AFL draft hopeful Sam Lowson opens up about using ice during his footy career

AFL draft hopeful Sam Lowson opens up about using ice during his footy career

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The secret Sam Lowson had carried for a full season was ready to burst out of him by the time he decided to tell his teammates the truth.

Lowson’s Coburg teammates in the VFL knew him as a bouncy small forward from East Ringwood who could create a goal from anywhere.

In 2017, this unheralded kid with flying dreadlocks and a passion for the contest had emerged from oblivion to become a mainstay of former North Melbourne star Leigh Adams’ side.

Every VFL footballer has a hard-luck story about why they haven’t made the grade — injured at the wrong time, a little too slow, maybe butchers the footy.

What Lowson would tell his teammates at their Healesville training camp in February 2018 set in chain what could become one of the AFL’s most remarkable stories.

Not many years earlier, he had stood in front of a mirror an emaciated 62kg, shocked by his own reflection.

Lowson had been a regular ice user, having destroyed his AFL prospects and put his family through years of living hell.

Now, as that AFL dream re-emerged after weaning himself off drugs and putting himself on the footy map with his dynamic play, Lowson needed to come clean to those around him.

Only months after Richmond’s premiership, Adams had told his Coburg players they would follow the Tigers’ lead and reveal a “hero, hardship and highlight” of their lives under the HHH program.

Lowson couldn’t think of a more fitting time to tell his teammates of his nightmare ordeal.

“I was speaking to (teammate) Josh Weightman who used to play at my local club and everyone back home knew. I said, ‘Josh, I am going to tell the guys at the club’,” Lowson told the Herald Sun this week.

“And he was like, ‘No way, do not do that’. And I said, ‘I don’t do it any more, it’s in the past and it’s good for other people to know. Eventually it is going to come out.’”

TIME TO COME CLEAN
Days later after talking to Adams, Lowson stood up at the Healesville training camp and poured out his soul.

Coburg general manager Sebastian Spagnuolo remembers his exact words.

“He stood in front of that group and eyeballed them. Then he put his head down and said his hardship in life was that he used to have an ice habit. It was an ice habit that he wasn’t proud of, but that it has made him what he is today. Made him hungry for success and hungry to turn it around.

“Then there was just silence, and then there was a round of applause. There were guys in tears in the group and in shock. They just never suspected it. As he sat down the group knew a whole lot more about Sammy Lowson.”

Adams, now a full-time assistant at North Melbourne, says it was a defining moment in Lowson’s career.

“For him to open up was pretty powerful and from that moment in time he became a leader around the football club. People looked up to him for the courage he had to tell his story and own it. As he said, the past is the past and it’s a part of his life he has to own because it has made him the person he is today.”

CRUEL TWIST
If Lowson sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because he probably should be on an AFL list by now.

The 24-year-old set the VFL alight with 13 goals in seven rounds on elite defenders like AFL-listed Isaac Quaynor and David Mirra last year as the mid-season draft approached.

Then on a Saturday afternoon two days before that Monday night draft while other aspirants like Kyle Dunkley rested in case of injury, he ripped his ankle apart in a belting at the hands of Geelong.

Every one of the eight AFL clubs who had interviewed him passed that night aware he was set for months of rehab, and when he returned half-fit to moderate results they passed again at draft time.

Now having given up his full-time job as a carpenter to devote himself to getting drafted, the Coburg leadership group member is aware this might be his last chance.

On March 28 those dreadlocks will go as part of a $5000 fundraising appeal to raise money and awareness for mental health and Beyond Blue.

But first he needs to tell the story of how he hit rock bottom and why he is never going back there again.

A FAMILY’S HELL
As he tells the Herald Sun in a bustling Sydney Rd cafe 200m from his home ground, this is his story and he needs to own it.

“I played junior footy and was overlooked at a TAC Cup player, too small and didn’t use the ball well and just kept getting rejected, but I went up to the seniors and would turn up the week before Round 1 and go straight into the ones and play pretty good footy,” he said.

“I started hanging around with some people who weren’t the right people to be hanging out with and got caught up in that scene and started smashing drugs pretty hard from 17 to just before I got the contract at Coburg.

“I was really bad on drugs for a while. I got to 62kg, I am 86kg now so it shows how much I lost. I put my family through a lot of pain. I didn’t even know myself and that was the most embarrassing thing.I was an absolute pig to them and I regret it every day for the stuff I put them through even though I don’t remember all of it.

“One night I went home and looked myself in the mirror and started bawling my eyes out. I had no idea who I was looking at. It was intimidating and scary because I couldn’t even tell the person who was looking back at me. I broke down and told my family I had stuffed up. They were so happy I could finally talk to them about it.”

WASTED YEARS
Lowson never used drugs on game-day before matches but took ice at weekends and during the week before stopping midweek in the lead-in to games.

“I guess at the time you don’t realise how bad it is,” he says now.

