Darkness descends. The six-lane highway stretches forth like a never-ending tentacle lined by street lights and twinkling shop windows. Daryn "Crezza" Cresswell glances down at his two hands gripping the steering wheel, at his chewed fingernails.
He's on the white-knuckle express from his home in Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast, still more than a hour's drive away, his mission to retrieve nearly $200,000 in gambling debts owed to him by a former golfing buddy, Peter Smith, who's been playing cat and mouse with him for weeks. While Cresswell was still on his winning streak, before his luck came crashing down like a meteor, he had deposited large sums of money into Smith's overdrawn betting account, blindly believing that the Sunshine Coast real estate agent, who'd sold him two investment properties, would pay him back. No matter that Smith was a man, like himself, totally possessed by the gambling demon. No matter that Cresswell's wife won't let this bloke in their house. Cresswell believes that Smith is the one man who can save his bacon. "No more f...ing games," he had barked to Smith in a phone conversation earlier in the day. "I want my money back - or there'll be consequences."
How did an occasional punt on the horses during his football career metastasise into a full-blown, pathological gambling problem after it? How did his circle of footy mates get replaced by a posse of loan sharks; his once-loving wife turn into an angry and bitter woman? It had taken just over two years for Cresswell to get himself into this mess, to accrue close to a million bucks in gambling debts.
He recalls that frenzied Saturday only months earlier, which had turned into a day-long machine gun blast of $1000, $5000 and $10,000 wagers to his bookie over the phone, a grand total of $250,000. He'd been suckered by gambling's most basic calculus: lots of smaller bets = one big loss. But how to resist the glorious thrill of it all? The euphoric charge of a big win? The punch to the throat of a big loss? It was just like being back on the footy field.
The next bet will be his salvation, he's sure of it. Except that now he's drained his homes of every last cent of equity, racked up enormous credit-card debts, and is sponging off mates to buy birthday presents for his three kids.
It wasn't supposed to be like this, not for a bloke with a celebrated 11-year career with the Sydney Swans, one of a posse of players whose nicknames precede them - "Plugger" (Tony Lockett), "Roosy" (Paul Roos), "Dunks" (Andrew Dunkley), and "Swotta" (Wayne Schwass). In his glory days with the Swans in the mid- to late 1990s, Cresswell was raking in $200,000 a season and amassing an impressive property portfolio, including a $1.7 million house on the Brisbane river - all later vapourised by his two-year love affair with gambling.
Although never one of the AFL's marquee players, Cresswell was highly respected as a workhorse, an aggressive midfielder who, at his best, could affect the tempo of a game, making average teammates seem good and good ones seem great, helping to lift the Swans from their deep slump in the early '90s to a grand final berth in 1996. Later, as an assistant coach, first with Geelong and then with the Brisbane Lions, he'd proved himself an astute strategist destined for distinction as a senior coach. But it's a different altar he's worshipping at now.
The chk-chk-chk of passing traffic slows and Cresswell turns into the suburb of Marcoola, pulling up in front of a grey brick McMansion. An ashen-faced Smith opens the front door on an empty, dark house, its silence as deafening as doom. His wife has shot through with every stick of furniture, he explains, leaving only the marital bed.
A pasty, pudgy man in his late 40s, Smith has always fancied himself as an operator, a smooth talker. But now he looks mangled. Pitiful. Scared. He's no match for the cool-eyed, 183-centimetre tall Cresswell, who is stabbing a finger into his doughy chest. "You need to sort me out, mate, because it's going to be diabolical for me if you don't." Smith says he's got an unencumbered property in Coolum Beach - he'll supply the documents and go guarantor.
Buoyed by the prospect of a financial reprieve, Cresswell leaves, satisfied. But when the documents finally come through after weeks of further coaxing, Cresswell's mate Anthony Dean, a loans officer at his bank, a footy-head and compulsive gambler like himself, delivers the bad news that there's a massive mortgage hanging over the property.
Now threatening blue murder, Cresswell tracks down Smith once more, and this time he offers up the details of another property at Coolum he claims he owns outright and has been hiding from his wife during divorce proceedings. All Cresswell has to do is organise the loan documents on his behalf and he'll sign them. "Okay, send the details through right f...ing now," Cresswell blasts. And so Cresswell goes back to his mate Deany at the bank, who has already advanced him $50,000 without requiring so much as a signature, and asks him whether he can "sort" the application. But when the time comes to sign these new mortgage documents, Smith can only be contacted by phone - in Bundaberg.
