Inside: the autobiography by Chris Judd
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2015 ISBN 9781760112912
I can't recall if I've ever actually read a football biography before. I bought this book for my teenage son, who like most boys these days is not a reader, but does like sporting biographies. I thought I'd give this one a go because Chris Judd was one of the great Australian Rules players, a Premiership Captain and Brownlow Medallist with the West Coast Eagles, as well as Captain of Carlton, one of the historically great clubs of the League (and the club my family has supported for five generations).
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I'm pretty sure Judd had a ghost writer (Greg Baum, a well-known football writer gets an acknowledgement for his assistance), but it is his thought processes, and how he went about his football career, that are of interest in this book. Judd comes through as an individual - not someone who easily swallowed what he was being told, but who thought things through himself and came to his own conclusions about things. He has written this book in four "phases", which correlate to phases in a footballers career.
As well as a journey through his football career, Inside takes us through Judd's learning journey through life - learning to be who he was, and not try to be someone else, looking back and seeing how the implosion of West Coast after the 2006 Premiership perhaps could have been avoided if the club had intervened earlier to stop certain players going off the rails, but then questioning whether they would have won if that intervention had happened. This opens up the question of just how important is football, which is a journey that Judd undertakes during the period of time this book chronicles.
While he always knew intellectually that football is just a game, and that life is much more than football, Judd's obsession to be the best, his competitive nature, meant that for many many years his life revolved around what was best for football - everything was viewed through that lens, and it is eye-opening for us "civilians" to see just how much is demanded of footballers. As for the West Coast drug scandals, I think Judd clearly explains the pressures young men endure playing and being in the AFL circus, and reminds us that, at 22, things can easily get out of hand. After reading this book, and thinking back to what I got up to at that age, I will not leap to judgement of sporting stars so quickly as I may have done before.
Judd states toward the end of the book that he is unlikely to become a coach, which may be a loss to the game, as he very clearly articulates the motivation required to be successful. It is not gaining a contract extension, or having a million followers on social media, or being a man-about-town, it is the desire to win. Focusing on that is a great enabler, and Judd, moving from West Coast to Carlton, shows us the difference between a winning culture, and a club where that culture had died, and how Judd tried (and failed) to re-instill it.
Inside is not a mere fanboy book about a footballing hero - it is more than that. It's not a classic of the genre, but it is an interesting insight into how a great sportsman goes about creating a career. Not sure I'll be reading too many more football biographies (for some reason cricket lends itself more to the written life than football), but glad I read this before passing it on to my son.
Only one thing more needs to be said.... Go Blues!!
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