OLLIE WINES was widely tipped to win the 2021 Brownlow Medal except by his self-confessed harshest critics - his parents.
His father, Tony Wines, described Ollie’s season as “pretty good” while his mother, Jane Wines has admitted even in her own Brownlow predictor her son didn’t come out on top.
While his parents might have played down Wines’ chances of claiming the highest individual honour in the game, Wines set about compiling a remarkable season.
He polled a record 36 votes in a record 16 games, including eight best-on-ground performances.
Mum Jane was enormously proud of her “big hearted” son.
“Honestly, we’ve never known he was going to be a star,” she said on Melbourne radio. “We knew he’d do very well at whatever he did at (age) 10 and it happened to be football.
“We didn’t know he was going to be an AFL footballer until his name was called out at the AFL National Draft in 2012.
“We don’t get ahead of ourselves at all in this household.”
While sitting and watching the count from their loungeroom in the Victorian river town of Echuca during a lockdown could not have been further from being at the formal event with their son, Jane said the beaming parents had celebrated just as hard.
“We’re in a lockdown so it was just Tony and I here in our little town of Echuca but I feel like I’ve been to a party with 300 people and partied all night,” she smiled.
“My boy Phar Lap with the big heart got there. I do a little mother calculation and I predicted that he would be about two votes off and I thought Clayton (Oliver) would come home well.
“There was one game I miscalculated; the Collingwood v Port Adelaide game. All my neighbours have told me to throw my calculator away because I’m no good at it.”
It was a similar story for Tony, who had thought his son would go close but didn’t expect him to take home the award.
“You don’t foresee things like this,” he said. “I would prefer he was playing footy next weekend.
“He’s had a pretty good year. I suppose, all dads of AFL footballers are probably the hardest critic.”
Wines is one of four children in a tight-knit country family. He has two older sisters and a younger brother.
When he was first drafted by Port Adelaide in 2012, the family was devastated, having been hopeful that he would remain in Victoria.
While it was a testing time in the Wines household it has all been worth it, according to Tony.
“He was my first boy and as I said to Ken Hinkley last night ‘you came and took him away on his 18th birthday’,” Tony Wines said.
“It was not his first choice. I can still recall draft night. It wasn’t one of my better days that’s for sure but he’s settled into SA, he’s made it his home and he’s made the Port Adelaide Football Club his home and I couldn’t be prouder of the way they have accepted him and us as well over the years.”
