How I saved Ben Cousins - interview with Ricky Nixon
Patrick Carlyon | July 04, 2009
SECURITY guards at Etihad Stadium joke that footballer manager Ricky Nixon must never leave work, given his car always appears to be in his spot.
Nixon does go home, of course. But he likes a drink, too, as the Crown Lager and VB slabs on the Flying Start office floor suggest, along with the dozen or so bottles of red.
He volunteers he is a "binge drinker", conditioned by a football generation that drank only on big occasions - and kept drinking once they started.
Plenty of his clients have erred since he became a player manager in the 1990s. Only last year, he says, he kept at least two incidences of player misbehaviour out of the papers.
One night in March, Nixon, 46, decided to drive home late from work. He'd been hosting an on-line sports management course and says he had made himself two margaritas.
Then at 11.08pm, as he was driving his Alfa Romeo 159 down Swan St, the rear of a tram loomed ahead. Bang.
NIXON'S court case - among other things, he was charged with drink driving - has been adjourned until September. But he readily agrees to regrets.
Bruised and concussed, he was heckled by residents.
He later blew .108.
"While I wasn't happy with the publicity my car crash attracted, put it this way - when you have news crews outside your house for four days and your kids can't go to school, I suggest that that is a bit over the top," he says.
"But maybe that's where it's at these days. I had a helicopter hovering over my house. You'd reckon I'd killed a busload of nuns."
Nixon is resigned to a stretch of tram and bike rides to and from his Kew home. He was using both modes of transport, coincidentally, well before his accident. Already, fellow tram travellers joke he must be practising for the suspension ahead. He describes such moments with equal parts bristle and mirth.
His car crash means he now must endure a form of notoriety he usually shies from.
For years Nixon perched somewhere above the football limelight, where a special few can turn whispers into headlines, and where a raw kid from Wagga - once he gets a few kicks and a haircut - can be positioned as the face as Nike.
Nixon jiggles the strings of those who dance across the sporting landscape. A wink here. A growl there.
He has long figured in lists of sport's most influential people. Yet the car crash was the second time in three months that Nixon clattered on to the main stage.
At Ben Cousins' press conference to announce his signing at Richmond before Christmas, Nixon lurked off-camera.
He'd handled one or two client scandals before. Managing Wayne Carey alone introduced Nixon to the vagaries of indecent assault and sleeping with your teammate's wife.
Today, Nixon knew what he did and did not want his client to talk about. Cousins was being quizzed about underworld connections. Nixon became miffed.
Nothing new here - as Nixon himself admits, people can and do annoy him. He felt a need to protect his client from a recidivist questioner. So he interrupted the press conference to out the persistent journalist as a "knob".
He got what he wanted. There were no more underworld questions. His only regret was that he did not conjure a better putdown than "knob".
The moment encapsulates why people swear by - and swear at - Ricky Nixon. His protectiveness of clients is well known.
Ask St Kilda's Nick Riewoldt and his football manager deserves a halo.
On Wednesday, Riewoldt signed a four-year deal that will probably be his most lucrative.
"He's a very honest bloke," Riewoldt says, a description foreign to typical perceptions of sports management.
OTHERS aren't as flattering. Recently, former player Glenn Archer looked set to burst when Nixon implied that Archer's views were irrelevant.
Nixon's notoriety spreads far. At home the other week, as coach of the Kew Comets Under-13s, he was accused of paying players under the table. "Absolute crap," he says.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, he has been compared to the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for his efforts to attract Gaelic football players to AFL ranks.
"I've had a public run-in with everyone," Nixon cheerfully admits.
"I call a spade a spade. Some people don't like that."
Nixon is pleased his clients appear to have forgiven him his car crash.
It offers an insight into his industry, which he pioneered in his pursuit of marketing lurks, and his exploitation of AFL loopholes, that another agent contacted the father of one of Nixon's clients. This agent, according to Nixon, decried Nixon for boozing, and being too old. Then he offered his services.
"I'd love to ring them up and thank them because the worst thing you can do is can someone," he says. "I never can other agents. People don't want to hear it."
Yet Nixon has always offered criticism of others. He once compared his client and friend, Wayne Carey, to a used car.
One expects he encounters "knobs" every day. His willingness to tell people what he thinks helps explain his rise from average player, afflicted by injuries, to corporate whiz.
After 11 years as an injury-plagued journeyman, up sprang Nixon the manager as players were becoming professional. He pressed and buffed the sport's corporate shine. He boosted Carey's worth so high that, even today, the best players can only just match it.
His face looks as though his head has been gripped in a boxer's helmet two sizes too small. He has a Mark Latham bullishness. Like the former opposition leader, he projects a flow of big ideas heedless to notions that some may offend.
The only people he answers to are the players he manages.
Still, Nixon is generous with sharing his thoughts. And his feistiness is softened by his emotional involvement in his clients' welfare. Finding Cousins a club last year took a "massive toll". Collingwood and St Kilda both considered and rejected him.
Nixon basks in credit for persevering until Richmond bit. He was confident when St Kilda met to discuss Cousins. He had to pull over his car when he got the call saying no. He feared Cousins' career - if not more - would slide.
"I sat there for 20 minutes composing myself thinking Ben's in trouble," he says. "Thinking, 'I have to tell him. And I know what's going to happen'. The ramifications were that Ben could nosedive into oblivion."
Did he get the strategy right every time? "Definitely not. People really annoy me who say that the trouble with Cousins or Carey is that nobody said no to them," Nixon says.
"That's absolute crap. If they think I didn't take up issues with Cousins and Carey . . . I mean you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."
Nixon says he counsels clients to tell him the truth - all of it - when they go wrong off-field. Yet Nixon doesn't dwell. It's not his style.
His entrepreneurial flair, it seems, manifests in his physical restlessness. He can't watch movies or television, he says, because he can't sit still.
There's the "Irish Experiment", which he hopes will deliver 15-25 players to AFL ranks within five years. Nixon still harps on the 18th AFL team planned in Sydney. He wants to see an Irish franchise that plays out of Sydney, plays in London, and helps make other teams wealthier.
He can't "switch off": "If I have three minutes for lunch, it's three minutes too long."
That said, he would not miss Melbourne. He'd prefer to live at Pt Lonsdale, where strangers do not bail you up to talk about football.
A CHANGE of pace, however, seems unlikely to inspire a change of attitude. Nixon has settled public differences with both Carey and Gary Ablett.
But his grudge with the reporter at the Cousins press conference? "That knob, and he is a knob, he's the same bloke who door-stopped my house for four days and had the helicopter above my house, because that was his idea of getting me back," Nixon says.
"And the fact is he is a knob, and he'll always be a knob. He was going to sue me for calling him a knob. That's how big a knob he is."
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25729329-661,00.html
