“I never wear shirts and shoes,” says the 27-year-old, grinning as he treads carefully to avoid pebbles and bindies lurking in the baked brown grass. “Even around the club I cop some slack because I’m always shirtless.” Indeed, the small forward didn’t really hesitate when asked to lose his shirt during his Men’s Health photo shoot earlier in the afternoon, but when you’re built like a glossy golden racehorse, you probably don’t have too many hang-ups about getting your rig out.

Heeney looks like an archetype from a bygone era; the bronzed Aussie, hair the colour of wheat, cheeky of smile, twinkling of eye, laconic of air. It’s all there, save for the white strip of zinc across his nose.

Fitting then, that the Swans veteran has evolved from his farm-boy roots to become a fully fledged beach bum. Loves his fishing; he shows the crew the groove in his front teeth from years spent biting down on lines. He caught a Marlin that might have weighed 70kg in January on his uncle’s boat up in Port Stephens. And he loves his surfing. Heeney’s insta is a barrage of big fish and barrels. If you didn’t know better you might look at this bare-chested bloke ambling across the scrubby parkland on a late summer afternoon and conclude that he might not belong on the lusher, greener grass of the SCG, just down the road, playing Aussie Rules.

Of course, if you do know anything about Heeney, you know better. You know that he’s one of the most dynamic small forwards in the game, a livewire with silky skills, who can also play on the ball or as a loose man in defence. Wherever he is, the ball seems to find him. Doesn’t mind the dirty work, either, but at the same time, can lose a defender and snap from 40 out on a tight angle to give his team a lift. He’s got ‘it’ in other words.

But if he doesn’t immediately strike you as an Aussie Rules player, there’s perhaps a reason for that. A rare homegrown NSW product, Heeney is, despite the inroads the AFL has made north of the border in the past 20 years, still something of an outlier. He could easily have been lost to rugby league. Heck, if he’d got into surfing a little earlier on, it might have been the salt water that claimed him.

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As it was, the AFL managed to snare him and fittingly, it was the Swans who have enjoyed his unique gifts. Spending an afternoon with Heeney, you can’t help feeling that he should be a bigger deal in this town—one passer-by yells out “Go Swannies” as Heeney knocks out some dips on outdoor gym equipment—but it’s highly possible many people who see him in the park today assume he’s just an unusually ripped surfie type who’s about to jump in his car and head back east, maybe squeeze in a few waves before dinner.

There is, of course, one thing that could change that and make Heeney an instantly recognisable household name in his hometown. If the local boy could lead the Swans to a premiership, the fickle Harbour City would surely embrace him. Heeney’s been to the big dance twice already, in 2016 and in 2022. And after his best preseason in a decade, he’s adamant something special is brewing at Moore Park this year.

“I’m super excited,” says Heeney of his anticipation of opening night and the Swans’ prospects this year. “I think Horse [coach John Longmire] has done an amazing job with how this preseason has gone. Obviously, the boys are fit, which makes a massive difference with training. I’m extremely excited to see what we can do and all the boys are pumped. There’s plenty of energy around the club and there’s a great vibe there. It looks promising.”

It’s classic late-summer talk, of course. Every player, every club does it. Heeney admits as much but insists this year is different. “You feel like every year you’re building, building, building,” he says. “But I’ve got plenty of excitement for this year.”

Time will tell, but if Heeney and the Swans are able to prevail on the last Saturday in September, he might find it a little more difficult to take an anonymous, shirtless stroll through his city’s most popular park.

Clothes and shoes by Nike; watch by Hublot, available at Kennedy Watches & Jewellery.

HEENEY GREW UP on a farm halfway between Maitland and Newcastle, deep in rugby league heartland. As a kid he and his brother, Beau, played soccer, league and cricket, the young Heeney proving himself something of a prodigy at everything he turned his hand to, racking up some cartoonish stats: he once kicked 68 goals in a season of soccer, including 16 in one game, and averaged 216 one season in cricket.

“That was at a young age and it was funny. I’ve caught a bit of slack for that,” he laughs, explaining that the numbers were just a product of his love of sport. “Sport was everything to myself and my brother,” he says. “Every day we were doing something, whether it was, soccer, cricket, AFL, rugby league, Oztag. And then we’d go to the beach every Friday afternoon, have dinner and go for a swim.” Simple times, but when you’re as gifted as Heeney was, things usually don’t stay simple for long.

Like most of his mates, Heeney was obsessed with League. He idolised Roosters’ fullback Anthony Minichiello and dreamed of playing the same position himself. His dad had played both League and Union. All signs were that Heeney would follow in his footsteps. And perhaps he would have had his old man not developed some reservations about the relentless head knocks he saw in League.

Heeney would be introduced to Aussie Rules through some family friends. As a six-year-old kid, who played in the under 10s, he didn’t know much about the game from down south other than you scored goals, you handpassed, you tackled, you competed. That was enough for Heeney, who began playing for a team called Walls End, before joining the Cardiff Hawks in the Black Diamond League, a club that would become his second family.

If it sounds straight forward, consider that Heeney was the only kid in his school who played the game. “In Sydney schools now, it’s obviously growing and they’ve got the AFL ball in their hands at lunchtime kicking it around and that was just never a thing growing up,” he says. “It was always NRL or soccer.” Naturally, Heeney’s interest in this peculiar game saw him cop it.

“Aerial ping-pong is what they called it,” he laughs. “And you did cop it, but it never bothered me.” Why not? “I enjoyed playing it and had fun and had some decent success doing it. So, I was just never phased by it.” As it’s beginning to become clear, not a lot a bothers Heeney.

He would be spotted by a Swans junior scout and join the team’s Academy at 12. It was a commitment that roped in his whole family. “Once or twice a week we’d have to drive down to Sydney, so two-and a-half hours each way just to train and be there in the Academy,” he says.

In his final year of high school he transferred to Waverly College in Sydney’s east, but even there he was still one of the few kids practising handballs rather hit-ups. Without the Academy, Heeney reckons, he likely would have given up on the sport and focused on League. Indeed, while he was showing immense promise in the game, he could barely name half the teams in the AFL.

“Even now, my history of the game is horrific and I cop a lot of slack from the boys because I don’t know my history too well,” he says. “I didn’t grow up with it as much as I did NRL, but I’m learning.”

In time, he would learn about Barassi, Jesaulenko, Skilton, Matthews, Ablett and all the greats who came before him. And like every young player who enters the AFL with wide-eyed dreams, he would strive to leave his own mark, too.

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HEENEY’S DEBUT FOR the Swans, at 18, in round one of the 2015 season, seems like one ripped from the pages of a teenage boy’s exercise book, where idle doodles fill the margins in maths class as the teacher drones on about Pi or Pythagorean theorem. Heeney kicked the goal that sealed a historic Swans victory, the team storming back from 41 points down in the third quarter. His teammates would descend upon him en masse, geeing up the youngster as they ruffled his mop of blonde hair.

In one of those delightful glitches in the matrix that sometimes occur, the photographer on today’s shoot swears he was in the crowd that day and caught Heeney’s left-foot on-the-run snap after it sailed through the sticks. He tells Heeney he’ll be at the SCG on Thursday for the Swans’ seasoner opener—the AFL’s first ever Opening Round in Sydney—against Melbourne. “I’ll kick it to you again,” Heeney jokes, as we make our way through one of the park’s bushier trails. “Try and roost it from the goal square.”

Heeney would hit the ground running at senior level, notching 17 touches in each of his first two games, before garnering an AFL Rising Star nomination after kicking four goals in a win over GWS. His teammates quickly dubbed him ‘Golden child’ and ‘Halo’.

That first year, the rookie would play alongside two greats of the game, Adam Goodes and Lance Franklin, both of the Swans’ legends imparting lessons the young Heeney would do his best to absorb. Hard work beats talent, train as you play. Lessons he still draws on today. “Both of them had talent and hard work,” he points out. “Everything they did was at 100 per cent intensity. But then at the same time they had a good balance of what footy was. When you’re at footy you give it everything. When you’re outside of footy you kind of get away and escape and that’s where you relax and recuperate to then give it 100 per cent again.”

That distance from the game can be helpful, he says, not only in maintaining perspective, but also in offering some respite from the ever-present fear that haunts many professional athletes, especially those in sports that involve collisions: you never know when it could all come to an end. Earlier in the shoot, as Heeney had professed how good his body was feeling, he was quick to look for some wood to touch.

“You just never know,” he says. “You never know how long you’ve got left. Anything can happen at any time. So you’re kind of always on edge, in a good way. You hope it’s not taken out of your control. You hope you can get to the end and retire on a positive note.”

It’s perhaps due to a couple of major injuries and a host of minor niggles—Heeney’s only ever been able to complete two full preseasons and lost most of his 2020 season due to an ankle injury—that while he would quickly become one of the Swans’ most consistent and reliable players, it wasn’t until 2022 that he felt he put it all together to reach the league’s upper echelon. That year he kicked a career-best 49 goals and made the All-Australian team. “That’s when I was like, Oh, it’s nice to see a bit of recognition for some of the work I’ve put in.”

Heeney was one of the key cogs in the Swans’ drive to the grand final that year, where the team suffered a humiliating 81-point loss to Geelong. It still stings, he admits, as we sit down on wooden parking rail next to his car. “After the game it was like, What just happened? We’ve had such a great year as a team and we come out here on the biggest day of the year and not show up. How did it go so wrong?”

But he insists the team doesn’t bear permanent scars from the loss and agrees that sometimes you need to take your lumps and experience the depths of disappointment before you can claim the ultimate prize. “It’s an experience that you’re grateful you had, but also wish it never happened,” he says of the conflicting feelings that come with defeat on the biggest stage. “And you do everything in your power to make sure that it never happens again.”

That, of course, doesn’t mean it won’t. Indeed, for Heeney and the Swans, 2022 marked only six years from their last grand final loss. “We lost against the Dogs and we were big favourites going into that,” he says. “Where I probably believe we had the better side. It shows you how hard it is to win a premiership. You have such a great year and then it can come down to three hours on one day.”

The pain of grand final defeats doesn’t really go away but Heeney knows that rather than let it roil, you’re best to use it. “It’s never nice, but it does help and it gives you a perspective that it’s bloody tough and it’s the ultimate,” he says. “So I’ve got plenty in my gut burning to achieve that ultimate success. And I think we’ve got a team we can do it with.”

Jacket, TWO.ONE, by Farage; shorts by Nike.

THIS SEASON WILL be the first full one in what you could call the Swans’ ‘post-Buddy era’. You only had to see the way fans stormed the field after Franklin kicked his 1000th goal last year to see how large the iconic forward’s shadow loomed over the Swans in his decade-plus in the Harbour City. Does Franklin’s retirement leave a void, not just among the Swans’ leadership group, which Heeney was a part of last year, but in the team’s ability to capture the public imagination here in Sydney? Heeney does his best to pay tribute to his teammate’s legacy while looking forward.

“He had such an incredible presence,” he says. “And from my opinion, he’s the greatest player that ever played the game. But it is what it is. It sucks to see him go but we’ve got plenty of young players that can stand up and hopefully, and I know for a fact, will continue the Swans’ legacy and build our own legacy.”

At 27, the golden child has grown up. When he looks around the dressing room these days he sees a lot of young faces, looking up to him as he once did to Buddy and Goodes. It’s his turn to set the standard. “It’s nice when you see the young fellows look up to you,” he says. “It’s a matter of bringing them along, driving them as much as possible because the more we bring them along, the better the team will be and the more success we’ll have.”

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Things didn’t go the Swans’ way at the beginning of last season. Perhaps the hangover from the grand final loss was lingering. Heeney believes the poor start was due to the team’s injury-plagued preseason. But the Swans did manage to turn things around, rallying to make the eight before suffering a narrow 6-point loss to Carlton in the elimination final.

Heeney, too, was hampered by injuries in the first half of 2023. “It was one of those ones where once again, my body didn’t have much of a preseason. But I’m not one to do excuses. I didn’t perform as well as I would’ve liked.”

It didn’t help things that his goal kicking was off last year—halfway through the season he was hitting just 36 per cent of his shots on goal, a stat that gets pundits talking. “You kick 50 to 60 per cent, you’re adding plenty more goals and you’re not having that pressure externally,” he says. “And then that pressure I put on myself as well to be an elite player. I guess my season was pretty similar to the team’s season.”

That’s probably not a coincidence. Given how well he and the team performed in 2022, it’s difficult not to conclude that Heeney is both instrumental to the team’s fortunes and an increasingly talismanic presence around the club.

This year, Heeney is buoyed by the fact that 43 of the Swans’ 45 players completed a full preseason. On top of that, a number of players are reaching the 50-70 game mark, the type of seasoning that often precedes a player’s prime, as bodies harden up and the hardnosed habits and rituals that underline consistency are honed. “The young players that have gone from say, 30 to 50 games to 50 to 70, others pushing over a hundred, that’s experience you can’t pay for,” he says.

The sun is getting low in the sky as we wrap up our chat. Before he goes, I ask Heeney about the curious tatts on his feet and ankles. “That’s a buck-toothed llama,” he says of a whimsical looking creature on his ankle. “They’re all drunken tattoos from surf trips.”

