Confident, Contrite And, He Says, Clean

The Age

Thursday December 18, 2008

CHRIS JOHNSTON

BEN Cousins' extraordinary episode of public catharsis yesterday - tightly controlled, but only just - began with a promise. The recovering drug addict and new Richmond AFL player wanted to be "open and honest", pledged the club's media manager, Judith Donnelly. "Ben wants to be as frank as he possibly can."

On paper it was an announcement of the fallen star's sensational AFL comeback. But it would quickly become so much more. Cousins would take questions on footy, she said, while suggesting that he was willing to consider other issues. She didn't name them but there are two: drugs and the underworld.

The timing was exquisite. Painful, almost. It was like the beginning of another chapter in the drama his life has become.

The morning's news was all about Cousins playing footy again, but also about a link, revealed in the Supreme Court, to alleged Melbourne underworld figure Angelo "Fat Ange" Venditti, who is accused of organising a contract on the life of a gangland drug dealer.

Police surveillance showed Cousins and Venditti spoke on the telephone earlier this year. Venditti is linked to others Cousins has associated with - Perth underworld figure John Kizon and Sydney man Fabian Quaid, charged this year with trafficking 45 kilograms of ecstasy.

So here Cousins was and Channel Nine was televising live. His combative manager, Ricky Nixon, would try in vain to stay out of the spotlight and stay out of people's faces. The mood was intense and expectant.

Cousins came dressed down, which was a development. Just the Tigers' shirt, plain jeans and runners. Neither was he wearing the self-satisfied smirk that has blighted his often disastrous media appearances until now. He looked confident but he also looked contrite. He looked poised to actually offer something meaningful.

First up, the Brownlow medallist said he felt "resurrected" - risen from the dead. He was grateful to Richmond for that. His year-long suspension for drug use had been "humbling".

Then the dark stuff began. No matter how wonderful a sportsman he has been or may be again, there's always dirt with Cousins.

Right now, he said, he was "very early on in my recovery". Rehabilitation, for him, meant "addicts helping other addicts" and "learning about situations I can put myself in and some I can't."

He did not want to elaborate on when he last used drugs, "but I can say I'm clean and positioned well for kicking off the next 12 months".

The changes he had made to his lifestyle were things he was still "coming to terms with". He was trying to lead a "normal" lifestyle and escape the "harsh reality of my affliction".

He revealed that early in his career he resented being held up as a role model and that he felt like a fraud because he was "leading a a bit of a double life".

Cousins was inevitably asked about the police surveillance that emerged during the bail hearing for Venditti. It wasn't as if, at this moment, with the promises of openness and honesty offered from the outset, that he was going to get away with sharing only something of his drug issues and then chatting about his hamstring.

He took the hard question with good grace. It was a "six degrees of separation" thing, he said, and through his "hard times" he had been linked with others who had also fallen on "hard times". What people didn't know, he said, was that some of his associations were "born out of sincere friendship", a common thread between those suffering "hard times".

The same reporter, Peter Morris from Channel Seven, who covers crime stories, then asked Cousins if he knew Venditti. Cousins said he did, like lots of people in footy did, but the relationship was not of a criminal nature.

Morris then asked Cousins if he knew Kizon. At which point Nixon - the manager - emerged from the shadows. "Have you actually got a footy question," he said to Morris. "Because you're being a knob at the moment."

Morris let others take over. There was a sense that it was getting edgy and that Nixon was the type of minder who would pull the plug on an important news conference before it was properly under way.

But there was also a nagging sense that Cousins, if given the opportunity, would have answered the Kizon question. There was a nagging sense that he would have answered anything, if there was the time and the place to ask.

© 2008 The Age

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