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Thanks to a downward spiral that oscillates between the bizarrely comical and the sickeningly tragic, it looks like Ben Cousins will be remembered by the bulk of this generation as a drug addict first, and a brilliant football player second.
Cousins’ off-field woes have reached the point where people’s first image of him won’t be that of a number nine in blue and yellow sprinting down Subiaco’s wing; it’ll be that of a sad guy with a crack-pipe in his hand.
The past month has seen the ashes of Cousins’ once bright star sent further into hell. Each incident has been more peculiar and depressing than the one that preceded it.
A low-speed car chase, getting caught by police inside Perth’s SAS barracks, and reports of Cousins, disoriented, driving over gardens and taking photos on his phone of a Sikh temple for reasons known only to his psychosis. From transcendent champion to cautionary tale, tragically, Ben Cousins does not seem like a person destined to grow old.
Before he was a public figure to attack, a symbol to scrutinise and ultimately a broken man to lament, Ben Cousins was a football player who was exceptionally good at his job. An impossible combination of strength and speed, Cousins was a more compact version of Patrick Dangerfield.
Mass x Acceleration = Ben. He was fearless, a working class warrior with an animalistic attack on the ball that belied his Hollywood good looks. He was desperation personified, with his idiosyncratic kicking motion where the head hammered down as the leg extended out an apt visual representation for how he simply willed the ball to its destination.
He was omnipresent in the clinches too, with a stature that seemed to stand far taller than his 179-centimetre frame. And then there was the running.
Cousins’ gut running is legendary in football circles. Entire articles have been written to try and understand the science behind how Cousins ran the way he did. The defining image of Cousins on the football field is when he’s off to the side of it – keeled over, gasping for air in the small space between the boundary line and the interchange bench, exhausted to his body’s limit, getting ready to go again.
Cousins didn’t just run hard though – he ran smart. His economy of movement was brilliant, always running to the right spots, to track an opponent, to receive a handball, to force a contest. Chris Judd once said “I don’t think I’ve seen someone run as hard to get the footy as Cuz does”.
What made Cousins one of best midfielders of his era was the fact that he could push his body past its limits and use his brain to get the best out of those new limits.
I’ll always remember Cousins for one passage in particular, something that I’ve never heard anyone else discuss. It occurred in the final minute of the 2006 grand final. At the 30:08 mark of the last quarter with the Eagles up one point there’s a stoppage on the far wing.
Cousins sheds the Jarrad McVeigh tag, wins the ball from the tap, explodes along the boundary line, handballs along the ground to himself to shake the oncoming Amon Buchanan tackle, cuts inside at pace and takes a bounce on the cut, breaks a Brett Kirk tackle before getting somewhat lost and handballing backwards to Chad Fletcher.
This eight-second sequence is vintage Cousins; the running power, the total unison of movement with his extraordinarily low centre of gravity, the exaggerated driving of the arms up and down and the head bobbing, grimacing in a desperate, determined pain. It’s frantic, ferocious and breathtaking. What happens next is ridiculous though.
Daniel Kerr, in what could have become a legendary brain-fade, gets the ball from Fletcher and brazenly kicks the ball sideways 30 metres to a contest in the dead middle of the corridor, the MCG’s centre circle. The ball breaks to the near wing, opposite where Cousins’ run occurred. Every single player (there are at least 14 by my count) involved in the previous passage is still on the far wing, hands on their hips, finished. Everyone except Cousins.
With 30:31 on the clock, Cousins bursts onto the screen again on the near wing, exploding at pace, performing the pressure act at 30:38 that leads Nic Fosdike to kick the ball out of bounds. McVeigh, Cousins’ tagger, is 50 metres behind him. It should be impossible for a human to do what Cousins did in these 30 seconds.
In the final minute of the most exhausting game of the year, he wins the ball, runs at full pace for eight seconds and sheds three opponents, getting noticeably slowed down by the last tackle, handballs, recovers, sprints 90 metres to the opposite wing, involves himself in the play, attempts a tackle, misses, double backs and then attempts a diving smother to force a kick out of bounds.
Again, he does all this in 30 seconds. Fosdike’s kick would be the last play of the game. The siren goes before the throw-in reaches Dean Cox and Stephen Doyle. Ben Cousins and the West Coast Eagles win the premiership.
This is one of the most incredible individual passages I’ve seen on a football field. And nobody knows about it, which touches on the contradiction of Ben Cousins. Off the field, Cousins behaves like a rock-star, and it’s not just the drug use. He wears deep V neck t-shirts, has a million dollar grin that looks eerily like Tom Cruise’s and drives around Perth with his shirt off.
In interviews he is captivating – a ball of masculine charisma. On the field though, Cousins was the definition of working class. He never courted attention. He seemed quiet, focused and driven. He rarely smiled, celebrated or talked trash. His game was closer to brutal than flashy. Gut-running is the least glamorous skill. He was a warrior – courageous, inspirational and humble.
To me, the beauty of playing sport is that whoever you are in everyday life, you get to leave that behind once you strap on the boots. You can be whoever you want to be on the field. Silent types become stirring leaders. Arrogant jocks become selfless workmen. If you try hard enough, in the context of sport at least, an average person can become a hero.
I don’t think Ben Cousins has any idea who he is in real life – at least the evidence suggests that. As a footballer though, within the reassuring confines of four quarters and a stadium’s walls, Cousins had an identity. He was a hero; a working class hero, which is something to be.
I don’t know Ben Cousins the person. He strikes me as a genuine, sympathetic, deeply troubled guy but any judgment I make about his character is pure speculation. I knew Ben Cousins the hero though. And thirty years from now when I think of Ben Cousins, the hero is the person I’ll choose to remember.