The ‘selfish’ realisation behind Christian Petracca’s star role in Melbourne’s Cinderella story

“I have a fair few,” Petracca says, that light-the-room smile on show. “I actually gave a few to Fraser Rosman, a young kid from the footy club. Same size — he’s a 13 — so he’s happy.”

And so is Petracca, which is the simplest explanation for his stunning 2021 finals series that culminated in a 39-disposal masterclass at Perth’s Optus Stadium last September. As his team ended 57 barren winters by swatting aside Brisbane Lions, Geelong and, ultimately, Western Bulldogs, his dominance amounted to 99 possessions (50 of them contested), 21 clearances, 23 inside 50s and five goals.

True champions rise to the biggest occasions? Tick. And now, at 26 with 127 games behind him, he enters the 2022 season at the centre of the conversation around the game’s goliaths.

An avid cook, he has found a simple recipe for contentment.

“I like who I am, and I like the people around me,” he says. “My girlfriend (Bella Beischer) is an amazing support for me — she’s secure within herself, and I’m secure within myself. I’ve realised more and more as I’ve got older, footy’s not the everything for me. There’s two identities — I’m Christian Petracca the footy player, and I’m Christian Petracca the human.

“I think as well I just got that attitude that I didn’t give a f—k as much, to be honest. I don’t see it as selfish, but just looking after myself more. This is my career, I want to make the most of it. I am such a nice person, sometimes that can be to your detriment. You’re a people pleaser, you like to please a lot of people. For me, all I care about pleasing (now) is myself, my girlfriend and my footy club.”

He hastens to add family to the list, noting the influence parents Elvira and Tony, and older brothers Rob and Julian have had. An Australian junior basketballer and Larke medallist as best player in football’s national under-18 championships in his draft year, hype and comparison have followed him like the most irritating of taggers. Yet for a long time it was the comparisons Petracca made between himself and others that held him back.

“That probably stemmed from the ACL,” he says of the footballer’s curse that struck him before he had properly started, in February of his first AFL pre-season, and delayed his debut until round 6 of 2016.

“I saw so many guys from my draft year — like my teammate Angus Brayshaw, Isaac Heeney, Darcy Moore — who were playing really great footy, and I was jealous.

“I was pretty frustrated — here I am, pick No.2 and I’m out for the whole year.”

Even when that big frame started rolling, he was obsessively drawn to what the other young guns of the competition were doing, the numbers beside their names each week, and holding his own performance up to their light. Maturity has taught him that comparison can be a healthy tool in a footballer’s development, but not when you’re marking yourself on such basic data.

“That definitely did eat me for four or five years — comparing myself to other players. I want to be like (Marcus) Bontempelli, or I want to be like Dustin Martin, (Jordan) De Goey. De Goey’s been an absolute star, they all have, and I wanted to be like them,” he says. “I think that just comes back to knowing who you are — I’m Christian Petracca, I’m not Dustin Martin, I’m not Bontempelli, I’m not De Goey. I’m myself, I’m my own person, I play the game in a different way.

“I think comparing yourself can go two ways — you can look at yourself in terms of stats and compare yourself that way, and that’s unhealthy, actually getting caught up in, ‘I want to have 30 possessions this week because Bontempelli had 30’. That’s really unhealthy, that really eats you alive.

“It’s more comparing yourself thinking, ‘OK, if I want to be the best, what do the elite do? Bontempelli goes to a Nike camp in Portland, well I want to do that, because that’s what the best do.’”

Visiting the headquarters of the maker of all those pairs of runners after the 2019 season was a significant step towards being the best he can be. Melbourne had endured “a terrible year”, but even as the losses kept coming he could sense personal development.

With good mate Christian Salem (“a great runner … such a hard worker”) he spent a month in the US upping his conditioning to a level that would accommodate a raw desire to be the best.

“It was sort of, ‘Enough’s enough, I want to get quite selfish in my training, in the way I attack footy’,” Petracca says. “It wasn’t necessarily anything like, ‘Wow, that changed my life!’ It was fresh scenery, being at a place where it was fully about the athlete, about performing. The coaches were amazing, so generous with their time. They help athletes get to where you want to be.”

After returning from Portland two summers ago he met Bella in Portsea; he speaks of her with warmth, and deep gratitude that she came into his life.

“I’m super grateful to meet her and her family, she’s an amazing person, she’s got great values. She’s ambitious, she’s competitive, and she wants the best for me — which I absolutely love and adore.”

Having been ranked close behind Ash Barty as a mid-teens tennis prodigy, Bella also “gets” the sacrifices elite athletes must make for their craft. “She understands sport — how selfish you have to be in terms of realising what you want to do. She’s so secure within herself.”

