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Good article from Phil re Fabulous Fred. http://www.theage.com.au:80/realfooty/news/features/cousins-has-to-heed-... [quote]Cousins has to heed the brutal truth Phil Cleary March 25, 2007 Unlike Ben Cousins, former Port Melbourne VFA goal-kicking champion Fred Cook never played in an AFL grand final or won a Brownlow Medal. Nor did he have his drug addiction trawled over in the national media. However, like Cousins, he was a football hero when amphetamines ravaged his life, in the late 1980s. Now he has some strong but compassionate words for Cousins. The words date back 20 years to the night Cook's mate Sam Newman arrived at the city watch-house to bail him out. "Why don't you apply the same principles that made you a champion footballer to your private life?" said Newman. Although Cook's addiction to amphetamines meant the words were lost on him, he believes the sentiment is the only way forward for Cousins. "Ben doesn't need hangers-on or blokes blaming his girlfriend. He needs some friends who are prepared to be brutal about his life," he says. advertisement advertisement For Cook the magic of amphetamines came from a world not foreign to the one Ben Cousins inhabits. "Try this," notorious criminal Dennis Allen had said when Cook complained of a cold midway through 1984 in the pub he owned a few kilometres from the Port Melbourne ground. In Allen's hand was a bag of white powder, which he pierced with a knife before placing some of the contents in Cook's Bacardi and coke. "'How good's this? I thought.' The cold disappeared and I could go all night," he remembers. Married four times, Fred Cook is an old style 59-year-old, who enjoys rattling off stories about his conquests. The stories might be embellished but there's no doubt he lived every day, often in the company of celebrities, football stars and women, as if it were his last. The names of football identities with whom he shared amphetamines and the horrible stories of his time with Allen are regaled with the naivety of a boy who has yet to truly grow up. "Allen was a big-time crook and rapist, and I have no time for rapists. But living on the edge with people who carried guns and tried to beat the cops, and washing Allen's drug money through the pub was so dangerous it was genuinely exciting," he says. For all his sins, there's nothing sanctimonious about Cook's assessment of Ben Cousins' predicament. "He's living on the edge. I've been there and know how exciting it can be. But seeing pictures of him on TV it's obvious his brain is scrambled. "All the rehabilitation in the world is useless unless he genuinely wants to get off the amphetamines. Maybe when people start to ostracise him and the money dries up he'll find a way." For Cook, the cash started to dry up when the amphetamines led him to neglect the pub and squander money, hundreds of thousands of dollars of it, he says, on bad business decisions. By the late '80s petty criminality had become a way of life, and jail a formality. In 1992, when I was the federal member for Wills, I visited Cook in Pentridge, where he was doing time for drug-related crimes. How could a man of such fame throw it all away? Ask any football lover over the age of 40 about the 1976 VFA grand final and the name Fred Cook will fairly burst from the lips. Only Dermott Brereton's courage in the 1989 VFL grand final compares with what Cook did that day at the Junction Oval in front of 30,000 people and a huge television audience. Bleeding from deep cuts to the mouth and seriously hurt after being king-hit by Dandenong full-back Allan Harper, Cook went on to kick five goals and stamp himself as a genuine Victorian football hero. This was a man who survived a heart attack in 1972 to play in six VFA premierships, and at 29 turned his back on a return to VFL/AFL football with the premiers, North Melbourne. Cook was a football god. Cook says he's freed himself from amphetamines, but he doesn't know where Cousins will be in a year. "No amount of preaching will solve his problems. He has to dig deep, really deep, because being on amphetamines can be fantastic. Your problems disappear. Your injuries disappear and you never get tired. Then one day it all falls apart. It's very sad." Phil Cleary is a VFA legend and former independent federal politician. [/quote]