Stewart ‘Froggy’ Fraser and Tony ‘Spud’ Paynter recently returned to Pakenham to remember the great times they shared as part of the Lions’ famous 1989 premiership side. They were two of a host of players who returned for the 30-year reunion, and there’s no way they’d let the tyranny of distance stop them – even though ‘Froggy’ lives in Thailand, and ‘Spud’ in Queensland. They sat down for this Beer O’Clock with sports editor Russell Bennett…
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Russell Bennett: Spud, tell me about the week of the 1989 flag – the days leading up to it…
Tony Paynter: It was Thursday night – selection night – and I’d been named in the team. I thought it was awesome, and Powlesy (Neville Powles) told everyone to go and have a good night’s sleep. I walked off to the toilet, feeling great about playing in my first senior grand final as a 17-year-old school kid. A bloke came in to the toilets, stood next to me at the urinal, and said “You know they’re going to try and slaughter you on Saturday, don’t you? Before they’ve even bounced the ball, they will”.
Here I was – this skinny kid! I was told they were going to belt the hell out of me, but hey, that’s just one bloke’s opinion, right?
Next minute, someone else walked in and told me the same bloody thing – almost word for word! (laughs). I knew I was in trouble.
RB: Good god! How did you handle things, come the Saturday?
TP: Well I went out to my position in the forward line, and this big bloke just started laying into me – elbowing me, jumper punching me, trying to trip me, the works. I was 67 kilos ringing wet, but this bloke started laying into me because I lined up deep forward! Over the boundary, I just heard “Pick on someone your own size! Why don’t you have a go at me!?”. It was Mick Wouters. My bloke got distracted, and went after him and I never saw him for the rest of the game!
Stewart Fraser: He kicked six bloody goals!
RB: So that’s the real story behind your six-goal brilliance?
TP: Mate, I had three opponents that day and I never saw one of them! (laughs).
SF: He only told me this story the other day, and blow me down, Mick Wouters walked in at the time!
TP: It was ridiculous (laughs).
SF: I just started telling him how he won us a flag!
RB: So you’ve got Mick Wouters to thank for winning the 1989 premiership?
TP: Oh yeah, he distracted these blokes from over the fence!
SF: And I had no idea about this – absolutely no idea – until he told me the other day! He got drafted to Brisbane after that too.
RB: You’ve just had a 1989 and 2009 joint premiership reunion back at the club recently, boys. What sort of an occasion was it for you?
SF: Mate, it was fantastic. Living in Thailand like I do, when I get back around my own mates and my peers from when I played, it’s just fantastic. Sport is one of life’s great levellers – particularly footy. It’s got me to where I am, too.
I run my pub in Thailand, but I still come back here every year. When I’m back here, it still feels like home.
TP: How many more are you coming back for?
SF: Well I won four flags – ’87, ’88, ’89, and ’90.
RB: Frog, you’re one of ‘The Magnificent Seven’ – the group of blokes who played in those four straight flags. So, four out of every 10 years you’re back here with Powlesy, Greg Atkins, Derrick Brown, Michael Utber, Danny Monckton, and Adam Ladbrook for a reunion? That’s not a bad ratio, mate…
SF: Yeah, that’s true! At the time we didn’t think anything of it – we just wanted to get a kick, but when you look back you do realise how special it was.
I’ll tell you something – at my pub, Fraser’s in Jomtien (Beach), I’ve got a lot of sporting memorabilia and photos on the walls. I have a lot of people who come to the pub and look at the photos, and some of them are from around here. They ask me if I played at Pakenham in that era! They’re always pretty special moments. It happens regularly. I had one bloke come in and ask if I knew Kenny Fraser by any chance. I said “Bugger off! He’s my cousin!” (laughs). I love that stuff – it’s such a small world.
RB: And Spud, you’ve come down for the ’89 reunion as well…
TP: Yeah mate, I wouldn’t be down here otherwise. I’ve come down from Queensland – I’ve been up there for 20 years or so.
After that game – the ’89 grand final – I got drafted to the Brisbane Bears and didn’t do very much there, unfortunately, and after I got the sack from there I got drafted by Hawthorn in 1991 and did nothing there either! (laughs).
Honestly, it’s these sorts of days – the reunion – that bring me back here.
The one comment I do have about today’s footy though is that as a 17-year-old – and we had a 16-year-old Travis Murphy in the side too – it was teenagers versus grown men. We had thugs that we played against some weeks – proper thugs!
These days you’ll watch a bunch of athletes playing against another bunch of athletes.
