From prison to premiership: the road to Marlion Pickett's AFL debutKonrad Marshall
The Age
17 November 2019The first glimpse the wider world got of Marlion Pickett was not on an Australian rules football field in Melbourne. He was neither bathed in sunshine doing a balletic blind turn in front of 100,014 spectators, nor buried by his Richmond Football Club teammates after a cool, calm but dramatic (almost cinematic) grand final goal. He was not wearing yellow and black. He was not 27 years old.
He was 20. He was 60 kilometres east of Perth. And he was behind bars.
Pickett was a character – identified only as “Marlion” – in a five-part 2014 TV documentary called Outside Chance, about an innovative 2012 criminal justice program, in which inmates of the minimum-security Wooroloo Prison Farm were allowed to play football matches against local teams in a regional league, outside their razor-wire confines. The aim was best summed up by the tagline of the series: “Winning their redemption, one game at a time.”
I watched the ABC show before I met Pickett in person, and it’s confronting. It opens with vision of inmates being strip-searched and foreboding iron doors slamming shut. It’s narrated by Andrew Krakouer, the former Richmond forward who went to jail for assault in 2008, before being released from prison, then returning to play in the AFL with Collingwood. A sentence from his opening monologue stands out: “One player, Marlion, looks like he has the goods to emulate my journey, and potentially make it big on the outside.”
Game footage comes next, and Pickett is instantly recognisable. That languid stride and loping gait. The way his slender arms cradle the ball and place it gently on the foot. Next, in a single snippet of vision, comes a breathtaking confirmation of his football identity. Call it the Pickett pirouette. The sweeping, circular, slow-motion spin is an exact replica of the old-fashioned evasive dance he did on the MCG against the GWS Giants that last Saturday in September, on his way to gathering 22 clean disposals and one premiership medallion, not to mention a place in sporting folklore as the first player in almost seven decades to make his AFL debut on grand final day.
The series doesn’t detail his crimes, nor does Pickett talk about them on camera, but he was sent away for 30 months following a string of burglaries in the Perth suburbs, where he spent his late teens. “I stuffed up in the past. Probably boredom,” he says on the doco, sheepish but honest. “Alcohol. Being brought up around drugs. Everything goes downhill from there. Guess you’ve got nothing to look forward to, so you start committing crimes, then from crime, you end up in here.”
The other players – with shaved skulls and rat’s tails and hollow eyes – spend much of their time stressing about making parole. On the field, they get sucked in when opponents taunt them as jailbirds and crims. Pickett, though, seems mostly immune from these pressures, launching endless scything runs, flicking nonchalant passes across his body, and flying for marks like a feather in the wind. In one scene, the players and coaches anonymously rate one another and Pickett finishes on top, with 89 of a possible 90 votes. He talks tenderly about his hopes, too, but with little belief in his voice.
“Hopefully I’ll make it to the AFL,” he says, eyes drifting down, glancing away. “That’s mainly my dream since I was a kid. Hopefully it comes true.”
The Wooroloo team plays well, sweeping all before them. The players enjoy the program, too. They eat junk food from club canteens. They visit their families on the sidelines. It’s an unprecedented level of freedom. One inmate calls it a torment – “Temptation Island” – and so it proves.
Late one night at Wooroloo, a player is discovered outside his cell. The prison officers toss his room and uncover contraband. A little marijuana. The player is immediately transferred to the medium-security Acacia Prison. His privileges are gone. No more footy.
“The real tragedy is that he’s the player with the most to lose,” says Krakouer. “Marlion.”
The jail goes quiet. The program is suspended. The documentary is cut short. In the last episode, Pickett fronts a camera. “I got caught with some poo over there. I got charged for it. Stuffed the whole team around I guess,” he says, shifting and upset. “I coulda done better, yeah. But you make mistakes in life.”