Under my gaze, he gets self-conscious for the first time today; his feet are a little gnarly, with the odd blackened toenail or two. “Yeah, not the prettiest of feet,” he grins. You get the feeling he doesn’t mind too much, though. The battered toes speak to hard work, a full preseason, miles on the track. His rig, too, is a monument to hard work and discipline. Together, they’re as much a testament to a guileless, laid back nature, as they are to something Heeney’s been trying to tell me all afternoon: he’s ready.

Get an AFL player’s body

Built like a prime thoroughbred, Heeney has the enviable problem of stacking on muscle too easily, something that can be a liability in an endurance-based game like Aussie Rules. “If I do too much I can sometimes blow out and put a bit too much weight on,” says Heeney, who tips the scales at 88 kg but has played some seasons at 91-92 kg. “Obviously it’s an aerobic game. I’ve played games at some heavy weights that I probably shouldn’t be. So I’ve dropped it back a few kilos to make sure I’m moving around really well but keeping my strength at the same time.”

Heeney likes doing basic bodyweight exercises but adding weight to increase load. Use this workout to build a body that can break tackles and blast through packs.

Watch by Hublot, available at Kennedy Watches & Jewellery; shorts by Nike.

Superset

>Push-ups – 4 x 10 with a 20kg weight plate on your back

>Chin-ups – 4 x 10 with weight (Heeney does lower reps carrying 35kg around his waist).

Core

>Leg raises x 10

>Windscreen wipers x 6 each side

>Sit-ups x 20

The 2024 AFL season kicks off tomorrow night, Thursday March 7 at 7.30 pm at the SCG, with the Swans taking on Melbourne in the first ever Opening Round held in Sydney.

Cover (left), Isaac wears: Jacket, TWO.ONE by Farage; shorts by Nike. Cover (right), hoodie and gilet by Nike.

Photography @harryhayes

Styling @grantpearce.inc

Grooming @vicanderson

Digital @michael_tartaglia

Assistant @danlinstudio

Related:

Your ultimate guide to the 2024 AFL season

The post Isaac Heeney and the pursuit of the ultimate prize appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

Rangy yet powerfully built, tattoos fight to catch the eye on Pedro’s upper body—I can make out his beer label logo, Drink West, under his left pec, while his back is dominated by images of a samurai and a demon—representing good and evil, the fighter tells me later. His left shoulder features an image of his cousin, who was killed serving in Afghanistan, while his thighs carry traditional Samoan designs. Only his calves have escaped the needle.

Between exercises Pedro checks in on a screen at the gym’s central pillar before moving on to the next exercise. He’s working in concert with an older, heavier set man with a similar array of ink. That would be John Pedro, Tyson’s father, a man whose reputation is the stuff of MMA legend.

While father and son train side by side, they barely acknowledge each other, both carrying a steely gaze as they knock out their reps. Pedro’s daughter and nephew are mucking around on some padded boxes nearby, while his wife, Rosie, looks on. “It’s the whole Brady Bunch in here today,” Pedro tells me, as we chat afterwards in the gym’s office, a towel draped over his shoulders. He’s right, there is something wholesome about the scene: a family hard at work in the gym, kids playing around them. Very Brady Bunch, very sweet. In some ways it recalls aspects of Pedro’s own childhood. In others, though, it’s markedly different.

Back then, father and son were master and apprentice and rather than side by side, tended to clash head on. “[It was] pretty normal, except we just fought a lot,” says Pedro of a childhood you could describe as both formative and complicated. “Essentially, we’ve always been fighting. I’ve only been knocked out twice, both times by my dad. Dad just thought he was raising Spartans.”

You could argue that’s exactly what John was doing. Afterall, you don’t name your son Tyson for nothing.

Cotton knit tank, POA, and cotton pants, $380, by Venroy.

UNLESS YOU’RE AN MMA lifer, the name John Pedro probably doesn’t mean a lot to you. But MMA in Australia owes a lot to John, who helped pioneer the sport over here as owner and operator of the King of the Cage promotion. A self-described ‘hood rat’, John, who is of American Samoan descent, grew up in LA with a gangland past, running with the notorious Bloods in Oceanside.

The story of how John made it out here to Australia is an interesting one: his own father’s dying wish was that his son serve as a Mormon missionary. “In America, half my family is Mormon, half the family is on the other side of the path,” says Pedro, offering a smile that’s all the more disarming for his tattooed body and cauliflower ears.

John would meet Pedro’s mum, Karran, here in Australia. The pair had three kids; Pedro has a younger brother and a sister, who’s now married to UFC heavyweight Tai Tuivasa. Fighting was in the blood, though John chafed against the media’s perception of MMA as a ‘bloodsport’. He began teaching his son Japanese Jujutsu and Kenpō Karate when he was just four years old. “We’d always be doing weapons and we started the ground game a lot earlier than a lot of other people,” says Pedro.

The young Pedro would also box, but at his mother’s urging he tried his hand at non-combat sports, including football, league, tennis, volleyball and basketball. “My mum wanted me to do everything but fighting,” says Pedro. “She absolutely hates it. Still hasn’t come to any of my fights [in MMA]. Never watched one. Hasn’t watched replays. Nothing.” She did watch him box once at a Blacktown youth club. That was enough. “I got hit, but he [the opponent] stepped on my foot at the same time and I fell down. She screamed so loud that everyone stopped, even the ref. That was it for her.”

Tank, $69, and shorts, $119, by P.E Nation.

Pedro’s parents would split when he was 12. His siblings went to live with their mum. Pedro stayed with John. That meant he kept doing martial arts. It also meant he kept fighting with his old man.

“It’s crazy, now, looking back on it,” says Pedro, shaking his head as he begins to recall a childhood marked by lessons in combat. “He wasn’t ready for kids, like a lot of adults at that age and he just had a different kind of switch. You weren’t allowed to make mistakes, whether it was martial arts or you spilled a drink or anything. He was just very hard and you never knew when that switch was going to get flipped.”

What happened if you made a mistake, I venture. It’s difficult to tell if Pedro is smiling or grimacing when he answers. “You’d get beaten. I try not to get him in trouble, make him look bad. My front teeth are fake. I’ve got a broken nose. I got a lot of hidings, as did a lot of Polynesian kids from that area. I think it was just passed down. They didn’t know any different.”

That shot to the mouth came when Pedro was 16 and told his dad he wanted to fight in the UFC. John told him to put on some gloves and get in the cage. John said he wouldn’t hit him, then Pedro clocked his old man. The switch got flipped. Next thing Pedro knew he was on the canvas with his front teeth missing. But the fight didn’t end there. John made his son keep fighting. Afterwards, he told Pedro how proud of him he was.

There’s another incident that leaps from the pages of Pedro family lore: the stabbing.

“That was more of a game we were playing—he used to throw a knife and try and catch it—and we were just trying to get each other to flinch and it just kept escalating and he missed the catch and it went straight into my chest,” says Pedro, pointing to his sternum. “I actually got in trouble after that for playing the game. He was like, ‘You made me play this fucking game. Don’t tell your mum’.”

To Pedro, the knife wound was just another scar. He begins patting his shoulders, chest, the top of his head. “Man, there were always scars on my head, my body. I didn’t know any different. I just thought that was how you grew up.”

How did he feel about all the hits he was taking, all the fists he was eating, back then? “Man, to be honest, I think I was just trying to maybe people please, because I was always trying to get his love, always trying to just show him that, I’m the son you wanted. He could almost do no wrong in a sense.”

What about now? Do those scars linger? Have he and his old man talked about the way things were back then? “We are starting to talk a lot more,” says Pedro. “He came from an era where you don’t talk about your problems. And it’s cool now that I’ve been training with dad so much. I drive him around and we get a lot of time to talk. He sends me messages just apologising or saying, ‘You’re my eldest son. I wasn’t ready’. And I’m like, Man, dad would never have said this in a million years. How he talks about me now almost brings a tear to my eye. It’s just cool to see him grow as a man. I think becoming a granddad, that changed him.”

Pedro feels that to this day no one has hit him as hard as his dad did. “Maybe that’s a psychological thing because I know some of these guys are definitely hitting harder,” he says. “Maybe they’re not hitting me emotionally as hard.”

And here’s the kicker: “I wouldn’t change anything because it made me who I am.”

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PEDRO IS UNLEASHING a kick towards the heavens, the tranquil waters of picturesque Little Bay, where I catch up with him a few days later for the MH shoot, offering an exquisite frame for an image that underscores both the sublime beauty and ferocious intent possible in martial arts.

There was never any question that Pedro would end up fighting as a career. It was just a matter of which style. It would turn out to be all of them. He would win the NSW state titles in boxing and train for the Olympics, but despite his success, he grew weary of the sweet science. He liked the complexity and range of the grappling styles, the chance to use all his limbs, unleash all his weapons. And he liked that in martial arts, you never stop learning. “Japanese jujutsu has a lot of grappling, but also has the striking,” he says. “And then I went back to Brazilian jiu-jitsu for a little bit and it’s just evolving so fast and I liked that idea of it changing so much. I still love boxing, but when you think about it, the biggest change has been from that to that in the past 100 years,” he says, inverting his fists from palms out to palms in. “So I think it’s just the evolution of MMA that I love. And you never feel like you’ve learnt it all.”

John’s legacy isn’t just a son who’s as hard as a proverbial coffin nail. It’s also one who’s a keen, and shrewd, student of combat sports. “I’ve trained at different gyms around the world and I’ll go, Oh, that works for me or that works for me. I can take a little bit of everything because I’ve never been to one gym, except City Kickboxing [Israel Adesanya’s gym], where I go, Oh yeah, that’s my whole system in one thing.” It’s the same with mentors, he says. “I’ve never seen one person where I go, I only look up to that person. I’m like, Oh, I can take a little bit from you, a little bit from you and try and make it into my own thing.”

Pedro’s entry into the UFC was perhaps ahead of schedule and came about thanks to a combination of chutzpah—after winning the Australian Fighting Championship 17 in October 2016, Pedro called out UFC president Dana White saying, “UFC I’m ready”—and good fortune. “I was literally the only fighter who was available and I’d only had four fights, so probably shouldn’t have got a call up yet,” he says. “But all the stars aligned and they’re like, ‘Do you want to fight in four weeks?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah’. They’re like, ‘Do you want to know who, where?’ I said, ‘No, if it’s the UFC, I’m in’.” It ended up being Khalil Rountree, now ranked number eight in the light heavyweight division, at UFC Fight Night: Whittaker vs. Brunson, in Melbourne.

Pedro would beat Rountree, before going 3-3 in his first six fights in the UFC. In the last of these bouts, against Maurício Rua in 2018, he would injure his knee. He didn’t know it at the time but he wouldn’t fight again for four years. For a man who’d grown up fighting, it would be too long.

Swim shorts, POA, by Tommy Hilfiger.

AS PEDRO PERFORMS a head turning, head flip on the sand at Little Bay, his lithe, supple limbs betray no evidence of the crippling knee injuries that very nearly ended his career.

The first knee reconstruction went well, he says. He worked out at Ethos every day with trainer, Meer Awny. “I was like, Let’s go. I got this. Then the second one I was like, Oh man, this is getting pretty tough. I think we were about two years in at that stage. The third knee injury was the killer. I was like, Fuck this.”

With hope of a return to the Octagon disappearing, Pedro would blow out to 110 kg from his fighting weight of 93 kg. With no fights on the horizon, money started to become an issue. People around him told him to retire. “It was getting to the stage where they’re like, ‘Man, you’ve got to give up your dream’.”

Without a fight to prepare for, life can get complicated for Pedro, whose motto is ‘peace through violence’. “When I’m in the Octagon I just get this tunnel vision and it’s serenity in there,” he says. “You’re not thinking about anything else. No problems, no dramas. It’s very easy. As soon as you come out, there’s always problems.”

Ironically perhaps, the nadir would come when the finish line was in sight. Pedro began drinking just before he was due to go into camp for his return fight. “I was watching Tai’s fight,” he recalls. “That’s where it started. I just started on the beers and just kept drinking.” It would turn into a multi-day bender in which he went missing from his family. The 32-year-old refers to it now as a nervous breakdown. “I signed the contract and I just felt overwhelmed with the idea of coming back for the fight, the reliance on money for the family. Everything had to succeed now because I’d got everyone to believe in me for four years. So, I almost felt like I was just running away from the bigger effort.”

It was John who pulled him out of it. He’d been in New Zealand but flew straight home when Rosie called him. “He picked me up and just said, ‘Let’s go. Let’s get to work’. And I was like, ‘Alright, sweet, let’s go’.”

Pedro’s return to the Octagon at UFC 278 against Harry Hunsucker in August 2022 was as euphoric as it was emphatic. He stopped Hunsucker with a front kick to the body and ground and pound. “That was, again, overwhelming,” he says. “I remember after I won that fight, I was still on and still wanting to fight the ref, fight everyone because there was just so much adrenaline going through me. I remember walking out the back and we sat down for a second and then it just flooded me and I started bawling my eyes out. It was too much for one moment.”

Anorak, $249, by Calvin Klein.

WHILE FIGHTING MIGHT be his life, Pedro knows he can’t do it forever. During his four years out he started a number of side gigs, including Drink West, his beer label with Tuivasa and Penrith Panthers’ skipper Nathan Cleary. He’s been a sought after collaborator for major fashion labels and recently landed a role in a feature film set in the MMA world that’s due to shoot this year. He also hosts The Halfcast Podcast with Tuivasa, will star in Channel 10’s reboot of Gladiators, launching this month and after our chat he has a meeting about setting up a children’s foundation.

