‘I just can’t put on socks and shoes’: Dermott Brereton’s crippling legacy

Hawthorn great and media commentator Dermott Brereton has graphically described how he cannot put his shoes and socks on, and struggles to walk down stairs or shake hands on some days, due to the severe physical toll of playing football.

In a powerful speech at the Melbourne Cricket Club, Brereton, who played in a famously combative style, detailed how his present life was impacted by injuries, how he struggled to sleep due to shoulder pain and that he was still feeling the impact of taking anti-inflammatory medications for four decades.

“Some mornings my beautiful partner Julie has to put on my shoes and socks for me. With the pain in my spine, where they put in a cage inserted there, I can’t reach. I just can’t put on socks and shoes,” Brereton, a five-time premiership centre half-forward for Hawthorn and one of the AFL’s most visible commentators, told the function at the MCC dining room.

Dermott Brereton’s 1980s battles with Essendon are the stuff of football legend. Credit: AFL Photos

“Some days I have to walk down the stairs sideways because I haven’t any cartilage – bone on bone, that is – for 40 years,” Brereton said in his “Ode to football” for the Norm Smith Oration at the MCG.

Click here to read article