When he says of Bella’s career as a tech lawyer with Hall and Wilcox that “she’s killing it”, there is genuine pride. That they started seeing each other in January 2020, and two months later were in a pandemic‑enforced hub for much of the football season is a ‘When I first met your Ma’ story to be celebrated. It was make or break, and “it’s made us even stronger”.

Cooking is a shared passion. Petracca says all his family are good cooks (“Italian culture, rich history of food — and carbs!”), and a rare upside of hub life was seeing everyone mucking in and making meal times a highlight of the day. He emerged with new ideas for dinners and lunches, and a clear delineation of their kitchen roles.

“Bella is my sous chef. She’ll do the chopping and cleaning up and I’ll do everything else,” he says. “She’s the brains behind the situation, and I’m the brawn. Is that how you say it? I put it all together, she’s the creative who takes the photos and puts them on Instagram and claims she’s done the cooking!”

Seafood is a go-to, although they try their hand at anything — Asian noodles, curries, Mexican and, of course, pasta. Perhaps surprisingly for someone who isn’t far off needing to turn sideways to fit through door frames, red meat doesn’t feature highly.

“I’m a big human, you could say, but I don’t eat much,” Petracca says while working his way through a lunch bowl of grains and greens with a poached egg on top, which he says will keep him going until dinner.

“I get full quite easily, I’m actually quite lean. I actually don’t eat much food. Only when I’m carb-loading for a game, then I smash a ridiculous amount of food. But other than that, Bella actually eats more than me.”

While Demons fans marked what for most was the first premiership of their lives with celebrations that rolled into Christmas, Petracca’s reward was simply getting home after six weeks on the road and chilling with his partner and family, who missed being in Perth due to restrictions. Melbourne was emerging from lockdown like a child rubbing sleep from its eyes, and the slow pace was the perfect come-down from the high of September 25.

He was back running within nine days of the grand final, a 10km gallop and a gym session, and used exercise and gentle kicks of the footy as a means of catching up with mates without bending Covid rules.

It made him chuckle to see social media posts from people who were aghast to have seen him “back on the horse” so soon after an achievement that genuinely changed lives.

“I had a lot of people saying, ‘Have a break, enjoy it’. I was like, ‘What’s to enjoy?’ We were in Covid, the outlet for me was going to the gym or for a run,” he says. “Bella works from 8.30 ’til 5.30. What was I going to do? Sit on my arse all day and watch replays of the game?

“Someone sent me a tweet that someone had posted: ‘Petracca already back in the gym.’ That’s our job, that’s what I get paid to do. I don’t get paid to sit on my arse, I get paid to train and get better for next year.”

As the walls came down and life opened up a little more, he and Bella went house-hunting in Armadale. Heading to inspections they would pass front fences and facades painted with the Demons’ logo, or larger-than-life portraits bearing his own or captain Max Gawn’s face. It drove home the magnitude of what they had done.

“When we were out of lockdown and started to go out a bit, you’d see Melbourne fans, the smiles on their faces, and you realised what you’ve actually done in terms of breaking this curse, ending a 57-year drought,” Petracca says. “The person we bought the house off was a massive Melbourne supporter. The mum was an elderly lady, she gave me a massive hug, which was really, really cool. I couldn’t stop smiling.”

A week or so after the premiership was when it dawned on him, too, that he was his famous club’s first Norm Smith medallist. Petracca reckons he’s still the same person who bounced through the doors as an 18-year-old — super energetic, excited, not fussed what people make of him — but time and maturity have brought perspective.

“When you first get there you don’t realise the impact Ron Barassi and Hassa Mann, Neale Daniher and Robbie Flower had on the footy club, on it’s people,” he says. “I get it now. To hear that I was the first Norm Smith medallist, it was pretty cool. It did hit home, I thought, ‘Shit, that’s actually something no one else has done’.”

The positive, upbeat young man who loves being around people insists this won’t change him, that he will continue to set high goals for himself in football and life. This is the “two Christian Petraccas” at work, although he cautions that realising football isn’t everything has only sharpened his focus, not diminished it. His approach to training is to dominate every session, every drill, to prepare with an intensity that flows into games as naturally as drawing breath.

The notion of Melbourne now being the benchmark draws that smile again, a concession that teams will be hunting the Dees now, but a commitment, too, to “still have that dog-eat-dog mentality — we want to be hunting them, too”. In more good news for blissed-out fans, his personal goal is to become an even better player.

“I think the premiership and that last four weeks of the finals series only gave me more motivation and confidence as a person, as a player, realising that I can be the player I want to be,” Petracca says. “I still feel like I can get to another level. There’s always doubt, external noise and other stuff, but I’ve got no doubt that I can take it to another level.”

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