28

Helen Garner's The Season is a book about football written from the outside looking in, by a loving grandmother witnessing awkward moments at training, courage and vulnerability on the field. In contrast, Brandon Jack's memoir, 28, is written from the inside of an AFL club, the experience so intense that there is no outside world.

Brandon Jack, son of rugby great Garry and brother of star AFL player Kieran, spent several years on the Sydney Swans list without ever quite breaking into the regular side. 28 refers to the number of senior games he ended up playing; often he served as an emergency, floating uncomfortably between seniors and reserves. No matter how manically he trained, how much self-punishment he meted out, he could never quite lift himself over that invisible line. For the last couple of years, he lost interest in the game, faking an injury to get out of playing seniors, leading the drinking games and mindless destruction of his fellow fringe players (I expect his recently released novel Pissants will cover these activities in more detail).

There is insight in Jack's story, and he writes with eloquence about trying to belong in a sporting team without losing his sense of self, but the largest pain here, and one he doesn't examine too closely, lies in his family. Jack and his parents were estranged for years (though I gather they have a better relationship now), but we only get glimpses of the casual brutality of his father's expectations and the effect they must have had on Jack and his two brothers. The brothers' decision to change codes from rugby to AFL was a dreadful blow to their father; not wanting to play football at all was unthinkable. But Brandon's true passions are music and writing, not sport.

28 is subtitled A Memoir of Football, Addiction, Art, Masculinity and Love. That's a lot to bite off, and perhaps it's no wonder that Jack can't fully chew the whole mouthful. Still, this is a remarkably candid and painful memoir and well worth a read.