Canadian Pyke to make his 'crazy game' debut

Canadian, Mike Pyke prepares for his AFL Debut

WHEN Mike Pyke told his mother that he was moving from France to Australia to further his football career, she was not totally surprised. The Canadian rugby international had played in Edinburgh for two years before joining French club side US Montauban, and so the move to Sydney did not seem unusual.

"I knew there were two types of rugby in Australia, league and union," said Christine Peterson who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. "I just thought he was going there to play one or the other. I really didn't think much about this crazy game you have."

The crazy game is Australian football and, at the SCG on Sunday, Mike Pyke will become one of its most exotic debutants. About 10 months after a friend who was working in Melbourne sent an email to an agent saying he knew someone "who might be pretty good", Pyke will pinch-hit in the ruck for Sydney against Richmond.

While AFL fans have become accustomed to Irishmen making the transition from Gaelic to Australian football, a 24-year-old Canadian rugby player rising to the elite level so quickly is unprecedented. "Miraculous," says Michael Quinlan, the manager who recommended Pyke to the Swans. "It's really amazing that it's happened so fast."

Christine Peterson, who had just returned to Canada last week after spending three weeks with her son in Sydney, will board another long-haul flight and be at the SCG on Sunday. It will be, she says, a head-spinning experience watching her son play a game at the elite level what was a strange novelty when he was a child.

"He had certainly heard of it but we don't even get fully-fledged games (on television) here," she said. "You would just see them jumping and running around some times without really knowing what was going on."

But Peterson is not surprised by how quickly her son has adapted. Having raised Pyke and his older brother and sister alone after being divorced from their father Ian when Mike was four (Ian Pyke died last year), she saw him thrive playing ice hockey, soccer and basketball as a junior before he settled on rugby.

"He's just a really good athlete and he's always done very well," she says of Pyke, who made his debut for Canada at full-back aged 19.

Canadian friend Matt Goodwin set in motion his unusual transition from rugby to AFL. Living in Melbourne, Goodwin was inevitably immersed in the local game and decided the athletic Pyke would be a natural. So he tracked down contact details for Quinlan and sent him an email.

"Basically it said he knew this guy who would be worth taking a look at," says Quinlan. "The thing that caught my eye was that he was 200-plus centimetres and 105 kilos. So I got in contact (with Goodwin) to see if he was legitimate athlete, looked at some footage and then I spoke to Mike."

Quinlan contacted the Swans because of their reputation for developing left-field recruits.

The Swans were impressed both by Pyke's physique and that he was already a mature, elite athlete. A program was put in place to fine-tune his skills.

"It's pretty amazing," says Brett Allison, the Swans assistant who has overseen Pyke's development. "When we first saw him (last August) I though he might have been pushing for a game at the back end of the season … but he's picked up the game really fast."

Now Pyke is not the only family member who has been converted to the crazy game. "Of course I always watched him play rugby but me and my sister (who also came to Australia) just loved it (AFL); it's a much more open, much more entertaining game," says Peterson. "When I was there I said to the coach (Paul Roos) that I wanted to see his first game and he said: 'You're on'. Mike was hoping it would be soon but I'm not sure he expected it to be so soon."

Few did.

- Richard Hinds - RealFooty