wegs on pendles
Team Captain
HEATH Shaw has the bloodline to be a good footballer — and to be stupendously loud. He runs true to his pedigree; even among the Shaws, he is regarded as loud, which is no small feat.
He is the quintessential kid at the back of the classroom. Easily bored and more easily distracted, he talks, fidgets and cracks jokes. He is boisterous and confident, but fortunately also funny and charming.
He has the irrepressible enthusiasm of someone with attention deficit disorder. That is unsurprising because that is what he has.
Diagnosed with ADD as a teenager, he took tablets to control the condition but stopped the medication when he joined the AFL as it remains on the competition's list of banned substances. He could seek an exemption, but the medication robs him of his appetite and he loses weight. He thus chooses steady body over steady mind.
"When I was taking it at school, I was down to about 64 kilos in year 11," Shaw says. "I would take two apples and two roll-ups to school and that was all I would eat for the day, so it makes it really hard.
"If I feel it coming on, I just sort of muck around and act out. Some days, I will be hypo and all over the place and then some days, I will be tired and relaxed. It's ups and downs but it is not a real problem. A few of the boys give me s---, saying, 'Take your tablets, mate'. Rhyce is the best for knowing how to deal with me. Mum and Dad couldn't handle it."
This generation of Shaw brothers is four years apart in age but extremely close. They shared bunk beds — Rhyce on the bottom to avoid Heath kicking the top bunk — and until a month or so back, they shared a house.
"When I first moved out of home, I lived by myself for a while and Heath used to come over all the time and stay," Rhyce says. "And when he didn't have his tablets, he was just a muck-up — he couldn't sit still, he just used to keep talking and annoy the s--- out of you. But when he had his tablets, he would clean my house from top to bottom. He wouldn't stop until everything was clean and everything was in the right order, like the cornflakes packet had to be facing a certain way, and he wouldn't talk to me for hours; he would just keep cleaning.
"I know it drives Shane Wakelin and Simon Prestigiacomo mad because they are the two guys that cop it the most from Heath. Wakes and Presty give it back — they have like a love-hate thing going on."
The family wasn't surprised when the ADD diagnosis came through.
"I was not really the golden child," Heath says. "Rhyce and Laine were the golden children — I was always in trouble. It was hard to be the golden child when you kept getting sent to your room.
"When I found out I had ADD in about year 9, I said, 'Mum that's why I was always in trouble, you were picking on me and I have got a disease'," he laughs.
"I think Rhyce was adopted — he looks nothing like us. My sister has olive skin and blonde hair, I have red hair and pale skin and Rhyce has black hair and dark skin, so I think we were all taken from our families when we were younger."
Not an academic type, father Ray admits he was surprised and impressed when at high school, Heath began asking to be taken on a Saturday for extra study.
"We found out later he was on Saturday detentions. We just thought he was being enthusiastic for a change. He had heaps of them and because they were so regular, we didn't twig."
Self-deprecating, Heath Shaw laughs easily and often. He is still called Hughesy by teammates for his resemblance to Dave Hughes the comedian. He has a similar confidence.
The ADD means he is perfectly attuned for the frenzy of the modern game, but not the attendant meetings that consume days between games.
"I sometimes get a bit crazy around (coach) Mick (Malthouse) but he handles it well. I don't know if he realises I have ADD but he probably has a fair idea by now because I can be a bit hypo and a pain in the a---.
"You have got to pick your moments and tone it down in important meetings. A couple of times, I have been kicked by guys telling me to shut up because I am talking away when I shouldn't be. But it is a bit of fun."
He bought a Valiant Charger recently that he hopes to restore. It was an ambitious project, given that he admits to little mechanical knowledge, and thus far has managed only to pull the car apart and has little idea how to put it back together.
"I am not mechanically really any good, but I was really good at ripping everything out of it. I probably should go into demolition or something. I get a bit side-tracked."
GROWING up a Shaw meant many things. Firstly, survival demands a confidence to fight your corner. Losing is unacceptable — particularly to your brother, father or uncle — and diving for a ball in Nan's backyard was a dangerous business.
Ray warned that Sunday cricket matches at his parents said much about all in the family. "The old man used to bury things in the backyard, so you would dive for a catch and Dad had buried a mattress for some reason, and you'd bounce. One day, someone tripped over behind the stumps, and the dog had died and Dad had buried it in the backyard. The soil is pretty hard in Reservoir, so Dad has buried the dog upside down and the bloody dog's paws were sticking up and they had come up out of the ground. There were no easy runs in backyard cricket."