Seven years later, Pickett meets me in the players’ lounge at the Richmond Football Club, where we sit on curved couches by a fridge and fruit baskets and computer game consoles, chatting about life and mistakes. Pickett doesn’t make many mistakes in footy. That started when he was six. He was the right age for AFL Auskick, but was nudged instead by his father to join his big brother in the under-nines.
That was in Balga, a suburb of Perth, but the family – four boys and three girls – moved soon to Manjimup, 300 kilometres south of the capital, inland from Margaret River. It was all wheat and sheep there once, now it’s truffles and wine. They moved more than once through his formative years, to Midland and York and Lakeside, and he played football wherever they went. His brothers played the game, too, but Marlion was the standout talent of the family. At one point in his late teens, footy was an everyday affair: training in the afternoons on Monday through Friday, then playing for the Perth suburbs of Koongamia on Saturdays and Nollamara on Sundays.
School was never his strong suit. Pickett was what you might call a disengaged youth. Whenever a season ended he started drinking, and doing drugs, although he doesn’t say what. He found himself in fights. He broke into homes, and sold what he stole from within. “I had my first son when I was 18, Marlion junior. I was with him for nine months. I didn’t know, but my missus was pregnant at the time with my second, Latrell,” he says. “That’s when the police came.”
Pickett was arrested in 2010, and his time at Wooroloo began in early 2011. He had met Jessica Nannup when he was 15, and she stayed with him through the custodial sentence that came his way. His crimes weren’t violent, and Pickett owns his actions, but there are also mitigating factors to consider.
“There’s context to this that’s important,” says Aaron Clark, director of the Korin Gamadji Institute, an Indigenous education and leadership centre attached to the Tigers. “In places like where Marlion is from, there are quirky mandatory sentencing laws that send people to jail for minor crimes. There are women going to jail for unpaid parking tickets. There’s inter-generational trauma, juvenile detention problems, deaths in custody. It’s important to think about these things when you’re unpicking the story of Marlion and his incarceration, and his vulnerability, and the thousands like him. We need to dig a little deeper, beyond the tale of a kid who did bad then turned good.”
Pickett echoes the sentiments of some of the players from Outside Chance in noting that the best part of the prison footy program was also the hardest: when your child comes to see you play, and then it’s time to go. “I’d walk off the ground, give them a hug and a kiss, and then there was no looking back, and they start crying,” he tells me. “It got so hard at one point that I didn’t really want visits. I told them to come every four months. Make it easier on everyone.”
Getting shifted to medium security, he says, became a blessing. In the minimum-security environment he had too much time, too little structure. In Acacia Prison he was surrounded by more serious offenders. His older brother was there, too, and a handful of uncles, some of them fighting drug addiction. “Seeing them in that state made me want to change,” he says, sipping a bottle of water in this cushy space where the players come to relax. “I didn’t want to be in and out of there, like that. I wanted to change for the better, for my kids, and keep the dream alive. Hard times, but I think leaving the kids and the missus helped me understand what I could be losing.”
With 12 months left to run on his sentence, he watched an awful lot of AFL matches, and those of the lower-level state league, the WAFL. He quit drinking, and hasn’t had a drop of alcohol in seven years. “I made my mind up: ‘When I get out, everything is about footy and family.’ The first week I got out of prison, I walked straight into South Fremantle Football Club.”
That was 2012. The South Fremantle Bulldogs are a proud club, with strong historic ties to Richmond. Champion centreman Maurice Rioli was a star there before and after his playing career with the Tigers. Krakouer was recruited from there, too. There are many more but one among them stands out: Mal Brown, the former Richmond powerbroker (or at least provocateur), who played and coached at South Freo. Brown played a pivotal role in the rise of Indigenous footballers from Western Australia.
Marlion Pickett with his children (from left) Marlion jnr, Latrell, Levi and Shaniquae. Credit:AAP
Have you heard of the Noongar nation? It is the largest language group or clan near Perth, perhaps in the country. If you follow football you’ll recognise the names of the nation. Hill and Yarran. Garlett and Narkle. The Jetta cousins. The Ah Chee brothers. Harley Bennell and Michael Walters are Noongar. Paddy Ryder and Lance “Buddy” Franklin, too. Before them came Peter Matera and Jeff Farmer, Nicky Winmar and Derek Kickett – not to mention Jimmy and Phil Krakouer. Or Barry Cable. Or the late great Graham “Polly” Farmer. Marlion Pickett is Noongar, too.
