Bewy's Banter – Shaun Bewick Column Round 9

GROWING up myself and Rohan were always naturally going to play at West Perth and we became the fourth generation in our family to play there, but we both now are creating our own paths at South Fremantle and my twin brother at the Brisbane Lions in the AFL.

I guess playing football was always going to happen given the way we grew up in such a strong football family.

Some of my earliest memories were when dad (Corry) was captain-coach at North Beach and it's amazing the connections you make. There was always another kid hanging around with me and Rohan, and it turns out that it was Brock Higgins and now I'm playing with him here at South Fremantle. We became really good friends and now 18 or 20 years later we are playing in the same team.

From early on, I remember always being down at the footy club with dad and I think it was a natural that me and Rohan would end up playing footy. Dad had finished at West Perth before I can remember anything about his time there, but as soon as I started taking any slight interest in footy, because of my last name it all revolved around uncle Darren from what he did at Essendon. I really picked up the love of the game from watching him play in the AFL.

We didn’t get attention because of the Bewick name at school so much, but in community footy we obviously were recognised for being Bewicks. Dad was our coach in the juniors, but a lot of people would tease us about ending up playing at West Perth because we are Bewicks and stuff like that. It didn’t happen so much at school and it wasn’t until we got into playing colts football at West Perth that Bewick factor really came about where focus came on to us because of our surnames.

Dad has been involved in football his whole life. He played 128 games for West Perth and kicked 195 goals. He was coach of our Kingsley team for a long time, he coached at North Beach, he coached out at York for a while and was coach of the West Perth 16s for five years before finishing up there the same year that I finished at West Perth. From when I was about 12 to almost 20, he was always my coach or helping with my footy in some way.

He would still come down to senior training a couple of times a year to do some goal kicking work with Anthony Tsalikis and a few of the other forwards. He would always have some form of involvement one way or the other. He is a life member at West Perth and was always welcome around the club in the early stages of my career there.

Dad's connection started early. His mum has been a West Perth supporter just about her whole life and her husband Ron played 115 games for West Perth, played in the 1960 premireship and was involved in a premiership after he stopped playing, and was on the board and a state selector. He had a lot to do with footy so that's where Nan got that from. Even her dad was Joe Brooker who was the coach of the 1942 premiership team. If you put it that way there have been four generations of Bewicks down at West Perth.

Some guys at West Perth knew about dad and saw his name on the locker and everything, but obviously Darren was the most famous member of the Bewick family. Everyone watched AFL and knew him from that and I loved watching him play for Essendon as well. I am very happy that the red hair didn’t pass on to us, though, he can keep that. He and Glen, another of my uncles, is a red head so we are grateful that it missed a few of us.

Glen even ended up coaching East Perth there for a while. I was still playing colts at the time and he was pretty close to getting the West Perth job when Bill did, but he ended up coaching East Perth. There wasn’t any strange feelings in the family about him coaching the enemy. We were all happy for him to get the chance to coach at that level, I know dad was happy for him, and he got the job after a really good performance coaching the colts. That helped him get his foot in the door at Freo so it was good for him.

I actually only just found out that he also played a season for East Perth in the reserves so maybe he had a bit of blue and black in his blood. Putting all that into it, I don’t think anyone worried about him coaching East Perth given he had already pulled on their jumper.

At the moment, dad is still working for North Melbourne as a scout after doing it for Essendon a long time before that. Glen works for St Kilda as a scout and has been doing that for a couple of years now. Their other brother Richard is also a life member at North Beach and he was my colts coach there, and is still involved in coaching. And Darren is still the coach of the Eastern Rangers in the TAC Cup. So they are all still involved in footy and probably always will be.

When myself and Rohan first got down to West Perth, we were lucky to be top-aged colts so we got to play three years of colts but it both took us a while to adjust. In our first year we didn’t play a game and I ended up playing a game before him. It took us until the last four games of our second year to finally get a colts game so it started very slowly for us. Then the year after as top-aged colts we found our footing a bit more. Then the last month of that year we played a few games in the reserves and from there, Rohan made his debut in Round 1 of 2009 when I was emergency.

Rohan broke his leg that year so he missed a fair bit of footy, but I managed to play four league games later in the year including the final we lost to Swan Districts. I then played 12 games in 2010, but Rohan had a really good year and ended up getting drafted after doing well at the state screenings. He was drafted by Gold Coast and then they swapped Jared Brennan with Brisbane so that's how he ended up there. I still had another year at West Perth after he was drafted, but at the end of 2011 I moved to South Fremantle.

I am still at South Fremantle and he is obviously still at Brisbane Lions so I guess you could say we are building our own reputations outside of West Perth now. In 2012, he probably had his best AFL season and he's now chalked up his 50th game this year and I had a good year in 2012 as well in my first season at South Fremantle. I am up to 56 WAFL games now and he is up to 52 AFL games so since he left for Brisbane, we have ended up playing around the same amount of games at senior level. He just obviously is getting paid a lot more to do it than I am though.

In 2010, we played 10 matches in the league team at West Perth together which was good. Mum and dad enjoyed that chance to watch us together and now it's been a few years since they have been able to do that.

Mum has been to watch a lot more of his games than dad does. She seems to get all the little trips over to Brisbane. She went over to see him last week for Mother's Day. Dad probably gets over to watch him two or three times a year, but mum might go five or six times. After my last game against Claremont, the second it finished they drove home to Joondalup to watch the start of Rohan's game on TV. They do their very best to watch both of us still. Rohan's games definitely take priority for mum.

There's no doubt I would like to play with Rohan again before we finish up. Hopefully Rohan has plenty of years left in the AFL, but he seemed to have his niche spot under Vossy and doesn’t seem to have that anymore under Leppitsch. He is out of contract this year so we will wait and see if he gets another deal at Brisbane or another club.

If he ends up back in WA and out of the AFL, I obviously would love to have him join me at South Fremantle. We probably are missing that type of marking forward player so he would fit in very well in our team and would be a very handy player to have. It's not something I have thought a lot about until now, but I'm sure mum and dad would love to see us play together again. They might want it more than we do, but we would enjoy it as well.

By Shaun Bewick