Hawthorn greats Sam Mitchell, Luke Hodge and Shaun Burgoyne have expressed shock at allegations First Nations players were mistreated by the club, including distressing claims they were separated from their families.
The ABC on Wednesday reported the contents of a Hawthorn-commissioned review based on interviews with First Nations players, with the ABC’s report including an allegation that Hawthorn pressured one couple to terminate a pregnancy.
Appearing on radio station SEN on Wednesday morning, Hodge, a former premiership captain with the Hawks, said reading the report had been “very uncomfortable” and the “terrible” allegations were a “shock to the system”.
“It was a tough read, there’s no doubt,” he said. “I think anyone who goes through that, it’s uncomfortable to go through and read. Your first thought goes to the players who went through it and the partners and the families that went through it because it doesn’t matter what your job is, it’s always family first.”
The AFL has announced an external independent panel led by a King’s Counsel will investigate the allegations, while the Hawks referred the report to the league.
Hodge said he was not previously aware of the allegations or “anything to the extent of what was written in the article”.
“When you have 18, 19, 20-year-old kids getting drafted, you always hear about break-ups and whether it’s the right thing,” he said.
“Personally, I’ve had a lot of private conversations with those guys [club staff]. Especially early on [for me], it was [them asking] is it the right thing for me to go back and see family and friends in Colac, because … my diet wasn’t great, and, ‘Is it the best thing for my football?’”
Those conversations were “totally different” to the situations described by the former First Nations players, he said.
He said the alleged experiences of the players and their partners were impossible for him to imagine.
“There were some very open and ruthless things that were [allegedly] told to these young kids, both the player and their partner,” he said.
Asked if the claims had made him second-guess his time at the club, Hodge said “we had a lot of successful years, but at this stage that’s irrelevant because of what young blokes were told or what they were put through”.
“When you get drafted by a football club, it’s supposed to be an exciting time of your life,” he said. “It’s supposed to be, ‘My life has changed, now I have a pathway for the next 10 to 15 years, hopefully.’ That’s not what [allegedly] happened with these young kids.”
Hodge noted the club had commissioned the review after former First Nations Hawks star Cyril Rioli made allegations in April of racist treatment by the club.
Hodge said he had initially wondered who the players were and whether he could get in touch with them but noted “the reason they were put under aliases was because they want to be protected”.
“They’re hurting in private,” he said.
In brief comments at an AFL charity luncheon on Wednesday, the Hawks’ current coach Sam Mitchell also said he was “upset” and “disturbed” by the report, while 400-gamer Shaun Burgoyne said the allegations were confronting.
Mitchell, who played at the Hawks from 2002 until 2016 and captained the side to the 2008 premiership, said he was shocked by the allegations.
“When I woke up and I read it this morning I was upset I guess,” he said. “… Disturbed is probably accurate. The fact that we were part of [the] organisation at that time, it’s enormously troubling now.”
Burgoyne, a Kokatha-Warai man, was also taken aback by the claims, which he said he was not aware of until now.
“It’s very confronting considering I was there, and I wasn’t involved in any of it because I would have helped and I would have … hopefully been able to prevent some of those things from happening,” he said.
The AFL Players’ Association president and Geelong midfielder, Patrick Dangerfield, also responded to the “disturbing” allegations.
“Players put a lot of faith in the people at football clubs, that they have their best interests at heart and quite clearly football is a part of that, but it shouldn’t ever be just football alone,” he said.
Dangerfield said he felt it would have been “extraordinarily difficult” for the players to talk about the alleged events with their teammates “because you put so much trust” in the club.
He said it was crucial the allegations were properly investigated. “Quite clearly, we haven’t done our job as we should have as an industry. It should never have gotten to this.”
