Adelaide Football Club champion Taylor Walker lifts lid on Phil Walsh, Crows pre-season camp, love and family

The young footballer she had been chatting with in the Channel 7 box at the Clipsal 500 was heading out for a night on the town.

Ellie’s job for the day was to transport corporate guests around the V8 Supercars course in a golf buggy, so she offered to take him and his mate back to the city side of the track.

When they arrived at their drop-off point, he asked if she would mind looking after his sunglasses. He was worried, he said, about losing them.

She thought it a mildly strange request – they barely knew each other. But sure, she said. Why not.

The footballer’s name was Taylor Walker and he now admits he didn’t really care about the sunnies – the request was just a ruse to make sure he had an excuse to catch up with her again.

“I was just being polite – I was trying to help,” Ellie Walker says with a smile as the three of us chat around their kitchen table. “But I fell for it. I fell for it hard, didn’t I? Maybe I wouldn’t have taken them if I knew it was a big scheme.”

She’s only joking, of course.

Five years later, when he proposed in Victoria Park, Walker drew on the same analogy and asked Ellie to hold his sunnies forever.

They are now the proud parents of three beautiful children and are about to embark on an exciting new life journey.

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Because after 19 seasons, 319 games and 715 goals with the Adelaide Football Club, Taylor Walker has hung up his boots, bringing to an end one of the most storied careers in Crows history.

It was a career that reached the giddy highs of captaining his beloved club to an AFL grand final, securing his first All-Australian guernsey at the grand age of 33, setting a record number of goals by a Crow and winning the club’s goalkicking award a record seven times.

And it was a career that endured some of the Crows’ darkest moments, including the tragic deaths of Phil Walsh and Dean Bailey, an infamous pre-season camp on the Gold Coast and a racism scandal Walker describes as his biggest regret.

He’ll go down in the history books as a genuine club great, up there with immortals like Mark Ricciuto, Andrew McLeod and Tony Modra – names he idolised as a youngster.

Today though, we’re chewing the fat in his inner southern suburbs home, reflecting on an autobiography he started six years ago when it looked like a bung knee was going to end his career prematurely.

The couple’s boys Hugo, 6, and Louis, 5, are at school and daughter Hattie, 4, is asleep in her room. It’s a long and wide-ranging discussion that covers everything from his Broken Hill roots to the future – one that will see him both stay involved with the Crows and spread his wings. But more on that later.

Walker laughs when I ask him what his not-so-academic 12-year-old self would have thought about the prospect of one day producing a 300-plus page book.

“Not in my wildest dreams,” he says. “I wasn’t the worst student, but I wasn’t an A-grade student. The reason I went to school was because my mates were there.

“My reports always said, ‘if Taylor applies himself we’ve got no issues’. But it’s when I get bored and I don’t like it, I become distractive.”

Walker was suspended in both primary school and high school. He’s not keen to go into details. He admits he has always pushed the boundaries but never felt like he hurt anyone.

His childhood was up-ended when his parents broke up and mother Margaret was left to raise three children (siblings Aisha and Ayrton are both older) on a hairdresser’s wage.

Father Wayne had been a star footballer for North Broken Hill, winning four league best and fairests and nine premierships. Walker credits his dad for encouraging him to kick and handball on both sides of his body (a trait for which he would become renowned in the AFL) but says he was “missing when I needed him” during his adolescence.

“I was only nine (when he left) so as a young kid that’s when you would start to connect with your dad a little bit,” he says.

“You get a bit of attitude and you test the boundaries a little bit, and I didn’t have Dad around – he was out of my life for a good five to six years.

“And Mum was very stoic throughout that. She was hairdressing and working extremely hard for all three of us kids … to put food on the table for us.

“And then he tried to get back into my life and I was like ‘f--ck you’ because loyalty is massively important to me and I’d seen how much he’d hurt my family.”

Their “love-hate” relationship still has its ups and downs but has improved over the years. Walker says he still has trust issues with his dad but is keen for his children to have a rapport with their grandfather. He says his upbringing has also helped shape the type of father he wants to be for his own children.

