – especially at my age. I was 23 and when they recruited me they thought I was 17 or 18!
The Ballarat blokes knew how old I was but the Melbourne people didn’t. You had two training squads – a Ballarat one, and a Melbourne one. We did most of pre-season training in Ballarat under Graeme Gellie who went on to coach St Kilda. After pre-season we trained full time in Melbourne.
It was great – I was training with Trevor Barker and the Wendouree West boys – the Cunningham brothers and Robbie Muir.
Q: This is clearly before the days of the draft. Where did St Kilda’s zone start and finish back then?
It was in and around Ballarat and the surrounding areas.
Q: You spoke then about training with the likes of Trevor Barker and those guys. That must’ve been surreal…
Trevor was my hero, and kids do the same thing now when they get into the system – they train with their heroes too.
They had other blokes at the club then; Max Crow – what a super player he was; Silvio Foschini, Paul Morwood; just brilliant blokes and brilliant players, and there I was training with them!
Q: You played seven reserves games at St Kilda. Talk me through the highs and lows of your time there…
The highest high was getting to meet everybody and getting accepted. It’s a club that my father loved. One of the greatest moments for me there was when we played on Queen’s Birthday so we had to train on Saturday. Mum and dad packed the picnic basket and took me to training. They were in the stands while I was training with Trevor Barker. Nobody knew but he was a late withdrawal and he wasn’t kicking so he’d handball it off to me every time. My dad thought this was huge, saying – “that’s my boy!”
Trevor asked who that was in the stand and I said it was my dad. He asked him to come down and Silvio Foschini took him to see all the boys. That was my favourite moment – just the look on my dad’s face.
Playing footy wasn’t inconsequential, but I was never that confident. That was a low, because I didn’t rate myself as highly as perhaps I should’ve. Getting injured and being out a fair bit of the year was pretty awful too.
When you get as fit as I did, getting injured early in the year was pretty shitty.
I started off doing the pre-season next year and I was still listed, even after all my injuries. Ainslie rang me and said they could pay me a lot more than what I would have gotten playing in the seconds at St Kilda.
I went up there but when I look back now I kick myself because I should’ve stayed at St Kilda. I should’ve found out if I was good enough or not. That’s one of my biggest regrets in sport – absolutely.
Q: How many years did you play for Ainslie?
I played there for three and made the finals every year. We won a flag in 1987 against the tide. In my first year there I played full-forward, but in my second year Brian Cook – Geelong’s CEO – coached us. We didn’t get on that well. I don’t think he liked the way I went about it because he’d eat footballs for breakfast. I wasn’t casual, but it wasn’t all-encompassing for me.
Q: There were some pretty handy types at Ainslie when you were there, weren’t there?
Yeah absolutely – Shaun Smith played with us and James Hird was in our juniors.
When Smith was 15 or 16 he had a big year when Cook was coach and he was the hub of our side – he was that good. He could get up then too – four or five times per game. He was probably one of the best juniors I’ve seen, if not the best.
Q: When you left Ainslie you wanted to coach. You then went to Ararat, that retired you after five years, so at 32 you went to Cobden and that’s where you met your wife Tania…
I’d just had a marriage break-up so it was a good time for me to move on and to get away from that situation.
I moved to Cobden and coached and got injured there too. Meeting Tania was the start of something special.
Q: Talk me through the timeline with the kids and when they all came along…
Ben was born in 1985, Sam in ’88, and Tim in ’89. Tania and I were together in 1993 and moved to Kooweerup in 1994. Tania got a job at the school and she’s still there. Teisha was born in 1996 and Cody in 1998. Their births were the five greatest moments of my life. They’re all beautifully well-adjusted and they’re all good at what they do. I couldn’t ask for anything more.
Q: Now I’ve got just a couple more questions here, and you can blame Ben and Cody for these! Let’s start off with an easy one – what springs to mind when I ask you about Danny Frawley and travelling to and from training in the city with him?
Well as you know Danny is a bit of a character – we had many funny trips to and from training but as my boys should know some of them aren’t repeatable. Let’s just say that one story involves an eight-seater Starwagon and a sunroof.
Plugger only drove a few times but you just didn’t want to get in the car with him in the end because he’d do nothing but play with the radio – he wouldn’t even look at the road! He’d do 140 kilometres per hour because St Kilda bought him a car so he just ran the guts out of it.
Q: The next one is from your youngest, Cody, and it involves yourself, a pub, a main road, and a distinct lack of clothing…
Oh no! I can’t believe he told you about that but, yes, it was on a footy trip. We were at the Murray Bridge pub – it’s a beautiful pub – and we stopped there on the way to Adelaide. We were having a few pots and seeing how far we could throw them into the river. Just before getting back on the bus, the boys pushed me into the toilets and took all my clothes off. The barman leant on the door so I couldn’t get out. The bus with my clothes started moving off and then the publican finally let me out. I was running up the road with the bus driver doing the old stop and take off again! He did that about 10 times, and I was the coach! A**holes!
