By Jake Niall
Lance “Buddy” Franklin defied convention on multiple fronts. He played for longer than seemed feasible for a player of his size. He kicked goals when other players couldn’t and, in a time of naked self-promotion, he eschewed the limelight that followed him. An inverse of the moth, the flame was drawn to him.
Hawthorn knew they had a special talent shortly after they took Franklin, the product of a West Australian wheat belt town whose mother Ursula was a member of the famed Indigenous (Noongar) football family, the Kicketts.
Lance Franklin (second from right), alongside fellow draftee Jarryd Roughead and coach Alastair Clarkson in 2004.Credit: Sebastian Costanzo
“The colt-like athletic traits were there for everyone to see and were mesmerising,” said Mark Evans, the Hawks’ then football boss and now Gold Coast chief executive, recalling the supreme athleticism and self-belief of a teenage Franklin. “[He] loved the sense of occasion even as a kid.”
The Hawks were highly protective of Franklin, shielding their budding superstar from premature adulation and excess; early in his career, Hawthorn, under a controlling coach in Alastair Clarkson, mandated that Franklin had to be chaperoned by a member of the leadership group – typically either laddish John Barker or Ben Dixon – when he went out on the town.
Franklin carried an early reputation for enjoying the collateral benefits of football fame, but also for outstanding training, preparation and for owning the trait that is uniform among champions: competitive drive.
He retires as a revolutionary figure in the AFL, a footballer who changed the course of games, clubs and the code of Australian rules.
Buddy Franklin in full flightCredit: Getty Images
Buddy’s difference as a footballer lay in his unorthodox package of small-man skills in a huge physique – he could change directions abruptly, using what Dermott Brereton called his lightweight boxer’s feet to wrong-foot opponents. Not only faster, he could run – and kick – further than others of his dimensions.
More than a decade ago, when the AFL was seeking feedback from players about shortening quarters, two champions objected on the basis that they did not want to forfeit a competitive advantage in running fitness – Chris Judd and Lance Franklin.
Franklin’s unorthodox package was such that he seldom soared for high marks, despite his height, but he was so powerful in the torso that he could still double-grab the mark or take it on the chest one out. His speed was considerable, as Essendon’s hapless Cale Hooker discovered when vainly chasing Buddy on the MCG members’ wing. He managed dribble shots, baulks and snaps that shouldn’t be possible at 199 centimetres and 106 kilograms.
Franklin changed Hawthorn, then the rules – the AFL allowed him to run a “natural arc” off the line when taking a shot for goal on that powerful left boot. In time, he would transform the Sydney market, where he put bums on SCG seats and then got people up and out of those seats with his spectacular feats.
He transformed the free agency market, too, by signing a staggering nine-year deal worth $10m as a rising 27-year-old. The AFL, incensed that Buddy had not gone to their new pet, the Giants, vented their anger at the Swans, who would lose their contentious cost of living allowance (COLA) after the Franklin signing, which had been so tightly held the news did not leak until just before it happened.
The Swans believe the allowance was gone before the Buddy deal, that it was only a nail in COLA’s coffin.
Franklin leaps over his opponent.Credit: Getty Images
Franklin wanted to be in Sydney and the man who signed him, Andrew Ireland, felt that his wife Jesinta, a businesswoman and model who negotiated Lance’s last contract, had been crucial. “If Jesinta had not been part of the decision, really I’m not sure it would have been as clear-cut.”
The AFL forced the Sydney board of directors to sign an undertaking that the massive contract would be honoured and the league subsequently subjected the Swans to a de facto trading ban in 2014-15. But Ireland felt that if anyone could fulfil the lengthy deal, it was Buddy. “In my mind, he could play the nine years,” Ireland recalled, who in courting the champion was struck by “his absolute love of the game” that would not dim.
Even more staggering than the nine-year deal was the fact that Franklin played beyond the contract, into a 10th year. All told, he spent a decade in red and white and nine years in brown and gold, managing slightly more games and more goals for his first AFL club.
Goals were drying up during Franklin’s era, yet he booted 100 goals in a home and away season in Hawthorn’s premiership year of 2008 (no forward has approached 100 since) and to snag 13 in a game in Launceston in 2012. His 1066 goals places him behind only three men in VFL/AFL history.
Franklin had two flags at Hawthorn, but his three grand finals for the Swans yielded none. He and the Swans were unlucky in 2016, when he rolled an ankle early in the grand final and the footy gods winked at Luke Beveridge’s Bulldogs, but the Swans were smoked by his old team in 2014 and by the Cats last year.
If it was felt that the Swans needed a flag to fully frank Franklin’s recruitment, it is also plain that he kept the Swans up in contention and, no less important, that they retained greater relevance in a non-footy market. Ireland said Gillon McLachlan reckoned the Buddy deal was “fantastic” for club and code.
Franklin will be an official legend of the Hall of Fame one day. “I think he’ll be straight in,” said Ireland, who differentiated between the expressive and cocky on-field persona of “Buddy” and the shy and private man known as Lance, who, fittingly, did not front at his retirement media conference.
Whether Buddy or Lance, Franklin was a unique figure in the football firmament. The only revealing interview of Franklin I’ve seen was from the draft camp of 2004, when the interviewer repeatedly tried this question on a 17-year-old Buddy: “If you could change anything about yourself, what would you change?”
“Nothing,” said Franklin.
And nor would we.