By Greg Blake
There are disappointments and then there are tragedies. And beautiful distraction that it can be, sport often blurs the lines. Going down in a grand final or losing a year with a torn ACL are disappointments, to be sure. Sometimes devastating, but temporarily so.
It’s unlikely Ange Goutzioulis would entertain any notion of his story being considered tragic. The eyes of the just-turned 56 year-old still offer a cheeky sparkle, but his tenuous balance, tremulous mannerisms give the game away. Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’re probably already aware that Goutzioulis has been diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease.
And this is purely a personal response, but that is just bullsh*t. This is an actual tragedy. This doesn’t happen like this.
There’s a dark irony in that as irrelevant as sport can appear to be when considered against the hellish magnitude of Ange’s diagnosis, the Victorian soccer community has rallied so magnificently behind him. However, the response is hardly surprising. More a glowing testimonial to Ange’s legacy on and off the field. Avondale FC have generously donated $2,500 to MND Victoria as has Malvern City $2,000
Long-time team mate and friend of Ange, Phil Stubbins, probably sums up the response best. “On and off the field, he’s just a lovely fella”, he says of Goutzioulis. “Unique”.
When I sat down to have a chat with ‘Shaggy’ recently – primarily designed to help spread awareness of MND – I reckon I was the gutless one, steering the conversation away from the massive elephant in the room and towards the comfort and safety of our mutual love of Heidelberg United Alexander goalscoring legend, Gary Cole.
” I remember my dad being a massive South Melbourne fan and I remember the old days when on a Wednesday night there was double-headers in the Ampol Cup, I think it was called”, Goutzioulis recalled. If South Melbourne started at six or Heidelberg started at six Dad and I will always be there by five o’clock by the fence, and my love of Gary Cole mainly came through my father.
“My father, whoever knew him, was a very subdued person as he got older, but in his younger days South Melbourne would score and he would run on the pitch, throw me over and away we went. And I remember one game South Melbourne were playing Heidelberg and I think Branko Bujevic scored for South Melbourne. Bang, we were on the pitch.
“About half an hour later Gary Cole scored and before I knew it dad’s lifting me over the fence and he’s running over and dad loved Gary Cole, so every time Heidelberg scored in those days if Gary Cole scored, he was on, although he was a massive massive South Melbourne fan. That’s how I grew up wanting to be Gary Cole so throughout my juniors everywhere I went I wore number sixteen.”
After a year in the South Melbourne youth program, Goutzioulis burst onto the Victorian in 1988, at State League club, Caulfield City. His team mates included a 16 year-old Con Boutsianis and Alexander’s current head of coaching, Nick Deligiannis. Goutzioulis moved swiftly from bench-warmer to starter to headline grabber by round five, when he scored a hat-trick in Caulfield’s 4-1 destruction of Bulleen.
He also impressed in his first visit to Olympic Village, scoring the match opener in Caulfield’s 3-2 win against Alexander. ‘Shaggy” did enough to impress that the 1988 Victorian champions, Heidelberg United, signed the raw teenager for that club’s return to the National Soccer League in 1989.
Goutzioulis took up the story. “I remember when (Heidelberg coach) Jimmy Tansey signed me, he asked me which number would you like? I was only 17 at the time so and I thought you know what I’ll go for the jackpot here and see how I go and I said I’ll wear number sixteen.
“He said to me, ‘You know who wore that top?’ I said, ‘Yeah, Gary Cole.’ He said, ‘Mate,’ he goes, ‘you’ve got to earn the right to wear that shirt.’ So that was the end of the conversation”, Goutzioulis recalled with a smile. “But it was great as the years went by. Not only did I meet him (Cole), he actually coached me and it was a dream come true for me. It was like as if all my dreams came true.”
As an NSL player with Alexander, South Melbouirne and, briefly, Adelaide City I was fortunate enough to cover plenty of games featuring Goutzioulis, and he was an eye-catcher from the get-go. He played the game with irrepressible vitality and verve. A wild colonial boy, a bushie. Wonderfully daring and reckless.
And as I sat across from him just a matter of weeks back, truth is that I just wanted to tear up at the cruelty of MND, not just the obvious physical toll it inflicts but how the mental burden of an MND diagnosis must weigh heavy and oppressive on the shoulders of both victim and those who fly lovingly in their orbit.
There is no treatment for MND, nor is there a cure. So, I just blurted it out. ‘Shaggy’, are you scared?
“No. To be quite honest with you, no”, Goutzioulis fired back, with courage and conviction in equal portions. “Naturally, when I was told I had MND, well, it’s…it was expected because they thought I might have it. So I went to the Motor Neuron Institute to confirm it. They basically confirmed it in five minutes.
” Naturally, as a human being, you know, you sit there and you say, out of all the diseases because unfortunately, yeah, there’s cancers around but there is a hope in the sense they can do chemo, radiotherapy.
“With MND, basically, there’s nothing there for you. So, like, we’re all going to die but it’s getting it through your head that you actually, that you will die is totally different to ‘we’re all gonna die’ if you know what I mean. it hits you between the eyes and I’ve lost both my parents the last sort of six years. So my family has had a bit of bad luck and to be quite honest with you, I’m not scared of death, but I’m more concerned for my siblings and my younger daughter.
“Hopefully I can live a long time because with my younger daughter in particular. I split up with my ex-wife when she was only one so I lost a lot of her childhood, things like going to first days of school and all that sort of thing.