While most Indigenous language groups have a few players in the AFL at any given time, the Noongar routinely has more than two dozen – a full third of all Indigenous players in the league. Legendary AFL coach Kevin Sheedy called them “the Zulus of this nation”. I once spoke in a Fremantle cafe to the documentary maker Paul Roberts, who made a film about the Noongar called Black Magic, and he put it best. “It is a story of spectacular over-representation. An astonishing anomaly.”
In the late 1970s, most WAFL clubs had only one or two Indigenous players, but Brown fielded as many as eight a side. He loved their flair and instinct, but something else Brown said rings true with Marlion Pickett’s recruitment to Richmond. Brown recruited Noongars not just for their unfathomable manoeuvres but because they’d steeled themselves in hardened leagues, often in the country where big boys pour milk on Mallee roots for breakfast. “They had played against men. They knew how to cop a whack,” Brown says. “You get a bloke who’s physically stronger and quicker … and his mates become the people at the club.” He could be talking about Pickett.
I chat about this with Pickett’s manager, Anthony Van Der Wielen, inside the boardroom at Richmond’s Punt Road Oval, one day before the grand final. Van Der Wielen is a director at South Fremantle but has been helping promote Noongar players like Pickett for 15 years. He also represents star midfielder Tim Kelly, who was a Noongar teammate of Pickett at South Fremantle, until he was taken by Geelong in the 2017 draft. He remembers when Pickett walked into South Fremantle.
Marlion Pickett aged six playing for the under-9s in Balga. Credit: Anthony Van Der Wielen“Marlion never shies away from what he did,” he says, watching the Tigers train. “It was a string of things – not a one-off mistake – so it was probably a matter of time before he went away. But it might have been a blessing. He needed something to slap him into line and give him that wake-up call. Then he rehabilitated himself.”
Once Pickett did that, his seven WAFL seasons yielded 98 senior games and two best and fairest awards. He became a gliding, leaping mix of outer grace and inner brutality. “Everyone was poo-scared of Marlion Pickett when he played WAFL, mate,” says Van Der Wielen, laughing. “No one wanted to go near him. Physically he would dominate you, and then he’d rip you apart with skill, too.”
Matt Clarke, Richmond’s national recruiting manager, was paying attention, but WAFL games can be an unreliable gauge of ability, in part because they play on such wide grounds, without the same congestion or contact as in the AFL. Pickett was also positioned across half-back and on the wing, until Tim Kelly left for Geelong. Pickett took his spot in the middle, and went from gazelle to bull. “You could see the AFL traits,” says Clarke. “He’d hit bodies. He’s actually a natural collision player.”
The Tigers also liked that he had shown loyalty to South Fremantle – and faith in himself – by staying and playing WAFL footy, within view of AFL scouts, instead of joining a cashed-up country footy club. “He could have earned much more money playing in the bush,” says Will Thursfield, a former tall defender at Richmond who is now a recruiting officer for the club. “But year after year Marlion kept fronting up for the Bulldogs, which is a big tick for his character.”
Overlooked in five successive AFL drafts, his resolve was tested. Pickett says it only made him “hungrier” for his chance. “I know clubs doubted me,” he says, pausing, “because of my past,” pausing again, “and my criminal record,” he says, stopping a moment. “I just wished they would judge me on my footy.” But AFL clubs are notoriously risk-averse, and seemingly none wanted to gamble on his talent. Tim Kelly had been a revelation when selected as a 23-year-old, but Pickett would turn 27 coming into 2019. Being drafted so old is incredibly rare. “Tim got in much younger,” Van Der Wielen says, “and I think Marlion saw that and probably thought his dream had gone.”
