Watson enjoys Shepparton Golf Club lunch as he opens up about supplements saga

Mar 1, 2020

Jobe Watson wouldn’t have accepted what eventually became Sam Mitchell's and Trent Cotchin’s Brownlow medals if he believed he and his team were cheating.

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Watson’s tell-all Q and A in front of a 100-strong crowd at Shepparton Golf Club on Friday touched upon this subject among many others surrounding his AFL career.

As a former Essendon Football Club captain and an ex-Brownlow medallist, Watson, 35, was at the centre of the Essendon doping scandal.

Thirty-four Essendon players, including Watson, were found guilty of having used the banned peptide Thymosin beta-4 during the 2012 season, and incurred 12-month suspensions.

Watson said at the time, his teammates didn’t really know what the supplements issue was about.

“We have a level of trust with the people the club was employing,” Watson said.

“We had documentation that everything was approved by the governing body, that it wasn’t harmful and that it didn’t break any laws.”

Watson said his playing group could see Essendon’s program wasn’t working — something he spoke to then-coach James Hird about.

“One thing that the players kept finding was our injury rates went way up as the season continued,” he said.

“And the level of recording of the injections was very limited — we noticed Stephen Dank saying to players ‘you’ve got to be injected today’ and if they responded ‘no, I was injected yesterday’, then it was a fair indication these injections weren’t being recorded properly.”

As the former Bomber prince recapped the dark moments of his AFL career at the lunch, he also made sure to include earlier, warmer memories of his club.

“My first memory of footy was in Melbourne in 1990 and I didn’t really understand what was going on, but Essendon was losing, and I can remember I was crying,” Watson said.

“Dad (Tim Watson) was just Dad, he wasn’t a player for me — him being a footy player was just normal.

“Later on, I was thrilled to be drafted as a father-son recruit by Essendon.”

Folowing Watson's retirement from AFL, he’s now a jack of all trades: not only is he a qualified barista, but he’s also a stakeholder in a café chain and gym in New York.

“We get plenty of Aussies visiting us every year and they’re always dirty that I’m not working behind the machine,” Watson said.

“It’s all going really well, and our group is about to open an Australian-Chinese fusion restaurant in Manhattan called Miss Alice, which will open in May.

“We’ve got another hole in the wall, which will open later this year.”

If lattes and gyms weren’t enough for Watson, he’s also dipped his finger in the real estate pie: he runs Melbourne-based advocacy business Infolio Property Advisors.

“We buy for investors and our own occupiers; 2018-19 were tough years for property, but the sentiment changed from the election last year and we’ve had a strong start to the year so far,” he said.

But all business aside, Watson said his biggest challenge since retiring in 2017 was being kept busy by his daughter, Juniper Hendricks Watson, who Watson and his partner Virginia Slaghekke welcomed into the world in September.

“It’s certainly a massive challenge, I love her very much,” he said.

Watson didn’t join in on the charity golf day at Shepparton — he said he’s not much of a golfer — but admired the setting and course.

“I heard there were some interesting scores and creative counting going on,” he said.

“I’m happy to be here and I’m liking being up in Shepp — we’ve had some community camps in my time as a player here.”