The goal posts are the same distance apart at every ground, parallax notwithstanding. Same surface, too, and same balls. But sometimes you would swear they are as alike to kick as bricks, beer cans and balloons, and that the footballers who kick them are unwitting dupes in an episode of Candid Camera, and that when they are done, someone will jump out and show them how a stunt ball has tricked them all.
Think back over this season. There's Stevie J, still slotting them from the boundary line, left and right, this pocket and and that, but there is also Travis Cloke, missing a set shot from 10 metres out at Geelong, an outcome so grimly predictable that opponent Ryan Gardiner could not even bring himself to rub Cloke's face in it, as per long tradition. There's Jesse Hogan, kicking to three slips and a gully at the MCG, but on the same ground there is Sam Lloyd, coolly drilling a post-siren winner from 50 metres out, high, handsome and with just a hint of draw, as if he had been doing it all his life.
Ghosts, gremlins and memories shadow them all. A recruiter saw Cloke's wide and remembered it from his Yarra Valley Grammar days, half a lifetime ago. Others watch Hogan's scatterings and have flashbacks to his time with the Colts in Perth. But for Lloyd, there was no sense of being possessed, only self-possessed. Six years ago, when just 20, he kicked 105 goals for Deniliquin, and has been kicking them for someone, somewhere, ever since. It turns out he has been doing it all his life.
Between these several stools looms Mason Cox, of Collingwood via Flower Mound, Texas, and Oklahoma State. No history weighs here, no habits, no conceits. As recently as two years ago, he hadn't heard of AFL football, or clapped eyes on a Sherrin, let alone kicked one. He had played one sport where he kicked a round ball, another where he handled a different round ball, and now he had an out-of-round ball and had to try to do both at the same time. Getting it or kicking it, both were maddening, a reminder of Irishman's Tadgh Kennelly's characterisation of the ball in his early days pursuit of it, 15 or so years ago, as like a rabbit that bounced away whenever he got near it.
You can Google Cox in a trial at North Melbourne when this whole crazy adventure began. The effect is quite comical, like a 211-centimetre Little Leaguer. But, remember, in AFL terms, he was six weeks old then.
Cox admitted that he found kicking the hardest part, closely followed by bouncing and handballing, and that's before you get to marking, the deliberate rule or the Coodabeens. Small wonder that an American blogger, tuning into Cox's AFL debut last month, remarked in bemusement that it looked like several sports being played at the same time in the same place, and asked as Cox himself once might have asked: "What is going on?"
But Cox had one big advantage, the same edge Jim Stynes had when he embarked on singular journey from Irish brainwave to AFL legend 30 years ago. He had a fearful amount to learn, but nothing to unlearn. He had not grown up like everyone else in his new cohort, trying to kick around right-angle corners like Stevie J, or over wheat silos like Billy Brownless, or on big, wide-radius, hook-footed arcs like Buddy Franklin, along the way developing tics, peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that would drive their new AFL coaches mad. He had no bad kicking habits, because he had no kicking habits at all.
What he did have was insurmountable height, a classy athletic background, an exceptional work ethic and an uncanny ability to learn and assimilate quickly the mechanics of the game. He has an engineering degree; he pulls things apart in his mind and puts them back together. He understands structures. "Coming from basketball I know what it is like," said captain Scott Pendlebury. "You at a football playbook and it is pretty simple compared to a basketball playbook. He picked up our structures pretty quickly. In basketball, you play off the back of structures."
Big picture: Cox has never been lost out on an AFL ground the way even native-born footballers sometimes are. As he settles into the Collingwood team, whatever might be lost in translation, nothing will be in transition. "He's from America, he's played five games and he understands what we want," said Pendlebury, "so there's no excuse for anyone else." Small picture: overnight, he learnt to kick.
When Cox signed with Collingwood in mid-2014, he fell into the care of assistant coach Anthony Rocca and development coach Craig McRae. They saw rawness, but also talent. "It was almost like trying to teach an Auskicker," said Rocca.
