The raging competitiveness inside Nathan Fyfe has been one of the budding superstar’s greatest strengths. It was also his biggest weakness. Story: Costa Kastanis
At the start of year 12 in 2008, Nathan Fyfe walked up to his coach’s office at Aquinas College and knocked on the door. He entered, sat down and asked a question:
“What do I have to change?”
One of Fyfe’s greatest assets, his competitive fire, had also been his biggest weakness in his formative years.
“Just awful.”
That’s how mother Christine described what her son was like to be around if he had been beaten in a game of tennis back home in Lake Grace.
It’s in this WA Eastern Wheatbelt town, 345 kilometres from Perth, that Nat’s competitiveness was forged.
“Being from a small country town there wasn’t always heaps of competition, so the benchmark was always set at being the best at whatever it was that I was doing, so whether that be tennis or football, I really wanted to be as good as I could be and, ultimately, be the best,” Nat says.
It started instinctively, when he was just six months old. Nat’s two-year-old brother brother Liam had suffered a brain injury that forced him to learn to crawl and walk again.
Christine recalls the earliest signs of her youngest son’s determination to win.
“Nat was there at every therapy session, trying to do better than Liam,” she says.
Tennis was young Nat’s first love. He’d stay up at the night before a tournament, sussing out his competition. Those he knew he would beat, he dismissed. If he expected a challenge, he’d think about how he could beat that opponent.
With his path to the final already mapped out in his head, Nat would be driven to the tournament by mum. On the way, Christine, knowing what the return journey would be like if he didn’t win, reminded him it was only a game.
“He’d say, ‘yes mum’, because in his head he thought he’d be walking away with a win anyway,” she says.
But thing’s didn’t always go to plan. Sometimes, an opponent Nat had written off as a regulation win would begin to get the better of him.
“You’d see him try and think really quickly how he could overcome what was happening to him, and if he couldn’t he should have just walked off the court,” Christine says.
“The ones he thought he would beat and he didn’t, he would just lose it, and he couldn’t recover for a long time.”
Nat’s other passion was football. Fortunately, defeat was rare for his team in little Lake Grace. Christine has mostly positive memories of a young boy who loved the game so much, he took it to sleep with him.
“Most kids his age take a football to bed, but he’d take his notebook and pen and he would draw out how the team should play and where they should be on the field,” she says.
“And he’d more than likely slide that piece of paper to the coach.”
In 2004, Nat moved to Perth, where he boarded at Aquinas College – an all-boys institution with a proud football history.
Fyfe returns to Aquinas
He cruised through his first three years of school, and despite being a very small, skinny kid, he had undoubted natural ability in football. It was in year 11 when his attitude became a problem.
Nat was playing in the Aquinas seconds. Despite his obvious talent, his coaches held him back from the first team because of his size.
Nat disagreed.
“When I wasn’t growing and I wasn’t getting a game in the first team, I thought I was a bit hard done by,” he says.
“I guess I thought I was more advanced than the coaches saw me, and that really frustrated me.”
Nat’s attitude deteriorated to the point where he found himself playing in the thirds. Christine, who made the four-hour drive from Lake Grace every week, struggled to watch her son.
“He just tried to see how many one-handed marks he could take,” she says.
“He wasn’t there to be serious because, in his mind, no one else was, it was inferior footy to him.”
It was at this point that Nat’s parents offered their son some guidance. They had never pushed him hard in any direction, because he didn’t need to be. But they could see his dream withering away in front of their own eyes.
“He was always going to be an AFL player, like every other kid, but Nat meant it,” Christine says.
His father, David, had a simple message, one that Nat remembers clearly.
“He told me I had to let my football be the ultimate voice and that I couldn’t let my attitude decide where my football ended up,” Nat says.
“Basically, he told me to shut up and let my football skills guide the path I wanted to go down.”
Christine also got through to Nat. She told him she wasn’t going to come watch him play anymore, not because of his football, but because of his attitude to football.
“That was pretty tough to hear,” Nat says.
“When she said that to me, it was a tough pill to swallow. I was still in that stage when I thought I deserved to be playing in the first team and I was getting hard done by, so to hear that on top of everything, it was a lot to handle.
