WORDS Michael McVeigh   PHOTO Peter Casamento

 Joel and Patrick Bowden are helping young people kick goals.

Australian Rules football is a game of contests and movement. Players attack the ball with ferocity, get free from their opponent using speed and agility, and then use their skills to get the ball towards goal.

Off the field is no different. Training to make the most of their body means players put in hours in the gym, while honing skills takes hours on the field. One would think this competitive environment would leave players with little time to think about life beyond football, so it’s good to meet people like Joel and Patrick Bowden, who believe in the importance of living a balanced life.

‘Training and playing come first’, admits Joel, but he believes that they can’t be everything. ‘You need to have different things in your life. If you’re just centered on one thing and it doesn’t work out, well everything comes crashing down.’

Joel has just had his first child, Alice, with wife Katie, and for the past few years has been studying teaching. He and Patrick have just become partners in a new café, Birdy Num Nums. On top of that, both are heavily involved in various community activities through the Tigers in Community Foundation.

‘Everyone has spare time, and it’s a matter of whether you sit on the couch and watch the cricket, or go out and do an hour in the community once a week’, says Patrick. ‘It’s not hard to fit in. The way we’ve been brought up, it just makes it easy.’

Joel is project leader of the North Richmond Housing Estate Program, dropping in one afternoon a week as part of their after-school program to play sport or just hang out talking with the youngsters. Patrick is the project leader for the Collingwood Estate Program, where Richmond players provide mentoring for mainly indigenous kids aged 12 to 18 at a drop-in centre.

While footballers have always done things for the community outside of their clubs, Joel says the foundation was created in order to formalize these activities and add a bit of continuity to them. Instead of doing events here and there, the players have a chance to build relationships and act as role models for the kids.

‘You create a bit of a connection and a relationship with them over a period of time, which is more substantial than one-off’, he says. ‘I think that building relationships and connections is very important.’

Patrick says he first got involved in community outreach work when he was at the Western Bulldogs, through a program called Red Dust run by their chaplain John van Groningen.

‘He’s got a fantastic program that takes professional athletes through the Northern Territory, out to Aboriginal communities’, says Patrick. ‘He was certainly a person who got me going down the way of working with young, in a way, unfortunate kids.’

The Bowdens’ father Michael—himself a former Richmond player—has been a big influence on their lives. Michael showed them the importance of being involved in their community, and linking in and helping other families. Michael got a job as a community development worker at the Ernabella Mission in South Australia, near the border with the Northern Territory, in the early 1980s. It was a formative experience for both the boys.

‘In the two years that we were there, we built so many friendships between the Aboriginal people and the people who were there at that time’, remembers Patrick. ‘It’s held and certainly stuck in the whole family’s way of life.’

The boys say their parents instilled in them a sense of what it means to live a good life. Their brother Sean was also a Richmond player, and is now a lawyer. Another brother Rhett is an accomplished cricketer. And two years ago, their other brother Kane ran from Melbourne to Adelaide to raise money for the Lighthouse Foundation. They also have a sister Majella, and a foster brother Charlie Kellett.

‘It was always instilled in us to have good morals, and live a Catholic way’, says Patrick.

While Patrick and Joel admit they’re not regular church-goers, their father’s faith—he was once in training to be a priest—has shaped the way they view the world.

‘Catholicism has shaped his beliefs, and his morals, that he’s passed down to us’, says Joel.

‘I still believe that I’m a good Catholic boy and live the way that I should. It teaches us the way to live, and he’s been a fantastic role model’, says Patrick.

Last year, Joel won the AFL’s Community Leadership Award for his work through the Tigers in Community Foundation. He says that spending time with the kids in Richmond has helped him understand more about how fortunate he’s been to have grown up in a stable environment, and to be able to play football for a living.

Lately, he’s been spending a bit of time with one boy in particular who is having treatment for a brain tumour. Liaising with his mother and him while he’s in hospital has been an incredibly moving experience.

‘I went and visited him in hospital and he had a bandage around his head and he can’t see out of his eye because he’s had a brain tumour removed’, says Joel.

These sort of things focus him on life beyond football. ‘It’s sad, actually. But these are things in life that happen, and you have to support the people they occur to.’

Joel is a dual best and fairest winner at Richmond (2004-05), as well as a dual All-Australian (2005-06). Patrick joined him at the club last year, and the new environment helped him enjoy a career-best year at the club.

‘I think we do work well together when we play together in the backline’, says Joel. ‘We can read each other a little bit, and it’s enjoyable.’

‘It’s good to have a familiar voice that I’ve heard my whole life around’, says Patrick. ‘It certainly instils a bit of confidence when I’ve got the ball.’

With the 2007 season about to begin, both players are hoping to bring some finals success to Richmond. Last year was a major milestone for both of them, and with a new business to tend to, the ongoing community involvement, and fatherhood for Joel, this year is going to be another busy one.

Patrick says it’s about being organized enough to fit everything into your program, and understanding where you should be giving back.

‘If your business life is going well, you can handle working with charities that donate. If your football is going well, you can use your profile to help charity events and things like that. We’re in a privileged situation, and for the time we’re playing football we can help a lot, so that’s what we try and do.’

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