Dane Swan: My mate Dustin Martin is just an ordinary guyDane Swan,
Herald Sun
March 13, 2018 1:23pmWHAT’S Dusty like?
If I had a dollar for every time someone had asked me that during the past 12 months, it wouldn’t make me as wealthy as his new deal with Richmond has made him, but it would take care of the drinks’ bill on our next overseas trip.
Well, not quite.
No one wants to know about my footy career any more, which is fine. I’m done and dusted and he is coming off one of the greatest individual seasons — winning the flag, the Brownlow Medal, the Norm Smith Medal and signing one of the biggest contracts in the history of the game, after knocking back an even bigger one from North Melbourne.
For some reason people seem fascinated about my friendship with “Dus”, and it’s the only thing they ask me about these days.
The answer is pretty simple. He’s just a great mate.
We are kindred spirits. We’ve always enjoyed each other’s company; we love having a good time (even if it isn’t as wild as some of the media makes out); we’ve got a tight-knit group of friends away from footy; and we’ve got a shared love of travelling. Our post-season footy trips have almost got as much coverage as what has happened on the field. If you listen to the stories that get around about him — and our trips — you would be excused for thinking he is like some mythical centaur who sits on a throne with worshippers fanning him with palm leaves. That’s bull---t.
He’s just an ordinary, average guy who, admittedly, is living out an extraordinary career.
People like to think we are flying on private jets or partying with sheiks and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, and partying with Trump. I wish!
We are just normal everyday guys having fun on holidays. It doesn’t matter who is in the booth next to us, whether they are the biggest stars in the world or not, Dusty and I couldn’t care less. We always think we’re having the best night on the planet.
We’re not the bad boys we’re sometimes portrayed as.
I’m sure part of the interest in our friendship is because we both managed successful careers — on our own terms — and we’ve somehow managed to have a life outside of the AFL goldfish bowl. That’s a bloody hard thing to do these days, and clubs frown on it.
But if we hadn’t done that, I don’t think either of us would have survived in the game.
Still, we’ve always taken our footy seriously, and trained hard (ask any of our teammates!).
No one sees the extra hours Dusty puts in on the track, or in extra boxing sessions. Unlike others he doesn’t post his extra sessions on Instagram.
We met on the footy field first, but didn’t know each other properly until late one Sunday night at Eve nightclub about six years ago.
Funnily enough, we were both at the end of a long session and we were the last two left there at the end. Eve hasn’t survived, but our friendship has.
One of the few times I’ve spoken to him about footy was in the middle of his contract negotiations last year.
He asked me what it was like to be a one-club player, and I told him it meant so much to me to be a Collingwood player from start to finish.
Mind you, it might have been different if another club offered me the sort of multimillion-dollar deal that North Melbourne offered Dusty last year.
He’s the most loyal bloke you would meet, and I always felt he would stay with Richmond, even if it meant giving up something like $2.8 million by knocking North back, according to the media.
Don’t worry; he’s still getting very, very well paid.
The money won’t change him. The only thing that may be a bit different is I suspect he will buy a bigger and better house now.
If he ends up going broke and never gets another kick (which I am sure won’t happen on either front), he won’t change.
And if he goes on to win another Brownlow polling 70 votes, and helps Richmond win another premiership or two, that won’t change him either.
We try and catch up for lunch or a coffee in Chapel St as often as we can, and much of the discussion centres on our location for our next end-of-season trip.
We’ve been doing it for four or five years now, and it hasn’t stopped even though I am retired.
Last year, we went to the US and Mexico. The trips are not exclusively just us. Joe Camilleri’s son Harlan comes every year and Sammy Fisher joined us in Austin, Texas.
I reckon Dus had something like 20 hours’ sleep in the week and a half after the Grand Final (he slept for a few hours at my joint in the early hours of that Sunday morning).
He loves his sleep, too, so he did that a fair bit on the trip away.
When we are on tour, we are not opposed to sleeping in the same bed at times. We just sit up, having a few drinks, watching TV, and end up having a sleep.
Breakfasts are very rare. We sleep through the mornings most of the time because often we won’t go to bed until the early hours.
We started the last trip at the ACL (Austin City Limits) Music Festival, which was pretty big, as anyone following my Instagram account would know.
I posted a video of Dusty dancing at the Summit Rooftop Lounge, with a bottle of champagne in his hand, as he sprayed it over the crowd.
He stole the show. Dusty loves his music and doesn’t mind taking over the DJing.
From there, it was off to Playa del Carmen, a coastal resort in Mexico. Everything was inclusive, so we would head to the pool bar early and spend the whole day there.
We ended up having a few afternoon kips, but never strayed too far from the pool bar.
We like to immerse ourselves in whatever city we are in, and in Mexico, it felt like we could let our hair down and have some fun.
On one of the days we all wore Hawaiian shirts, just to be a bit different. We’re happy to look a bit stupid sometimes, but we don’t care because no one else knows who we are.
Dusty was big on the pina coladas in Mexico. We all have our own stupid in-jokes no one else would even find funny, but we do. If he does something stupid, he’s the butt of our jokes, and it’s the same with any of us. No one is immune, not even a Brownlow medallist.
We run into heaps of other AFL players doing exactly what we are doing, but no one in the media wants to talk about them. They only talk about us.
Dusty lets his hair down when he is away because he loves the anonymity of it all. In Melbourne, it has almost got to the stage where he can’t even go out any more. There are too many prying eyes and too many people watching him.
Hopefully that’s all about to change. Let’s just say there will be a “Dustin Martin Wing” in my pub, The Albion, where he can be himself whenever he wants.
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