Like them,he was thrust into the role. Like them,he has found it wearying at times. Perhaps more than them,he accepts it. He acknowledges that he cannot bring book learning to the mission to root racism out of footy and society generally. What he can offer is his lived experience and a platform from which to elucidate it. That he does.
“I have always said to people that kids are never too young to start learning about racism,” he writes. “Being Black,I have no choice but to be political in order to survive in Australia ... I had no choice about it from a very young age.”
In Betts’s book,there are two voices,one growing with and gathering authority out of the other. The first is the football naif. We meet him on page one,playing pretend footy matches with his two teddy bears in the back of his mother’s two-door Magna on two-day shuttles across the Nullabor between the homes of his parents’ people in Port Lincoln and Kalgoorlie.
That ever wondrous Eddie never fades. Here he is on his first AFL goal:“I couldn’t believe I’d kicked it - but I also alwaysknew I would kick it,too,if that makes sense.”It did,hundreds of times. The Eddie you meet in the book is the Eddie you saw on the field. When he returns to Carlton in 2020,he finds his name still scratched into a desktop in the auditorium.
Family,nuclear and extended,journey with him through the book,and so does culture and community,“mob” to him. They’re there on every page,his collective raison d’etre.
Betts tells of his distress to be separated from Anna and their children even for a couple of weeks during lockdowns,but also of how he and Anna had to infiltrate vegetables into the diet of teammate Charlie Cameron,one of several they took under the wing of their house in Adelaide. That house was always open.