How departing West Coast Eagles CEO Trevor Nisbett became a giant of WA footy over half a century
Departing West Coast Eagles CEO Trevor Nisbett has encountered glory, controversy and a tragic passing. There is a hidden side to WA football’s ‘Godfather’ that explains how he built his astonishing reach, writes MARK DUFFIELD.
West Coast chief executive Trevor Nisbett was at Flemington racecourse on Melbourne Cup day.
Not with celebs, big wigs or household footy names.
But with a group of old mates.
There was Trevor “Banger” Francis. Mark “Speed” Harris and Frank Panuccio, aka “Lucky Frank” were there too. All have been attending the Cup together for several years now in honour of a mate no longer with them.
Peter “Pinga” Upson.
If you want to understand the real Trevor Nisbett - the man behind the administrator and the values he holds dear - these blokes are ground zero; buddies from junior football at South Bunbury in the late 1960s who made their way into the club’s senior teams in the 1970s before Nisbett left for Perth in 1976 and a 45-year career in football administration.
Upson, an outstanding country footballer with a dry as chips sense of humour, was Nisbett’s closest friend. He died suddenly in September 2019, on the morning of West Coast’s semi-final loss to Geelong; the same week the Willie Rioli WADA infraction was revealed.
A master of understatement would have declared it a bad week.
Upson and Nisbett had been born a week apart in 1957 and grew up on either side of Bussell Highway in Bunbury, which is usually the line of demarcation between South Bunbury and their fierce rivals Carey Park.
Upson was in Mangles Street, a good torpedo punt from South Bunbury’s home ground Hands Oval, while Nisbett was in Ecclestone Street, Carey Park, but his dad Ted and grandfather Len were South Bunbury stalwarts.
He was always going to be crossing the highway for footy.
Nisbett and Upson had made their South Bunbury league debuts on the same day, aged 16, against Carey Park.
“We were as tight as you could get I guess,” Nisbett said.
The Melbourne Cup trip has become a way of honouring Upson.
“We had been talking about it for years and Pinga had been with me on about four occasions and the other guys who were my close mates had said they would love to do it and I said, ‘Why don’t we?’ We had just lost one of our mates so let’s do it,” Nisbett said this week. “We have all known each other since we were seven years old. We decided we should be doing this.”
It is one of two significant times on the calendar they honour their great mate.
“We meet every Boxing Day, have a beer and pay tribute to Pinga,” Nisbett said.
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Nisbett left for University in Perth in 1976 but never forgot his roots.
It has been a pattern of his working life since.
He remembers who was there at the start and he is happy to take a few with him.
Nisbett was lured to East Perth by John Leyendekkers, a Royals man with links to South Bunbury. He would play five league games for the Royals. He was a rover described by former East Perth player Wes Coutts as “in and under” and by Vic Peos, another young Royal of the era, as “nuggetty with attitude”, a description that makes Nisbett laugh now.
“I certainly had attitude,” he said. “It was kill or be killed.”
Nisbett would play a lot of reserves football. League games at the Royals were hard to come by.
Barry Cable had come back to WA from Melbourne to lead the 1978 team to a premiership and the Royals also had Larry Kickett, Wayne Otway, Alex Hamilton, Rod Duggan and Chris Allen, who played similar roles to Nisbett.
“It was pretty hard to get a game,” he recalled.
The playing route was not to be Nisbett’s path up the football chain. Rather, it started by helping Royals fitness guru Bruce Sinclair preparing players physically for the season as well as branching into developmental roles at the club.
Coutts said Nisbett brought a new, “pretty hard” edge to Royals pre-seasons.
“I have a lot of respect for Nizzy,” Coutts said. “He helped me out along the way and kept me on track fitness wise.
“I was a bloke who had a podgy build. He kept on your back. We had never trained before Christmas and suddenly we’re starting to do running training before Christmas.
“I remember one Sunday morning we did a two kilometre warm up around the footy club and then we got told we had to do 10 laps of a one kilometre track around Perth Oval. A group of us didn’t keep up and so got told we had to do another 10 so we ended up doing 22 kilometres in one day.”
When Coutts lost his way off the field, then suffered a serious knee injury which all but ended his prospects of a WAFL senior career, Nisbett still took an interest in him.
And while Nisbett was at East Perth, he never forgot his football roots. East Perth players Peos, Gerard McNeill and Clayton Lewis all found their way to South Bunbury while Nisbett was at the Royals. Nisbett provided references and recommendations.
In 1984 and 1985, with McNeill as captain-coach, South Bunbury won back-to-back flags in the tough South West Football League. In 1985, the team was undefeated.
When Nisbett moved on again, to become football manager at Subiaco in 1984, he became part of a powerful coaching and administrative team at the Lions as they rose to power.
Haydn Bunton Jr had returned to coach and the club had progressive management ahead of its time in the WAFL. Michael Carlile was president and Michael Flanagan the general manager.
But Nisbett’s influence at East Perth was clear from the people he was able to recruit. He brought Wayne Loxley back to Subiaco from East Perth as reserves coach and fitness coach and players Shane Cocker, Greg Carpenter, Sandover Medallist Peter Spencer and Kevan Sparks all crossed to the Lions.
Loxley said Subiaco’s administration had been “pretty average” in the 1970s but the club had sought fresh direction. And when astute judges like Carlile looked at where that might come from, there was a feeling that someone like Nisbett was “the best person in football who might be available”.
