On a warm January day earlier this year, Michael Walters knew something was up when assistant coach Simon Lloyd asked him to come upstairs into the club’s match committee room.
He had completed a mandatory skin-fold test earlier that morning.
“A couple of weeks before, I was told if I didn’t meet my skin-fold requirements, the club were going to send me back to the WAFL,” Walters says.
Walters failed the test, registering 5-6 (mm) over where he needed to be.
“That was my deadline,” he says.
“I knew I was going to go back to Swan Districts to train until I met the requirements.
“I was just shocked and reality soon hit.”
Walters was told what he needed to do to get his AFL career back on track.
“They said I was training really hard and doing everything right, except for the things away from the club,” he says.
“The main thing was my eating.”
Walters knew changes had to be made if he was to force his way back into the club.
“To be honest, I had to stop going out with my mates,” he said.
“There were a lot of sacrifices I had to make.”
He also needed a way to rediscover his waning passion for the game.
Because Walters’ fitness levels were not meeting AFL requirements at Fremantle, he spent countless hours just running, trying to get back to a base standard that would allow him to rejoin the main group.
“I couldn’t really get into the main drills they were doing for pre-season, like ball work,” he says.
“I was just running laps, 3kms of just running laps.
“You sort of get sick of it and bored. I was doing it for the first five or six weeks and I had to find the passion.”
‘Son Son’, as he is affectionately known, found inspiration in the form of his unborn baby, which was just one month away from arriving.
“The only thing that really kept me in football was knowing that I had to support something that’s coming, something special,” he says.
“My baby that was on the way at the time gave me the passion and made me mature and grow up a little bit, which I needed to.”
Walters also called on the support of his girlfriend, Marnie Tyers, and his family.
“Her support has just been outstanding,” he says of Marnie.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do it without her.
“Not only her, but also my parents and my brothers.
“I’ve got a lot of support and you finally find out who your real friends are when you are in that situation.”
As it turned out, returning to Swan Districts helped Walters rediscover his love for the game.
And he found that the sacrifices he’d made were beginning to pay dividends.
“The results were obvious,” he says.
“I could feel myself losing the weight, I was much quicker and I could run out games for longer.
“And just looking at myself in the mirror, I could see my face was skinnier than what it was.”
Two months after he had been sent back to Swans, Walters returned to Freo to have his skin-folds tested. The results were astounding.
“I had lost 10 kilograms and ended up dropping 15 (mm) on my skin-folds,” he says.
But he wasn’t back yet. It was a call from the club’s leadership group that confirmed ‘Son Son’s’ return.
“They gave me a call that night and said I was welcome to come back.”
Walters reflects upon this chapter of his footy as a positive and credits the club for helping him change the direction his career, and his life, were heading.
“The club helped me out whenever I needed them, but they weren’t going to be there to hold my hand,” he says.
“I had to get through it by myself and try and fight my way through it, not only for myself but also for my family.”
He says his teammates have also provided invaluable support during the past six months.
“Even now, they still ask me how I’m going, giving me a phone call to see how everything is and how my baby is,” Walters says.
“The support has been there through thick and thin.
“Even when I was at Swans, if the Freo coaching staff weren’t calling me, then the players were calling me and making sure I was keeping on top of things because they wanted me back.”
Walters says he has taken an immeasurable amount out of this experience that will help make him a better footballer, person and father to his healthy five-month-old daughter Layla.
“I’ve taken that your footy career can just crumble in a matter of seconds,” he says.
“At the same time I was back at Swans, my grandfather passed away and the baby was born, so I had a lot of ups and downs.
“But all that just makes you grow and I feel I have grown and I feel real good about it.”
Walters had a conversation with Ross Lyon about a month ago where the senior coach asked him what his goals now were.
“I told him I want to come back because I want to prove to everyone that I can do it,” Walters says.
“My goal wasn’t to play games at the start, but now that I am real close, I want to have a crack at a game and show everyone that I’ve done it.”
With news of his selection for Fremantle’s round 16 game against Melbourne at Etihad Stadium, act 2 of Michael Walters, the AFL footballer, begins now.