“I love him and I’ll do anything for him, because I’m loyal to my family and friends, sometimes too much, but I don’t want to be like him,” Walker says.

“I want to be around. I want my kids to respect me, I want them to trust me, that they can come to me no matter what and I want them to love me irrespective of what happens, of what happens in their life, what happens in our life.”

Margaret Walker hung up on Crows recruiter James Fantasia when he called in 2006 to offer her 16-year-old son a scholarship – she thought it was one of his mates playing a prank.

Fortunately, another recruiter rang back and Walker became an Adelaide Football Club scholarship holder, meaning the Crows could let him slide to pick 75 in the following year’s national draft.

He spent the 2008 season playing for Norwood (the same club his father had played a handful of reserves games in the 1980s) in the SANFL as Crows coach Neil Craig refused to yield to fan and media pressure to give the exciting young forward a crack at the big time.

He eventually debuted against Collingwood in front of 41,000 at the MCG in Round 1, 2009, kicking at least one goal in his first six games, then bags of four and five to earn a Rising Star nomination.

Despite kicking 23 goals in 14 games in his debut season, he fell out of favour and missed the finals series in which the Crows fell to Collingwood in a tight semi-final.

He found some consistency to play 18 games in 2010 and the first seven games the following year before he was dropped and was back playing for Norwood when the Crows travelled to Melbourne to take on Collingwood in Round 9, 2011. This is how he found himself at the centre of his first major controversy – when television cameras captured him drinking beer in the crowd during a curtain raiser to a Port Adelaide v Fremantle clash at AAMI Stadium.

It was a Saturday morning and Walker had played the previous night for Norwood. Broken Hill was playing Roxby Downs in the curtain raiser to the Port game and, hence, all of Walker’s hometown mates were in Adelaide for the game.

He had been named as emergency for the Crows game against Collingwood the following day but because he hadn’t travelled to Melbourne and had played the night before, figured a few morning beers at West Lakes with his mates couldn’t do any harm.

Then his phone started ringing. Walker ignored the first call from footy operations boss Phil Harper but picked up when he saw chief executive Steven Trigg was calling.

The Fox Sports footage of him drinking the day before he was emergency for an AFL game was already a talking point on radio and TV and had even aired on the Crows flight to Melbourne.

“It was an innocent mistake but they said I needed to get out of there,” Walker says.

“I was like, well it’s only like midday … I said to my mates: ‘Why don’t we go through the BWS and get a carton of piss?

“So we went and got a carton and went home and drank that.”

Pictures of him drinking at the footy featured prominently in the next day’s Sunday Mail.

Those same pictures now hang proudly in the cellar of his home after they were blown up, framed and signed by his mates, who presented them as a Christmas gift.

Former Port Adelaide champion Warren Tredrea cited the beer incident the following year during a scathing on-air radio assessment of Walker’s performance during a Round 3 game against Hawthorn.

Tredrea’s critical assessment of his work-ethic and professionalism stung.

But rather than stew on it, Walker did something almost unheard of in the parochial cauldron of South Australian football: He reached out to the enemy.

“I’ve always, if there’s a challenge in front of me, I always attack them,” Walker says. “So I was like ‘F--k it, I’ll just ring him.’

“We organised a meeting, we caught up and then we sort of organically just kept catching up and watching a little bit of vision.”

The pair worked together for a couple of years, catching up for coffee or over the phone and Walker says the 255-game Port great’s mentorship and advice were critical to helping him understand the secrets of success as a key forward.

And he had no qualms about fraternising with Port Adelaide royalty, despite the fierce rivalry between the two Adelaide clubs.

“As much as I love the Crows, I love great sportsmen so if I can take a pot of gold or learn a lesson from someone that’s been there and done that, I’m always open to that,” he says.

Tredrea’s overriding message was about work rate and he urged Walker to set himself a goal of getting to as many contests as possible to increase the impact he could have on games.

