IT WAS last Thursday, at the Blackburn South home of a 1960s Richmond player, that Ben Cousins was truly embraced by the Tiger family, setting in train an irresistible momentum for his rebirth as a footballer.
Cousins, who had arrived at 6am from Perth on the midnight "red-eye", was spirited from the airport by his manager Ricky Nixon to the home of Barry Cameron, a 96-game Richmond ruckman who also happens to be the father of the club's general manager of football operations, Craig Cameron. Cousins spent six hours at Cameron snr's home, meeting key officials, senior players, coach Terry Wallace and the new general manager of learning and development, Jeff Bond, who served as the Australian Institute of Sport's psychologist for 22 years.
Cousins was interviewed and probed in four separate meetings: first, he spoke with Wallace, Cameron and Bond, then had a one-on-one discussion with Bond.
Next, a group of four senior Richmond players — new captain Chris Newman, his predecessor Kane Johnson, Troy Simmonds and Nathan Brown — spent 40 minutes with the player they had chased in vain in his past life as a celebrated West Coast champion. The players, unsurprisingly, wanted him.
Finally, Cousins met president Gary March and chief executive Steve Wright. March found Cousins to be slightly nervous, but completely honest and forthright in his responses to all the curly questions thrown at him.
Significantly, this chastened Cousins did not exude arrogance or attitude. He just wanted to play the game again at the highest level.
He also made a major concession: he would let Richmond view, and have the power of veto on, the contentious documentary of his own life that he has been filming. The mere fact that Cousins was drawing attention to himself in such a way, when clubs wanted to avoid such distractions, had made other potential suitors uncomfortable.
Later that day, Wallace, Cameron and the football department made the in-principle decision to recruit Cousins. They were counting on the help of the AFL in opening up an extra draft pick — help that was ultimately not forthcoming — but the club had crossed its own Rubicon in the sense that it did not object to recruiting a recovering drug addict. It just had to find a way to accommodate him, without losing face or compromising its youth policy.
On Friday, the Richmond board approved the football department's recommendation. Three days later, the Tigers' late bid for Cousins would almost unravel when the AFL Commission rejected the application to have Graham Polak, recovering from head injuries sustained in a collision with a tram, placed on the rookie list.
By then, however, the pro-Cousins momentum had become unstoppable — as March had warned officials it might when the Tigers first began to explore the prospect of making him the highest-profile, pre-season draft pick in history.
Cousins' AFL career had seemed buried after he was finally spurned by sponsor-conscious St Kilda at a late-November board meeting before the national draft; following on the heels of Collingwood's rejection (and soon followed by Brisbane's predictable withdrawal), the St Kilda knock-back seemed to represent the end.
In the days immediately following St Kilda's rejection, Cousins was holed up in his Perth home and unreachable on his mobile. Nixon and others close to him were concerned for his welfare, knowing the potential for such rejection — seemingly by the whole competition — to cause a downturn in his recovery.
Yet, sources insisted that it did not, and the Cousins who subsequently presented to Richmond was in a better frame of mind than the player Collingwood, the Saints and Lions judged to be too risky.
Richmond first began to explore the notion of Cousins in yellow and black after the national draft, when it had passed on its final selection, pick 70, after Brisbane picked the player they wanted, Bart McCulloch.
Richmond acknowledged that, if not for Brisbane drafting McCulloch at pick 69, the whole Cousins project probably would never have eventuated. It was then that Nixon planted the idea of Cousins for Punt Road.
That said, the Tigers did not want to use their first pick in the pre-season draft on Cousins, and sought to conjure an extra choice through the Polak application — a bid that rival clubs, led by Collingwood, viewed as a rort to get an extra pick and was strongly opposed. Richmond was stunned by the AFL's rejection of the Polak plan.
The league had indicated privately to various parties that it was keen to see Cousins drafted and playing next year, league boss Andrew Demetriou having been lobbied heavily by the AFL Players' Association, among others, on Cousins' behalf.
Richmond began to see that the talent pool in the pre-season draft was running dry and that Cousins should therefore be considered.
March says Kevin Sheedy's role in bringing Cousins to Tigerland has been exaggerated at the Richmond end, but that the influence of another Cousins' supporter, Brownlow medallist and media commentator Gerard Healy, has been understated. Healy is a mentor to Cousins and was one of the five people Nixon had engaged to protect and advise him in the event that he was drafted by the Saints.
Healy's major role was not simply to lobby Richmond and the league, but to turn the tide of public opinion through his media outlets, especially 3AW's Sports Tonight , which became command centre of a shameless "Give Ben a Fair Go" campaign. Sheedy's major contribution was to challenge Cousins at a meeting between them (and his father Bryan), in effect telling him to get off his backside and phone the clubs that had "live" picks in the December draft. On Monday night, after the AFL flattened the club's plans to pick Cousins with the Polak manoeuvre, Richmond finally came to terms with this truth: that the consequences of not picking Cousins were potentially far worse than the risks of selecting him.
The Tigers had earmarked their pre-season pick on an untried kid. What if this kid — effectively the 80th player in the draft — didn't make it? He would forever be the player whom Richmond picked "instead of Ben Cousins". The Tigers had seen this story before: Aaron Fiora and Richard Tambling had been maligned as players they'd picked before Matthew Pavlich, and Lance "Buddy" Franklin respectively.
Perhaps the most influential body, finally, was that most volatile and unforgiving force: the Tiger army, which has sacked coaches and overturned administrations in the past. The fans, by a margin of at least five to one, were for Cousins, who will pack the MCG for the club's round one home game against Carlton.
"Supporters were a major consideration," March said. "There's a compelling argument that this was in the best interests of the unity of the entire football club."
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