How an American Basketball Player Became a Star in Australian Rules Football

Visits: 6

MELBOURNE, Australia — As Mason Cox sprinted toward the football, one thought ran through his mind: attack it.

He leapt up onto the back of the defender in front of him, using him as a stepladder to bring himself closer to the dropping ball. He timed his leap to perfection, turning his 6-foot-11 body into a long crane, and plucked the yellow, oval-shaped ball out of the night sky.

It was a clean and pivotal mark, or catch, 25 meters (27 yards) out from goal in an Australian rules football match. Cox would finish that game with eight contested marks — the second-highest ever in an Australian Football League playoff game — and three goals. His team, Collingwood Football Club of Melbourne, won that playoff game but lost in the grand final — Australia’s Super Bowl — the next week.

Yet Cox stood out for another reason: He is an American, from Highland Village north of Dallas. In the last five years, a handful of Americans, generally tall men performing a specialized role, have been contracted by A.F.L. clubs. By the beginning of the 2018 season in March, Cox was the only one still left in the league.

He has become a bit of a sensation in Australia, a fan favorite whose goals are often met with chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” He has been welcomed in part because Australians would love to see more global recognition for their homegrown sport. He has also shown a playful embrace of the country, wearing a “Crocodile Dundee” outfit to a team party and joking on Instagram, “I think I qualify for citizenship now.” (Cox intends on beginning the process of becoming an Australian citizen in December.)

“Footy’s something I take very seriously in my life,” Cox said in an interview, using the Australian nickname for the sport. “I put a lot of effort and time into it and it’s something that this city is so crazy for. You can’t get away from it sometimes, because you go down the street and people want to talk about the last game you played.”

With the exception of Irishmen — Gaelic football is similar to Australian rules football — foreigners are a rare sight in the A.F.L.

But Cox, 27, who now speaks with a healthy dose of Australian accent, could be the perfect brand builder, giving international cachet to a domestic sport that began as a means of keeping cricketers fit during their off-season in the winter.

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Cox’s height has given him an advantage. Other tall Americans have been recruited for the league, but none have gotten as much notice as Cox.CreditDarrian Traynor/AFL Media, via Getty Images

The A.F.L. has long craved international expansion and recognition — the league started playing an international rules series against Ireland in 1984 and, in the past decade, it has played exhibition games in Abu Dhabi, Shanghai and London.

Still, Cox may well be the last American to make it in the A.F.L. In March, the league announced that it would be shelving its combine in the United States — which it had been holding annually since 2012 — for at least a year as it made Ireland the priority in its search for international talent.

An earlier edition of that combine changed Cox’s life.

In the spring of 2014, a few months before graduating from Oklahoma State University, where he walked onto the basketball team, he received an invitation to attend a combine for the A.F.L. in Los Angeles. He had never heard of the league.

But the league had a shortage of people capable of performing the specialized role of ruckman/center-half-forward, which requires someone at least 6 feet 6 inches tall, mobile, athletic and well coordinated with both their hands and their feet.

In an island nation of about 25 million people, there just aren’t many who fit that bill. But there are plenty of American college basketball players who do.

Cox was one of them, and he killed it at the combine.

After a visit with several teams in Australia, he received four contract offers. Cox had already accepted a job as an engineer with Exxon Mobil in Houston, figuring his athletic career was over, but backed out of it to sign with Collingwood in Melbourne in 2014.

Upon arriving at the football club in late August 2014, he and Craig McRae, the club’s then head of development, went to work. “We just got into the everyday grind of getting it all done and really locked into it,” Cox recalled with a smile.

Initially, like many a novice, Cox dropped the Australian football onto his foot with two hands. This was problematic, McRae explained, because “the ball’s going to be dropped — particularly a 7-foot guy — the ball’s going to be dropped from a long way above the ground, so then there’s so much room for error.”

Therefore, “our game requires you to guide the ball” onto the boot with “one hand.”

Cox’s progression was rapid. Less than two weeks after he first picked up an A.F.L. ball at Collingwood’s facility, he hit McRae in stride with a laces-out, 45-meter, or 49-yard, low drop punt.

Though his team, Collingwood FC in Melbourne, lost in the playoffs, Cox has remained a fan favorite.CreditRyan Pierse/AFL Media, via Getty Images

Four weeks later, Cox was consistently dropping the ball onto his foot with a one-handed guide.

For the specialized skill of contested marking, or catching the ball in a crowd, McRae took Cox to see Anthony Rocca, Collingwood’s then development coach, once a week. “His hands were really clean,” McRae recalled, taking note of Cox’s big hands. “He just wouldn’t fumble.”

By the end of his three-month, intensive course in Australian rules football with McRae and Rocca, Cox was able to join the rest of Collingwood’s professional footballers in preseason training. He then played for Collingwood’s minor league team for just over a season before making his big league debut in April 2016.

He scored a goal with his very first kick. By the beginning of this season’s finals — the Australian term for playoffs — he had firmly established himself as a solid role player.

But Cox’s breakout performance in the preliminary final two weeks ago suggested that he might be on the cusp of becoming a transcendent star. His strong performance — two goals and a deft assist — in Collingwood’s nail-biting grand final loss to the West Coast Eagles a week later reinforced that tantalizing notion.

Rocca, who still coaches Cox, believes that the American has only just started scratching the surface of his enormous potential, saying that his scope for future improvement “is absolutely huge.”

Cox has embraced Australia’s culture, values, lifestyle and even language. He said that he especially likes Melbourne, his adopted hometown.

“Something that I’ve loved since I’ve been here is it’s a multicultural melting pot,” he said.

He eats pho on Victoria Street; he enjoys Greek and Italian food and culture in Melbourne’s northern suburbs; and he has befriended people from many different ethnic backgrounds: His best friends include a Vietnamese-Australian whose family came to Australia as refugees, a Filipino-Australian and a recently arrived Swede.

Cox’s speech is peppered with Australian vernacular. He speaks of “university,” not “college,” and expresses his full agreement with something another person says with the ubiquitous Australianism “a hundred percent.”

And he has picked up a distinct Australian accent. Even his family has noticed. “When he gets home, we put him right back into place very quickly,” his oldest brother Nolan said, with a laugh.

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