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Dane Swan: Bum, businessman, bon vivant – and not as bad as you think

Footy fans knew him as one of the great rogues of the game. But in his autobiography, and over lunch, a different Dane Swan emerged. Karl Quinn spoke to him in 2016.

Karl Quinn

Technically, says Dane Swan as we sit down to lunch at The Smith in Prahran, "I'm unemployed, I'm a bum".

The Brownlow medallist and Collingwood champion hasn't played footy since the eight-minute mark of round one this year, when just 45 seconds after coming onto the ground his foot was crushed in a tackle. It took months of rehab, and a Meccano set of metal pins, to piece it back together enough that he could walk. It took a little longer for him to concede that kicking a ball was no longer an option.

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Dane Swan's retirement announcement

From the moment he picked up the microphone, the retiring Collingwood star had reporters at the press conference laughing.

He announced his retirement in August, but that was swiftly followed by the end-of-season ritual of overseas trips and partying, so it was only as his teammates headed back to the gym in late November that the new state of affairs began to feel real.

Dane Swan is a former footballer.

So far, he wears the mantle lightly. He knows depression is a real factor for many athletes post-retirement, "but I don't think I'll struggle. I'm pretty comfortable doing f--- all."

He's in no hurry to crack on with his next phase of gainful employment. "I'm not stupid enough to think I'll never have to work again, but I'm going to take a good break and enjoy myself. I don't know what lies ahead for me, but whatever it is, I don't want to do it now."

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He's got a big chunk of 2017 mapped out already: he's bought tickets to Coachella, the music festival in California in April. He's going to travel around Europe for 10 weeks. He's thinking Burning Man (in Nevada in August) might be on the agenda too, and there's a bucks' party in Vegas. All up, he says, "I'll be away for six months of the year. I don't want to look back in five years and think, 'I wish I'd done that'."

Dane Swan at lunch with Karl Quinn at The Smith in Prahran.

Dane Swan at lunch with Karl Quinn at The Smith in Prahran. Photo: Wayne Taylor

In 2018, he'll knuckle down, he promises. He's got his manager on the job already, scoping out possibilities. "He's finally being put to work," he says. "It's easy to get a contract when you're playing good footy. Now he's got to earn his money."

Of course, Swan isn't resting on his laurels completely. At his peak, he was pulling in about $1 million a year in salary and sponsorships, and he's put some of those earnings to work already: he owns a streetwear fashion label (Ratbagg), a tattoo parlour in Moonee Ponds, and he has a share in the Albion Hotel opposite South Melbourne Market, the pub-cum-nightclub that was deliberately set ablaze in August 2015 by the debt-riddled builder who was overseeing the renovations. (The pub should be open for business mid-next year, he says. "I'm looking forward to having a beer in there. I'll have my fair share, don't you worry about that.")

So really, then, you're a businessman?

"I'm a business, man," he counters. "To quote Jay-Z."

Swansong: The Collingwood faithful gave him one last hurrah on August 23, 2016.

Swansong: The Collingwood faithful gave him one last hurrah on August 23, 2016. Photo: Michael Dodge

Brand is probably more accurate, though how marketable Swan Inc proves to be outside football remains to be seen.

The first test will be the sales figures for his autobiography, My Story, in the peak Christmas period.

Here's my first question about the book – "Dane: did you actually write any of it?"

"Nah. I haven't got a typewriter," he quips. "Me HB pencil ran out."

The wordsmithing fell to Martin Blake, former sports writer at The Age. Swan didn't know him at first, and probably wouldn't have agreed to do the book had it not been for the long recovery period.

He couldn't leave the house when they started, so Blake would come over and they'd talk for an hour or two. It was surreal, at first. "He'd say, 'I see in 2004 you had 28 possessions in this game – tell me about that'. I was like, 'F--, are you kidding? I've got absolutely zero idea about that'."

But after a while, he started to remember things, and to open up. "Therapy's not the right word, but it was nice to talk about things I'll probably never talk about again," he says. "When I'm sitting down to dinner with [partner] Taylor [Wilson] she doesn't say, 'Tell me about that 30-possession game in 2006, Dane; let me know how you were going'. It was nice to remember some of the nice things about myself."

With long-term partner Taylor Wilson at the 2015 Brownlow Medal count.

With long-term partner Taylor Wilson at the 2015 Brownlow Medal count. Photo: Pat Scala

While My Story is not the most imaginative title, there's a certain logic to it, for if there's one key message in its 312 pages, it is that Dane Swan was always master of his own narrative.

It got him into trouble at times. The worst was in 2003 when he became involved in an assault at Federation Square; it cost him $200,000 in legal fees and costs – at a time when he was earning just $36,000 a year – but it easily might have cost him his career before it had even really started.

There were other moments that got him on the front page of the Collingwood-obsessed Herald-Sun – "the Herald Scum", he dubs it – but there were plenty others they missed, too.

"There were times when the club said, 'If the media finds out about this, we're going to have to let you go'," he says. "And f---, it was a nervous couple of weeks."