"I'm away for a while" he tells Cresswell. "Just sign 'Peter Smith', mate."
"But I don't know how to sign your signature, mate," replies Cresswell.
"Just sign 'Peter Richard Smith', mate."
What Cresswell doesn't know is that the moment he forges that signature - on November 24, 2005 - he's signing up for a future prison sentence. The designated house in Coolum belongs not to the real estate agent Peter Richard Smith, as he claims, but to another bloke living on the Sunshine Coast who shares his name, which Smith has harvested from his real estate agent's database. The ruse will not be found out until three years later, when the real owner of the house applies to purchase an investment property and finds to his horror a mortgage attached to his house.
But of course Cresswell can't read the future. He would have done things far differently if he'd known that, four years down the track, in 2009, he'd be sharing the back of a police paddy wagon with a biker involved in a grisly Sydney airport murder, whose tips for surviving prison's pecking order - never borrow; never lend; if someone has a go at you, have a go back, only harder - will stick with him. But then again, Cresswell, convicted of two counts of aggravated fraud, will have the better part of a year in jail to muse on all the misdeeds and mishaps of the five dark years leading up to his imprisonment in 2010. Bankruptcy. A sexual assault allegation. Two suicide attempts. A broken marriage. And finally, only two weeks after he goes behind bars, a terrible family tragedy he'll never get over.
Cresswell points to different areas on his battered knees. A shin bone cut out and moved here. Two big screws inserted there. "My right knee isn't too bad," he says, looking down, "but the left is terrible. I need an operation if I'm to start running properly again." He's had 20 operations in all, 16 during his football career. Cheek bone. Jaw. Groin. Broken hand. "Many footy players wind up with knees like this," he sighs.
We're sitting in the neat, airy living room of his rented home in Coolangatta, located in one of those sprawling housing estates that could be anywhere in Australia, lined with indistinguishable brick veneer mansions standing shoulder to shoulder in spotless streets. Serving a home-made quiche is his second wife, Joanne - a blonde, dimpled, former netball champion from Newcastle, England, who's been Cresswell's rock since they met in Tasmania in 2008 (the pair married in 2011). "For the price of a one-bedroom unit on the north shore in Sydney, we can get a place this size here," says the amiable 33-year-old in her soft Geordie accent, as she pounds out a quick email on her laptop. (It's no surprise to learn, given Cresswell's financial history, that Joanne is now in charge of the bank accounts of the landscaping business they've been running since his release two years ago.)
But back to Cresswell's knees. AFL fans will remember that sickening moment in 1997 when he sat on the field, his face wrenched with agony, using his right hand to thump his dislocated left kneecap again and again until it clicked back into place. The spectacle of him limping off the field unaided ("I don't believe in stretchers," he tells me) made the evening news, and sank into football folklore, but to this day he can't understand what all the hoopla was about. "It happened in the first quarter; it was a pretty wet field and I went to turn - my foot got stuck, my body twisted and my kneecap popped out. All I could think was, 'Get it back in, get it back in', the pain was so bad," he shrugs.
While reflecting on his career, his later descent into gambling, and several other personally distressing periods along the way, Cresswell proves to be a slightly guarded speaker, perhaps burned by the press one too many times. Occasionally, his deeply furrowed brow unfurrows to reveal a more relaxed expression, but he's a man who looks older than his 42 years. While in prison, between Friday night fist fights and marathon gym sessions, he found solace in writing poetry, engraving a sweet ode to Joanne on a leadlight mirror he crafted, and drafting the words for a tattoo that runs in script down the left side of his torso: "Enjoy the present/Don't dwell on the past/No time for regrets/As time goes so fast."
Reach back into Cresswell's childhood and you'll soon see where his grit and determination came from. Cresswell grew up with three older brothers and two sisters in the great barren hills around Queenstown, Tasmania, where his father worked as a miner and later as a service station proprietor, and his mother as a bus driver. At the age of four, Daryn was diagnosed with Perthes disease, a degeneration of the hip joint that meant he had to spend months in traction in a Hobart hospital before being put in plaster for the better part of a year.
Advised by doctors against ever participating in contact sport, he was soon playing footy with his three older brothers in the loose grey gravel of the local sporting grounds (grassless because of pollution from the mines) or in the front yard of their weatherboard cottage behind the servo. "It used to sting like hell showering afterwards from all the cuts," he laughs.