“He brought a fresh set of eyes, strong disciplines and strong ideas on how to set up a playing list,” Loxley said.
Nisbett’s time at Subiaco also netted the Eagles a bonus when he joined the club as football manager at the end of 1989.
The VFL was expanding West Coast’s playing list to 52 and restricting each Victorian club to one West Australian player in the draft to allow the Eagles to fill out the list. With Nisbett’s inside knowledge, the Eagles were able to delay taking Brett Heady until pick 92 in the draft. Even better, 1994 Norm Smith Medallist Dean Kemp was taken at the end of the draft as an additional selection.
“There was a television dispute and I don’t think there were a lot of telecasts in 1989,” Nisbett said. “The AFL only gave the Victorian clubs the right to choose one West Australian through that draft.
“I knew who was watching who throughout the year and the only visitor on a number of occasions to Subiaco games was Stephen Nash from the Bulldogs and, at the end of 1989, he was leaving that club with Mick Malthouse and we (the Eagles) eventually employed him.
“I couldn’t recall any other clubs making massive efforts to watch too many Subiaco games. I just figured the two skinny kids might get through.”
Nisbett and the “two skinny kids” weren’t about to forget where they came from either. Told that Subiaco could claim and paint 400 seats in Lions colours to use for their members on AFL game days, Nisbett got Kemp and Heady to paint 500 seats on the wooden benches in Subiaco’s old two-tier stand.
Over the years, the Lions used those seats and their adjacent members’ bar to sell corporate packages at AFL matches which turned the club into the financial powerhouse of the WAFL - a competitive edge Subiaco only began to lose when football shifted to Optus Stadium in 2018.
Nisbett’s AFL record is there for all to see.
He was the football manager from 1989-98 and was a key figure in three grand final appearances for two flags. He has been the CEO from 1999 until now for four grand finals and two premierships.
He leaves a club with a membership in excess of 100,000.
Nisbett has seen success and failure, sometimes at the same time. He was at the helm during the scandal-sullied era between 2002 and 2007, which netted a flag but numerous drug controversies before the club took extreme steps to rebuild its off-field culture.
The last two years have been horrible by any club’s standards, let alone one with the high bar West Coast has set itself over the years.
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Nisbett’s time as an AFL administrator has coincided with my time as an AFL writer - 1990 was his first full season in the job at West Coast, 1992 was my first season as an AFL scribe.
It is not the only thing we had in common.
I had played for South Bunbury during my time at the South West Times in between 1982 and 1984 and had been a premiership teammate of Peter “Pinga” Upson under Gerard McNeill in 1984.
The day “Pinga” died in 2019 shocked us all and I remember thinking at the time it would shake Nisbett to the core.
I sought him out in the Eagles rooms after the game to offer my condolences. His face that night was covered in lines of grief and pain that looked like they had been chiselled in.
In our phone chat this week, I asked him about that night.
His voice broke and he checked himself for a second.
“It is still tough,” he said. “When you revert back you think, ‘How did that happen?’
“When things like that happen they certainly change your outlook - towards your friends, towards your family. It helps you to realise what is really important.”
Nisbett has been a little bit different since that day.
The loss of his mate and the extreme struggles of two injury- and pandemic-ravaged seasons have offered him fresh perspective.
“I certainly don’t bite back as hard as I once did,” he continued. “I have certainly changed my view on a few things. The last couple of years have been so difficult it has just been easier to say nothing rather than to bite someone’s head off.
“We really have had a seriously depleted football team and it is hard to justify because when you try to justify it it is just seen as making an excuse.”
Pinga’s passing was the trigger for Nisbett and “Speed” Harris, “Banga” Francis and “Lucky Frank” Panuccio to get together for their Melbourne Cup trips.
Harris is nicknamed “Speed” because as a player he didn’t have any.
Francis got “Banger” because he was fearsome on a football field and only slightly less fearsome off it. Fights with him were either won by 20 metres or inevitably lost.
“Lucky Frank” is accident prone and either lucky to survive the many misfortunes he has stumbled into or unlucky to have stumbled into them. And “Pinga”? He earned his moniker on account of his dad Frank being widely known as “Ninga”.
For Harris, the treasurer at South Bunbury during the glory days of the 1980s and doing a stint back at the club again now, the trips are confirmation of what he has always known about Nisbett.
He doesn’t forget where he has come from or the people that helped along the way.
“The one thing I find about Trevor is that he always has time for you,” Harris said. “He is a high-flyer in the football world, very influential, but he still has time for everybody.”
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Whether you are a Nisbett admirer or detractor - and there are people in both camps - there is no disputing that he has been a giant of the game in WA for over half a century.
That era draws closer to the end next week.
On Monday, Nisbett will attend his last AFL draft as West Coast CEO before handing over the reins to Don Pyke, who starts on January 15.
More Coverage
It has become fashionable in recent years for us to regard Nisbett as a “Godfather” figure in WA football - a person who grew so powerful with so many links to so many football figures that critics wondered whether it was good for the game. He developed a well-earned reputation as durable, powerful and tough to the point of ruthless.
But there is a side to Nisbett outsiders are less familiar with.
And when you trace him back to his roots, a slightly different picture emerges - one that goes a way to explaining how a single person developed such astonishing reach.
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