He came to live in fear of his phone, and of text messages from Eddie McGuire in particular. The morning after his pub burnt down, McGuire called him to break the news. After shock, Swan's next reaction was relief. He'd had a big weekend, and it could have been so much worse.

Another day, another scandal.

Another day, another scandal. Photo: supplied

The attention came, he says, "because I was part of the Rat Pack, I was covered in tattoos, and I was good. And I was playing at the biggest club in the land."

But he courted it. He loved being hated by rival teams' fans. Them calling him fat was "the way the game should be", he says (though he draws the line at the sort of racial abuse levelled at his mate Adam Goodes).

All of which conforms with the standard image of Swan as that most archetypal of Australian characters, the larrikin. But there's another side to him too, the side that's evident as the waiter asks, unprompted, if he'd like to try a cheeky little pinot noir he's just got in from New Zealand. (The answer is yes, natch.)

It's there when he orders, too: The Smith is his local, and he knows his way around the menu. It seems logical for me to hand over the food selection to him, and what he picks – a range of Asian-themed dishes, including kingfish sashimi, tempura prawn in betel leaf, and seared calamari with melt-in-the-mouth "young" ginger – is all delicious. But where's the steak, Dane? "I've eaten here maybe 50 times," he admits, "but I've never made it to the mains."

Tempura prawn stuffed betel leaf with ponzu sauce at The Smith.

Tempura prawn stuffed betel leaf with ponzu sauce at The Smith. Photo: Wayne Taylor

Here's another revelation: he's a big fan of Broadway shows. "I like live anything – sport, theatre, music," he says. "I try to go to all the musicals when I go to New York or London, and I try to get some of my less cultural friends to come along."

He's not simply the plus-one of Taylor, his American-born partner of nine years, either. "She picks some, I pick some," he says. "I've seen probably 20 now."

His favourites: Mary Poppins, The Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, Aladdin, Wicked.

"I wouldn't go and see Les Mis, the big sad dramas, though. They don't interest me. I want to be entertained, I don't want to sit there being depressed."

If it didn't sit so at odds with the tattoos he seems to have ordered by the square metre, or the rumoured friendships with some of Melbourne's more "colourful" figures, you'd say Dane Swan was a man with an eye for the finer things in life. He likes to travel, to party, to eat in good restaurants, to drink good wine. And he's free to do as much of that now as his bank balance will allow.

Kingfish sashimi with green chilli, mango and coconut.

Kingfish sashimi with green chilli, mango and coconut. Photo: Wayne Taylor

Not that he didn't take his opportunities in his playing days, too.

"I made a decision reasonably early on: Do I want to get the best out of my career, or do I want to sacrifice a bit out of my career and get the best out of my life? I chose to get the most out of my life," he says.

Sometimes that meant pulling a massive night after a game, in clear defiance of the club's no-drinking-during-the-season policy.

"I might go for 24 hours," he says. "Sometimes you'd get home at 3am, sometimes you'd get home at 3pm the next day."

As he admits in his book, he did drugs as well, though only occasionally, he insists, and nothing performance enhancing.

"Party drugs," he clarifies.

Cocaine? "Yeah."

Ecstasy? "Yeah."

Ice? "F---ing no, come on," he says, genuinely outraged at the very idea. "F---ing hell."

He's been criticised for talking about the drugs by people who think it sets a bad example for the kids, but he thinks not talking about it is worse. It's hypocritical, and it doesn't deal with the fact that party drugs are a real part of our culture.

"And if you don't put it in, people start asking questions," he adds. "Unless in the next 15 years of my life I do something incredible, which I don't see happening, I was only ever going to write one book in my life, and it was part of my life, it happened."

Swan's career achievements are substantial – Brownlow, premiership medal, club best and fairest (three times), All Australian (five times on the trot) – but some people will inevitably wonder what he might have achieved if he'd chosen to couple his natural ability with a stronger work ethic, a more committed approach to looking after his body. To them, he has a simple message: don't waste your energy.

A sight Collingwood fans never tired of – Swan celebrating a goal.

A sight Collingwood fans never tired of - Swan celebrating a goal. Photo: Wayne Taylor

"Who knows whether I sacrificed being better than I was? No one can ever know, but those breaks – going out when I shouldn't have, eating burgers instead of salads – mentally, that helped me. I needed to get away from footy."

At any rate, if he had taken that route, "I could have been worse. If I'd stuck to the rules and did everything right and trained my arse off and didn't go away on the end-of-season trips but stayed and trained and got fit, I could have burned out five years ago. I could have thought it's getting to me, I'm run down, I've f---ing had enough. My body might have been cooked."

In the final assessment, "I've got no regrets. I'm extremely comfortable with what I've done.

"I love footy and I would have played it for free if I wasn't good enough to play AFL," he says. "But it wasn't my whole life. It came third, after my family and friends."

THE BILL PLEASE

THE SMITH, 213 HGH STREET, PRAHRAN. 9514 2444.OPEN SEVEN DAYS, MIDDAY-LATE

Dane Swan's My Story is published by Hardie Grant.

Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin

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