It was a mentorship that lasted until Tredrea’s former Port Adelaide assistant coach Phil Walsh (who helped the Power to its maiden AFL flag in 2004) took over from Brenton Sanderson (who had replaced Neil Craig at the start of 2012) as head coach of the Crows at the end of 2014.

Walsh wasn’t a fan of Walker working so closely with someone outside of the club. He was, though, a huge fan of his young key forward, so much so he surprised the football world by making the then 24-year-old captain before the 2015 season.

It was an appointment Walker initially declined. He’d never been a captain before and was worried his larrikin nature would jar with such a responsible leadership position.

Ellie and his mates from Broken Hill urged him to reconsider and on January 14, 2015, a bearded Walker sat next to Walsh at a press conference announcing him as captain.

It was the start of what both men hoped would be a long and fruitful partnership.

Tragically, that was not to be.

Just after 4am on Friday, July 3, 2015, Walker’s phone started vibrating on the bedside table. He opened one eye to see it was Crows chief executive Andrew Fagan calling and didn’t answer because … well … it was 4am. If it was that important, he thought, Fagan would call back.

Three seconds later, Fagan rang again. This time Walker answered.

“He told me that we’ve had some bad news, that Phil had been (killed) overnight,” Walker says.

“Because I was out cold (half asleep), I said to him, ‘Oh, is he OK?’. And he said, ‘No, no, no, he’s dead.’ I was like ‘holy f--k’. I woke up like that (Walker snaps his fingers to emphasise the immediacy of his change in consciousness).”

The next few hours were a blur.

He was living with Brad Crouch at the time but rang Ellie straight away before waking and telling his housemate.

Fagan had told him to round up the players and get them to the club as soon as possible. Former skipper Nathan van Berlo and fullback Daniel Talia lived nearby. He rang van Berlo and picked him up but Talia wasn’t answering his phone, so when they got to his house he had to yell through a fence to wake him and then relay the horrible news from the other side of the front gate.

All the players made their way to West Lakes as news gradually spread that Walsh’s son Cy had stabbed his father to death in their family home. It would later come out in court that Cy was affected by undiagnosed, untreated schizophrenia.

He was found not guilty of murder due to mental incompetence and ordered to spend the rest of his life under mental health supervision.

It was one of the biggest stories in AFL history and Walker, a young captain still finding his way, spent the rest of the day focused on looking after the welfare of his teammates.

“I didn’t know what to do, I had no idea,” he says. “There’s no script for this one. It’s not like when you get your licence and you know, right, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that.

“It was like, f--k, what are we doing? We came to the conclusion as a club … to let people grieve the way they want. If they don’t want to be here (at the club), they could go home and if they wanted to be here, let them be here.

“We were giving them as much information as we could. It was sort of like, yeah, it was a weird time.”

Ellie admits to running a red light in the chaos of the early morning but says it’s hard to recall too many details of that day.

You sort of remember it but it’s very hazy also,” she says. “Because it’s that trauma in your brain, you’re sort of like ‘Wow, did that actually happen?’

“It almost feels like you’re looking, when you think back to it, you are looking from above being like, ‘Wow I can’t believe you went through that.’ It was very difficult.”

Walker, who proudly wore his emotions on his sleeve in the later years of his football career, admits he didn’t cry over Walsh’s death until almost a week later, once the numbness of the initial shock had started to abate. The AFL cancelled Adelaide’s clash with Geelong scheduled for two days later but the Crows returned to the field the following weekend against West Coast in Perth in a game Walker says stands out as one of his proudest moments as captain.

Adelaide lost the game but won the respect of the football world by simply turning up despite bearing the weight of such an unimaginable tragedy. There were no run-through banners and no club songs before the game and flags flew at half mast.

At the final siren, West Coast and Adelaide players stood arm-in-arm around the centre circle and cried.

The next day’s Sunday Mail summed up the respect the players had earned with the front page headline “Brave men, brave hearts”.

Walker says the club hierarchy was “phenomenal”, ignoring the costs of putting on extra flights to ensure all players had the support they needed in Perth.

“It was really emotional,” he says.