“And it saddens me that I might not be there for the great times like experience her getting married, having children and enjoying one day spending time with my grandkids. But my daughter in a way, she’s a real tough kid, very resilient, very independent. And she sort of put into perspective, in a way, she said to me,
“She actually said to me,’Dad, sometimes you don’t get the fairytale ending’.
I wondered whether Neale Daniher’s high-profile story offered Goutzioulis a degree of encouragement. After all, it’s been a decade since the AFL playing and coaching legend was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. Daniher has been the face of the Big Freeze, which raises funds to find a cure, and his work has played a huge part in raising more than $100m to find a cure for MND. He was named Australian of the Year in 2025.
“I’ve got my beliefs with that. I’ve always been an active person.” he says, vaguely referencing Daniher’s marked physical decline of recent years. “I can’t stand still. Being home now and not being able to do much doesn’t sit well for me. The best way I can answer you without sounding dramatic, I don’t want to exist, I want to live.
“That I’m waking up means it’s a day closer to the end. That’s the way I’m looking at it. So I’m trying to do as much as I can before the illness gets a grip of me.
“They’ve said to me that I’ve had it for three years. I believe I’ve had it for much longer. In fact, I remember as soon as they told me I had MND, I found our interview we did about the club at Nick’s (Rahovitsas) house. I can’t remember what year it was, but I could tell when I was talking to you (for the club’s 60th Anniversary DVD series) that day, my speech was a little bit affected.
“But the real common signs were I took 10, 12 years off football and I started coaching Waverley Wanderers. And my assistant would always say to me,”Shaggy, the way you’re walking mate, you’ve got a problem.” And I said to him, “It’s my back. I can’t move to my left. I can’t move to my right.
” And a friend of mine, she said to me,a few times she said, ‘Your hand’s always shaking and your speech is slowing down.’ I never thought anything of it. And it reached the stage where last year I had about four or five falls and I thought to myself, I better get myself to the hospital because I knew something was up but I didn’t know what. And I told myself they did everything they did.
“And I remember them saying to me, leaving the hospital, they said to me, ‘You haven’t got Alzheimer’s, you haven’t got MS, you haven’t got dementia, and you haven’t got MND.’ And that’s so important. And I thought, ‘Okay, beautiful. I’ll live with having balance issues, no problem.’
“Then I went home, had one or two falls again, and when I went back and they actually sent me to a different neurologist. And at the hospital to pick up MND, it either comes from your brain or your spine, but I was clear with that. So they never did a nerve and muscle test and once they did that, that’s when they found MND.”
Goutzioulis’ deep and abiding affection for Heidelberg United Alexander is a constant theme in any dicsussion about his playing days, his post football life or through his illness. “This club not only gave me a chance to play and to put my name out there, it also helped me with things off the pitch in the sense of earning a bit of money, buying a house. It opened so many doors for me” he explains.
“And what they’re doing now, getting behind the M&D cause, it’s a debt that myself and my siblings and my daughter can never ever repay. To me it means everything. Sorry, I’m feeling a bit emotional here. Cut this bit out, sorry.”
We talked a bit more about football, the grand memories of the 1990 marathon men or his two goals to help sink Preston at Olympic Village in the dramatic NSL relegation derby in 1992/93. The same year that Alexander – in the final for the fourth time – finally won the elusive NSL Cup for the first time.
“I’ve watched it a couple of times, the Cup Final against Parramatta Eagles,” he explained.” It was a wonderful, wonderful night. I touched on it the other night (at a Heidelberg function). The club went many, many years without winning anything. So it meant everything to the club and to a lot of us who never won anything as players.
“So it was something ticked off to put on your resume. But the great thing about that was coming back from Sydney and having, you know, 100, 200 people at the airport waiting for you. Like, I never, ever would have thought someone would turn up at the airport. So that was special. It just showed how much it meant for the fans, more than us, if that makes sense.”
As we wrapped it up, I asked Ange what his late mum and dad might being be telling him from on high. “They would say to me, give it your all. You’ve got a daughter to think of and have a crack at trying to live.”
His fate – although not the timing – largely decided, his legacy when the time arrives? “You know, take the sporting side out of it. You know, everyone’s going to leave some sort of legacy one day and to me it’s like I want to be remembered as a bloke who loved people, enjoyed company and basically I just want to be remembered not as an angel, not as the guy who played here and there. That’s very insignificant in my thoughts now. I just want to be remembered as a good bloke, mate. That’s all.
“You always got to remember there’s always someone out there that’s worse than you and as we’re probably speaking there’s a young child dying somewhere so that gives me a lot of perspective in life whether I die next week or in a year or two years time I’ve lived, I’ve become a father, I played a game I loved, I loved life, at least I’ve had a chance at life.
“Now there’s a lot, millions out there that don’t get to experience that. So it puts everything into perspective for me, so it makes me feel so much better about it, ’cause learning to live with a fatal disease is a grief that you can’t explain. It just sits with you.
“But the silver lining is that tomorrow is another day and with every day living, I still get to enjoy my family, my loved ones. Hopefully I can get to a few games this year and surround myself with beautiful people. And like they said to me, they said to me, it’s terminal. So every day is a blessing and that’s the way I look at it.”
And it seems Ange Goutzioulis remains a wild colonial boy at heart. As he faces infinity without so much as flinching. “I’m hoping I’ll be sitting here again with you hopefully with a couple of other boys having a beer in ten years time,” he declared.
Cheers ‘Shaggy’, that’ll be nice.
