AFL champion Eddie Betts has revealed explosive new details from the infamous Adelaide pre-season training camp in 2018.
Betts has detailed his recollections of the camp in his soon-to-be released autobiography, The Boy from Boomerang Crescent, via The Age.
The four-day camp held on the Gold Coast left Betts feeling “like a piece of me was brainwashed”.
The three-time All-Australian writes that confidential information he had shared in a private counselling session had been misused.
“The camp ended up appropriating a First Nations peoples’ ritual of a ‘talking stick’ and attempting to apply it to all of us, even the non-Indigenous players and coaches,” Betts said.
“In my view, the talking stick was used incorrectly, and I was not aware that any Elder had given permission for it to be used either.
“There was all sorts of weird shit that was disrespectful to many cultures, but particularly and extremely disrespectful to my culture.”
Betts says Crows players were blindfolded, directed onto a bus with papered-over windows and taken to a random location as the Richmond club song played loudly on repeat.
The first thing Betts saw when he removed his blindfold was around 12 men, all dressed in black in the power stance Adelaide displayed before the 2017 Grand Final.
“Things like, we weren’t allowed to shower … we had to stay sweaty and smell ‘manly’. We also had to keep what they described as ‘noble silence’,” the former forward said.
Betts also opened up on the camp initiation where instructors hurled verbal abuse at him.
“Things were yelled at me that I had disclosed to the camp’s ‘counsellors’ about my upbringing. All the people present heard these things,” Betts writes.
“I was exhausted, drained and distressed about the details being shared. Another camp-dude jumped on my back and started to berate me about my mother, something so deeply personal that I was absolutely shattered to hear it come out of his mouth.
“Then we started an exercise that consisted of role-playing our responses to our partners … one of the responses suggested to us was, ‘I feel like a better father and husband, having come from this camp.’”
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Betts later voiced his concerns with the camp to the Crows playing group. He was dropped from the club’s leadership group three weeks later.
“After a meeting with all the Blackfullas at the club, I decided to address the playing group and talk about how I found the camp, mainly addressing the cultural safety implications for us brothers,” Betts revealed.
“I sought permission to remove all the Aboriginal boys from any further interactions with the ‘leadership specialists’ and their mind-training exercises.
“I told the club I wouldn’t be involved in any more mind-training exercises at all.”
Betts said the camp impacted his on-field performance in 2018 and left him questioning his playing future.
“Personally, I felt like I’d lost the drive to play footy, and to be honest, I’m not sure I ever had the same energy I did before that camp,” the ex-Crow said.
Betts left Adelaide to return to Carlton at the end of 2019.
His autobiography in full will be released on Wednesday.
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