If that weren’t enough, there have been offers in the past to turn his and John’s lives into a movie. Pedro also wants to write a book, but at the same time, is conscious of not getting distracted from fighting. Besides, he says, his story isn’t finished, a reason he gives for not yet having gone on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “There are a couple of things I want to tick off the list before I go on there.”

Like what? He smiles. “I’d rather just show everyone.”

The ‘show’ will begin with his next fight. Pedro is currently in the process of adding weight ahead of fight camp. He’s at 104 kg, aiming to get to 106 kg, before cutting to 93 kg for a fight, likely to be in the first quarter of this year. Getting to that weight involves a lot of pies and pizzas.

“It’s pretty shitty,” says Pedro. “Last camp my nutritionist was making me eat pizzas and burgers in between my meals because I was just cutting weight too fast. I was dropping three kilos a session and having to eat just to get it back on.” Of course, the boom-bust extremes of preparing for a bout mean that once you do begin your cut, those same pizzas you were almost gagging on a week ago, suddenly loom large in your mind’s eye. “I follow a lot of food pages,” says Pedro, with a chuckle. “When I’m cutting weight, I’m like, I’ll have that one and that one and that one.”

Adesanya’s camp at City Kickboxing in New Zealand is brutal, he says. “Most gyms are like two [workouts] a day max, but they’re doing four or five sessions a day sometimes.” Outside of camp, Pedro does strength and conditioning at Ethos in the mornings and either jujutsu or boxing in the evenings. “That’s my staple. Going back into camp, that’s all I do. It’s not too hard on the body. I try not to do too much wrestling or too much kickboxing.”

Camp is a physical and mental crucible designed to break a fighter down and build him back up again, to push the mind and body to breaking point, to sharpen instincts like a blade on stone and, ultimately, fortify the spirit for battle. By the end Pedro will be ready.

“I feel like I unlocked a new mentality in the last fight [against Anton Turkalj at UFC 293 in Sydney] where I went full monk,” he says of his fight prep. “Normally I take my computer and do a lot of other things while I’m in fight camp. That last one I did nothing. I just sat in my room journalling, meditating. I did everything perfect and it was weird but I got to the last page of my journal and where normally I can see all my goals, I couldn’t see anything past it [the fight] and I felt like I was ready to die in that fight. It gave me this sense of freedom. I was able to just flow. It was the freest I’ve ever felt in there.”

Finding freedom in the cage is the result, he says, of unlocking your alter ego, something Pedro’s been working on with Adesanya’s mental performance coach, David Niethe. “Tyson Pedro has a lot of flaws, a lot of weaknesses,” Pedro says. “Through camp we undergo this transformation so that by the time you enter the cage you’re ready to unleash your alter ego.” An idealised, optimised expression of who you are: your best self.

Who or what is Pedro’s alter ego? A rōnin, he says. I nod. A martial inspiration makes sense for a fighter, though perhaps this one is open to some narrative interpretation. In feudal Japan, a samurai becomes a rōnin after the death of his master, or after the loss of his master’s favour. Pedro, you could argue, did the opposite. He earned his master’s favour. His respect, love and approval, too. Yes, he had to fight tooth (literally) and nail, for them. But he’s his own man and master now.

Tyson Pedro’s MMA gym workout

Pedro uses this workout to build the total-body strength and stamina required to go five rounds in the Octagon. Use it to fortify your physique.

>Hang clean shrug – 4 x 4

>Single-leg dumbbell depth landing – 3×5

>Barbell hip thrust off box – 4 x 8, 8, 6, 6

>KB swing – 3 x 8

>DB wrist extension – 3 x 12-15

>DB Seal Row – 4 x 8

>Cable side bend – 3 x 12

>Half-kneeling cable serratus punch – 3 x 8

Above: Swim shorts, $109, by Calvin Klein. Opening image: Tank, $69, and shorts, $119, by P.E Nation.

Photography: @stevenchee

Styling:@grantpearce.inc

Skin:@moniquejonesmakeup

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Uli Latukefu keeps on fighting

Dwayne The Rock Johnson on getting into the best shape of his life at 50

The post Tyson Pedro and the search for your best self appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

Each time Foreman sinks one of his meaty fists into the bag, there’s a dull thud as the padded cylinder swings back and the viewer is left to imagine such ferocious force radiating on human flesh.

Writer Norman Mailer, who covered the fight, tells the interviewer: “Foreman hitting the heavy bag is one of the more prodigious sights I’ve seen in my life. Of all the people I’ve seen hitting the heavy bag, including Sonny Liston, no one ever hit it the way Foreman did.”

I’m reminded of the scene as Uli Latukefu, a man of similar build and power to the young Foreman, metes out punishment to a bag at Woolloomooloo PCYC in Sydney’s inner east. Each of Latukefu’s thunderous blows echoes around the gritty old school gym, as the bag swings as if on a pendulum. Cast amid ancient fight posters that are peeling off the walls, it’s if the greats of the sweet science—Tyson, Roy Jones Jnr., Lennox Lewis and Ali himself—are looking on.

When the photographer stops shooting, the 39-year-old father of two breaks to wipe sweat from his brow, his intensity broken by a blinding smile. “When I smile people think, He’s so big but so friendly,” he jokes.

Boxing isn’t Latukefu’s chosen sport. Growing up, he loved rugby. This year he found jiu-jitsu, realising how much he missed “physicality” and how healthy it can be to have your arse handed to you. In 10 months or so, it’s become his obsession. “Physically I’m quite capable of doing things, but you step into an arena, not knowing anything, it’s a whole new skillset and you have to be humble or you will be humbled very quickly,” Latukefu tells me, as we chat later over a lunch of kefta rolls at a pub down the road.

The actor doesn’t mind taking some licks, he says, if it’s in service of growth. “My approach to everything is to be teachable,” he says. “Be teachable, be teachable, be teachable. I don’t care if I get tapped out 50 times. If I’m learning, I’m good because I’ll get there eventually. And having that mindset fits perfectly with jiu-jitsu because the consequences of not having that are immediate.”

It’s hard to picture a 117kg, 198cm colossus being humbled physically but Latukefu was cut down to size, so to speak, in his early days on the mat by a 16-year-old blue belt. “I mean, you go in thinking, He’s not as big as me. He’s not as physically imposing as me,” recalls Latukefu. “So, you have some level of confidence that I’ll be able to manage. And this guy just wrapped his legs around my neck and then had my arm stuck and I just went, This is it! I love this!”

It wasn’t the only time Latukefu would find himself on the receiving end this year. A move to LA would put him in a similar, if wholly metaphorical, chokehold—“It mounted me and had me in a tight, tight squeeze,” he jokes of the City of Angels. It would see him doubt himself, his instincts, why he was pursuing a dream that was hurting the people he loved. Jiu-jitsu would help him there, too, he says, showing him time and again that no matter who you are, there’s always more to learn, that you can endure more than you think you can, and that even when things aren’t going your way, you can turn the tables, flip the script. As long as you don’t tap out too soon.

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LATUKEFU DOESN’T STRIKE you as, he puts it, a “farm kid”. Yet it was to an acreage outside Queanbeyan, near Canberra, that his parents, together with four of his uncles, emigrated from Tonga in the early ’80s. “There were five of them who were the first Pacific Islanders in the area,” says Latukefu.

His dad would die from a heart attack when Latukefu was five. The extended family rallied together and Latukefu and his cousins, including hip-hop DJ Hau Latukefu of Koolism fame, became close knit. “It was awesome,” says Latukefu of his bucolic upbringing. “If you can imagine just having all this space and land to run around. A lot of my first cousins, we kind of grew up more as brothers and sisters. I remember just running wild with pears and plums and apricots. It was just a good, wholesome upbringing.”

The rural idyll, the freedom and expansiveness would imprint itself on the young boy. Perhaps it made him soft, a little naive to the ways of the world. But the world, or rather Sydney, was coming for him. Latukefu’s family moved to Croydon Park in the city’s inner west when he was 12 years old. It was a rude shock.

Latukefu found the pace of life in the big smoke too fast, the people rude. After being the only Tongan family in town back in Queanbeyan, in Croydon Park, Latukefu was now surrounded by his people. It should have been a homecoming; the problem was Latukefu couldn’t speak the mother tongue, making it tough to connect with his community. “It was really intimidating,” he says. “I didn’t really grow up with much knowledge of my Tongan heritage. The young kids here spoke Tongan. I felt really left out all of a sudden. I felt like a foreigner in my own culture.”

Latukefu would move in with his mum’s family. In time, he would pick up the language and cultural ways, “things you should and shouldn’t do”, but “it took a minute”. With 10 people living in a three-bedroom house, Latufeku, his mum and his younger brother shared a bedroom through his teens.

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Language wasn’t the only way he stood out in the Tongan community. The country boy was tall and lanky where the other Tongan kids were big and broad shouldered. But at least they had sport to bond them. Latukefu’s uncles had put him in rugby union from the age of six. He also played league, volleyball and basketball, where he had the height but not the finesse to play centre. “It was like, these guys have so much skill and I just wanted to punch somebody,” he laughs.

Instead, he set his sights on one day wearing the Wallabies’ yellow jersey. “Tonga was getting murdered on the international stage and being born and raised in Australia, I identified with John Eales as my hero in that era,” Latukefu explains of his choice of allegiance. “And ’91, we’d won the World Cup. I remember there was such a reverence around getting the yellow jersey back then. That was my dream for the longest time.”

Latukefu played No.8 in high school and just missed out on a place in the NSW Schoolboys side. After graduating, he played for West Harbour and had a decent first year. By then he’d become a gym rat and filled out. As he approached his second season he was switched on, determined to have a big year. It wasn’t to be. He dislocated his shoulder on a pre-season tour of New Zealand. He couldn’t afford surgery. And while he didn’t know it then, his competitive rugby career was over.

From there, Latukefu fell into a hole. He worked at a pub in Burwood that had topless waitresses as he began an exercise science degree. But lectures on biomechanics and lactate thresholds were wasted on a young man who preferred to use his body rather than analyse it. “I wasn’t feeling it. I felt I was drowning, to be honest. And then football wrapped up and I just had no idea.”

He describes the time as a “lost period”. He drank a lot, hung out with a rough crowd, his lack of direction descending into nihilism. “I just didn’t give a shit,” he says. “I didn’t care about anything. I was with a girl at that time and just knowing that I had no options. I didn’t know what to do.”

“It was really intimidating,” he says. “I didn’t really grow up with much knowledge of my Tongan heritage. The young kids here spoke Tongan. I felt really left out all of a sudden. I felt like a foreigner in my own culture.”

That’s how it could have gone had he not found a pair of familiar saviours. After visiting cousins in Queensland who’d become born-again Christians, Latukefu began to open himself up to spirituality, though he admits he was initially bemused by his relatives’ religious fervour. “I just remember thinking, What the hell? I mean, they used to party, drink to the early hours of the morning and then some, and they just changed,” he says. The cousins invited him along to church. He joined them—what else was he going to do? —and found something he hadn’t even known he was looking for.

“They were talking about God, obviously, but it was also about having purpose,” he says. “That you are meant for something and to be hopeful.”

Perhaps it was desperation, or just that sliver of hope his new-found faith had planted somewhere inside him, but in 2004 Latukefu decided to try out for Australian Idol. “I’d always sung at school, and I thought, Yeah, just give it a crack. Who cares?”

He would make the competition’s top 100, bowing out at 80 after forgetting his lines. Buoyed by the experience, he began to feel like music could be his thing. The musical gene ran in the family—his cousin Hau, of course, was a DJ. Another cousin was an opera singer and another, a talented guitarist and Prince fanatic. “I kind of always grew up around music and I do have a good ear,” he says. “So, I thought maybe music was going to be my career.”

It wouldn’t be, but it put him closer to the path he was seeking. When his cousins’ church put on a musical, Latukefu thought he could help out. When he got there, though, he was persuaded to audition for the lead role. “That was the beginning of falling in love with acting.”

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“YOU’RE NOT YOUR job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.”

You can picture the look on the faces of the NIDA brass as a hulking Islander kid mean-mugged his way through Tyler Durden’s famous Fight Club rant on the evils of consumerism. “Everyone in the audition was going like, What? They had [chosen] something from a play, but I really liked it. I liked what he said and so that’s what I went with.”

As he’d done with Idol, Latukefu approached the audition at Australia’s most prestigious drama school with the mindset that he had nothing to lose, which he didn’t. He was a jock-turned dropout. Who cares? he thought. “When someone first mentioned NIDA, I had no idea what it was. Other than the church musical, I had no history in acting.”

They say (they most recently and probably famously being AFC Richmond supporters in Ted Lasso) that it’s ‘hope that kills you’. It can, of course. But the other way to look at it is that you need only a little open-ended optimism to take root inside you before you can start to see a bigger world. Confidence, too, can alter your frame of reference. Latukefu had both. “I knew I had something to offer, and I knew that my heart is big and I could give this thing a good crack,” he says. “I think they [NIDA] saw that I was determined to do something.”