RB: Back in the wild days of the ‘80s, you would have had games where you questioned how you’d get out of them safely…
TP: Oh yeah, sometimes we even wondered if we could drive away from the ground safely! (laughs).
SF: It was so different back then. I was a young kid from Berwick, and Neville Powles was my school teacher at St Francis but he was also our coach! He coached me to all four flags.
RB: What was it like having your teacher also be your senior footy coach?
TP: Powlesy used to grab him by the ear and pull him out of class!
SF: Oh yeah, we didn’t get on at all.
TP: But the word ‘mentor’ wasn’t too strong a word for him in the end, was it?
SF: I played a lot of junior football at Berwick, so it was a pretty big thing to make the call to go to Pakenham. I kicked 100 goals in a season as a junior and won league medals, but when a good mate of mine (Michael Cashen) died we all just went our own way and a lot of that junior football era got lost in the scheme of things. I played my first senior game under Peter Allen – an absolute legend – at 17…
TP: And he still called Australia home, didn’t he?
SF: Different bloke, you peanut! (laughs)
TP: Well it’s just that you were very light on your feet, so I thought there was a bit of an influence there…
SF: You smart arse, Spud.
RB: Frog, you got to Pakenham in 1987 and won a flag in your first year, didn’t you? You must’ve been a pretty handy type…
SF: Yeah, I did. I played around the centre. I liked to play where the ball was, really. Powlesy was an excellent coach – it was a classic footy experience playing under him. Here’s my PE teacher at St Francis, pulling me by the ear at school for being a smart arse, coaching me to flags in senior footy. We just gelled – he was a very, very smart man.
TP: I’ll tell you what he did do, Powlesy – he’d write his players letters and put them in their bags.
SF: Yeah, he was before his time, Powlesy.
RB: Explain that to me, Tony…
TP: He’d write a personal letter to us in finals. I got this letter one year from him saying: “Spud, you can rip these guys apart” and here I am thinking I was the only one that got this great, uplifting letter! That’s the effect he had on the group. He was amazing – he was a teacher by trade, but he was a mentor to us as well.
RB: Was that part of the real magic of that era – the connection you all felt under him?
TP: Yeah, it was Powlesy – he was the connection. He was the glue.
SF: Well yeah, I mean he coached four years for four flags. It doesn’t get better than that.
TP: He made you feel like this supreme being out on the field. We all felt that way. I’ve still got my letter – I kept it. When you get a letter from him, you don’t care if you’re going to get flogged out on the ground. You just want to play for him.
SF: Mate you only played in one! I’ve got four letter somewhere, but I don’t know where I put them! (laughs).
RB: Froggy, how old were you when you retired in the first place?
SF: I stopped playing at 26, originally. I’d won four flags, and I got involved in the hospitality industry – I was the assistant manager at a hotel, but then I came back five years later and was the player-coach at Kooweerup.
But when I was still in my 20s, I went up to Brisbane and managed this restaurant and nightclub. It was out of control. All these cricketers would always come and have a drink there, hell Celine Dion even had a birthday there! At the time, the Bears had moved there from Carrara on the Gold Coast. I knew everyone.
TP: He ran a nightclub called ‘The Grand Orbit’. It was incredible.
SF: It got out of control one night. There were these guys in who, shall we say, were up to no good.
TP: Here’s a story!
SF: I’d been to a function with a football club, and I came back on this Friday night and walked into the nightclub and asked one of our bouncers who these blokes were. I told him to keep an eye on them – we had 12 security guards on at any one stage on the weekend – and these guys were throwing these blocks of ice around the room. We got them outside, and one of them pulled a gun and it went off. This bullet hit one of our security guys – a great mate of mine – in the shoulder and ricocheted through his body and killed him. It happened in seconds. The gun got jammed when these guys tried to let it off again, and they got away and threw it in the Brisbane River. After that I just moved on.
Mum and dad died when I moved back to Melbourne, and I ended up in Thailand. I lived in Bangkok and Phuket for a couple of years. I left Melbourne in 2004.
RB: And now four out of every 10 years you’re back here?
SF: That’s it.
TP: He makes a trip of it. I know I wouldn’t have come down if it wasn’t for Froggy. He’s making all this effort to get here from Thailand, and I could just drive the Kingswood down from Queensland! (laughs).
RB: What are the lasting memories you’ve both got from that 1989 season, not necessarily just the grand final?
