All Good Things

Nat Fyfe Says Goodbye

A great man has announced his retirement and, given he was born in Western Australia and gave his talents exclusively to a local team, I’ll assume here the burden of first explaining who Nat Fyfe is before I pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

The bare facts are dull and will be dispatched swiftly: Fyfe was born in 1991, raised in a modest wheatbelt town, and then became a teenage boarder at Perth’s Aquinas College – which is a kind of Hogwarts for footballers, conservative politicians and real estate agents who dabble in crypto.

But the mere recounting of facts is an arid enterprise and conceals the principal, salient detail of this man’s existence: that he is Tithonus, the once-mortal lover of a goddess.

In my sober analogy, the goddess here is footy and Fyfe her brilliantly potent lover, who must nonetheless succumb to the indignities of age. In Homer’s telling, Tithonus is so charming and virile that the goddess Eos begs Zeus to confer immortality to her boyfriend so she might be pleasured forever. But her request suffers from ambiguity – she does not specify eternal youth, see, so poor Tithonus is bestowed immortality but remains subject to physical decay.

Bummer. Perhaps pinched with guilt, Eos at least finds a comfortable bed for the now decrepit Tithonus: “But when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.”

I can’t see Fyfe babbling endlessly in a quiet room – his future contains an MBA, conspicuous philanthropy and his investment in some tastefully sterile cafe in a trendy suburb – but it’s true that time and flesh betrayed his rare talent and great will, and he’ll be forgiven for privately cursing them.

Nat Fyfe was drafted by the Fremantle Dockers in 2010, when Nat Fyfe was still Nat Fyfe and not the gifted lover of a goddess. Tall, cropped hair, relatively scrawny – he was pick 20 that year, and if Fyfe could see the stars in his future, not many others could.

Between 2010 and 2012, Fyfe underwent an extraordinary physical and mythic transformation: the scrawny kid was now half-made from marble, and the impoverished fans of Freo had a North Star. He was becoming a feline genius, and God forbid I trip into hyperbole, but the basic facts of Fyfe’s physicality must be included here. His lips were made from memory foam; his long hair a lush field that all who saw it desired to walk barefoot through. He had Popeye’s biceps, Mr T’s thighs and you could prepare your dinner on his abs.

This cartoon collection of physical virtues still had to be animated by courage and ferocity of will – and it was. Fyfe moved through congestion like a giant strolling through a cornfield, a thrilling combination of grit and vision. It was impressive that he could see the optimal pass from the crowded middle; it was eerie that he could acquit that vision while several men clung to his body like massive barnacles.

Now forget the vision, the swollen lips, the formidable musculature. This is what I want you to know about Nat Fyfe: he was a freak of will. You could see it in his eyes. They were intense. Fyfe saw games not as contests between 36 men, but a juvenile mess that he alone could impose order upon. He was wilful, fierce and gloriously self-possessed.

On the field, all of this made sense. Off the field, Fyfe had the strangely aloof air of a dictator in the third decade of his reign. Fyfe’s magnetism worked only on grass; off the park, he seemed like a shark bored by shallow waters. His eyes were always cast above the horizon, which often precluded sight of his teammates.

I mean this in a collegial sense, not his sight of them on the field, and when Fyfe became captain in 2017 it wasn’t a terribly popular promotion in the changing room. Fyfe was cold, self-contained – the boys preferred the chill surfer vibes of David Mundy, a man of almost equal talent to Fyfe, but without his cult-leader stare.

Since Fyfe’s announcement, I’ve read a few pieces reflecting upon his career. They mention him being one of the best on field in Fremantle’s only appearance in a grand final, back in 2013. He just might have been, but my memory of that day – and I was there watching in row ZZ, just inches beneath the MCG’s canopy – was him taking two set shots inside 50 and kicking both out on the full. I took this to be a grim sign of our fate that day, and so it was.

For a man of such enormous gifts and monkish commitment, Fyfe’s ability to kick a goal from a set shot was fucking awful. I’ve no doubt that he long studied this flaw; that he sought the best advice and spent the longest time trying to correct it. But he never did correct it, and now I can only idly muse upon the quirky appointment of talent by the athletic gods upstairs.

Nat Fyfe – now Tithonus Fyfus – won the Brownlow Medal in 2015, and then again in 2019. Winning two Brownlows puts him in the canon, but his body didn’t care. His calves, knees and vertebrae all betrayed him with sadistic frequency. As a fan it was painful to watch this half-flesh/half-marble man succumb to the paroxysms of a fickle spine, and so I can only imagine the frustration this demigod must have felt. Did Fyfe kneel in the changing room and condemn his own body? Did he try to exorcise his physical gremlins with sheer force of will? What prayers were made when he realised there were still things his fanatical commitment couldn’t prevent?

Before I come to Fyfe’s last years, I want it recorded here that he was both magician and brute, and that two Brownlows still seems insufficient reflection of his ability. Still, as the years passed and the body ailed and Fyfe began to appear only as a substitute, the gap between his body and will became a terrible gulf.

I became anxious for Tithonus. His mind had retained a memory of his brilliance, but his muscles hadn’t, and recently I’ve watched our genius enter the game with the hapless energy of a puppy trying to mate with a Christmas tree.

I was anxious for two reasons. One, that our legend might embarrass himself; two, that he would concede a free kick with his clumsy enthusiasm. There was a time – a good time – that Fyfe’s energy was paired with physical brilliance, but in recent years I’ve watched, sadly, his untethered enthusiasm.

My thing? I write. In doing so, I like to think that I can only improve my craft, that is, until such a point – madness or dementia, say – when my returns shrink. But as an athlete, the shelf life of Nat Fyfe’s genius was always tragically limited, no matter how volcanic his will or monkish his habits.

I assume that Fyfe will transform his spooky will into something else. It ain’t over for ol’ Pillow Lips. But please, dear reader, consider the possession of a talent that you care enough about to turn into brilliance – and then being told by your own body that the prognosis is terminal.

At just 33, Tithonus is already an old man and must reinvent himself if he’s to leave the room Eos made for him. And he will and he will and he will. Godspeed, you brilliant weirdo.