The forgotten story of ... Patrick O'Dea

The Australian rules star brought his prodigious kicking to American football, before mysteriously disappearing

Whether by choice or circumstance, the history of modern sport is littered with tales of stars voluntarily turning their back on celebrity, but it’s unlikely anyone will ever walk the same strange path to anonymity and back as Australia’s first great footballing export, Pat O’Dea.

From footballer Peter Knowles swapping Wolverhampton Wanderers for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to All Black Keith Murdoch disappearing for 40 years after knocking out a security guard, and Justin Henin retiring as the world’s best tennis player, there are many reasons sportspeople go into exile. But not many take the pursuit of peace and quiet to the same extreme lengths as O’Dea.

His role in introducing the Australian style of kicking to the US at the end of the 19th century would have made his life memorable enough, but his later disappearance helped create a legend that was only enhanced by his re-emergence 17 years later.

Piecing together O’Dea’s journey from Xavier College, Kew, to international superstardom is not easy. The many versions of the tale told by football historians show little interest in his Australian rules career, and few can agree on the details of his life in the United States.

In the 21st century there is nothing unusual about an Australian chancing his leg at a lucrative career in the NFL. With millions of dollars a season on the table for the best punters in the game, why wouldn’t any prodigious kicker give the game a chance? It’s doubtful such motives crossed O’Dea’s mind in an era when the college game ruled and professional football in the US was in its infancy.

What we know is that O’Dea gave up a promising football career in Victoria at the end of 1895 and travelled to the US the next year. It’s suggested that he took a detour on his way to study law at Oxford University and paid a visit to his brother Andy, the University of Wisconsin’s rowing coach. From there his prodigious drop-kicking and athleticism won Pat a spot on the school football team, and he enjoyed such a meteoric rise to stardom that he was soon named among the best players in the country.

Born in March 1872, O’Dea first came to public attention at the age of 15 when he rescued a woman from a shark at Mordialloc beach. He also impressed in school football at Xavier College, leading to him progressing through the ranks of the game in Victoria, first to the junior club Austral then to senior side Melbourne, where he made his debut shortly after his 20th birthday.

He joined the oldest club in the land at a good time. Having almost gone broke a few years earlier, the footballers had been rescued by the powerful Melbourne Cricket Club, and the MCC’s patronage allowed them to recruit strongly and start climbing back up the ladder. They hadn’t finished in the top three for more than a decade when a raid on local clubs netted them two promising forwards in O’Dea and future Australian Test cricketer Harry Graham.

The two recruits contributed to 10 wins in an improved 1892 season. Graham had a more direct impact, finishing third in the league’s goal-kicking, but O’Dea soon began to win praise in the newspapers for his long drop-kicking. More importantly he was able to play in 1893 while Graham was touring England with the Test team, and as Melbourne climbed back to second on the ladder that year O’Dea was moved to the wing so that his long kicks could be better used to the advantage of Melbourne’s forwards.

The switch made him one of his side’s most important players, and in 1894 he was named as an emergency for Victoria’s match against South Australia at the MCG. A season review described him as one of the best players in the league.

On the opening day of the 1895 season his drop-kicks were described as “an art at which he has no rival”, but a few weeks later, with his side still unbeaten and at their highest point in years, O’Dea left Melbourne and the MCG for the nearby East Melbourne cricket ground and a new career with Essendon.

In stark contrast to today’s media coverage of player movements, O’Dea’s mid-season switch between two of the league’s best teams barely registered a ripple. He played out the season with Essendon, saving his best performance of the year for a match against his old side before dropping out of the sport.

A few months later he was in Madison, Wisconsin, where his life was about to undergo a significant change. A popular story (one which requires almost total suspension of disbelief) is that he surprised Andy on the school’s playing fields, and after their reunion scooped a football off the turf and unleashed one of his prodigious drop-kicks just as the school’s football coach was walking past.

Whether or not you can stomach that series of coincidences, O’Dea’s kicking certainly impressed the locals enough that they convinced him to continue his football career and studies with them instead of moving on to England.

In an era of American football when the forward pass was still illegal and field goals were worth as much as touchdowns, the Austrlian’s boot proved the easy way to make five points in an increasingly brutal sport. An 1894 game between Harvard and Yale known as the Hampden Park Bloodbath led to matches between the two being suspended for a number of years, so kicking for a score instead of subjecting players to potentially crippling scrimmages seemed a wise move.

O’Dea’s career at Wisconsin had a slow start, confined to one game in 1896 due to a broken arm suffering during practice in the week after his debut, but in 1897 he became a sensation. Until the 1960s most American football teams employed position players for kicking duties rather than use a specialist, and while his official role was as a fullback the Australian’s key role was to use his drop-kicks to Wisconsin’s advantage.