TP: For me it’s an easy one – for that whole season, it was the camaraderie we had when we were at the footy club. Froggy was only 21 or 22, but to me he seemed 32 – he was just so experienced. He and the rest of the guys were heroes of mine.
SF: Beating Drouin was special as my cousins were from Drouin and Kenny was a legend at the club. There’s one classic story – we drove down to Drouin one night to catch up with Wes Pyle. The family owned the local supermarket, so we went there to see where Wes was. His parents said he was working at the cheese factory. So, we drove there and security let us through without a problem. We walked in around the factory looking for Wes wearing white coats and masks and Wes wasn’t overly happy to see us!
RB: And that points to you guys going hard at each other on the field back in the old West Gippy days, but off the field there was genuinely great mateship wasn’t there?
SF: Oh absolutely. Coming into the West Gippsland competition as a young kid from the VFA, I loved it. The league really suited me. There weren’t many times that I wouldn’t stay around with the blokes from the other team afterwards. Greg Atkins hated that! (laughs). He wouldn’t even shower after the game – he’d just get his bag, and leave. He’s an absolute champion bloke, but he was big on opponents being the enemy so when I did that sort of thing he’d hate it. Chris O’Sullivan turned out to be one of my best mates and he played at Cora Lynn. We lived together in Melbourne and Brisbane over the years.
RB: So 1989 was your third senior premiership, Froggy, and you were still only in your early 20s. But by 26, you were retired. Why?
SF: It was just business – getting into the hospitality industry. I moved to Brisbane and built and opened The Grand Orbit on Eagle Street pier with a group of partners, which provided some of the best times of my life, and being involved with the Lions was the highlight.
I ultimately came back at 31 to live with mum and dad after being away in Queensland for five years, and I gravitated towards Kooweerup because my mum was born there and my Pop coached them, and I had a good relationship with the O’Hehirs and those guys because I’d played against them. I played three years there, starting off under Darren Pope. I coached for two years after that season.
It was around that time that Mum died from melanoma, so then I was living with Dad and got home one day and found him in a pool of blood.
RB: Froggy I don’t want to make you re-live that, but what happened to your dad?
SF: I was living with Mum and Dad when I got back from Brisbane, and had been back about six months and Mum was diagnosed with melanoma. She had it years before that, and it came back and took her life. Then I lived with my old man and one night I was meant to go to Lachie Hillard’s for dinner – I went to different mates’ places just so I didn’t have to cook! (laughs). Anyway, I found Dad after he had a stroke and fell off the ladder and fractured his skull. Not good! He was in the Alfred after that but never recovered.
I left Australia after that – in my mid-30s. I just wanted to start a new life.
RB: But Fraser’s – your pub in Thailand – is heavily influenced by your relationship with your parents?
SF: It is. It’s got my mum and dad’s influence all through it. I’ve got a story about them on the menu, and there’s ‘Norm’s Bar’ and ‘Dotty’s Family Room’. I’ve got all this memorabilia over there that I’ve collected from back here. To be honest though mate, you’re probably the person I’ve spoken most to about my life. People will see things in the pub and ask me about them, but that’s about it.
TP: Tell him what happens at 4:27 on a Saturday…
SF: Look, at 4:27pm every Saturday arvo the alarm bell rings and the staff yell out ‘Norm’s shout!’ in memory of the old man, and everyone gets a free beer.
RB: Why though? Why 4:27?
SF: Well when Mum and Dad sold the family house they moved to a new estate in Berwick. They moved to a cul-de-sac and met a lot of younger couples. When Norm met the other husbands they were all working on their gardens. It was 4:27 on a Saturday so they decided it was time to have a beer. So, every Saturday from that day on they would have a beer in Norm’s bar at 4:27, and the legend continues.
RB: Even he called you ‘Frog’, didn’t he? You two both need to explain your nicknames…
TP: I’ve just always been ‘Spud’. I have no idea why – it’s just always been that way. He’s probably ‘Frog’ because he looks like one!
SF: (Laughs) When I was growing up, I’d hop around in the back garden rather than crawling. I moved like a bloody frog. Even my little sister, when she was going through school, was known as ‘Little Frog’ or ‘Tadpole’.
TP: We could have been ‘Weapon’ or ‘Tank’, but here were are – ‘Spud’, and ‘Frog’. Bloody hell! (laughs). I’m the youngest of eight, so ‘Spud’ is probably the least of my worries. That was the best one, just about.
RB: So, Froggy, you moved up to Thailand for a fresh start?