Heath, a left-handed batsman and right-handed bowler, was capable, according to Ray, of playing cricket at a very high level. Sensing his young brother needed to be put in his place, Rhyce sorted Heath out at the nets.
"I came steaming in and hit him in the rib cage with a cricket ball, and he has thrown the bat at me a hundred miles an hour and walked back home with his pads and everything on, crying and cracking the s---s, and he wouldn't come back — I had to carry the rest of the gear home," Rhyce said.
Heath laughs that the matches prepared him for anything that could be said on the field: "We had some monster cricket matches. I am tipping there would have been a couple of worse things said than the Selwood situation."
The competitiveness of the younger Shaw to meet and beat his older brother has been a significant factor in developing the back flanker into a senior AFL player. Rhyce is renowned as one of the hardest workers at the club. Naturally, that means Heath must work harder.
This sibling rivalry boiled over in round three in an animated fight between the pair in the middle of the MCG against Richmond. It startled teammates and opponents, but not either Shaw boy.
Heath is not as quick as Rhyce, but is deceptively fast, despite a Shaw waddle. He won the Gavin Brown Trophy last year for the player best at tackling and other more incidental skills known as one-percenters. Former captain and premiership player Brown enthuses at the young defender's potential.
"He is almost the complete player, really," Brown says. "He is a beautiful kick; he reads the game as good as anyone. He is also a very good one-on-one player, which was the reason he got into the side in the first place — that and his kicking ability. He is getting better and better every year and not just incrementally but in big amounts."
After 32 games, Heath Shaw's greatest ambition is not to overtake his brother, father or uncle Tony in number of games played. His greatest ambition is to beat the least known of his Collingwood playing relatives, Neville. "I just want to get to 44 because my Uncle Neville played 43 and he always gives it to Dad and Uncle Tony, saying, 'You played 146, you played 300 and whatever, but I played 43 good ones, so that is all that counts'."
Perhaps, for the boy with ADD, it is about not trying to concentrate on too many things at once. Keeping it simple, for there is little doubting the desire to knock off big brother, Dad and Uncle Tony. That is a life's work.
And he will certainly tell them about it.
POOR KID I LOVE HIM TO BITS
He is the quintessential kid at the back of the classroom. Easily bored and more easily distracted, he talks, fidgets and cracks jokes. He is boisterous and confident, but fortunately also funny and charming.
He has the irrepressible enthusiasm of someone with attention deficit disorder. That is unsurprising because that is what he has.
Diagnosed with ADD as a teenager, he took tablets to control the condition but stopped the medication when he joined the AFL as it remains on the competition's list of banned substances. He could seek an exemption, but the medication robs him of his appetite and he loses weight. He thus chooses steady body over steady mind.
"When I was taking it at school, I was down to about 64 kilos in year 11," Shaw says. "I would take two apples and two roll-ups to school and that was all I would eat for the day, so it makes it really hard.
"If I feel it coming on, I just sort of muck around and act out. Some days, I will be hypo and all over the place and then some days, I will be tired and relaxed. It's ups and downs but it is not a real problem. A few of the boys give me s---, saying, 'Take your tablets, mate'. Rhyce is the best for knowing how to deal with me. Mum and Dad couldn't handle it."
This generation of Shaw brothers is four years apart in age but extremely close. They shared bunk beds — Rhyce on the bottom to avoid Heath kicking the top bunk — and until a month or so back, they shared a house.
"When I first moved out of home, I lived by myself for a while and Heath used to come over all the time and stay," Rhyce says. "And when he didn't have his tablets, he was just a muck-up — he couldn't sit still, he just used to keep talking and annoy the s--- out of you. But when he had his tablets, he would clean my house from top to bottom. He wouldn't stop until everything was clean and everything was in the right order, like the cornflakes packet had to be facing a certain way, and he wouldn't talk to me for hours; he would just keep cleaning.
"I know it drives Shane Wakelin and Simon Prestigiacomo mad because they are the two guys that cop it the most from Heath. Wakes and Presty give it back — they have like a love-hate thing going on."
The family wasn't surprised when the ADD diagnosis came through.
"I was not really the golden child," Heath says. "Rhyce and Laine were the golden children — I was always in trouble. It was hard to be the golden child when you kept getting sent to your room.