By this time, his family had already lost two boys: infant Scott, who drowned three years before Daryn was born, and baby Brad, who succumbed to SIDS while Daryn was still a toddler. "For all the sadness my parents must have felt in the early part of my life, I don't remember black clouds hovering over the family," he recalls. "Strangely enough, the death of my brothers only hit me hard in recent years." (This was no doubt sparked by the sudden death of another brother, Paul, a "father figure" to Daryn, from a burst hiatal hernia in 2006.)
After the servo went up in flames one night - badly burning his dad Brian, who vainly battled the flames - the family moved to the fishing town of Strahan on Tasmania's west coast, where his old man became a cray fisherman, and where the 12-year-old Cresswell joined the Zeehan Bulldogs, dreaming he'd be another Peter Bosustow, one of his Carlton heroes. Of all his footy-mad brothers, it quickly became obvious that it was the young Daryn who had the fire in his belly. "It was a really tough, hard league in our part of the world," he recalls. "I loved the ferocity of it all, the camaraderie, the bravery."
His perception of football as a battlefield was cemented when Cresswell was dragged "kickin' and screamin' " to Hobart when he was 14, where he made his mark at the Glenorchy and North Hobart football clubs. At age 19, he was drafted by Geelong and on the fast track to being a Cat - or so he thought. His stint with the Geelong reserves barely lasted three months. "My attitude was terrible. I thought I was special. But I was missing my family and just wasn't ready." When he returned to Hobart, Cresswell realised in an instant the terrible mistake he'd made.
So when the Sydney Swans came calling after the mid-season draft of 1992, when he'd just turned 21, Cresswell was primed and raring to go. At that time the Swannies had scratched up just three wins in the season under coach Ron Barassi, but its fortunes were about to rise, particularly after Paul Roos and Tony Lockett were recruited in 1994. It was the arrival of coach Rodney "Rocket" Eade in 1996, a former Glenorchy player like Cresswell, that really set the team on fire. "He took my game to another level," says Cresswell. "We went from the bottom of the ladder to virtually the top in one year." (The Swans made the grand final in 1996 and the finals in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2001, before Cresswell retired at the end of 2003.)
He recalls the grand final match of 1996 - even though the Swannies went down to North Melbourne - as one of the happiest moments in his playing career, in part because the club flew his proud-as-punch parents up from Tasmania. "The night before the game, my old man apparently ducked down to the hotel bar. When they found out he was my dad, they didn't let him pay for a drink." Sadly, within six weeks of that joyous time, Brian Cresswell died in a boating accident. "I got into the booze after Dad died," muses Cresswell. "It took away the pain. But that was long before the gambling bug set in."
If Cresswell had an advantage by dint of his hard work, it came at the cost of a hefty dose of edginess. "I was so uptight before games I couldn't keep any food down, so I'd keep drinking water. Then I'd spend the next 40 minutes or so vomiting, sometimes sticking my fingers down my throat to bring it all up. I'd get to the ground early, be the first to get strapped up, and then I'd pop a couple of Sudafed to keep me alert."
Is he a worrier? "Er, not really," he says defensively, while his wife, standing behind him, nods a vigorous yes. "He gets pretty emotional," she interjects. Did he ever take performance-enhancing drugs? "No, never", he says, fixing me in the eye, as if to say, "I'm aggressive enough without steroids".
"My biggest strength on the field was also my biggest weakness off," he admits. "If challenged, I would just want to fight 'em or beat 'em. But if you want to win, you have to be pretty ruthless".
All this energy and unbridled aggression fed perfectly into the emerging "Bloods" ethos of the Swans - playing for the love of the jersey rather than yourself, a do-or-die team spirit that would reach its mightiest form in the grand final victories of 2005 and 2012. Nonetheless, Cresswell feels something has been lost from the game. Although he won the Swans' Best and Fairest player in 1994, he is an unapologetic advocate for bringing back the biff. "AFL is becoming like netball," he scoffs. "I definitely think the game is over-umpired. It's quicker now, and you have to be a lot fitter, but they've taken a lot of the physical contest out of the game."