From the aimlessness of the previous few years, Latukefu could now see a path beginning to unfold before him. “It was probably the knowledge that this is the way I’m supposed to go and I’ll learn along the way,” he says of his willingness to walk across the hot coals of emotional vulnerability and get burnt. “I was at peace with not knowing everything, because I knew that I wanted to go that way. So failing was like, it’s all good. It’s all good. I’m not meant to know everything.” Who cares?

The question that would arise later, as his career began to find its shape, was whether he could maintain his earnestness, his hope, his boldness, as the stakes grew larger. “I think you have to stay that way,” he says. “It’s very hard. My old drama teacher used to say, ‘The more you know, the more fearful you become’. But if there’s a way to still be knowledgeable and yet playful and still enjoy stuff, I think we have to be that way. Across all aspects of life.”

Latukefu learned a lot of things at NIDA. About preparation, hitting your marks, using method to unlock emotional truths. But one thing the college preached that never sat right with him was that acting should take everything from you. “I always thought that you are made up of so many different aspects of your life and you need to bring all that into your acting as opposed to just focusing on acting,” he says.

Indeed, rather than sit around marinating in doubt after auditions, Latukefu kept himself busy in manual labour. He worked as a painter, shifted bricks and filled skips on construction sites, punched clocks in factories, even “unloaded shipping containers filled with fishmeal”. “It’s just been in my blood to be working.”

He liked inhabiting two disparate worlds. “You’re more than just an actor.” And, by the same token, he was more than just a tradie.

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Not long out of NIDA, he would land the role of Kool Kris in Chris Lilley’s sitcom Jonah from Tonga (2014), then follow up soon after with a part in the TV drama Devil’s Playground. His first big break, though, came with Marco Polo, an ambitious big budget Netflix series. “It was my first international gig, first time working overseas. It was exciting.” And it was heartening, proving to Latukefu that he that he wasn’t an imposter, he could hold his own with international stars. “It was a big eyeopener for me to see where I stood in that world. The fact they picked some dude in Sydney, who just graduated, felt like confirmation. Like small seeds of you’re on the right path, just keep going.”

“I knew I had something to offer, and I knew that my heart is big and I could give this thing a good crack,” he says. “I think they [NIDA] saw that I was determined to do something.”

Over the next few years, his career gathered momentum, with bigger parts meaning less down time on the tools, right up until 2019, when he was cast in the leading role in the Kiwi film The Legend of Baron To’a. “From that point on, I didn’t need to go back to the trades. But acting, being as hot and cold as it is, it was a real challenge for me to go, ‘Let go now, you’re okay’, and just be patient.”

Heading into 2020, he would see his patience rewarded, and tried, by two forces of nature that were about to turn Latukefu’s life upside down. One of them, COVID-19, affected everyone. The other? He goes by the name of The Rock.

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LATUKEFU HAD AUDITIONED for Young Rock, NBC’s biopic series on the life of Dwayne Johnson, in LA in early 2020. When COVID hit he flew home to hear that he’d landed the coveted role but that was as far as the good news went. There was no shoot date, no location, “nobody knew anything”. In the absence of a plan, Latukefu’s wife, an event director, went back to work, “just to put food on the table”.

Then, some good news: NBC announced they were going to proceed with the series, shooting on the Gold Coast with Johnson shooting his scenes in Atlanta. Latukefu knuckled down to focus on the challenge of playing the Johnson of the turtle-neck fanny-pack era, a lost soul grappling with broken dreams (in the NFL), ambition to burn but unsure of the path to tread. Latukefu immediately saw the parallels with his own life.

“I just wanted to tell the story of a kid who thought he was on this road, that wasn’t the road, and what do I do next?” he says, recalling his own crumpled yellow-jersey dreams. “With acting, too,” he adds. “The disappointments of either getting a role and it not working out, or not getting a role that you had this gut feeling about. And just disappointment in general, finding resilience and being hopeful that something else is going to turn up.”

You’d have to say Latukefu pulled it off. The first series was well received. Latukefu’s world expanded yet again. Season 2 would again film on the Gold Coast, before the third season moved to Atlanta, where Latukefu finally worked alongside Johnson, though they’d previously met, after two years of Zooms and phone calls, on the set of the DC Comics film Black Adam.

My old drama teacher used to say, ‘The more you know, the more fearful you become’. But if there’s a way to still be knowledgeable and yet playful and still enjoy stuff, I think we have to be that way. Across all aspects of life.”

“Oh, man, that was tough,” he says of his first meeting with arguably Hollywood’s biggest star. “That was nerve-racking as hell. The first take, his character’s dying. I kneel down beside him and I kneel on his inner thigh. I’m not supposed to break eye contact and I just feel flesh underneath my knee and I go, Fuck. That’s his thigh, underneath my knee. I’m thinking, Awesome first impression. He’s just like, ‘It’s all good. No worries’.”

What did he learn from Johnson? Humility. Professionalism. Oh, and a small thing: giving every person you meet everything you’ve got. “I’ve worked with a lot of talent before and they all kind of do the same thing where they acknowledge everybody [on set]. But with him you’ve got his attention and he’s giving you his best. And that’s how I aspire to be.”

After three seasons, NBC announced earlier this year that Young Rock would not be returning for a fourth. Latukefu took it well. “It is what it is. There’s no use holding on to it. I really believe in just being present and enjoying the moment for what it is.”

A good attitude to have, particularly when you don’t know what’s around the corner.

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LATUKEFU IS BEGINNING to get misty-eyed, his voice threatening to crack. “Sorry, it’s the lack of carbs,” he deadpans as he takes a sip of water. I’m finding it difficult to reconcile this sudden burst of sensitivity with the imposing figure who brutalised the heavy bag earlier in the day. But ask a father about his family or, more specifically, to reflect on choices he’s made that might affect them, and even the toughest men can turn into teddy bears.

What happened? Well, back in January, Latukefu decided it was time to uproot his family and move to LA, where he’d get his green card and hopefully become a working LA-based actor. He’d landed a role in a horror movie called MaXXXine, the third instalment in a star-studded franchise featuring Kevin Bacon and Helena Bonham Carter, among others. Latukefu’s instincts told him he was on the right path. The plan was panning out.

Well. ‘We plan, God laughs’ goes the Yiddish proverb, though the challenge Latukefu faced came from human hands: the recently ended actors’ strike brought Hollywood to a standstill. And it put Latukefu in a bind. He and his wife spent late nights debating whether to stay in LA, burning through cash as he waited for his green card, or return home? They decided to stay, but as weeks turned into months, Latukefu’s unease began to mount.

“It just dragged on,” he says. But while he could come home, Latukefu wanted that green card. That was the plan, after all. He was on a path, remember? “Man, I just remember watching my kids go to sleep and there was just this moment where for the first time in a long time, I felt regret about my decision. I felt like, I’ve made the biggest mistake here. I think I’ve fucked up, badly.”

It’s here that Latukefu’s emotions come to the surface. Perhaps it’s his own experience of being uprooted in childhood that underlines for him how his decisions might impact his kids. He knew the time had come to make a call. “My wife and I sat down and we’re just like, ‘No, that wasn’t the plan [coming home]. The plan is what we’re doing. Double down. This is what we’re going to do.’” They weren’t tapping out, in other words.

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Latukefu’s perseverance would be rewarded. With the help of Johnson and others who wrote letters on his behalf, he got his green card. Once he had it, he could return to Australia, where he was due to start filming The Last Anniversary, a drama series produced by Nicole Kidman’s production company, in late November, before shooting the second season of Last King of the Cross in January. And with the actors’ strike over, he can now return to the US and resume the path he was on.

But Latukefu won’t forget this past year in a hurry. For the angst it caused him. For pitting his family against his career. Once again, he can’t help invoking jiu-jitsu to describe the inner turmoil he grappled with—you can’t blame him, the sport does lend itself to allegory. “When you’re stuck in an awkward position, you can barely breathe, you’re gassed out and someone’s choking the shit out of you, how much can you withstand? How much pressure can you really hold? That’s what it felt like.”

What did he learn from Johnson? Humility. Professionalism. Oh, and a small thing: giving every person you meet everything you’ve got. “With him you’ve got his attention and he’s giving you his best. And that’s how I aspire to be.”

Latukefu speaks of his new hobby with the zeal of a convert and it’s possible that, like finding his faith long ago, he discovered the dojo when he needed it most. “For the first time I felt this release of pressure to be able to do something that I enjoyed wholeheartedly and not think about acting,” he says of signing up to classes after initially taking his daughter for self-defence lessons. “It feels like I’ve regained a part of who I am through this sport. I enjoy, I won’t say violence, but I enjoy the challenge of being in a tussle with somebody. The experience of being under pressure, victory, loss. That’s something I’d forgotten. I threw that away when I was done with rugby, but it [jiu-jitsu] brought it back to me. It brought back parts of myself that I’d shelved. And now, I’m unapologetic about it. I feel alive.”

We talk about English actor Tom Hardy who, Latufeku tells me, is a purple belt; several belts, and probably worlds, ahead of where he’s currently at as a three-stripe white belt. Latukefu was due to have his first fight, as an ultra-heavyweight, a couple of months ago, but suffered two herniated discs in his back and couldn’t walk for four days. Then a week out from another Gracie Barra competition, he partially dislocated his knee.

The injuries haven’t dimmed his passion, though. Because once again, he knows he’s found something, that he’s on the right path. That injuries are setbacks not roadblocks; God, or the universe’s way, of testing you. How much do you want this? What are you prepared to sacrifice? How much can you withstand? “I’ve made it a life goal,” says Latukefu of his plan to earn a black belt. “For me, it’s a symbol of dedication and of discipline and all those things.”

Those things . . . that can define a life.

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Latukefu’s jiu-jitsu inspired workout

Latukefu does 6-minute rounds of the following moves to reflect the length of a jiu-jitsu round.

>Spiderman push-ups x 1 min

>Sit-ups x 90 secs

>Kettlebell swings x 90 secs

>Skipping x 2 mins

Repeat for up to five rounds.

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Photography: Steven Chee

Stylist: Patrick Zaczkiewicz

Grooming: Monique Jones

Haircut: Richard Kavanagh

The post Uli Latukefu keeps on fighting appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

The Rock, or to use his given name, Dwayne Johnson, is standing in his home office, a bright, inviting space into which afternoon sunlights pours through French doors. Next to Johnson is a life-sized replica of what looks like a T-REX skull, an unapologetically masculine office paperweight, but befitting of a man who calls himself The Rock. Behind him on a shelf are bottles of his tequila, Teremana. Johnson is wearing a tight-fitting black Project Rock muscle tee, with tattoos creeping out the sleeves onto his mountainous biceps. He’s also wearing red shorts and occasionally grabs at his knee. It probably goes without saying, but he is in awesome shape.

It’s the third time I’ve interviewed Johnson, though this is the first occasion we’ve been able to see each other. I tell him it’s good to put a face to his name. He laughs obligingly. “You, too. I was always wondering what the fuck Ben looks like.” I hope he’s not disappointed.

The Rock is here to talk about his new film, Black Adam (in cinemas Oct. 20), a passion project he’s been attached to for 15 years. It’s a notable addition to Johnson’s canon for a number of reasons. Firstly, as many have posited in relation to Tom Cruise, you wonder if Johnson is too big a star for comic-book fare? Is the power of his personality and the wattage of his charisma somehow neutered in spandex? Time will tell on that one. Secondly, the film required the most likeable and arguably most popular actor of his generation to play an anti-hero. Finally, it required him to get in the best shape of his life and maintain it. Even for someone like Johnson, an all-time great gym-floor grinder, that was a challenge.

“That was our goal, for me to bring in the best physique possible,” says Johnson. “So, the challenge with that is not only do you set the bar high, which is fine… bring it on! But then you realise you have to maintain that for months. As you know, you bring in a great physique, usually for a very finite window. If you’re an Olympic athlete, if you’re a fighter cutting weight for your fight, if you’re a bodybuilder stepping on stage, it’s for a short amount of time, usually a day or two, maybe a week. I had to maintain this for months!”

Johnson gave himself an additional challenge – of course he did – forgoing the padding actors usually wear to fill out superhero costumes. He’s like Christopher Reeve in the original Superman but with, you know, Everest-sized traps bursting from his neckline.

“We could have said, ‘Fuck this, put the muscle pads in the suit. Don’t worry about it’, as they normally do,” says Johnson. “And it’s not a knock to my friends at all, but I felt like, Let’s be disruptive and let’s do it differently. Let’s take all the muscle pads out, which we did, and let’s just make this like it’s my skin. And now what happens is when you have that suit on, every detail shows. It’s as if you had your shirt off. Man, it was constant, constant work, tweaking and tweaking for months.”

Johnson prides himself on being the hardest worker in any room he’s in – if he and Cruise were ever to share the screen, celluloid might just combust. But it’s this ethic that’s kept him at the top of his game – and at the head of the Hollywood pack – for over two decades now. And, as he enters his 50s, Johnson’s not letting up. If anything, he says, this is the time when, as a man, you’ve got to double down on hard work. Between The Rock and a hard place, perhaps. That’s the uncomfortable space Johnson’s always inhabited. That’s where you have to go to get results. That’s how you become a force of nature. 

Men’s Health: Where are you? Are you at home?

Dwayne Johnson: I am. I’m in heaven known as my office.

Very good. What have you been doing today?

