How a megalomaniac almost destroyed my footy club

For Carlton supporters this past week was like re-living a bad dream, as a ghost from a past the club is trying to put behind it re-appeared to slander the Blues as some kind of AFL equivalent to the Cronulla Sharks.

Last Sunday week, the day that the club - and nation - formally farewelled his fellow board member at Carlton during the 1980s, Dick Pratt, at the club’s Princes Park home, the true John Elliott re-emerged publicly in a report in the Sunday Herald Sun.

As part of a bid to rehabilitate his shattered public image, Carlton’s longest serving president has launched his own website and did have his own show on community television.

In order to promote that, he has been spruiking himself at every opportunity.

That included a function in Tasmania where he was reported to have discussed Carlton ``paying off’’ women who he claimed were out to ensnare Blues players with false allegations of rape.

Except for one woman, from a 1999 incident, who he thought may have been a genuine rape victim. Did Elliott comprehend the implications?

Victoria’s police commissioner Simon Overland did and ordered an investigation.

Victim ``Kate’’ re-emerged with an open letter in the Herald Sun seeking justice, although she - and Carlton’s CEOs of the time - deny Elliott’s seedy aspersions that the club offered her or any other woman hush money.

Typically, Elliott didn’t want to know her.

It’s hard to see this episode has done anyone any good but it has come back to hurt many people, like a modern cautionary tale for all associated with Carlton.

Elliott’s callousness has brought back the pain for ``Kate’’ and for Carlton the embarrassing opprobrium his antics brought as it tolerated the final, near-ruinous years of his presidency.

Elliott was a powerful, forceful and sharp operator in business, politics and football during his early years as Carlton president in the 1980s. He was good for the Blues, a man of his time.

He brought - and bought - South Australian stars including Kernahan, Craig Bradley and the unfortunate Peter Motley to the club in one season, 1986 and delivered a flag in 1987.

It took seven more years for the next.

Yet as his personal fortunes began to unravel, as Elliott in the eyes of many became increasingly discredited and erratic, he started to use his position at the the Carlton Football Club for his own ends.

He used the star players, the staff and the supporters to highlight himself. All allowed it.

Typically, one new stand was named the John Elliott Stand despite a popular supporter push for it to be named after on-field legend Bruce Doull.

During the prez’s Supreme Court fraud conspiracy trial, some wags canvassed it could be re-named The John Elliott Enclosure.

He also helped put the club in debt to build another grandstand which the AFL, local residents and even supporters didn’t want in a vain, multi-million dollar bluff to force to league to make Carlton its third AFL ground.

His grand talk about a carpark under Princes Park was as empty and ill-conceived as the Legends Stand, which rarely ever filled with fans.

Elliott believed he could use his political links to ensure Docklands Stadium would never be built.

Carlton ``never’’ re-built its playing list, just its stands.

He puffed away until Quit quit its lucrative anti-smoking sponsorship of the club.

It was delusional stuff, yet no-one seemed to have the will or courage to pull up Big Jack or throw him out of the club. This was a personality cult.

And in this the club’s true supporters, particularly those members who kept re-electing him year after year, bear a large degree of blame for their complicity in the club’s fate after 2001.

Those who followed Carlton’s fortunes closely could see a looming disaster, yet failed to act, content to enjoy the late 1990s success built on the sand of a fragile, ageing player list, growing corporate debt and suspicions over how the club was meeting the salary cap.

The Carlton football community’s failure to face facts came back to bite us all, viciously.

Too many who knew better looked on as Elliott,  his personal and business life crashing from one crisis to the next, used the club as his last personal prop of social respectability and acceptance.

He lost his Liberal Party positions, he lost Elders, he lost his wife, he lost his house, he lost his licence for drink-driving in Royal Parade, he lost investors millions, but it seemed he would never lose that presidency. Each of these statements need to be accurate…..

And in the end, Princes Park lost the battle to survive as a venue as the Legends Stand became a white elephant when opposition supporters refused to attend a perfectly good venue, but one they lambasted and despised as being John Elliott’s ``Caaarlton.’‘

Football supporters are not as stupid as Elliott thinks. They voted with their feet, in their thousands.

Carlton fans may recall the day after Elliott beat the $66 million Elders fraud and conspiracy charges in 1996. That Saturday he turned the Princes Park turf into his personal stage for retribution.

Elliott, while presenting the keys of a sponsor’s new car to a supporter, lectured the crowd like some Mafia boss about justice being done and truth always coming out.

This arrogant snubbing of the justice system made for a tawdry pre-match spectacle.

Elliott added the National Crime Authority to his list of ``enemies’’ and made a fanciful, unrealistic, ultimately futile attempt to sue it for $75 million.

But while he escaped judgement on his alleged actions in the Victorian Supreme Court, the club and its supporters were made to pay big time for his belief that anyone or anything can be bought in this life.

The cheating of the AFL salary cap under his presidency resulted in penalties which crippled this giant club’s ability to recruit, just as the ``buy players’’ mentality left it in the dinosaur age as the competition moved ahead with the national draft and salary cap.

Elliott’s parting gift was making the unthinkable that we had secretly feared happen, and the club’s on-field abilities collapsed to the point where it ``won’’ its first wooden spoon since being founded in 1864.

That, and years of humiliation and instability, were Elliott legacy to his beloved Carlton.

The only downside to the arrival of Richard Pratt and the re-birth of the Blues, is that Dick carried some baggage - and I’m not talking about cartel behaviour, rather
Elliott’s re-appearance on the scene.

His chief achievement has been to dredge up a past which risks the club’s enemies portraying it the AFL’s equivalent of the Cronulla Sharks.

Carlton people are far better than that, but years of misplaced loyalty saw Kernahan always protect his 1980s benefactor.

It took a full week after ``Kate’’ went public and Victoria Police questioned Elliott, then days after Channel 31 axed his show, for Carlton to belatedly act.

Kouta’s old captain Kernahan has at long last cast Elliot out, presumably on the shrewd advice of club CEO Greg Swann.

Better late than never.

But unfortunately `Sticks’, this is one target you should have aimed at years ago.