Tall tales of his kicking prowess are endless, with his longest punt alleged to have travelled a wind-assisted 100 metres, but much of the hype was justified – he went on to kick 32 field goals in three seasons. An accomplished hurdler he also found time to appear on the school track team, where he once ran a fifth of a second outside the world record.

His off-field contribution was also important. Wisconsin considered ending their football program in 1898 due to a lack of players and O’Dea led a successful student rally to help save the team. With a weakened side full of new recruits Wisconsin suffered a disappointing season, but the newly elected captain shone brightly. A Chicago newspaper claimed that “no better kicking full back exists” and the newly minted “Kangaroo Kicker” was named as one of five “All-American” college fullbacks for the season.

Despite their troubles Wisconsin ended the year with a 47-0 win over Northwestern, and O’Dea etched his name in the history books by unleashing a 56-metre drop-kick goal, the longest in college football history and another in the long line of impressive kicks which had made him a star.

He soon moved from the sports pages to the gossip column, with an April 1899 article claiming that the opera singer Dame Nellie Melba had been asked by concerned relatives to try to convince him to come home. She was said to have pleaded with him to give up the brutal game, but was rebuffed by O’Dea, who described the sport as “harder than bucking the Chicago line” but held firm. The paper said it was “extremely doubtful if Madame Melba, aided by a team of horses and a writ of habeas corpus, could keep O’Dea out of the game”. But he did pledge that the 1899 season would be his last.

He played much of that season under an injury cloud, with claims that he’d suffered 13 serious injuries in America, compared with just one in his Australian football career, but despite his failing physical condition O’Dea’s amazing feats continued.

During one game against Illinois he converted what was described as “the most impossible kick in football history”, from 45 metres into a 30km/h headwind, to win the game. He took on Minnesota star Gil Dobie and, when trapped on the sidelines, neatly sidestepped Dobie and drop-kicked a long goal. In his last game he showed that he wasn’t just a kicker, returning a kickoff the length of the field for a touchdown.

Offered the modest fee of $500 to become head coach of Notre Dame in 1900, O’Dea completed his law degree at the school and registered a coaching record of 14 wins, four defeats and two ties over two seasons. The side lost just one game in 1901, but his tenure with the Fighting Irish came to a swift end after an exhibition match against local professionals. A week before the game O’Dea switched sides and joined the pros, but his plan went awry when Notre Dame’s fill-in playing coach hatched a number of surprise plays which beat the professionals 22-6.

After a year at the University of Missouri, O’Dea moved to San Francisco to practise law. He remained there until disappearing without trace in 1917. Even his brother could shed no light on Pat’s whereabouts. The popular belief was that he had joined an Australian army unit passing through San Francisco on its way to the Great War, and had been killed in Europe.

During O’Dea’s absence another Australian briefly made his mark on the American game. Edward “Carji” Greeves, the first Brownlow Medallist, was paid the then enormous sum of $15,000 to work as a kicking coach at UCLA for three months during 1928. Greeves’s visit to the US briefly brought O’Dea’s name back into the public spotlight, but with no clues as to his fate the “late” Wisconsin kicker was soon forgotten again.

It wasn’t until 1934 that the mystery was solved. A journalist with the San Francisco Chronicle was tipped off that a respected businessman from an isolated Californian timber town named Charles Mitchell was actually the great O’Dea. Once tracked down, he was more than happy to admit who he was, claiming that he had simply wanted to start a new life where he wasn’t so well known.

Soon after his disappearance there had been a suggestion by an Elsie Waters that he had stolen money from her during his days practising law, but when he returned to a hero’s welcome after 17 years, Waters’s allegations had been long forgotten.

O’Dea claimed he had eventually grown tired of the charade, saying: “I often found it rather unpleasant to not be the man I actually am. So I am going to be Pat O’Dea for the rest of my life. Perhaps I should never have been anything else.”

On his return to the University of Wisconsin in 1934 he was pictured on the front cover of the match program with the headline “Wisconsin’s Greatest Homecoming”, and he continued to make trips to see them play for the rest of his life. The last time he visited Madison was in 1959, when Stanford invited the 87-year-old to fly east as a guest with their football team.

Having never returned to Australia, O’Dea spent the last four months of his life in hospital in San Francisco. Having shunned publicity for such a large part of his life, his last few months were full of accolades. President Kennedy sent him well wishes, and he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame a day before his death in April 1962.

We may never know the true story behind the disappearance of Pat O’Dea. He stuck to his story until the end, and though no further allegations of shady business practices cropped up, he never sat down to definitively tell his own tale. Nevertheless, while his career at home had been reduced to a footnote in history, his adopted nation had made him a legend.

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