Just got up with the babies. Regardless of what time you go to bed, they’re up at 6am. They’re jumping on us and I went to bed probably around 1-1:30, as I normally do. So, the babies, did my thing, working here. I went to go work out, but then I realised I had some more stuff to do so I came back and got my work done. I’ll go train in about an hour-and-a-half to two hours.

 

 

 

 

 

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All right. So, let’s talk about Black Adam. This is an iconic comic book character and you’ve been attached to the project for a long time. What excited you about the role?

Delivering a character in the superhero genre that had never been seen before. No actors before me had played Black Adam, brought him to life. That was an exciting opportunity to do something that had never been done, but also, more important than that, is the opportunity to get in and disrupt the superhero genre in this way. You have a character like Black Adam, who is, depending on how you interpret his philosophies, is he a superhero, an anti-hero or just a bad dude? And so, that was exciting too. And I’ve had this project for a very long time. This is a true passion project. A lot of times that sounds cliched, but brother, in this case, it’s been almost 15 years since we first started talking about making the movie. So it’s been a passion project of mine, and also, you have an opportunity here to deliver something, I think, that’s pretty cool. A lot of people don’t know about Black Adam. If you’re not deeply invested in DC, then you’re familiar with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman, Lex Luthor, etc, now the Suicide Squad. And what I like to tell people is, pound-for-pound, Black Adam is right there with Superman in terms of his superpowers. The difference is Superman has a code of ethics that he abides by, which is why he is the greatest superhero of all time. Superman won’t kill anyone. Black Adam, on the other hand, you can’t finish your sentence if you mean harm to him or his family. You can’t complete your sentence without him ending your life.

So, an antihero then. Did you have any internal conflict about playing against your public perception or did you relish that?

Well, the world knows that I have a heart as black as my T-shirt and that I’m one cold-hearted human being. I was excited about it. The movie-going audience who watch Black Adam may not agree philosophically with his way, but ultimately, they will understand. And I love the opportunity of bringing that character to life. One of the reasons why I’ve identified so deeply with Black Adam… Yes, he lives in a grey area, but his philosophy is black and white.

If you hurt my family, the ones I love or my country or my people, you’re going to pay. And there are no questions asked and there’s no more conversation. There’s no bringing you to justice. There’s no apprehending you. You die. What was also very appealing to me, and I think will appeal to a lot of people, is you can’t put him in a box. You can’t say, “You have to be like this. You can’t do this. You have to do this. You have to do that”. I felt like I experienced that throughout my career, like when I first got to Hollywood, for example. Twenty years ago, “You can’t call yourself The Rock . . . You can’t talk about pro wrestling. You can’t be this big. You can’t work out as much. Change your diet. Lose weight. If you want to be like Will Smith, Johnny Depp, George Clooney” – who were the biggest stars when I first came in 20 years ago – “this is how you have to be”. Well, I tried that on for a few years and then finally I said, “Man, fuck this. I can’t be like that. I’m not those guys. I could never be those guys. I’ve got to be myself. I’m not in a box. Don’t tell me how to be. I’m going to be myself.” Same thing with Black Adam. So that was one of the many reasons why I connected with him.

Yes, in your early days in wrestling, you were a bad guy or a heel and then you ended up becoming the most popular guy. Is it the same kind of thing where being real is what fans respond to?

Yes. When I first got to the WWE, I was brought in as what’s called a babyface – means a good guy, wrestling terminology. And I was told at that time by Vince McMahon, “I need you to be happy and smiling and you are grateful to be here, and that’s who I want you to be when you go out there”. Now keep in mind, I had just come from the world of college football and in our football over here in the States, the University of Miami were a defining football team. We talked shit. We were disruptive. We were undefeated for 10 years at home. We were national champions and not only would we kick your ass, but we would tell you afterwards. We would enjoy that ass kicking. So we were just big shit talkers. So, I was not that way [a babyface], even though I, of course, smile and be affable, but when it’s time to do business and rock and roll, there’s no smile. That was a hard transition for me. Now, obviously, the world of wrestling is different than MMA. We know the outcome of what’s happening, 

But you’re still going to rock and roll with this guy. There’s no smile. So, I had to adjust and I started going out smiling all the time, happy to be there. Man! The fans just felt in their gut what I was living in my gut, which was, “This shit is not me, and this is not real”. So, what happened in that world of wrestling, after a couple of months, they said, “Man, I saw you play at University of Miami, man. You’re not this dude”. And they started booing the shit out of me every night in arenas. Now, is that a problem in wrestling? No. Fans boo everybody all the time. The problem was I was being pushed to be the next big star as a good guy, so I would go out and it would be like, “From Miami, Florida, Rocky Maivia”. “Boo”, and I smile. “Hey, hey, yeah, thanks”, and it got to a point where it drove the fans crazy that I wasn’t being myself. And then it was just the vitriol, man. It was like, “Go fuck yourself – fuck you”. And it killed me not to go, “Fuck me? Come over that guardrail. You step over that guardrail. You tell me how tough you are.” I couldn’t do that. So finally, they made me Intercontinental Champion. That didn’t work. I was booed out of the building. They took the belt off me. I got injured. I tore my PCL. I had to go home. It was the summer of 1997. At the time, UFC wasn’t as popular, but a group called Pride was very popular in Japan. I knew those fighters, and I was like, “Man, do I go do that? I could make more and at least I could be myself”. Then I get a call from Vince McMahon, who said, “Listen. When you come back in August… ” (this is in May)… “I want you to join a group called the Nation of Domination. It’s a heel group. Black militant group. And you’re going to be a heel”. I said to Vince McMahon, “Okay. I have one request for you”. He goes, “What is it?” I said, “When I come back, I just need two minutes on the microphone so I can tell people my why.

And I want to establish I’m in the Nation of Domination, even though I’m half Black and half Samoan, a proud man of colour. Me being in the Nation is not a white thing; it’s not a Black thing. It’s a respect thing.” So he goes, “Fine”. I went out there. I said what I said to the people: “It’s not a white thing. It’s not a Black thing. It’s in me. It’s a respect thing”. And from that moment on, I was myself. I reacted to people how I wanted to react. I became, within a month, the hottest bad guy in the company. It got to a point where I was, in a way, so bad, that fans were like, “That’s my guy. He’s real. He’s authentic. He just told me, ‘Go fuck myself’, and I love him.” That’s a long story to tell you that it’s the same thing with Black Adam: he is himself all the way.

Dwayne, let’s talk about your fitness. You were already in amazing shape. But did you have to up the ante to play a comic-book hero and fill out the Black Adam costume?

We did. My goal was to bring in the best physique of my career, and that includes my years as a football player, my years as a pro wrestler and my years as an actor. And I’ve worked with a trainer very closely now for over a decade. His name is Dave Rienzi. That was our goal. The real challenge was the diet and putting in the work and balancing the cardio, the training and then 12 hours on set. It was all very demanding. And then trying to find the right time to get your proper rest and recovery.

But the real challenge was to maintain that for months and months. You have to approach that strategy with real care and real nuance. It’s not, All right. Go after it and grit and grind it out. No. You can’t do that because your body can’t sustain it and your body will break down, whether you’re in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties or sixties. It doesn’t matter. So, we had to really approach it with a real care and a real science, and he [Dave] was there throughout the shoot and just constantly looking at my body, seeing how it’s coming along. How’s my sodium intake? How are the carbs? How’s this? How’s that? There’s just so much we had to look at.

You turned 50 earlier this year. How are you feeling about that? And has that affected your training?

Yeah, I think there are markers you have in your life. I think us, as dudes, you hit your thirties, you like to think you’ve got your shit together – you generally have no fucking clue. You’re trying to work your shit out. And you’re trying to fake it till you make it, that kind of thing. 

You hit your forties, hopefully by that time you’re starting your family, you’ve got some things, you find yourself in a groove, you’re getting settled now, it’s feeling good, feeling comfortable. You’re going through a lot in your forties too, but I wanted to make sure that by the time I hit my fifth level, I was in my rhythm and groove and also make sure that, by that time, my training was in a great place. What I mean by that is that my body was in a great place, that it wasn’t too banged up, and that I wasn’t like, “Oh man, I got to get this surgery done and that surgery”.

So really, in my thirties and early forties, when I was coming off of wrestling, I was still feeling the effects of wrestling and all my injuries there. And then I had a big injury where I tore the top of my quad off my pelvis and I tore my adductor off my pelvis in the last wrestling match I had in 2013, which then caused my abdominal wall to tear in three places. So, I had to have emergency hernia surgery in three places. And then with the tearing of the top of my quad, it never got reattached because the doctor said, “If you want to reattach, it’s going to take you a year; the way it’s torn, it will scar-tissue up and you just have to be really smart with your training”. So, that’s what I did.

By 40, I said, Okay, I’m going to spend the next decade training as smart as I possibly can train, balance out training and family and work as best I can, be an open sponge, learn every day and apply what I’ve learned, but also not worry about ego training, not worry about the weight that I’m putting on the bar, push myself, but not worry about any of that, so hopefully, by the time I hit the fifth level, my joints are feeling great, I’m still able to not only maintain, but still able to add real muscle and some really dense muscle. That’s a long answer to tell you I’m feeling pretty good. 

Make your body rock solid

To play a badass you’ve got to train like one. Here, long-time trainer Dave Renzi (above) reveals how he got Johnson in bad-guy shape… and kept him there.

“We came into this project with the goal of bringing the comic-book depiction of Black Adam to life, which meant getting DJ into the best shape of his life, elevating his physique to a whole new level and building the ultimate superhero physique. 

It was an 18-month pre-production process to achieve this. The first 12 months were focused on gradually gaining lean muscle while maintaining DJ’s body-fat percentage and the last six months we shifted emphasis to maximise the detail, shape and roundness of the muscle. Once we achieved the look, it was then a matter of maintaining that look throughout the entire five-month production, which is a massive undertaking given DJ’s gruelling filming schedule of 12-hour days and intense action sequences. This required a lot of nuance and close communication. It’s a balancing act of managing the intensity of training and diet to maintain the look, while also taking into account the physical demands of filming and acting. DJ’s performance on screen is paramount and having the energy he needs to perform is the top priority. The end result is one of DJ’s greatest performances to date.” 

The post Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson On Getting Into The Best Shape Of His Life At 50 appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

The energetic mammal isn’t the only one in high spirits today. You’d have to say, after spending the morning with a carefree and at times jocular Goodes, that right now he’s pretty happy with the way his life is going, there’s not much about it that he’d change and, as he tells me, he’s comfortable in his own skin. So yes, I may as well say it: he, too, is having a whale of a time.

Which is not something you would have said about the 42-year-old, dual Brownlow medallist seven years ago when his AFL career came to an acrimonious and, in many people’s eyes, shameful end. The treatment Goodes received in his final years from sections of opposition fans left a stain on Australia’s most popular game that’s proven difficult to remove.

For his part, Goodes in retirement has chosen to look forward rather than back and put his energy into actions rather than words. He’s launched a raft of initiatives that aim to empower his people to seize opportunities in education and employment, including the GO (Goodes O’Loughlin) Foundation with Michael O’Loughlin and the Indigenous Defence and Infrastructure Consortium (IDIC). He’s also authored a children’s book series called Welcome To Our Country, which is giving Indigenous kids, including his own children – Adelaide, 3, and Otis, 1 – a chance to see their community represented in print. And he’s become an ambassador for wellness brand Wanderlust, a company whose values of inclusiveness, equality and connection align neatly with Goodes’ own post-footy focus. 

But while he’s largely shunned the media spotlight post-football, Goodes remains a fierce advocate for his people, a position that still today in Australia requires strength and fortitude, even if it is, as Goodes sees it, largely a responsibility. “I think the strength comes from me going on a journey and learning about who I am as an Aboriginal person and understanding the history behind being an Aboriginal person in mainstream Australia,” he says. “And if I don’t have a voice as someone with the profile that I’ve had, then how is that going to make it easier for the next generation? I’m standing on the shoulders of my ancestors and the sacrifices they’ve made. So how am I making it easier for the next generation? I take that responsibility on quite honestly and proudly and I think a lot of other Indigenous role models do as well.” 

A man driven by purpose and at peace with himself. The truth is you probably need both to be an effective leader. Less obviously, perhaps, it’s difficult to truly savour life’s sweeter moments, like watching a whale frolic on a sunny day, without them either.

Earmarked for success

You might be surprised to learn that, born in Wallaroo in South Australia, Goodes as a kid dreamed not of taking speccies in front of a packed house at the MCG but rather of hitting the back of the net at Old Trafford. His best mate, a kid called David Schneider at Forbes Primary School in Adelaide, came from a family of Brits who were rabid Red Devils fans. Goodes followed suit. “I was always thinking how amazing it would be to be playing in the English Premier League one day,” Goodes says, as we chat at a picnic table overlooking Bondi’s magnificent shoreline. “I also thought about how nice it would be to travel overseas and get paid to play sport.”

A rangy, athletic kid, Goodes took quickly to most sports but what distinguished him, even at a young age, he says, was his ability to listen. “I was a bit of a sponge and I think that was a big part of why I was able to be so successful in my life,” he says. “I was always open to feedback and criticism from other people.”

He got that, he says, from his mum, a member of the Stolen Generation, and from his respect for his elders more broadly. “Not having all the knowledge and knowing that my elders had more knowledge than me meant that actually I should shut up and listen and absorb this knowledge,” he says.

