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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.

The incident has been privately acknowledged by the Hawks and publicly downplayed by Kennett but never have the Riolis publicly addressed what took place in Launceston during the Indigenous round of 2018 after the club’s narrow victory over Port Adelaide.

Rioli described the incident as “the final straw” in the club’s precarious relationship with its Indigenous players and their culture after a string of events in previous years.

Shannyn Ah Sam-Rioli was standing in Launceston Airport with her mother-in-law Kathy - who had designed the Hawks’ Indigenous round guernsey - when Kennett approached her and commented upon her designer ripped jeans. According to Shannyn, Kennett asked her what was wrong with her jeans. After making a retort about his boots, Shannyn asked Kennett: “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing Jeffrey?”

The Hawks president then placed his hands in his pockets and offered her - he claims as a joke - some loose change to buy thread to sew up the jeans.

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. Shannyn says now that his handwriting was superb, but the words were not enough.

“I felt belittled and humiliated,” she said. “The club kept saying I was over-reacting, but they were portraying me as the angry black woman. They said later I had wanted to go home to Darwin for a while. That’s not right.”

Added Cyril Rioli: “I’ve never really spoken about what happened in Tassie, but I think there was a lot of gaslighting at the end of my career by the club.” Rioli’s relationship with Hawthorn is complex and multi-layered, but he remains estranged from the Hawks and doubts he will attend the next 10-year premiership reunion in 2023.

Of the club president, Rioli said: “I wouldn’t want to be there while he’s there.”

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”.

Kennett insists the Tasmanian incident was misconstrued and that he was disappointed that Rioli felt the way he did. He said on Friday he had exchanged messages as recently as five weeks ago with the champion footballer while Kennett was in Darwin visiting his son, and that he still hoped to catch up with Rioli in-person when the Hawks played in Darwin next month.

“We’re very disappointed his career ended with us when it did. We’ve reached out to Cyril so many times. He is part of Hawthorn, and he is part of Hawthorn’s history, and I’m so disappointed he’s come to this conclusion. But it is what it is.”

Kennett reiterated that his airport comment to Shannyn regarding her jeans was similar to jokes he had made many times previously with many other people. He said he had not meant to cause offence.

Like several past and present senior Hawthorn personnel contacted by The Age, Kennett said Rioli’s welfare remained of paramount concern.

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.

“But bloody oath it was hard sometimes. Some things that happened to my teammates. The comments by coaches about the blackfellas all sitting together. The white fellas were always welcome to join us. I don’t think they (the club) really had any idea of what it was like for us, in reality.

“Seeing the way they treated Shan. It was the final straw. It opened my eyes seeing how distraught she was and defending her and seeing how they were to us.” Of Kennett’s letter, Rioli said: “It didn’t really explain anything.”

After the Launceston incident, teammate Burgoyne visited the Riolis and attempted to persuade Cyril to stay. Shannyn told The Age of Burgoyne’s visit: “I wasn’t included in the conversation. He never spoke to me about what was happening.”

Football boss Wright visited Shannyn and she says he wondered aloud whether the Kennett comments had triggered some bad memories from her childhood. Wright told The Age he 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.

According to the Riolis, Kennett insisted that he had been joking about the jeans and said he had spoken to Shannyn in a way he regularly spoke to his children. The Kennett letter briefly outlined his experience working with First Peoples communities and opened: “I am very sorry my comments at the Launceston Airport offended you. They were not intended to do so.”

Kennett wrote: “I would never, and have never intentionally or unintentionally been disrespectful to a member of the First Peoples community.”

Although Kennett expressed the hope that he and Shannyn could get their relationship “back on track” this never happened.

She recalls that weeks later towards the end of June 2018, after the Riolis had flown back to Melbourne after two soul-searching weeks in Darwin, Kennett spoke over her at a meeting in the offices of Rioli’s TLA management. “I’ve already apologised,” he said. “What more do you want me to do?” Shannyn said she regretted shaking Kennett’s hand at the end of the meeting that laid the foundations for the Rioli’s retirement announcement days later.

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Shannyn believes Rioli’s only AFL coach Clarkson genuinely tried to do the right thing by her husband despite what she described as some uneducated comments over the years. Clarkson hosted Rioli, Burgoyne and Paul Puopolo at his farm for a Rioli farewell dinner, but Shannyn wishes Clarkson had not tried to influence her through her family after the Kennett incident.

“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.”

And there have been many times, too, that Rioli has told his wife how wrong she is to think that way. That he wouldn’t change a thing. “I told her again the other day. ‘Don’t think that way. Things happen for a reason.’ And I wouldn’t change her for anything.”

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