It's known that Cresswell had a significant falling out with some of the senior Swans staff late in his Sydney career, and the loss of mentor Rodney Eade, who resigned in 2002 and was replaced by Paul Roos, hit him hard. "I didn't enjoy my last year there because of the politics around the coach," he says. Many of the players he grew up with at the Swans had gone and he felt old among a much younger side. Then came the injury that ends many a football career: the dreaded achilles.
The late afternoon light is casting long shadows across the living room. "It was the biggest mistake of my life, leaving my coaching job at Geelong to move to Brisbane," says Cresswell. Under pressure from his first wife Donna, who hated Geelong and wanted to move back close to her family in Queensland, Cresswell accepted a less prestigious gig as assistant to Leigh Matthews at the Brisbane Lions, where he found himself shifting witch's hats for a coach not renowned for delegating or consulting. Cresswell, bored and idle, began gambling in earnest. It was 2005, and his descent had begun.
His wagers were always on the racetrack ("I hate the pokies") and intensified after he bought shares in two racehorses. With a solitary exception: Cresswell claims a $200 bet on the Swans to win a match against Carlton back in 2003 was a one-off. "It was just a single-win bet - a small wager, which I'd never do if I was playin' today," he declares (the AFL has since introduced regulations banning betting by players and coaches on its matches). He adds that he was disappointed when the Sunday Night TV program, which ran a story on him shortly after his release from prison, made this bet the angle of its story, although he didn't turn down the $20,000 cheque for the interview ("It helped me set up the landscaping business and start again").
But it's a big step from being keen on a punt to committing fraud. What on earth possessed him to forge the signature on those loan documents in the first place? Surely he knew it was illegal. "You have to remember that I'd known Peter Smith for a long time; I thought we were mates. On the house documents, it said Peter Richard Smith. Like, give me a break, how on earth was I to know that there were two Peter Richard Smiths living on the Sunshine Coast? I wasn't in a fit state of mind, I was desperate, so I signed."
In this version of events, Cresswell has a rather unique and compelling supporter: the detective of 30 years standing who arrested him in Sydney in 2009 and extradited him back to Queensland. "I was in the CIB on the Sunshine Coast when the Cresswell case landed on my desk," recalls Aaron Butler, who recently left the force. "The only reason Cresswell was charged was because he signed those documents. Peter Smith had already committed offences prior to Cresswell, but hadn't spent any time in prison; by the time he was brought in to be cross-examined in Daryn's case, he was already in jail for other fraud and embezzlement charges."
Butler doesn't mince his words, describing the former real estate agent as a "slimy turd", and the loans officer at the bank who processed the mortgage documents as a "very dodgy" character, who was sacked within months of the loan being approved. "The bank, too, bears responsibility in this," says Butler. "One of the biggest regrets of my police career was having to charge Cresswell. The wrong man went to jail".
But it was another, seedier incident that really derailed Cresswell's promising ascent as a coach. At the height of his gambling addiction in 2006, he wound up drunk one night at Brisbane's "jock" hotel, the Story Bridge, where he met an attractive Kiwi backpacker. Cresswell booked them into a room at the Carlton Crest Hotel, but tippy-toed out in the early hours of the morning to return to his wife's bed. Then, remembering with a thunderbolt that his credit card was maxed out, he returned to the hotel just after dawn to pay the bill in cash. He escorted the woman through the lobby, told her he would bring his car around, but in a sudden unchivalrous moment - brought on by fear he would be recognised - he left her standing on the footpath. The woman went to the police station later in the day claiming she'd been sexually assaulted. Although she dropped the charges within five days, the resulting newspaper stories almost certainly cost Cresswell a gig coaching St Kilda.
A move back to Tasmania in 2007 to coach the Tasmanian Devils in the VFL failed to salvage Cresswell's marriage or his career. By this time, no longer able to afford big bets, he was scavenging money off his own players, leaving a trail of broken friendships. "I'd become a juggler and a liar," he says ruefully. "I was at rock bottom." And so he tried to end it all twice, first with a bottle of pills, waking up two hours later with severe stomach cramps and diarrhoea. Then, while out jogging one night, he tried to throw himself in front of a truck, thinking that at least this way his kids would get his life insurance if he could make it look like an accident. But at the last minute, against screeching brakes, he pulled himself back.
And then he was given a lifeline in the form of a new woman in his life, Joanne Foster. The couple met in early 2008 when they worked in the same Hobart building, Joanne for Netball Australia and Cresswell for the Tasmanian AFL. But even here deceit threatened to unravel their blossoming relationship. "He told me he was separated from his wife and living at a mate's place, but after he kept coming to my flat and making excuses why we couldn't go to his, I started asking questions," says Joanne. "But by the time I found out he was lying to me we'd quit our jobs and were on a plane to England."