Adam Goodes would move to Horsham in Western Victoria to attend high school. By now he’d switched his focus to AFL. He would play for the North Ballarat Rebels in the TAC Cup as a 16-year-old, which led to him being drafted by the Sydney Swans as the 43rd pick in the 1997 draft. 

Once he got to Moore Park, Goodes didn’t stop looking around for people to learn from, gravitating to his nephew Michael O’Loughlin and other Indigenous players on the team. “It was the first time that I’d been in an environment where I had multiple senior Indigenous men around me,” he says. “Mick, Troy Cook, Robbie AhMat. And I followed in their footsteps, the good and bad things that they did. It was a great learning curve for me.”

Adam Goodes and Michael O’Loughlin are literal blood brothers (and Bloods brothers) in what has become one of the defining friendships of Goodes’ life and, you suspect, a big reason why he’s in such a solid place these days. “There’s been a lot of ups and downs, more downs and I think that’s when you really see the strength of the friendships you have and realise how important they are.”

Indeed, where so many men lose track of mates once they enter relationships and turn their focus to their families, Goodes has worked hard to keep his ties strong. He still catches up with his old high-school mates from Horsham every year and more recently he and other Sydney-based Swans alumni have begun meeting up once a month for a beer. “That’s just filled another void,” he says. “We just book it in once a month, whoever can make it. It’s like a special men’s club. Dinner, beers. Perfect.”

On his terms

When Adam Goodes arrives at our shoot, he’s dressed in a plain white Tee, black shorts and black sneakers. The first thing you notice is his size. I’d forgotten he played some of his career in the ruck. He’s become a little more solid through the core and torso than he was during his playing days but there really is no mistaking a former athlete in the flesh. Even as the spotlight fades and they take on the familiar rhythms and tropes of civilian life, they’re always going to stand apart from the rest of us.

That distinction can mark them for trouble. What do you do when you don’t have the routine of week-day training, video sessions, the big game on Saturday? How do you stay in shape without someone giving you a program and grabbing at your skinfolds? How do you forge a purposeful life for yourself without the structure of a sporting club and the tug of ambition, particularly when, as you quickly and acutely become aware, no one is watching you anymore; nobody really cares?

Goodes loves it. Loves exercising on his own terms, maintaining a body that’s capable and useful, rather than one built purely for performance. “I feel healthier now than I did when I was playing because there was constantly something wrong with my body,” he says. “You’re pushing your body to its absolute limits every training session, every game. So, for me, all of the training, all of the meetings, that was wearing me down.”

These days Goodes runs as frequently and as far as he feels like, often pushing Otis in the pram on laps along the Bondi boulevard. “I don’t put too much pressure on myself from a fitness point of view,” he says, telling me he’s barely done any heavy lifting in the gym since he walked off the SCG for the last time. “I’m never going to get back to the peak fitness I had when I was a professional athlete. But I don’t need to. What I do need to do is to be fit and healthy for my kids to play with. That’s where my health will always be measured.” 

What about the competitive itch? How does a former athlete scratch that? The answer is by taking park soccer “extremely seriously”. Goodes plays centre-forward for Waverley Old Boys Over 35s. Former Socceroo and SBS commentator Craig Foster is on the team, meaning Goodes doesn’t miss a chance to put his ears to good use. “He’s got incredible drills and a lot of enthusiasm for the game still,” Goodes says. “And like I said, I’m a sponge. I like to absorb that feedback and put it into practice.” The only thing missing, he says, is heavy contact. “I like to be physical,” he says. “I look for that. I like to be a presence up forward and I treat it just like any other game I play. Once I’m on a soccer field, I’m out there to win and I want to get better.” 

Adam Goodes doesn’t meditate before contests as he used to before Swans games – he’s not playing for Brownlow votes. Instead, in retirement, he uses meditation as a way to decouple from the frustrations and aggravations of daily life. “I think I’m one of those people that when things aren’t going well and I’m frustrated, meditation grounds me,” he says. “Because life happens and unfortunately a lot of things attach to you. Usually jumping in the ocean washes those away for me but sometimes you just need to go to a quiet place and be with yourself and your thoughts. That’s what meditation is and that’s what it does for me. It’s an incredible tool.”

Much like his attitude to exercise, Goodes doesn’t put too much pressure or expectation on himself when it comes to  practising mindfulness – that would be self-defeating – grabbing anything from five to 40 minutes when the opportunity arises. “That’s the way I think about all the things that I do,” he says. “I don’t beat myself up because there’s so much more to life now.”

Listen, learn, lead

As Adam Goodes and I are chatting, we’re occasionally interrupted by eager dogs escaping the clutches of their owners along this popular walking track. Each time Goodes stops to give the mutt a cuddle before an apologetic owner dashes over to retrieve it. “I love dogs. Love their energy,” he tells me, after helping a woman clip her pet’s collar. Later, a middle-aged man with a ponytail spots us, making a beeline for our table. He hands Goodes something I can’t see. Goodes glances at it. Later, he shows me what the man gave him. It’s a stamp with the Queen’s head on it. “I was wondering why he gave me this,” he says. Then he shows me what’s written underneath her majesty’s head: Terra Nullius.

You could argue this avid, socially conscious stamp collector could scarcely have picked a better person to bestow his unique gift. Goodes was named Australian of the Year back in 2014 in recognition of his leadership and dedication to the Indigenous community. But it’s what he’s doing post-career, which isn’t making the headlines or getting the recognition it deserves, that could be his ultimate legacy. That’s saying something for a bloke who made four All-Australian teams and was named on the Indigenous Team of the Century.

Go back seven years, in the immediate aftermath of his career, Goodes wasn’t sure what he was going to do with the rest of his life, but he was determined to let his hair down, at least for a little while. For six months he travelled the world with his now wife, Natalie, ultimately proposing to her on a trip that saw them take in Coachella, the NBA finals, the Superbowl and enjoy a European summer, among a host of bucket-list stops. Having worked to be debt-free by the end of his career, Goodes had plans to keep the good times rolling for two years. But just before he left, he was approached by a group with a proposal to start an Indigenous business enterprise. “They planted the seed and when I came back, I was like, Wow, this sits right in the sweet spot of what I want to do. This leads to work for my mob. It’s working with Indigenous entrepreneurs, working with government organisations, working with CEOs of big corporates. And I said, ‘Look, I’m in’.” 

Adam Goodes started the business, IDIC, with Dug Russell, Michael McLeod and George Mifsud, becoming a majority owner and CEO. Throwing himself into the unfamiliar world of boardrooms, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presos, he once again drew on his ability to listen and learn. “I don’t have an MBA, I’ve never been to university, I’ve never run a business before but Dug, Michael and George had all been working in corporate Australia,” he says. “I just learnt so much off them.” From not really having a firm post-career plan, Goodes had managed to find a calling. “The opportunity was right there in front of me and now I’m still doing that seven years later.”

The other thing that’s happened post-football that will ultimately define him, as it does for any man who has kids,
is fatherhood. How, I venture, has it changed him? “I think I’d lived a very selfish life as a professional athlete,” he answers levelly. “And many of my ex-girlfriends could probably attest to that. It was probably the reason for a lot of the breakdowns in my relationships. But that selfishness was something I had to do for my sport and for my own personal performance.”

Once kids came along, Goodes says, the obliqueness and uncertainty of life gave way to clarity, purpose and responsibility. “Questions like ‘what’s life all about?’ actually mean something now,” he says. “You have a kid and you’re like, Okay, this is what it’s about.” 

Like many new fathers, Goodes is determined to close the gaps he experienced in his own upbringing. “My father wasn’t around when I was a kid so the biggest thing for me is to be there for my children,” he says. “But also, I’ve got a huge responsibility to educate my children about who they are as Aboriginal people. I didn’t have that growing up.”

His children also inform his mission to make this country a more caring, compassionate and accepting place for everyone to live, something he knows requires him to stick his neck out now and then. That’s not easy but you’d have to say few are more practised at it than Goodes is. “We have to do things, we have to say things,” he says. “I think it’s not only a responsibility for myself, but for all of us and the communities that we live in to make it safer and better for the next generation.”

Ultimately, that will take leaders. And while AFL is no longer a big part of Adam Goodes’ life, he does credit its role in giving him the tools to drive change. “I think what happened from the sporting field was I got the self-confidence to have a voice,” he says. “I never wanted to be a leader until I started contributing in the Swans’ Bloods system and I thought, Wow, I could be a leader here if I exemplify these values and behaviours. I was able to captain the club for four years leading up to a premiership in 2012, which I’m really proud of. So, for me, I think understanding the power you have and the platform you have is really important. But more important is using that positively. It’s all about how can I use that to benefit our people?” 

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Lightly tanned with thick, brown hair greying around the temples, blue eyes and a perfectly proportioned physique, he greets me with a huge smile and hearty handshake, as we exchange pleasantries on the rain that’s tumbling down outside. 

You’re immediately struck by Sam Wood’s lack of affectation or pretence, his down-to-earth demeanour and impeccable manners, a product, you suspect, of his Tassie upbringing. You can see why the producers at Channel 10 picked him as their prize paramour – and de facto embodiment of Australian masculinity – for the 2015 season of The Bachelor Australia. 

And why a bunch of the country’s most beautiful women might want to date him and how one of them, his now wife, Snez, would fall for him. I had assumed Wood, 42, was one of those guys that women want. But, I wondered, did men want to be him?

The answer, I’m happy to report after a very pleasant hour in his company, is an unequivocal yes. And not just because he’s got a Marvel-level physique or because he sold a stake in his app, 28 by Sam Wood, for a gobsmacking $71 million. For me, it’s because once upon a time, before his life was hijacked by the kind of narrative flourish you might expect of a sozzled screenwriter, Wood was a shy, skinny teenager who had turned to the gym in search of confidence. Once he found it, along with a corresponding passion for helping others get in shape, there was no stopping him. When his big break came, he managed to turn potential and possibility – plus a frankly ludicrous premise – into the closest thing there is to a modern fairy tale. 

“I was a pretty quiet, self-conscious kid from Tassie,” Wood tells me over a plate of zucchini fritters. “Even now I have moments of imposter syndrome and disbelief that this whole thing has reached the levels that it has and almost like I don’t belong here and the whole thing could come crashing down at any moment.”

You’d have to say that’s an understandable and probably healthy reaction to stardom. Feelings of inadequacy and doubt don’t just disappear when you find success. At least, you hope they don’t. It’s that uncertainty that helps keep you grounded. The thing about Wood is he’s never tried to fool anyone. Despite appearances, he’s not Prince Charming and if this is a fairy tale, it’s only when viewed through Instagram’s heavily filtered lens. Deep down, he’s still that skinny teenager looking to live his best life. In the crazy, confected world of celebrity glitz and glamour, he probably is an imposter. That’s the rub with authenticity: if you’re truly for real, when success and all its trappings arrive, you should feel like a fake.

Training days

Wood’s story begins in West Hobart in 1980, where he was the eldest of three kids. His sister, Hannah, is three years younger than him and his brother, Alex, three years younger than her. His dad owned a catering company, a job that saw him work long hours and weekends. When the family did see him, Wood says, he was grumpy or stressed. 

For the most part it was an upbringing typical of the late ’80s and ’90s until Wood was 15, when his mum passed away from cancer. “That turned my world and our whole family’s lives upside down,” Wood says. “My dad, we didn’t know him that well because he was always working. When Mum passed away, he sold his business and just took care of the three of us. Didn’t work for three years until he ran out of money, basically. I have such respect and appreciation for the sacrifice Dad made and everything that he did for us in such a tough time for him, too.”

It was in this period, after his mother’s passing, that Wood would discover the gym. He’d always loved sport and did his best to play footy, cricket and basketball. His problem, he says, was that his beanpole frame made him awkward. “I’m 6’3 and 100 kilos now and I was 6’3 and 68 kilos at 17,” he says. “I was very lanky and I wanted to gain some confidence. I was probably more self-conscious about it than I realised.”

His quest to bulk up was slow and painstaking, he says. He barely added a kilo every six months. But he was fascinated by what the body could do if you challenged it and fed it right. He kept eating, kept lifting, kept poring over issues of MH for tips, slowly and methodically building his rig into something he was proud of.

As high school progressed, Wood was unsure what he wanted to do with his life. “I was the kid who, three days before we were meant to start work experience, I’m asking our PE teacher if I can hang out with him and he’s going, ‘Geez, you’re disorganised, mate – but all right’.”

After school, like many Tassie kids, he headed to the mainland, having decided to pursue the thing he was passionate about and study exercise science in Ballarat. While he was there, a trainer named Craig Harper delivered a talk on the world of personal training that would change Wood’s life – well, it seemed that way at the time; though, in terms of narrative heft, it pales in comparison to what would happen later. Wood was spellbound by Harper’s tales of a lavish, pristine facility catering to a hungry client base. “He painted this exquisite visual picture of this thousand-square-metre PT studio with a running track round the outside,” Wood recalls. “This was 2000. PT was relatively young. He’d established a pretty good studio, only did one-on-one training and he had 30 trainers. Back then, that was pretty incredible. He was a real pioneer.” 