"When I found out I had ADD in about year 9, I said, 'Mum that's why I was always in trouble, you were picking on me and I have got a disease'," he laughs.
"I think Rhyce was adopted — he looks nothing like us. My sister has olive skin and blonde hair, I have red hair and pale skin and Rhyce has black hair and dark skin, so I think we were all taken from our families when we were younger."
Not an academic type, father Ray admits he was surprised and impressed when at high school, Heath began asking to be taken on a Saturday for extra study.
"We found out later he was on Saturday detentions. We just thought he was being enthusiastic for a change. He had heaps of them and because they were so regular, we didn't twig."
Self-deprecating, Heath Shaw laughs easily and often. He is still called Hughesy by teammates for his resemblance to Dave Hughes the comedian. He has a similar confidence.
The ADD means he is perfectly attuned for the frenzy of the modern game, but not the attendant meetings that consume days between games.
"I sometimes get a bit crazy around (coach) Mick (Malthouse) but he handles it well. I don't know if he realises I have ADD but he probably has a fair idea by now because I can be a bit hypo and a pain in the a---.
"You have got to pick your moments and tone it down in important meetings. A couple of times, I have been kicked by guys telling me to shut up because I am talking away when I shouldn't be. But it is a bit of fun."
He bought a Valiant Charger recently that he hopes to restore. It was an ambitious project, given that he admits to little mechanical knowledge, and thus far has managed only to pull the car apart and has little idea how to put it back together.
"I am not mechanically really any good, but I was really good at ripping everything out of it. I probably should go into demolition or something. I get a bit side-tracked."
GROWING up a Shaw meant many things. Firstly, survival demands a confidence to fight your corner. Losing is unacceptable — particularly to your brother, father or uncle — and diving for a ball in Nan's backyard was a dangerous business.
Ray warned that Sunday cricket matches at his parents said much about all in the family. "The old man used to bury things in the backyard, so you would dive for a catch and Dad had buried a mattress for some reason, and you'd bounce. One day, someone tripped over behind the stumps, and the dog had died and Dad had buried it in the backyard. The soil is pretty hard in Reservoir, so Dad has buried the dog upside down and the bloody dog's paws were sticking up and they had come up out of the ground. There were no easy runs in backyard cricket."
Heath, a left-handed batsman and right-handed bowler, was capable, according to Ray, of playing cricket at a very high level. Sensing his young brother needed to be put in his place, Rhyce sorted Heath out at the nets.
"I came steaming in and hit him in the rib cage with a cricket ball, and he has thrown the bat at me a hundred miles an hour and walked back home with his pads and everything on, crying and cracking the s---s, and he wouldn't come back — I had to carry the rest of the gear home," Rhyce said.
Heath laughs that the matches prepared him for anything that could be said on the field: "We had some monster cricket matches. I am tipping there would have been a couple of worse things said than the Selwood situation."
The competitiveness of the younger Shaw to meet and beat his older brother has been a significant factor in developing the back flanker into a senior AFL player. Rhyce is renowned as one of the hardest workers at the club. Naturally, that means Heath must work harder.
This sibling rivalry boiled over in round three in an animated fight between the pair in the middle of the MCG against Richmond. It startled teammates and opponents, but not either Shaw boy.
Heath is not as quick as Rhyce, but is deceptively fast, despite a Shaw waddle. He won the Gavin Brown Trophy last year for the player best at tackling and other more incidental skills known as one-percenters. Former captain and premiership player Brown enthuses at the young defender's potential.
"He is almost the complete player, really," Brown says. "He is a beautiful kick; he reads the game as good as anyone. He is also a very good one-on-one player, which was the reason he got into the side in the first place — that and his kicking ability. He is getting better and better every year and not just incrementally but in big amounts."
After 32 games, Heath Shaw's greatest ambition is not to overtake his brother, father or uncle Tony in number of games played. His greatest ambition is to beat the least known of his Collingwood playing relatives, Neville. "I just want to get to 44 because my Uncle Neville played 43 and he always gives it to Dad and Uncle Tony, saying, 'You played 146, you played 300 and whatever, but I played 43 good ones, so that is all that counts'."
Perhaps, for the boy with ADD, it is about not trying to concentrate on too many things at once. Keeping it simple, for there is little doubting the desire to knock off big brother, Dad and Uncle Tony. That is a life's work.
And he will certainly tell them about it.
POOR KID I LOVE HIM TO BITS
