The No. 1 father-son rule: Teach them well
The Age
Monday June 8, 2009
ANDREW Watts says that since his son Jack was taken at No. 1 in the 2008 AFL draft, he has noticed that people have started telling him that he, Andrew, was good at sport when he was young."It's not true," he says. He loves sport, all sport, but he wasn't what he would call good at it. He did a science degree at university and then entered business but admits he would love to have been a teacher. He arrived for our interview with seven folders with clippings on various aspects of sport. We had previously met - at the national draft in November - when he approached me to discuss something I'd written.This week, knowing there was a possibility his son would play his first AFL game for Melbourne this afternoon against Collingwood, I rang and asked if we could continue the conversation. Somewhat reluctantly, he agreed.Andrew Watts doesn't only think seriously about sport. He's a churchgoer who can talk interestingly about religion. When it comes to sport, however, he believes - to quote former Australian cricket captain Greg Chappell - that what you do in the first 100 hours of your sporting life is critical.He quotes all sorts of people in support of this belief - Lleyton Hewitt, Gary Ablett senior, Darren Jarman. When Jarman was six, his father spent hours with him and his brother making them kick a football at a pole outside their house with both feet. Andrew Watts knows only too well how skilfully Darren Jarman can kick a ball. He's a St Kilda supporter. He remembers when Jarman went forward in the last quarter of the 1997 grand final and kicked five goals "without once missing"."When Darren Jarman got the ball, he wasn't thinking, 'How am I going to kick it?' He didn't think about kicking it at all. His awareness was about where the other players were, where the goals were."When Jack was six or seven, his father would kick the ball with him in the backyard. For a study in the technique of kicking an Australian football, Watts recommends watching Jason Akermanis. I ask him what he likes about Akermanis' technique. "The way he holds the ball, the way he lines up square to the goals. He holds the ball with light hands and in line with his boot. There's no sideways movement. He drops the ball perfectly straight. The rest is 99 per cent guaranteed."Watts taught his son to kick a footy. If he wanted to kick across the ball and not through it, he'd let him do it a few times and then say, "If you're going to kick like that, I'm going inside." Jack didn't have a brother. He needed his father to play. Watts also taught his son to respect the least-talented player in the team. Without him, there is no game.Watts is different from most sporting parents in that he didn't push his son, now in Year 12 at Brighton Grammar, to pursue a particular career. "It's his life. It's up to him. If Jack had said he didn't want to play AFL, that would've been OK with me."Jack has two older sisters, Kate and Stephanie. Both were good at sport but not exceptional. Watts' approach with each of his children was to equip them with sound techniques early on. The children's mother, Janine, has also been a keen sportswoman, making state junior squads in softball and cricket.Throughout his junior development, Jack excelled at basketball as well as football. He told his father that if basketball was as big as football in this country, he might have pursued that.When his father asked why, his son said, "Because in basketball you're in charge of the outcome." That is - in football, there are more factors involved in getting a result and more of the game is beyond the individual's control.Watts also remembers his son saying to him that he liked "the strategy" of basketball. He notes that a lot of the strategy of basketball - screens, set plays, zone defences - are now part of AFL football.He also notes the number of former basketballers, such as St Kilda's Nick Dal Santo and Collingwood's Scott Pendlebury, who are now doing well in the AFL. It bolsters his belief that there is a gap in football development, roughly between the ages of 12 and 16, being filled by sports such as basketball.Our conversation starts around 8.30pm. It goes until one in the morning. He tells me, for example, about the difficulty of trying to eradicate bad habits late in your career, something he learnt about when he had his golf swing videoed and saw the fault in his action. "All those years of practice had just entrenched the fault". He was told it would take 1500 repetitions to instil " the better way".His beliefs about sport echo his social and religious beliefs. In his view, as a society, we need to acknowledge the disadvantage of being underprivileged. He sees a similar principle at work in teams and in communities. "You have a lesser skilled group and a more skilled, more privileged, group. Each is as important as the other".But sport, he says, "fascinates" him. It brings a grin to his face and lights up his eyes. He stands to physically demonstrate Akermanis' kicking style or the mechanics of a jump shot. He does a good impersonation of Kevin Sheedy seeking to persuade a kid at a training camp to use his left foot. (Putting a hand to his nose in the manner of a salute, thereby dividing his face in two, Sheedy looked to his left and said to the kid, "There's an exciting world out there".)To explain his love of sport, he quotes television personality and Geelong supporter Daryl Somers who said he could sit and watch the Cats for hours. "There are so few times in your life when something is perfect and occasionally in sport you have moments that are. It's like coming across a beautiful view or that moment in an opera when a singer hits a particular note with the right emotion in their voice".Martin Flanagan is embedded with the Demons for season '09
© 2009 The Age