Wood “begged and pleaded” with Harper to let him do work experience at this mythical gym in bayside Brighton. “I just said, ‘Please. I’ll scrub toilets at 5am. Please’.” Harper was won over by the kid’s enthusiasm and it wasn’t long afterwards that Wood was showing up at 5 in the morning as promised, working through until 8. “I was just a sponge soaking up all this information and my head was exploding with the excitement of it all,” he says. “It was like, This is just like how I imagined it, but better.” By the end of the stint Harper had offered him a job with the caveat that he finish his degree in Melbourne. 

Right from the beginning, Wood killed it at Harper’s gym, quickly amassing up to 60 clients a week. Harper was incredulous at his charge’s progress. “He said, ‘What, you’re earning $3500 a week?’ I said, ‘Yeah’. I was 20. He’s like, ‘Oh my god, what are you doing? What marketing are you doing?’ I said, ‘No, no marketing’. It was all word of mouth.”

 Wood had quickly found that his best marketing tool was his passion. “It was like my enthusiasm just got me clients because I’d train these beautiful Brighton families and I’d tell them my life story,” he says. “I’d pour my heart out. I was pretty raw and honest and vulnerable. Next thing, they’re like, ‘You should train our neighbour. You should train our son’. It just spread.” 

Wood worked in Harper’s gym for six years before deciding he’d like to strike out on his own with an idea for a kid’s gym. Harper would join him with a 30 per cent stake. “There was something a little bit comforting about that,” Wood says of having his mentor by his side. “We took over an old garage and we turned it into Australia’s first ever kid’s gym.” 

‘Geckos’ as they would call it, was “a sport and exercise paradise” for kids aged 5-15. It quickly became a hit with local families, but the challenge came when Wood tried to expand and encountered a problem many young entrepreneurs face: there’s only one of you. “You can’t duplicate yourself,” Wood says. “The success of this one centre was very heavily based around the fact that I was there 70 hours a week and knew every kid and every parent’s name.” 

He remembers launching a Geckos in Sydney to a lot of fanfare only to check in six months later and find it in disarray. “The equipment kit was all banged up in the corner and you’d say to people, ‘How’s Geckos going?’ They’d say, ‘What’s Geckos?’ It would really tail off and it wasn’t something I was proud of.” 

Eventually he pivoted to a franchise model aimed at PE teachers and PTs who loved working with kids. “That worked much better because you had direct contact with the business owner and the buck stopped with them,” he says. He had 35 franchises by the time he eventually sold the company. He also opened his own premium space, The Woodshed, in Brighton East. Again, these were pivotal moments in his life but looking back now, they can seem, to an outsider, like minor, tertiary details. That’s because something preposterous was about to happen.

Perfect match

When looking at Wood’s life, it’s tempting to divide it into pre-and-post-Bachelor ‘epochs’. Indeed, that’s not just neat from a narrative perspective, it’s something Wood himself does, so seismic has been the impact of the show on he and Snez’s lives. “I’ve gone from being a 35-year-old guy with no girlfriend and no kids thinking, I really thought I’d be married or at least engaged by now, to married with four kids,” he says, shaking his head as if he’s still struggling to comprehend the startling trajectory his life has taken. “It feels like two years because it’s been such a wild ride. It doesn’t feel like seven.” 

So, where did the fairy tale begin? Where you might expect: the gym. “I had a lady, Kelly, diehard member,” he says. “I’d be sitting at reception and she’d come in and quiz me about my love life. I’d say, ‘Look, nothing to report at the moment, Kelly’. She’d be like ‘This is ridiculous, Sam. You should go on that Bachelor show’.” Eventually Kelly wore him down and he submitted an application. “I did it thinking, It’ll keep Kelly happy – as if anything’s going to come from this.” 

He would get a phone call the very next day. Soon he was flying to Sydney where he found himself in front of a boardroom of Channel 10 and Endemol Shine execs. “I remember as I left that meeting, the chief executive of Channel 10 said, ‘Don’t go and do anything radical with your hair or anything like that. I said, ‘This is pretty much how I am, mate. I’m not getting neck tattoos or anything over the next few weeks’.” 

Three weeks later the gig was his, though Wood still didn’t really appreciate the enormity or, indeed, the basic premise of what he’d got himself into. Two days before filming, an executive producer asked him what he thought of the show. “I go, ‘I’ve never seen it’, and he goes, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Mate, I’ve never seen one minute of one episode’.” He said, ‘Let’s start filming and see what happens’.”

That first night of filming Wood had screech-owl eyes. “My head was spinning and there was a different girl coming down the driveway every five minutes and there were 500 cameras and I was totally spaced out,” he laughs. The producer quickly picked up on the potential of Wood’s guileless, unvarnished charm to win over audiences. “He loved it. He goes, ‘You know what, you’ve got no preconceived ideas, you don’t have an agenda, you’re not trying to act. It’s just you trying to work this fucking thing out. It’s making great TV because every reaction is a real one. This is the best thing ever’.” 

Even better was the part that in a sorry script reads as cliched, but in the jaded prism through which most of us view reality TV is just plain fanciful: he met the love of his goddamn life. “You sort of get the impression when you’re part of the beast that is The Bachelor, that they either want a train wreck or a beautiful love story,” he says. “And because I fell in love with Snez, they were like, This is magic. Just let it happen.”

To this day, he and Snez, who was from Perth and had been convinced to go on the show by her then eight-year-old daughter, Eve, shake their heads at the ridiculousness of their meeting. “I don’t know if I was cynical but I was very much a realist going in,” Wood says. “I hoped that I would meet someone, but I never thought I’d meet my future wife. Even today – almost monthly, I reckon – Snez and I have a little giggle to ourselves. I think it was just meant to be.” 

Calm with the chaos

Let’s face it, you’d be a mug to waste a platform like The Bachelor. Wood isn’t a mug. In the aftermath of the show, he was inundated with enquiries about The Woodshed and from people asking him to write them programs. He began to think about launching an online platform that could help people on their fitness journeys Australia-wide. 

“I’d always looked at Michelle Bridges and at Kayla [Itsines] and gone, Pretty amazing what these guys do. I always had the belief that I could potentially do something like that if I had the reach. It was a very hopeful, fleeting thought.” 

Wood saw a gap in the market for a less rigorous, movement-focused platform that would encourage participants to build slowly and gradually towards their fitness goals. “I felt like these other programs were too intense,” he says. “Train for an hour a day, count every calorie, and I’m like, that’s not my attitude. My attitude is I just want to help people move more, eat better, be a bit more mindful, take baby steps in the right direction. Progress not perfection.”

Having always worked in 28-day blocks with clients, it made sense to make the program geared to the same cycle, he says. He began with a website and didn’t do any advertising. The results were immediate. “We had 5000 subscribers in three months paying $50 a month and it just blew my mind.”

The site and later the app took off but it was during COVID that its popularity really exploded, as home workouts became a necessity-driven phenomenon. “28 went bananas because people were so much more aware of training at home,” Wood says. “Where it might have taken 10 years to get on people’s radar, it was all brought to a head in six weeks.”

Suddenly the business had become a very valuable commodity and with the help of his childhood mate, David Jackson, formerly of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, in May last year Wood was able to sell a stake in the company to DNA testing company MyDNA Inc. for $71 million. 

At the same time as his business was taking off, Wood’s family was also growing at an exponential rate, with the arrival of Willow in 2017, Charlie in 2019 and Harper in May last year. “It’s definitely challenging, but the best thing ever,” Wood says of fatherhood. “I consider myself so lucky. Thinking back to my dad, it took a tragedy for him to get to know us as deeply as he would have wanted to. I didn’t want his regrets to be my regrets.”

Looking for a crack in the fairy tale? You don’t have to look that hard, Wood reckons. “We always get asked, ‘How do you guys get the balance so perfect?’ It’s like, You’re kidding. We’re a circus! You might see a nice picture on Instagram, but behind the scenes we’re as chaotic as any household.”

It’s a crazy life and sometimes, Sam Wood says, it can become too much. It’s during those moments that he’s lucky to be able to lean on the one person who knows just how much his life has changed. “There was definitely a period there, probably two years into 28 when it was really rocketing, that it was almost this out-of-body experience where you’re looking at it and going, This is not really happening to me. It was Snez that got me through that. We’ve both been through such a ridiculous experience. She was a real rock. She was just like, ‘No, trust your gut. You do deserve this. Keep doing what you’re doing’.” 

She didn’t say it, but she might have added, Just keep being yourself. 

Get Stacked Like Sam Wood

Sam Wood took three months to physically prepare for this MH cover. “I was in the best shape of my life,” he says. “I did a lot of extra work. I was very good with my food. I’m normally an eight of 10. For this I was a 10 out of 10. No alcohol, high protein, fewer carbs, and I definitely did more from a fat-burning perspective with extra cardio sessions. I’m like, This is only three months of my life. I don’t want to stuff it up.”

Wood mixes up his upper-body exercises but insists on having one from each of the following lifts:

1. Horizontal press

Bench Press, dumbbell press, incline press or push-ups 

2. Vertical pull

Lat pulldown, chin-ups 

3. Horizontal pull

Seated row, cable Pull 

4. Vertical press

Dumbbell shoulder press, barbell shoulder press

Wood alternates between heavier lifting weeks in which he does
5 sets (2 warm-up, 3 working) of 5-8 reps with 2mins rest and a week of lighter/higher-rep sessions – 5 x 10-12 reps. 

He also throws in supplementary arm exercises – dumbbell curls, triceps pull-down – as well as core work. 

The post How Sam Wood’s Love Of Training And People Made Him An Irresistible Force appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.

I take it as a sign that he’s relaxed and at ease. I know from the last time I spoke to Franklin, back in 2017, that’s he’s not always comfortable in the spotlight and doesn’t like to engage with the circus that’s surrounded him since his early days in the AFL.

“I’ve never been about myself or individual accolades,” says Franklin, when I chat to him later in a courtyard outside the studio. “I just go about my business nice and quietly and obviously very privately. I’m all about my family and keeping them happy. It’s my personality. To people that know me well, I’m probably an extrovert. But when I don’t know you, I’m pretty introverted and just keep to myself. That’s just who I am.”

Throughout our shoot there have been glimpses of that more extroverted side. “How big do they think I am?” he jokes to his agent after trying on a pair of jeans that are comically large. When our videographer pokes fun at me for saying the Swans are my second team (it’s true!), implying that I’m trying to suck up to Franklin, he laughs along: “He’s on today, isn’t he?” he says of our lippy crew member. In these moments there’s a sparkle in his eyes and you can imagine how playful and fun he probably is in the Swans’ dressing room. “I’m a big kid around the footy club,” says the 36-year-old father of two (Tullulah, 3, and Rocky, 2, with wife Jesinta), who’s joining us today in his capacity as an ambassador for Swisse Vitamins. 

Franklin’s exploits on the field are already etched in AFL folklore. It’s truly boy’s own stuff. Last year’s 1000th goal against Geelong in round two heralded a pitch invasion the likes of which the AFL hadn’t seen since, oh yeah, when Franklin became the last player to kick a hundred goals in a season back in 2008. There are the kicks for goal off one step from 60m out, the dribbles along the ground from deep in the pocket and, best of all, for me anyway, his galvanising multi-bounce runs down the wing before kicking for goal at a full sprint.

Franklin’s celebrations after one of these coruscating feats is unbridled. He either raises his biceps in muscular triumph or opens his arms as teammates descend upon him. In these moments his charisma commands a stadium and practically shoots through your TV screen. 

On the flipside, it’s safe to say that while few players have ever loomed as large on the field, even fewer are as humble as Franklin is off it. Today, for example, when I compare his profile to the late Shane Warne’s, he looks uncomfortable but thanks me for it. When the photographer asks if he prefers to be called Lance or Buddy – a crucial distinction, you might think, between his public and private personas – he says “either’s fine”. It’s textbook good-Aussie-bloke behaviour, the kind of stuff the Swans’ ‘No Dickheads’ policy famously enforced. It’s tempting to cast his reserve and humility as some kind of shy man’s shield – this is, after all, the tallest poppy in a country with the biggest pair of secateurs – but the more you talk to Franklin, the clearer it becomes that it is, as he says, just who he is. It’s who he’s always been. 

A few weeks into preseason training, the game’s biggest star is approaching his 19th and possibly final season – he signed a one-year deal that was announced before last year’s grand final – as he would any other. That one-year deal doesn’t raise the stakes or heighten the pressure he puts on himself, he insists. The lure of another grand final appearance provides all the motivation he needs to summon the determination to succeed. 

Indeed, that singular focus might just be the secret to Franklin’s sustained excellence and preposterous longevity, a combination that usually results in statues outside stadiums. You block out all the noise, you brush off all the compliments and you disregard the analyses of your game, intrusions into your private life and clumsy attempts to understand your appeal. Instead, you keep your eyes solely, utterly and unwaveringly on the prize.

How’s your summer been? What have you done to relax? 

Buddy Franklin: This off-season is probably no different to my last 18 off-seasons. You just try to unwind. Obviously playing a full season of football is demanding, so it’s important that you have that time to relax and enjoy some time with the family. We headed up to Queensland, went back to Perth. After a few weeks you get back into training and start getting prepared for the season.

Are you able to fully switch off from football?

