AFL star campbell brown reveals father mal browns iconic reaction after gold coast suns axe
Campbell Brown and his father Mal are two of the most colourful characters the AFL has ever seen, and the former has opened up about the infamous incident that ended his 205-game career.
The 39-year-old Hawthorn player ended his Gold Coast Suns career and was unceremoniously dropped after breaking then-teammate Stephen May’s jaw in a brawl outside a Los Angeles nightclub.
May needed two plates to repair the fracture, although the fiery defender has accepted Brown’s apology for the 2013 incident, which occurred after a pre-season camp in the US.
After a series of off-field and on-field disputes, the Suns finally had enough and sacked the fiery utility player, ending his career.
But it was an incident involving his father that has gone down in folklore and will be remembered by many more than the brawl itself.
It didn’t take long for footage of the brawl to surface Down Under, and Brown’s father, Mal, was a cult figure himself, following a WAFL Hall of Fame career and a spell at Richmond, which would see him regularly appear on court when he played. The game; it was inevitable that he would be a target for the media.
Brown, fearing for his AFL career, called his father to describe what had happened and asked him not to make any comments to the media – something his colourful father happily obliged.
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Until he grabbed what has now become an iconic foot spray.
Brown has revealed the details of how the moment – which has gone viral around the world – came to pass.
‘Three or four days went by and the press was so far-fetched about it. They were just saying all sorts of nonsense that wasn’t accurate. The old man just had a little slow burn. He (Mal) got a little more angry every day,’ he told the Ausmerican Aces podcast.
The slow burn continued to grow before it exploded in front of the television cameras
“The Suns have never come out and cleared up some of the misinformation that might have helped,” Brown said.
‘I think it happened on a Thursday and I think it happened on a Monday, so four days have gone by and Mal is getting sold out and he hasn’t said a word.
‘He’d go out on the street for a bit and then come home and he’d park in the driveway – we had a house in Hawthorn – and there would be two vans parked out front, a Channel 9 van and another one, a Channel 10 van.
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‘And they waited there for a couple of days trying to catch Mal and stop him.
‘Mal said, ‘I’m too smart for them, I’ll go round the block’. My mum wasn’t there at the time so he knew the parking in the garage at the back was free.
“So he went into the alley, pulled open the garage door, drove in, and Mal knew he was in,” Brown laughed.
But he wasn’t.
An eagle-eyed reporter spotted Mal trying to evade the media and run down the alley – just in time to get a comment that has gone down in history/cough.
‘She (reporter Sharnelle Vella) saw Mal going into the alley so she told the cameraman to come with me and they snuck into the alley. And as Mal was trying to roll down the shutters, she came in (with) the camera and the microphone.
‘And Mal got out of the car and banged. There she was. There were cameras. He was arrested. He was blocked. And she said ‘have you spoken to your son’?
‘And Mal, right on top of his head without breaking stride, threw the barrel down: ‘No, I haven’t and you can go and get out of my life, get out of my property and my ring and not get up and spend time like every other b***h, is that any manners’.
‘And she said ‘thank you’!, Brown said.
Mal Brown was often controversial, notably calling Indigenous people ‘cannibals’, before denying he was racist.
In addition to some colourful acts of on-field hooliganism during his 202-game career, he also made some of the all-time great dunks as a coach.
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Brown said he was so impressed by his father’s viral response that they’re going to play it at his funeral.
“I don’t even know how you can put c*** and manners in the same sentence so eloquently, but he did it,” he said.
‘The old man calls. I pick up. ‘Hello’? And the old man says, ‘Son, I’ve already commented’.
‘And that’s it. And that’s it. And now everyone says that’s the best response I’ve ever heard. It’s become a meme. It’s gone viral. He couldn’t believe it. He had about a million hits on YouTube. He didn’t even know what YouTube was,’ Brown said.
The infamous brawl may have ended his football career, but Brown, who is now deeply involved in the football, racing and betting industries, will never forget it.