“Once I really wrapped my head around it, that’s when I decided I needed an attitude change.”
At the start of year 12 in 2008, Aquinas had organised a football tour to Melbourne. Nat’s name was not on the list.
Swallowing his pride, he walked up to Aquinas first-team coach Jamie Lockyer’s office, knocked on the door, entered and sat down.
Lockyer knew there and then that the switch had been flicked inside Nat.
“What I saw was the light bulb go off,” Lockyer says.
“Nat had got to a point where he thought, ‘I want to make something of this’ and he certainly made that very clear to me in our conversation, that he needed to go on the football tour to Melbourne and play first 18 at Aquinas, and that he was prepared to do whatever it took.”
Nat remembers clearly the advice Lockyer gave him.
“He told me about my attitude and how I needed to raise my intent to work hard and develop and really fit in as part of the team,” he says.
“It took me a while to change my mindset from ‘these guys have got it wrong’ to ‘I actually have to change a few things to get back to where I was’.
“Once I made that attitude shift, that I didn’t deserve to be in the team, that I had to earn my way back into the team, it set the path out clearly for me.”
Nat, who had a considerable growth spurt in year 12, went on that tour to Melbourne, and he shone all season long for the Aquinas first 18 team that won the prestigious Alcock Cup school competition.
Lockyer hadn’t coached him before year 12, but what he saw throughout 2008 excited him.
“Nat demonstrated throughout the year that he had the freakish ability to do things in a game that made you look twice at him and realise he could be destined for greater things,” he says.
But it wasn’t just on the field that Nat was starring. Off it, he did everything he could to help take his game to the next level.
“He was fastidious in wanting to improve all the time,” Lockyer says.
“He didn’t want to leave any stone unturned in trying to make sure he gave the very best performance every time.”
Nat had also found a way to harness his competitive fire inside and use it to his advantage.
“He’s one of those players that quite obviously never liked to be beaten, never, ever,” Lockyer says.
“And I’m not just talking about any game or any quarter, I’m talking about any contest.
“You could always tell by his demeanour and the manner in which he responded to things that he was extraordinarily competitive and wanted to rectify whatever the problem was.
“If he had been beaten in a contest, you could see immediately he’d be getting back and working on making sure that he wouldn’t be beaten the next time.”
But if Nat was beaten, that petulant young boy from the Lake Grace tennis court or the Aquinas thirds was nowhere in sight.
“During year 12, he was never demonstrative in his emotions,” Lockyer says.
“He always seemed to be able to keep a level head. I never saw him get flustered, he was very calm and methodical.”
The ultimate test of Nat’s maturity beyond his early attitudinal struggles came on the greatest possible stage of them all – the AFL Grand Final in 2013.
Not used to losing throughout his football career, he was faced with the toughest defeat of his life after Fremantle’s wayward kicking for goal cost it any opportunity of victory.
“It was an eerie feeling once the siren went,” Nat says.
“We had never been in that situation before. There was no real script to follow. No one knew what to do.”
Nat was a forlorn figure. He had missed two early set-shots himself. After senior coach Ross Lyon had given the team his final address, the players made their way out to greet their families and speak to the media. But not Nat, he stayed inside the change rooms a little while longer.
Knowing how hard he judged himself from his Aquinas days, Lockyer had an idea of what was going through Nat’s head.
“He was so meticulous throughout the course of every game, he was never satisfied,” he says.
“You see in many other guys, if they get beaten, it doesn’t bother them and they move on. But Nat was never like that. If he did one thing wrong he’d always strive to rectify it.
“I can imagine he would have just been beside himself because he sets such extremely high standards for himself.”
His mum knew exactly what he was going through.
“When he’s so emotional, he finds it hard to hide his emotions, so he needed to get himself under control before he walked out in front of all those people,” Christine says.
Nat eventually made his way out to meet his family, his Freo hoody pulled over to cover his eyes.
“It was a really flattening time, and a tough time to think about, but ultimately, we’ve been there now and that experience will hold us in really good stead going into 2014.”
The fire in Fyfe is now well and truly under control and fuelling a burning desire to help Fremantle be the best.