Oh, it can be hard, there’s no doubt about that. Being a professional sport, there’s never an off button. I think it’s so demanding, not only physically but mentally, too. You get two to three weeks, physically, just to take a deep breath, rest up your body, and then you’re over sitting around and you’re ready to get back into it. Then you start training on your own and making sure that you’re fit by the time you get back to the team.

How do you normally feel going into a pre-season? Is it something you look forward to or dread?

No, I love it. I’m passionate and I love what I do. I wouldn’t have played for 19 years if I wasn’t. I’m still driven and I’m excited about the year ahead. I wake up every morning excited to get to the club and get the best out of myself and that’s no different this year.

Is there any sense that as you don’t know if this is your last season or not, that you want to savour it?

For me, first and foremost it’s just about enjoying it. I’m not putting any pressure on whether I go on another year or another two years or this is it. I’m just enjoying every day and whatever happens at the end of the year will happen. I’m still passionate and driven to succeed and I think that’s the thing that’s driving me this year: to hopefully win that premiership.

What is the focus of your training this pre-season? 

It doesn’t really change for me. Injury prevention’s a huge thing. Obviously, I’m 36 years of age. So, it’s about looking after myself, keeping my strength up and just getting ready in terms of the conditioning. I think the key to my last couple of years is getting out on the training track and being able to get in a good routine every week. 

Do you do any upper body work?

Well, believe it or not, this year I’ve actually started doing some upper-body strength work. But for the last 10 to 15 years, I hadn’t needed to. This year I’m adding some upper-body moves, like bench press. But man, I’m no
good at that stuff.

Yeah, I’ve heard the early stories about you and chin-ups.

It’s never been great.

Because you’re so tall?

Yeah, because I’m tall and my strength’s okay. I don’t really need to do too much of it.

So, what are you benching?

I’m not happy with it, mate. We keep the reps low ’cause if I go too heavy, I put on too much weight.

Last time I spoke to you we talked about a time in your early days at Hawthorn when you ran 18 150s in a row. And you weren’t letting anyone beat you. You wanted to beat Shane Crawford, who was one of your heroes. Could you do something like that these days?

Oh no. That was when I was 21, 22. The young guys are running similar sets these days. But my program is different to what the young guys do because the average age at the club is 23, 24. So, there are a lot of young kids that are obviously doing the full training whereas as I’ve got my program prescribed for me. But in the next four to six weeks my load will start picking up so that I’m ready for round one.

What will that load be at the peak?

Oh, for the younger guys in pre-season you’re looking at doing a 10 to 12k session on a Monday. They’ll do another 10k session on the Wednesday. I don’t do the Wednesday session. And then on Friday another 10 to 12 kilometres. So, a lot of the guys are doing over 30 kilometres a week. And that’s for three months. They’re getting the guys super fit. I’ll be doing Monday and Friday between eight to 11 kilometres – that’s skills and running. Endurance as well as speed work. The focus is on repeat efforts and working on your skills under fatigue. 

That’s a hard load for a 36-year-old. How much is your body feeling it?

Physically, I feel pretty good. The last two years I’ve felt good. I still feel that physically I can compete and play the game. But obviously I’m not the athlete I once was. I’m not as fast as I was or as agile. That comes with being 36. But yes, I still feel I can compete at this level and the enjoyment is still there. We’ve got a lot of young kids at the footy club. So, for me, helping those boys come through is what I’m enjoying.

You’ve had your share of injuries, but it seems to me that you always come back strongly.

Thank you.

Why do you think that is?

For me it’s passion. I think if you’re passionate about something you can change and you can get better and improve. Missing a year of football [in 2020] with the recurrence of hamstring problems was a devastating year for me. I’d played 16 years without injury and then suddenly missing a whole season was taxing on me mentally and physically. But I knew that if I put in the work, had a really good off-season and got stronger in the gym that I could bounce back. I just put a real focus on, Okay, this is what I need to do to get back out there and really went to work on it. I’ve been able to play the last two years and it’s been great.

Yeah, you’ve maintained a level of consistency and there hasn’t been any noticeable decline in your play.

Some people might think differently.

Did you ever expect to be able to play this well, this late in your career?

It’s not something I ever thought about. Did I think I’d play until 30? I don’t know. For me it’s more about that passion. I love what I do. I love being out there, I love playing in front of big crowds, I love playing with the young boys. If you’re passionate about something then it’s easy to get up and go to work, isn’t it? 

Obviously when you signed your 10-year contract there were some who didn’t think you would see it through or that you might be a shadow of yourself in your twilight years. But guys like you LeBron, Brady, Nadal just seem to keep going. Would you say it’s a point of pride in yourself to maintain consistency as you age?

Totally, totally. I think when you’ve played the game for so long at a high level there’s a level of expectation to play well every week. That’s just the pressure I put on myself. I want to play at a high level for as long as I can. And I think it can be frustrating when you don’t get to that level. So, you just put pressure on yourself to be at your best.

Did the detractors or people who questioned that contract add any motivation for you? Or would you say you’re just competitive by nature?

I’m just competitive. People are going to have their say – that’s just part and parcel of the media. For me, it was just about competing, getting out there and loving what I do.

You said to me last time we spoke that sometimes people look at your exploits on the field and put them down to natural talent without fully appreciating the work that you do in training or on the track. Is that part of the equation when you’re gifted?

There’s no doubt that can happen, but I think you can only get so far with talent. You can play for a few years and get away with it, but after a while those people get worked out and they’re out of the system. I’ve always prided myself on working hard, getting the best out of myself, and I think there’s no doubt that’s why I’ve lasted this long.

Can you take us back to the day after last year’s grand final? Where were you and how were you feeling?

At 10 o’clock in the morning we were on a bus going to the airport and then we were flying back to Sydney. I’ve played in six grand finals. Losing is the worst feeling you can possibly have as a player, as a team and as an individual. There’s nothing worse. It’s devastating. There’s so much work to get there and that was the most disappointing thing about last year. But I’m all about growing and getting better. And for us, we’re such a young group, I can only see us getting better. The way we’re training at the moment and the way we’re preparing, I think if we keep working hard, hopefully that premiership could be there this year. That’s the thing that’s driving me this year.

When you look back at it, what do you think went wrong for you and the team that day?

We just got beaten by a better team on the day, that was hungrier than us. We had a really positive year. To make the grand final, I look at that and go, Wow, that’s an incredible thing to do. Two years before that we were at the bottom of the ladder. So, we turned things around really quickly and were able to make a grand final well before anyone even thought it possible.

You had already made the decision to play on at that point, but did the loss give you any sense that ‘there’s no way I can go out like this’?

No, not really. I’d already made my decision. I’ve lost three grand finals at the Swans, so I’ve got that motivation to keep going. They’ve all been bad losses. After any grand final you lose you always have that feeling that you don’t want that ever to happen again. We just have to lick our wounds and go again.

Let’s talk about your 1000th goal in round two last year. Had you thought about it before the game?

No doubt. I think I just wanted to get it done. I thought this is the night I want to do it because we were away the next week. I was like, all my family’s here – they’d flown over to watch round one and then they were here in Sydney for round two and if I didn’t get it they would’ve been away from home for three weeks. My sister flew in from LA. So, I was like, It needs to happen tonight! I put the pressure on myself as I always do before games. I was lucky that we were on fire. The boys were playing some really good football and it couldn’t have unfolded any better. I think once it was done, it started raining, you know what I’m saying? It was just a special night. Something I’ll never forget.

With the kick itself, did you go into your normal routine?

Well, I was just thinking, I better not miss this, I better not miss this. But the first couple of kicks I’d had, I was kicking well, so I was pretty confident. But there are always those doubts, especially when the pressure’s on. 

And the aftermath? Did the reaction surprise you?

Not really. Obviously, it was full on. But it was just incredible. It really was. For me to do it in front of my home crowd, in front of our great supporters, was just a special time and then to share that with the boys from the footy club, staff and then my family and my wife was amazing. My son wasn’t there because he ended up having to go home because he was too tired. But Tullulah was there, so she stayed up and then it was 12 at night! So, to have a couple of beers with the boys, enjoy it for what it was and then see my family, there’s nothing better.

The last time a crowd invaded the field was in 2008 for your hundredth goal of the season. Can you compare those two moments and what they meant to you?

I think in 2008 I was 21. I was a kid when that happened. You probably don’t realise how special it is because you think it’s going to happen every year. This time my life was completely different. Married, two kids, life’s just changed completely. This time I was like, Okay, if I ever get the opportunity to kick a hundred goals or ever get to a thousand, I’m really going to enjoy it and really soak it up. And this time I really did that. Once I kicked the goal, I was like, You know what, I’m going to really enjoy this moment. It’ll probably never happen again. So, I lapped it all up to give back to the supporters that ran out there.

The fact that no one has kicked a hundred in a season since makes it even more special, don’t you think?

Yeah, the game’s changed. Back then you’d have one focal point that you were always going to kick to whereas now you’ve got multiple options, four or five different guys – which is much better for the game. But supporters love seeing guys kick goals and kick big goals. I’d love to see a guy come in and kick a hundred goals again, but I can’t see it happening for a very long time.

You mentioned your family. You’re a father to two young children, Tullulah and Rocky. How has the experience of fatherhood compared to your expectations of what it would be like?

I don’t think I had any expectations. I was pretty cruisy. That’s just my nature – take it as it comes and learn as you go. But it’s been unbelievable. It really has. I couldn’t see my life without them. It really does put things in perspective. Football can be a highly stressful game. And just being able to come home to your kids and see a big smile on their faces and see them happy and healthy, that’s what drives me every day.

What in your childhood do you look back most fondly on?

Being outdoors. As kids me and my sisters were outdoors all day. We grew up on a small farm where we were kicking the ball around, going to netball, just a lot of sport. Our Saturdays and Sundays were taken up by sport from the age of six. 

You’re very selective about companies and causes you put your name to. What was it about Swisse that appealed to you?

Being a professional athlete, you always want to live a healthy lifestyle. And to align myself with such an iconic brand in Swisse was a no-brainer. It’s just an awesome brand and I’m proud to be associated with it.

Aside from exercise, which you obviously get plenty of, what else do you do to take care of your health and fitness?

Sleep’s really important. Getting eight to nine hours a night has been a real key to what I do. Even though I’ve got two kids, my wife allows me to get my sleep in. She knows how important it is for me to perform to make sure I’m fully recovered for training and ready to go. Hydration is also huge. People don’t realise how important it is. You think a lot clearer when you’re hydrated and it’s obviously crucial to performance. So, it’s sleep, hydration and good food.

Do you meditate at all?

I do, but not daily. I tend to meditate on game day. There’s obviously a lot of things that go on in your mind before a game, so I usually do 10 to 15 minutes before I jump in the car or get on the bus to go to the game. It’s just to have that time, to take some deep breaths to relieve stress. As soon as you’re done you feel like, Okay, I’m ready to go.

How do you think you’ll approach your health and fitness after you stop playing? Do you think you’ll enjoy exercising on your own terms, rather than having a program to follow and benchmarks to hit? 

I think I’ll definitely stay fit. Exercising is a huge thing for my mental health. I need to do that. But I think when I’m retired, I’m going to try to do a marathon. I enjoy running. There are things like that that I’d love to tick off. Everything has been so structured for me for so long. I’m guided by a diary every day telling me this is what time you’ve got to be here; this is what time this is on. So, I’m looking forward to not having that and to doing things that I haven’t been able to do, like skiing and surfing. 

So, there’s no chance of you letting yourself go?

No, as I said, for my mental health, exercise is the big thing. That’s what I love to do so why would you go away from it?

You became a member of the Swans leadership group in 2020. How did you find that?

I’ve loved it. I think as I’ve got older and found my place at the club it’s been a natural progression for me to be in the leadership group and it’s something I enjoy. I’m nearly double these boys’ ages now, so it’s just come naturally. If I can help them out in any way, I’m always there with a shoulder to lean on.

Do you notice the age gap at times?

No. I think it’s probably kept me a little bit younger, to be honest with you. We’ve got a club full of characters. They’re all their own men and I think that’s something that I’ve loved being a part of.

Is your leadership style mostly by example?

It was. As I’ve got older, I’ve learned to use my voice around the football club, helping players out, and if I see something then saying it.

What are you looking forward to most in retirement when it does finally happen?

Well, it could be in 10 years! It’s not something I want to be thinking about right now. But travel would be a big thing. Going overseas, maybe living there for six months. When you’ve been in one thing for half your life there’s always things that you’ve had to give up and for us it’s travel. Right now, if you do travel, you’re always thinking in the back of your mind, Hey, I’ve got to be prepared for next season. 

You are one of the few Australian athletes, especially among AFL players, who truly has a national profile and transcends codes and even sport. You’re probably on the Shane Warne/Ian Thorpe level. How do you feel about that kind of profile and prominence?

It’s not something I’ve given too much thought to. It’s great to be put up on that pedestal, but it’s not something that keeps me up at night. I just like going out there and having fun and enjoying what I do, and if that makes people happy and they love seeing that, then that’s great. But it’s a great compliment. Thank you.

How would you like to be remembered?

As a player, as someone that was trustworthy. I think trust is a big thing. Trust that you’re going to be able to go out there and compete, give your all every week. That’s the most important thing in terms of earning respect from your teammates. As a person, being genuine and loving to the people who are close to me. 

The post Buddy Franklin Is Ready To Give Everything He’s Got appeared first on Men's Health Magazine Australia.