“Every time you do it, you are not like I did (ice). It’s like having a cigarette. I don’t want people to think I was a full-time drug addict, that’s not the case but it was a really bad habit.

“After it all ended, seeing how backwards I have gone, it was what made me so angry and sad, I thought, ‘I have wasted four years of my life’, but now it drives me more than ever.”

One of the most remarkable aspects to Lowson’s story is that from rock bottom he was able to extricate himself from the grip of such an addictive and dangerous substance.

“Even when I was going through the lowest of lows, I had told people I would play VFL. I wouldn’t have said it was the drug that was the addiction. The hardest part is when you stop no one wants to be mates with you. I realised all my so-called mates were only there for one reason, to get on a high, and that’s where Coburg helped me out.

“I didn’t do it cold turkey. I drip-fed it out of my life. I went from taking drugs daily to aiming for once a week and then after that I thought I will do it every second weekend and then to once a month and then I will aim to do it at the end of the footy season and that’s where I got to the year before I went to Coburg. I didn’t touch it the whole footy season and played really well.”

ON THE CUSP
The 2017 season was a development year building fitness, before a lisfranc foot issue curtailed a promising start to 2018.

By the time he had kicked 13 goals in the first four rounds of 2019 and 16.13 in the seven games before the mid-season draft, the recruiters had come from everywhere.

Richmond, Carlton, Brisbane, Melbourne, North, Sydney, Hawthorn and Essendon all interviewed him and interrogated Adams and Spagnuolo about his character.

They didn’t have to obfuscate and deflect.

They told the truth about a kid who had gone through dark times and would do anything to grasp a chance to play AFL.

“I would say every person in their life has got a past and has done something they aren’t proud of,” Spagnuolo says.

“All he should be judged on is what he is doing at the moment. He has done everything right to put himself in the frame for a better future and a future in the AFL if it goes his way.

“Last year he would get up at 5.30am to work on a site, get to the club nearly 12 hours later at 5pm, train for a couple of hours and review the game until 9am and drive home to Park Orchards and then do it three nights a week plus training. It’s why we are so proud of him. He has had heaps of opportunities to throw it in and instead he is so determined.

“I would love him to get an opportunity. On talent alone he has enough to play AFL footy.

“I can understand recruiting managers thinking it is a high-pressure environment where you can go back into old habits but everything I have seen in the last three or four years shows he has the resilience to make it.”

NO SECRETS
Lowson’s message to those recruiters was the same last year as it is now: he is an open book and there are no secrets tucked away in those pages.

“The recruiters all knew. A few of them said, ‘We have had people call us to say don’t take you.’ I said, ‘I told Coburg two years ago, I want to be honest with you. I can’t change it but I want you to know this is me.’

“Sydney were keen, I had to do a psych exam with them and Melbourne were as well.

“Then I got injured and they would have thought, ‘Why risk it when it’s a six-month contract and he will be injured for three months’. They would say, ‘He’s got a bad past, will he slip up?’

“But if they were to give me a chance and see how much I want it and how hard I train, they would understand I am not going down that path again.

“All the clubs asked me, ‘How do I know I am not going to do it again’. I guess the only thing I could tell them was you don’t understand what it’s like to be doing that stuff and the mental stuff that goes with it. To be out of it, the last thing in the world I want to do it go back down those black holes.

“I have worked so hard for this opportunity. Why the hell would I stuff it up?”

SUPPORT CREW
Lowson is living at home with mother Lil and step-dad Peter as he conserves money to train and his father Don’s back in his life.

Brother Ben in America and stepsisters Micaela and Rebecca also provide support.

Lowson believes he would have been picked up if not for that ill-timed injury but has no regrets about playing, saying he couldn’t let down the teammates who had done so much to support his quest.

He cannot help but think about Marlion Pickett’s story after Richmond backed his character, despite a stint in prison for burglaries.

Richmond senior advisor Neil Balme says clubs will increasingly take chances on those kind of redemption stories and Tigers list manager Blair Hartley, a Park Orchards local, has kept in touch.

“He said ‘I don’t really talk to players all the time but whenever you need anything give me a call’. After I told him my story he said ‘I have so much respect for you, you are one of the players I want to see get there. If we didn’t have five of the same player we would have taken you, we think you are the best pick in the draft’.”

Frustrated to be overlooked after the injury-hit finish to the year, he texted those recruiters for advice.

They were consistent — keep working on your fitness, get to more contests, keep your character and social media presence clean, don’t stop hoping.

Lowson still runs into those mates back home — many still with drug issues — and hopes he can be an example that an ice habit can be broken.

He won’t stop playing VFL until those recruiters tell him they are no longer looking at him, aware the journey to clean living is about so much more than AFL.

“Has footy saved me? For sure. Footy has definitely saved me. It saved me and my family as well. If it wasn’t for them I would be on the street still doing it now.”