“For a long time it was easier for me to shut up,' says Cyril Rioli. AFL hawthorn cyrilrioli
It is almost four years since Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett spoke to Cyril Rioli’s wife Shannyn in a manner that ultimately precipitated the champion footballer’s dramatic exit from the football club and the game he had so richly punctuated for more than a decade.
In the days that followed the exchange between Shannyn and a man she barely knew, her husband Cyril missed training and a crisis developed with a number of top-level club meetings involving Kennett, football boss Graham Wright, coach Alastair Clarkson, Rioli’s manager Adam Ramanauskas and teammate Shaun Burgoyne among others. Kennett sent text messages to Rioli and then wrote the Riolis a letter. The couple still keep the letter in their Darwin home.
There were many incidents that built to Rioli’s decision. Twice Shannyn says she prompted the club to improve its cultural awareness, but there was little response. In an incident that still devastates the couple, they say that on an end-of-season trip in 2013 a senior player asked teammates whether the partner of an Indigenous teammate was “also a boong”.
Rioli, the 2015 Norm Smith medallist and a three-time All-Australian, said: “I look back on a lot of things that happened there and it makes me feel all right about myself. There’s a lot of love and I get taken aback a bit about the influence I had. Football boss Wright visited Shannyn and she says he wondered aloud whether the Kennett comments had triggered some bad memories from her childhood. Wright toldhe had no recollection of making this comment. Coach Clarkson contacted Shannyn’s mother and sister in a bid to defuse the situation, offering to fly sister Jordan to Melbourne to intervene.
“Junior only ever wanted to finish his career at Hawthorn,” she said. “He wanted to retire at 30, that was always his plan. But he was retired at 28. I feel guilty. I still cry myself to sleep at night wondering if I made my husband walk away from his career.” The couple believe some of Rioli’s mental struggles since retiring from Hawthorn date to his time at boarding school at Scotch College, where he “lost a part of himself” and then trying too hard at Hawthorn to be “a people pleaser”.
Shannyn said those who called her response to Kennett an over-reaction could never understand its context in the events over the years that preceded it. She recalled when a young Indigenous player - still playing with another club - moved in with the Riolis in late 2012 the club was not happy with the influence of his partner and pushed her to return home.
The club’s subsequent appointment of highly rated Indigenous liaison officer Leon Egan lasted barely one year with Egan only employed one day a week. The club has said the million-dollar funding was largely spent on Hawthorn’s community programs at Katherine. Now the welfare officer role has been mandated as full-time by the AFL and the Hawks appointed Brady Grey two weeks ago.
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