Worried that Cresswell seemed to be on the brink of a breakdown (although she still had no idea its source was gambling), Joanne had suggested they get away to England for three months. "The plane had just taken off, and he told me he'd just left his wife. 'What do you mean you just left her?' I demanded. I really didn't know what to feel. I knew he was the one for me but I didn't like the way he was handling things."
Nor for that matter did Cresswell's mother, Clare. "To leave your children like that, to not tell your wife where you were going, I was pretty disappointed in him," she says. "It was on the front page of The [Hobart] Mercury, and I had a friend calling me up and saying they'd seen him on a plane with another woman."
To make matters worse, for reasons better known to himself, Cresswell lied to his family when he called them from London, claiming he was in Melbourne. His bizarre actions - shameful as they were - were the product of a desperate man, insists Joanne. "He was at breaking point. I honestly believe he wouldn't be here today if he hadn't got away."
After moving to Sydney in 2008, Cresswell sought the help of a psychologist specialising in gambling addiction. "He told me that because I took it up so late in life, it would be easier for me to give it up. It was part of my life when I was 35 and 36, rather than something that stretched on for 10 or 15 years. But it was still a long battle."
Jeff Bond, a former head psychologist with the Australian Institute of Sport, believes footballers are especially vulnerable to gambling addiction, pointing to examples such as Brendan Fevola, because they're risk takers and fearless by nature. "Footballers are adrenalin junkies, which is a key reason why it's so hard for them to retire," he notes. "Gambling is a relatively safe way for them to get this competitive fix once their playing days are over."
A personality such as Cresswell's, with an inherent predisposition for turning almost any game, from golf to poker, into a wagering opportunity, is a textbook example of this, he says. But Bond also believes that gambling, particularly horse racing, is more entrenched in the AFL than any other football code. "When I was working with the AFL in Melbourne, it seemed like just about every second person in authority, from coaches to managers, had an interest in horse racing." Bond fears that little will change until the AFL begins to view gambling with the same alarm it directs at drug and alcohol abuse.
Cresswell concurs. "Gambling is a real problem in the AFL," he says. "I think it should be discouraged much more than it is." He complains that he received little or no support from the AFL Players Association. "I didn't go looking for help, but nor did they offer it," he says. "I didn't hear from them." As for the Sydney Swans, "I don't owe them anything, and they don't owe me anything."
It's an unseasonably warm winter's evening in Coolangatta and an assorted group of players, a collection of the shy and the brash, the buffed and the skinny, run into the sheds. Last year, Cresswell took this polyglot team, Palm Beach Currumbin, to the grand final, even if the match descended into an all-in brawl in the fourth quarter, for which he blamed match officials. But tonight, as if to remind his team that roughneck on-field shenanigans are part of the game, he's inscribed two words - "aggression" and "spoils" - on the whiteboard. "We need to push harder," he says.
"Daryn is like the Pied Piper with these kids - he's tough but fair," says Gavin Power, head recruiter of the Palm Beach Currumbin club. "They know Daryn, they know his story, and they respect him for coming out the other side."
The football world tends to be very forgiving of its favourite sons. It's crystal clear that Cresswell, through his coaching and new landscaping business, is rebuilding his life. If meeting Joanne provided the determination he needed to fight the gambling bug, it was the suicide of his 13-year-old nephew Nathan, just two weeks after he went to prison, that provided a devastating wake-up call to put his family first. During his time back in Tasmania, Cresswell had spent quite a bit of time with Nathan, who was still suffering badly from the death of his dad, Daryn's brother Paul. "He left a note," says Cresswell, after a long pause. "It said that he just wanted to be with his dad."
Another painful pause. "I was overcome with guilt because I hadn't been there for him, my gambling problems had taken me away. I'll have to live with that now for the rest of my life."
Gambling Help Line: 1800 858 858.
Lifeline: 13 11 14.
You can read about Cresswell's time in jail in his book, Crezza: From AFL Glory to Prison and the Long Road to Redemption (Random House).
@gregcallaghan1
This article originally appeared in Good Weekend. Like Good Weekend on Facebook to get regular updates on upcoming stories and events.