SF: Yeah, I travelled around a bit. I went to Phuket, Bangkok, and even Phnom Penh in Cambodia. I ended up teaching at this school in Bangkok…
RB: Wait a minute… you? A teacher?
SF: Yeah I pretty much talked myself into the job. It was quite a big school, and I ended up running the bloody English department after bluffing my way through!
There was this American guy and he was leaving, so I was sitting there thinking ‘I reckon I could get his job’. You’d have to go and pick your pay check up from the people who ran the school…
TP: So what I’m getting out of this is that you were the next bloke who walked in the door who spoke English as a first language…
SF: There were 10 in the department, but when I’d go and get my pay each month I’d always sit there and talk to them. When the American guy left, I was there at the right time! I said I’d do it. She asked me if I was up to it, and I said ‘of course I am!’ (laughs). I had no teaching history at all. I completely made the lot of it up on the spot.
RB: You’ve always been a good talker, Frog, I know that – but this is taking it to another level…
SF: I was running pubs and restaurants, and here I was – an English teacher. My mates thought it was hilarious because they knew I could barely speak it!
RB: How long have you been at Fraser’s for now, Frog?
SF: I built it five years ago. Being a sports junkie, I get sport from all around the world and the time zone in Thailand makes it perfect. I have loads of different sports memorabilia and 17 TVs in total! The old man would be proud. Where can you say to the wife ‘I’m going to the pub’ and get away with it?
RB: Who are some of the people you’ve met in your line of work over there?
SF: Frank Bruno (boxer), (Allan) ‘Alfie’ Langer (NRL legend), Steve Coppell (former English Premier League club manager and national player), and Bob Sapp (former MMA fighter). I also have personally-signed shirts from Ole Gunnar Solskjaer (Manchester United manager and former player), (world famous boxing trainer) Freddie Roach, the Australian cricket team, and AFL and NRL teams. It’s just part of the job…
TP: No it’s not, Russ. He’s Froggy F****** Fraser – that’s why.
RB: On that, Spud – what sort of player was Froggy – according to you?
TP: Oh, mate – how much time have you got? He was a 30-plus possession player every time he walked out on to the ground. He was super gutsy in the way he went about it. I mean, just look at him! Seriously, he’s got nothing much else to give you, but he’d just dive on that footy all day and get it to another player who would use it on the outside. He’s taken it all on the chin… the head, the nose, the eyes, the ears…
SF: Yeah, that’s probably why I’ve only got one eye!
RB: What sort of player was Spud, Froggy?
SF: He only played one year and kicked six in the grand final! In that era we had Travis Murphy who came straight out of fourths, young Spud, all these kids. We weren’t old, ourselves, but he came on to the scene and was very quick and evasive as a half-forward flanker. In that grand final, he was just incredible. It was probably one of the best individual efforts I’d seen, because in all the other grand finals we didn’t have a lot of guys who’d star in their own right. Spud, though – he could have six kicks and kick you six goals.
TP: Mate, I was a passenger. We had a lot of great players.
SF: In the four flags I won there, he was probably the only one who kicked a big bag.
TP: It was just my day. What about a bloke like Travis Murphy, though? He never even played thirds or seconds. He came straight out of the fourths! He wasn’t a boy though – he was a man.
RB: One for the two of you – in that era back then in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s who were the most influential players you played with?
SF: It’d have to be Powlesy or Greg Atkins.
TP: For me it could be Froggy, or Lachie Hillard.
RB: And opposition players? Who were the standouts?
SF: There were so many – I’d struggle to narrow it down. There were a lot of good players who played in different positions. For example John Proctor would change a game – he’d have six kicks and kick six goals. Sully (Chris O’Sullivan) would put a display on racking up possessions. They were all a challenge.
TP: Mate I’d know I was in for a tough day if I even just lined up on a red-head! They were tough – real hard work. Russ I’d panic even playing on blokes with beards!
RB: Finally boys – what was the reunion like back at the club recently? 30 years since the 1989 flag?
SF: It was pretty overwhelming, to be honest. When it comes to footy, you just play – you don’t think of the consequences at the time, or how you’ll be remembered. As you get older you reflect a bit more, but not at the time.
It was the young blokes, the 2009 premiership guys, who made it really special. They were genuinely interested in what our group from ’89 achieved. It was a great experience. They gave us a round of applause, and it was pretty special. I was touched.
RB: Gentlemen – it’s been absolute pleasure sitting down with you over a couple of beers in your brief stay back in Pakenham. I’ve loved it!
TP: Cheers Russ.
SF: Pleasure, Russ.