They sent him on his travelling way with a bag of footballs and a few basic tips, foremost among them about the importance of the ball drop. For a man of his height, it is a long way down, over which journey much can go awry. It is not enough to get boot to ball; it must be middle of boot to point of ball. At least it has a point. A round ball is harder to kick straight than a spheroid, and it is noteworthy that the Irish connection in AFL football all have been good kicks.
Cox took away his homework and sent McRae video updates from around the world. The first was from an unidentified location in Europe. "I could hear the chopping of wood in the background," McRae said. "He was on some farm. I've still got that footage. He was still doing double-handed drops. But he was concentrating on the ball drop." Back in Australia in October that year, the rest of the list was on annual leave, and Cox had McRae and Rocca undividedly to himself. They put in the hours, booked and unbooked. Three sessions a week indoors, one outdoors, exposed to the elements. "I learnt about Mason that he's a great problem solver," said McRae. "He finds answers. Give him a good framework, and then stay out of the way. If he makes a mistake, let him fix it."
Rocca watched as Cox worked through his frustration. "One thing we picked up early on: even without proper technique, he could kick the ball a long way," he said. One day, after a vexing session on the delicate craft of short kicking, Rocca told him to forget the fine points and just kick the ball as far as he could. "Fifty-five metres out, no worries at all," he said. "They'd float through, most of them. But the power was astonishing."
Like McRae, Rocca noticed how smartly Cox would correct himself. "That's the best thing you can have, especially with goalkicking," he said. "If you can correct yourself quickly, you're on the path to kicking the next one. He does." Like Rocca, McRae saw innate kicking talent. "One session, we were outside, experimenting with some movement," he said. "I'd run on a 45 [degree angle], 40 metres away, and he'd just hit me, without moving. I was thinking, seven-foot-tall guys aren't meant to do that."
McRae and Cox went to every final, and other games, too, studying Aaron Sandilands live and Dean Cox on tape. By the time the full squad reconvened late in 2014, Cox was ready to join in. Bit by bit, his game clicked. If anyone at Collingwood worried that the physicality of AFL would deter Cox, they were soon disabused. Rocca said that several times in early pre-season manoeuvres, he made slide-tackles, soccer-style. "We had to pull him up on that," he said. From where Rocca watched last week, Geelong's defence tried to rough up Cox. "They had a bit of a target on Mason," he said. "But he was fine. He's got an appetite for it."
Rocca still coaches Cox. McRae no longer is at Collingwood, but he and Cox are neighbours and remain friends. To McRae, the strangest part of that memorable, first-minute, hello-world goal on Anzac Day was that it wasn't strange at all; he and Cox had rehearsed it together 1000 times. "I watch him as much as I can," he said. "I'm proud of him, very proud."
Kicking is so unthinkingly at the heart of the game that no one thinks about it much. But let's face it: kicking is all. Hawthorn's whole game is to get the ball into the hands of the kickers, and they've won the last three premierships. Conversely, in Cox's team are two blokes who can't or won't trust themselves to kick the ball at all.
Cox kicks as a matter of course. He now outkicks his famously long-kicking tutor; this Rocca ruefully admits. He teaches kicking to Auskickers who have been playing the game for longer than he has known about it, as he noted in a playful tweet during the week. Against Geelong last week, he kicked when even his coach thought he should have handballed. His least defence was also his best: it went through for a goal, this in the week when footy's greatest non-handpassing goalkicker, Kevin Bartlett, was announced as the next to be cast in bronze at the MCG. Probably without even knowing it, Cox had all the moral ascendancy.
You would not call Cox an elegant kick, and you never will. Nor would you have called Stynes' kicking action a work of art, even in his Brownlow Medal heyday. But it was effective, grooved and machined for the task. Cox is a tall, gangling man putting boot to ball with manufactured method, so that you can almost hear him talking himself through the steps, in Rocca's and McRae's words, as he does: "Hold, low drop, release, follow through."
But mostly, it goes as his brief, unprecedented, extraordinary career has gone, the shortest and truest path there is, in a straight line.
