The wider worldMatt Murnane
March 11, 2012
Home base: Gibson Turner with children from the Harts Range Community Primary School on a recent trip to the Northern Territory with Richmond teammates. Photo: Joe ArmaoSITTING at Alice Springs Airport, Richmond rookie Gibson Turner shifts in his seat, scratches the back of his head and takes a second to pause before giving his answer.
The question put to him is a long the lines of "what would you be doing, if you weren't playing footy at Richmond".
This is the sobering reality for an indigenous teenager growing up 80 kilometres out of Alice Springs.
"If I wasn't playing footy, I would have been drinking or doing drugs," he admits. "As I was growing up, I got into heaps of trouble. I used to hang around with the wrong group.
"I just used to do the things with the other boys. I never used to be a leader, I used to tag a long with the group."
The events of the past few days surrounding Melbourne's Liam Jurrah have brought to light what in many ways, is a different world, and one that only its inhabitants can fully understand.
Turner, as one of Jurrah's many cousins, knows of that world — although he is in no way involved in the family feud that has turned Jurrah's life upside down and again focused the football world's attention on the difficulties and cultural differences indigenous recruits face.
Turner is yet to play a game for Richmond and may never in the future, but already his story is worth telling.
It is one of achievement, the significance of which most of his teammates will never appreciate. They can't.
It is the direction his life so easily could have taken, that makes the path he is on now so admirable. But Turner had to work hard to keep it on course. He had to buck the trend; it was never going to be handed to him.
The story starts with his grandmother, who took Turner — then in his early teens — back to his hometown of Santa Teresa and straightened him out.
"She put me into school and for the first time I really wanted to focus on school, I never used to rock up," he said.
"I went to school every day and that's when things started to come my way."
Selection in the Northern Territory Thunder under-18 team was the first step. Turner had missed the cut for the under-16 year squad years earlier, despite the coach telling him he was good enough.
His attendance at school held him back.
But that was no longer an issue when a teacher from an Adelaide College came to visit him with a position in a scholarship program.
This time, Turner made the cut. He was one of six boys to uproot himself from his family for the privilege of going to boarding school and playing high-level schoolboy footy.
One by one, though, his mates left. The debilitating home sickness that gets to so many aboriginal prodigies sucked them back to Alice Springs.
It should have got to Turner, but it didn't.
Much like it was as a young teenager bunking off school and running with the wrong crowd, the temptation to follow his mates and decide Adelaide was all too hard was strong.
Stronger than even he can express.
But Turner dug in. And we already know where he might be now, if he didn't.
"By the end I was the only one there . . . that made it really hard for me," he said. "But all I wanted to do was chase my dream to play AFL. That's all I was thinking about.
"And that's what I'm doing now, chasing my dream."
The 18-year-old chased his dream all the way to the AFL draft camp, but even there he still considered it unreachable.
"I went to draft camp and I went to all my interviews but I missed the Richmond interview because I slept in," he said. "So I thought I would never have any chance of going to Richmond."
But the Tigers saw something in him.
"After the draft camp, Richmond flew me over to the club and interviewed me there and my interview went really well," he said.
Taken at pick 60 in this year's rookie draft, the zippy small forward is now living his dream, even if it's not quite what we expected.
Game plans, dietary requirements, team structures and line meetings is a lot for a youngster like Turner to get his head around, and far removed from the "see ball, get ball" approach to footy he grew up with.
How he came to unwittingly find himself at the door step of his coach's house in Melbourne by sheer fluke, is an insight into the adjustment Turner's life is about to make. He hadn't been in Melbourne long before he found himself with a day off and a chance to catch up with cousin Jurrah.
The pair arranged to meet at a train station in Bentleigh. But a mix-up left Turner all alone, for the first time, in the big city.
"I thought to myself, damn, what am I going to do now? So I just went for a walk down the street," Turner said.
A little while later, another indigenous rookie — Hawthorn's Amos Frank — spotted Turner as he and another Hawks official drove by.
"They pulled over and they were like ‘what are you doing?' and I was like ‘nothing, I'm just going for a walk," Turner said.
Frank then asked what he thought was an obvious question considering their current location: Had Turner just finished visiting Tigers coach Damien Hardwick?
"I said ‘nah, I don't even know where he is'," Turner responded.
"And then they were like, ‘you're standing out the front of his house, man'. I was like ‘really? Far out'. I got into a big shock.
"Then when they took me into Dimma's house he was like ‘what are you doing here?" And I was like ‘I don't know, I just got lost out the front of your house'.
"It was crazy. He had a good laugh."
But Turner is adjusting to this wider world. In a pure football sense, the raw talent is there. And so is the pedigree.
Aside from the connection with Jurrah, he is also a cousin of North Melbourne livewire Matt Campbell and is close friends with Hawthorn excitement machine Cyril Rioli.
If he turns out half as good as Rioli, Tigers fans will be overjoyed.
But all that is unlikely to happen this year, despite the similarities he shares with his good mate.
A groin injury has prevented Turner from testing himself in the NAB Cup so far, and when he does play this year, it will be mostly for Coburg in the VFL.
In the interim, his first season will be about making the adjustment — learning the game plan, gaining weight and, most importantly, fitting in at Punt Road. In that respect, Turner is excelling, the degree to which has surprised everyone at Richmond.
Anyone who has spent time with Turner knows exactly what the Tigers see in him. There is something infectiously likeable about his personality.
"Gibbo", as he is known, has already formed a close bond with Alex Rance, one of the Tigers key men, and is well liked by the other senior players.
"They say it can be hard for the first-year players to settle in and get involved with the older guys at clubs," he said. "But I'm so lucky that I've fitted in really well. I'm still in shock with how much they've opened up to me."
Rance, Gibson and emerging key forward Ty Vickery traveled to Alice Springs recently as part of the club's "Outback Tigers" community initiative, which involved the players visiting some of the most remote schools in central Australia.
Back in his hometown, Turner was like a rock star, and instantly more recognisable than his bigger-name teammates.
Decked out in official black-and-yellow apparel, the kids just wanted to be near him: to talk to him, to touch him.
By making it on to an AFL list, he has achieved something many of those kids can only dream of.
Yet even if Turner never plays an AFL game, his undertaking with Richmond will still give him an opportunity to accomplish something else, perhaps less desirable to the youngsters who idolize him, yet even more important.
At nearly all of the schools the Tigers visited, the percentage of the students that will go on to complete Year 12 is zero – not two per cent or one per cent, absolute zero.
Turner, meanwhile, will attempt to complete his VCE studies through a program at RMIT University this year.
"There's not much indigenous boys that get the opportunity to finish school. I'm one of the lucky ones," he said.
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/afl/afl-news/the-wider-world-20120310-1uroj.html#ixzz1ojWexDFo
