Taming a Tiger on the drink SAMANTHA LANE
July 18, 2010 DANIEL Connors had got drunk again. Drunk and aggressive again.
But unlike the other times - there had been several over the years though they were largely unknown beyond Punt Road - a messy early-morning episode that started in the foyer of a Sydney hotel and wound up with a thud in a bathroom was going to create more than a bad headache. Not least because the events that took place after Richmond's third successive loss involved Ben Cousins, who felt the only way to control a younger teammate that he was fond of was to punch him.
The lamentable circumstances led Tigers captain Chris Newman and his leadership group to issue Connors with an eight-match suspension and six-week ban from the club that startled new chief executive Brendon Gale at first but has proved sobering in all kinds of ways since.
This much was clear to all who attended Newman's recent birthday celebrations - dinner and drinks with 20-odd friends and teammates at Southbank Japanese eatery, Koko.
Connors was among the gathering that night, cracking jokes and being his typically infectious self. Significantly, he was sober. And this is the way he has vowed to stay for at least the rest of his fourth football season - one in which he momentarily feared he might be fired before a stunning rebound that saw him judged best afield in Richmond's best win of the season last Saturday night.
Connors' 35-possession, one-goal game against the Dockers surpassed his outstanding effort six days earlier against Sydney. That afternoon, as he cooled down in the change rooms and spoke to The Sunday Age, the irony wasn't lost on Connors that two outings against the same opponent that occurred 12 weeks apart had marked the low and high points of his young career. The 21-year-old chuckled as he relayed how several Swans had taken the opportunity to remind him about what transpired at Sydney's Intercontinental Hotel after the teams last met.
''A few of the Sydney boys let me know about it,'' Connors said. ''They wanted to know if I wanted a drink after the game. I said 'no thanks'.''
Connors' reputation preceded him at Tigerland.
''I heard that he was a super talent but that he was loose,'' fellow Bendigo boy and ex-teammate Nathan Brown said this week.
The pair are still in regular contact and Brown admits to having a brotherly kind of love for ''DC''. He wonders now whether that might have affected how hard he could be on him when he was a senior player and member of the club's leadership group and Connors was getting up to the kind of shenanigans he used to.
''He had all the talent in the world, he was very likeable and he was a good bloke. But he also liked a good time and could find himself in trouble more often than not,'' Brown said.
In his first three years on the Tigers' list, Connors, the 58th pick of the 2006 draft, did that on numerous occasions. The pattern was that when he drank too much he had a propensity to get physical. In short, he was a bad drunk.
Before his recent suspension, which ended with him being punched by Cousins who later said he had acted in desperation as a means of pacifying Connors, Richmond had already tried drastic measures to give him a wake-up call.
Under Kane Johnson, Newman's predecessor, the leadership group instructed Connors to complete two weeks of hard labour for another off-field slip-up. Connors was ordered to get up at 6am to work on a building site and was then returning to the club after the players had gone to work with the Tigers' boxing coach, John Vickery.
''You'd need a few sets of hands to count how many times he got in trouble,'' Brown said. ''He probably shouldn't drink past a point. But everybody in the world shouldn't drink past a point. Everyone's got their breaking point, or their moment of silliness. His just comes a bit quicker.''
It has taken severe punishment - as well as being ordered to train and play with VFL club Coburg for six weeks earlier this year, Connors was directed to alcohol counselling and to volunteer at Fitzroy outreach centre St Mary's House of Welcome - but in banning himself from booze for the season he would appear to have finally addressed a recurring problem.
''I actually didn't know what was going to happen at first. I thought I might have got the sack. It was a massive eye-opener,'' Connors said of the uncertain time. ''To give me this extra chance, there was no way I wasn't going to come back and play good footy for the club. I owe the club and I just want to slowly try to pay it back.''
Richmond has not won five of its past six matches because of Connors, though his return to the seniors, in round 12, has coincided with the bold three-week streak the team is on. But just as Geelong now regards its indefinite suspension of Steve Johnson in 2007 as a watershed moment (it was eventually a five-match ban before he became that year's Norm Smith medallist), the Tigers of 2010 might one day hark back to the call it made on Connors this year. Because while the 17-gamer remains something of a no-name to the masses, his club has never doubted his talent, only his ability to use it.
''One of the reasons we were so disappointed in him in Sydney was that he'd actually taken lots of steps, probably over 12 months, to improve lots of parts of his lifestyle,'' Richmond's football manager Craig Cameron said yesterday. ''He'd moved in with his sister, he started studying and things were really starting to settle for him.''
The Connors-Johnson link is not only theoretical. Soon after the Tiger was punished, Joel Selwood, a former teammate of Connors' at the Bendigo Pioneers and fellow member of the 2006 TAC Cup All-Australian side, helped arrange a meeting of the pair. Connors travelled to Geelong and heard first-hand how the now highly decorated Cats' forward turned his negative into a positive. Since being welcomed back to Richmond's senior side Connors has not looked back. Now that he has seen more of him, former Tiger ruckman turned club boss Gale says he likes Connors' feel for the game and the fact he can break lines. ''He's a bloody good footballer,'' Gale said this week.
Brown, who trained and occasionally played alongside him over three years, believes Connors can be one of the best.
''He still has a long way to go but if he gets fit enough, I think he can become an elite midfielder who goes forward and kicks goals,'' he said. ''I think he can become as good as Steve Johnson.''
Jack Riewoldt seems to have sewn up the prize for greatest Richmond success story of 2010, but if things continue as they have for Connors he won't be far behind. It says much about how standards are being set and enforced under a new hierarchy at Tigerland. ''I reckon it has probably been a turning point for the club,'' Brown said.
Connors' manager, Anthony McConville, has begun negotiations with Richmond for a new deal. It's something Connors couldn't have imagined 12 weeks ago.
''Daniel's coming out the other end a better footballer and a better person because of it,'' McConville said this week. ''But it's up to Daniel. Ultimately he's the one that's going to carry out the decision.''
If words can be trusted as indicators for how profoundly the penny has dropped, Connors will do that.
''You've normally only got one shot at it,'' he said. ''I was lucky enough to get another one and I'm going to hold onto that very tightly.''
In truth, Connors has been lucky to have more than a couple of shots at it. But this time around, Richmond's hopes for him would seem well-placed.
http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/taming-a-tiger-on-the-drink-20100717-10f8w.html