“I remember walking off the ground and all the boys were bawling their eyes out. And then in the rooms and it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

“The whole thing was really eerie, but it was almost like that was the next step that we needed to take. Like go and play. Walshy wants us to play.

“To be able to just get out on the field and do what Walshy would have wanted us to do was pretty courageous.”

Though he only coached 12 games, Walsh had built the foundations of a team capable of September success.

Two years later (with a forward line starring Walker, Eddie Betts, Tom Lynch and Charlie Cameron and a midfield featuring Rory Sloane, Sam Jacobs and Crouch brothers Brad and Matt) the Crows finished minor premiers and stormed into the grand final under his replacement Don Pyke.

The 2017 season was also significant for being the year the Crows started working with mind-training company Collective Mind in a controversial partnership that led to the following year’s pre-season camp that ultimately tarnished the brands of both organisations.

Before the camp though, Collective Mind put forward the idea of Adelaide players adopting an aggressive posture for the national anthem before their 2017 finals games. Dubbed the “power stance”, Crows players stood legs wide astride with arms flexed by their sides, chest out and shoulders back as they stared down their opponents before the game.

The stance was praised after the Crows won their first two finals but widely mocked after it backfired against Richmond in the grand final.

As captain, it fell to Walker to tick off on the idea before it was implemented.

“I spoke to a few of the leaders and asked them what they thought and we thought, why not?” he says. “And if you’re a betting man, it worked 66.6 per cent of the time. It was just grand final day that didn’t work.

“If I had my time again would we do it? Probably not. But at the time we thought it might be a competitive edge for us and, who knows, if we had won people would be calling it heroic and saying it was a great idea.”

He offers a pragmatic shrug that could only come from someone who had already lived through the unthinkable.

“You live and die by those decisions, don’t you?” he says. “We didn’t kill anyone. No one died. Life goes on.”

Having steered a grieving club through genuine tragedy, Walker possessed a perspective few could have. The fallout from a failed pre-game stunt stung, but it wasn’t life or death. What hurt more was the football that followed.

The Crows entered the grand final as favourites but fell apart after quarter time.

Richmond stormed to a 48-point win to end a 37-year premiership drought and star forward Jack Riewoldt famously gatecrashed the post-game set by American band The Killers, grabbing a microphone to belt out the hit song Mr Brightside.

Walker still hasn’t watched a full replay of the game and turns off the radio whenever Mr Brightside comes on.

The grand final loss was the catalyst for a pre-season camp in January 2018 that star forward Betts later labelled as “weird” and “disrespectful”. Josh Jenkins said some of the activities were “dumb” and “disgraceful” and Bryce Gibbs claimed the camp was responsible for ending some players’ careers.

Both the Crows and AFL hierarchy later apologised to the players amid claims some activities included pseudo-psychological hazing, weaponised personal trauma, and cultural insensitivity.

As captain, Walker says the club had asked him to give the camp his blessing despite having limited details about what was about to occur.

“I felt like I was put in a bit of a vulnerable position because I was encouraged a lot to back it in, however I had f--king no idea what we were doing,” he says.

“I was like, well, if you can guarantee us that it’s going to help us, then I’ll back you in. And I felt f--king pissed off about that. That’s what I was probably disappointed about the most.”

Walker says some of the camp was a positive experience but says confidentiality breaches marred some activities and can understand why some players were upset at what occurred.

“There was some stuff that they (the facilitators) said to a few of the boys and you’re thinking, ‘Not everyone in this group knows that,’” he says. “So that’s when a few boys got a bit disgruntled, which is fair enough. I felt quite pissed off that I had to endorse it, but I had no idea what we were going to do.

“The intention … I could see what the club wanted to do. Execution … poor.”

If he had his time again, he says, he wouldn’t give the camp the same unqualified support.

The camp is not, however, Walker’s biggest regret as a Crow. That’s a title he reserves for a racist comment he made about Indigenous North Adelaide player Robbie Young at quarter time of a SANFL game in 2021.

Walker was at the game to support teammate Matt Crouch’s return from injury and his comment was overheard by a Crows official who fronted him and set in play a chain of events that led to the then former captain copping a six-week suspension from the AFL.

“I find it very hard to talk about,” Walker says. “I’m very embarrassed about it. I get embarrassed about it because I’m a little bit petrified about telling the kids. Also, I have some really, really close Indigenous friends and it breaks my heart that I hurt them – not just them, but their communities.

“But I also look at it and go, ‘I’ve learnt so much.’ Even hearing it (the comment he made), I hear it every now and again and it traumatises me … it makes me very uncomfortable.

“I just know, being on the other end of it, how much you can hurt other people by what you say.”

Walker says he rang all his current and former Indigenous teammates to apologise but the hardest phone call was to his mother, made all the more heart-wrenching because he had to make that call on her birthday.

Fast forward to 2026 and Walker, now 36, was again on the phone to family and friends, letting them know he was hanging up the boots after 19 years in the AFL system.

He announced his retirement to the wider world on August 10 and the news prompted an eight-page tribute wrap in The Advertiser the next day – an indication of the impact the kid from Broken Hill (but born in Adelaide) had made in SA.

Walker says playing AFL long enough for his children to be genuinely involved in the game and for them to remember him playing is “the best part of his career”.

He’s now ready for the next chapter in his life, but football will continue to play a central role.

Next year marks 20 years since he starred in a North Broken Hill premiership as a 17 year old and he’ll pull on a Bulldog guernsey again for a few games in 2027 and shoot for another Broken Hill Football League flag.

Walker (and Ellie and the kids) will also head to England mid-year to host a cricket fans’ touring group for the Australia v England Ashes series, he will call AFL on Triple M radio and is likely to take on an ambassador-type role with the Crows.

He also wants to revitalise the club’s past-players program to help give current players a better understanding of who has come before.

He has previously flagged a long-term interest in coaching but says becoming a line or assistant coach in the AFL would require moving interstate, something he’s not yet ready to contemplate.

He says he has no interest in becoming a senior coach.

“I have seen really good coaches and unfortunately their family (pays the price) … and I just don’t want to do that,” he says.

Which brings us back to family.

By the time we are finishing our chat, a bleary-eyed Hattie has wandered out from her room and snuggles deep into her father’s lap. She’s off to gymnastics soon, and Hugo and Louis will be home from school.

Walker and Ellie know they’ll spend a fair bit of time in the next decade or so ferrying kids to and from various junior sports commitments.

They’re ready for the challenge, though slightly concerned about Louis’s recently announced goal of following in dad’s footsteps and playing football at Adelaide Oval – except he wants to do it playing for Collingwood.

The middle Walker is now (famously) a mad Magpie supporter who idolises Brownlow Medallist Nick Daicos.

It’s an allegiance that can cause tension among the family.

In the Crows’ Round 1 clash with Collingwood this year, Louis and his brother Hugo, a passionate Crows fan, started fighting in the crowd because the former kept yelling out for Adelaide players to miss whenever they were kicking for goal.

Ellie reckons Louis is a chip off the old block.

“He’s obsessed (with Collingwood) but Louis is Taylor reincarnated,” she says. “He loves to stir the pot and he will go and put his Collingwood stuff on every day after school, but I think it’s a little bit just to wind Taylor up.

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“I think maybe that’s why I fell in love with Taylor because I like how he just always is up to something.”

Nearly 13 years since Walker asked her to look after a pair of sunglasses he didn’t really care about, the cheeky long-game he started in a Clipsal 500 golf buggy is still paying dividends. ■

Tex: A Taylor Made Footy Story by Taylor Walker, co-written by Courtney Walsh and Reece Homfray, published by HarperCollins (RRP $49.99), is out November 10. Walker will officially launch the book with an event at Norwood Concert Hall at 6.30pm on Tuesday where he will be in conversation with Reece Homfray and special guests.

Originally published as Adelaide Football Club champion Taylor Walker lifts lid on Phil Walsh, Crows pre-season camp, love and family