A brief history of Bernie Vince

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I come from Stansbury on the Yorke Peninsula. Mum and Dad have a farm and they are still there. I’ve got four sisters, all younger than me. They’ve all moved to Adelaide. All of us went to boarding school in Adelaide at times, for Year 11 and 12. We had all gone to Minlaton District School and would be picked up by the school bus. It was about 15km away. It’s a great life on the edge of the gulf and I still get back there as often as I can. It’s a bit harder now that I am in Melbourne. I go back every Christmas and with the mid-season bye you get four days off so you can actually spend a couple of days there. Mum and Dad have a farm and they are still there.

When I was playing footy after leaving school I played in the south east of South Australia and they got me a job as a trainee agronomist at Naracoorte. The following year I came down and played for Woodville West Torrens in the SANFL. I was 19 or 20. In Year 11, I got a cricket scholarship to Prince Alfred College in Adelaide. Some stars have played there—obviously the Chappell brothers and others like Greg Blewett and Rick Darling. In my final year I got the most wickets and the most runs. I bowled pace and thought it was quick at the time, but it really wasn’t. I started opening the batting, then I batted at No.3.

Cricket was my No.1 thing. I never really thought about footy although I loved playing it. I was small and skinny and never thought I would get there. I dabbled in basketball, but that was something you could play on Friday nights and still play cricket on Saturdays. All my sisters played netball in the winter. Mum played netball and Dad played footy. Dad was captain-coach of the Stansbury Football Club for a long time and captained the combined Yorke Peninsula team so he was handy. I think he played a couple of reserves game in the SANFL, but he was a shearer and he knew he would be going up north for that so he couldn’t commit to too much. My uncle Chris played for Woodville and I think might have played under Malcolm Blight’s coaching.

When I came down to Adelaide to play for the Eagles I only played two reserves games at the start of the year and ended up going home to play. That was the year I got drafted. I wasn’t really fit enough for footy. I was playing A Grade district cricket for Woodville and that was the reason I got out of pre-season training. I said I was playing cricket even though the cricket training was on Tuesday and Thursday nights and the footy training was on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I didn’t want to burn myself out, that was my excuse. I was unfit in those first two rounds and I was battling. I went back and played there for probably 10 weeks. I played in the association team and I kicked four goals from a wing. That was when they said to come back down. I didn’t really want to come down and sit on the bench in the twos again, I was enjoying myself. But if I hadn’t come down, my life could have been completely different.

I was going down the path of being an agronomist because I thought I would end up back at the farm and it would help out my farm knowledge, spraying crops and knowing all that. I played seven or eight games in the reserves and then went into the firsts, and then I got drafted. That’s how quickly things changed for me. They say about people deciding between footy and cricket, but it just happened and I was involved in footy because I got drafted. Here we are 13 years later and I still haven’t made the choice yet!

The day I got drafted I was playing cricket at Woodville and all the TV cameras turned up. They love any sort of story like that. Every station showed me getting out. I was thinking if ever I am going to make a run, this would be it. I don’t think I would have gone much further with my cricket. I still got to play cricket in my home town because Stansbury was only a couple of hours away from Adelaide. The last time I played was a couple of years ago in a Twenty/20 game here in Melbourne. Jeremy Howe played in it too. My best cricket experience was facing Jason Gillespie and playing against Darren Lehmann, Mark Cosgrove and Ryan Harris. They were playing for Northern Districts this day against Woodville, and there was Mark Higgs, who made150. Lehmann made 97. Ryan Harris came in and smacked them all over the place. I played in eight premierships for Stansbury. They had a real good run after not winning a flag for 63 years then won 11 in a row. As a cricket watcher I loved watching Greg Blewett. I had the same bat as him.

This year I became an ambassador for the Greyhound Adoption Program. I’ve loved being involved. We had a greyhound for a while and it raced in country Victoria. The adoption program is a good side to the greyhounds and no-one ever knew about it. It is starting to get a lot of traction in the newspapers and on TV and I am seeing a lot of people with greyhounds in the street.

I am involved in real estate. I bought my first house in my second year of footy over in Adelaide and from that day on I had a love for it. I spent a lot of time with an agent over there driving around and looking at properties, just as a sort of work experience without being invested in it. I don’t know what it is, but I just loved it. Coming over here to Victoria, I got the bug again, and through a friend of a friend I started doing the same thing here where it’s a whole new ball game—the Melbourne market compared to the Adelaide market. We ended up getting our own agency and trade under the name of Pride Real Estate Prahran. We are franchised from the Pride Real Estate firm. There’s two of us who are directors and we have five people working for us now. We started with two people and have built up from there. Today (Tuesday) was our day off at Melbourne so I did a full day in there. We get two half days off during the week and I try to get to most of the appraisals. I like to get in a hit of golf but that’s not always easy. I am pretty hands on and I like to get involved whereas some people buy into a business and don’t get involved. That’s what I think I will concentrate on after footy. It will make the transition easier because we have got it up and running over the past two years. It’s completely outside football and you don’t think about footy. You aren’t sitting at home like some people, playing Playstation.

I have loved living in Melbourne. There was a bit of fear of the unknown because I didn’t know what to expect when I first came here. Obviously they love footy but sport is just like a religion. They love their footy in Adelaide, but here it is like the same on steroids! Adelaide would quite often miss the big shows and concerts, but Melbourne never misses. Quite often I will have mates come over for a footy weekend and they will go to four games in the weekend. I can certainly see myself living here after I finish footy.

I like a lot of sports. Certainly I watch a lot of footy, but I have found myself watching a lot of golf. I used to think it was pretty boring until I started playing and I have really got the bug. I love the competitiveness of golf because you are competing against yourself. No one else can affect the way you play. I got so competitive with myself that it made me angry that I couldn’t hit the ball as well as good players could. I’ve only been playing 14 or 15 months, but I joined up at Riversdale and that forced me to play more. I’ve got a lot of mates there and a few guys from the footy club were already there. It’s a frustrating game because no matter how good you get at it, you want to get better. Someone told me it would take two years before I got any good at it and I didn’t believe them.

On TV I don’t regularly watch any particular footy show. When there’s no news they seem to make a big thing out of nothing. I know they have to fill a spot, but some of the stuff doesn’t even seem like a real story. When someone wins they are going to win the flag and if they lose a game it’s all over as far as the finals are concerned. I love watching footy itself, but as far as the shows go I enjoy watching The Bounce because it’s the funnier side of what has happened on the weekend. I’ve been on the Channel 9 Footy Show a lot and I find myself watching that.

My favourite phone apps are the Real Estate app, the Riversdale Golf Club, the WillyWeather app — I always check on the hometown to see if Dad’s getting any rain back there. I don’t have Facebook and the boys get stuck into me because they think I am old and don’t know how things work. I’ve got Instagram and Twitter. I find I use Instagram, but compared to some of these boys they don’t put their phones down! There is so much happening on there if you wanted to see it. The amount of crap that pops up. My missus has Facebook and she could honestly sit there for two hours and watch videos. I can see how if you are bored you could get on it for an hour before you realise it. On Instagram at least you can follow who you want to follow.

Probably the most embarrassing songs on my iTunes would be some Charlie Pride songs that Dad used to listen to in the ute when we were kids. When people hear them they get stuck into me. Sometimes I deliberately play them to stir up the young blokes.

One TV show I watch is Wentworth, which might surprise people. It’s only once a week and I don’t like getting stuck into a routine. I’ll tape it on Tuesday and watch it later. I don’t have a Playstation or X-box. I’m not a book reader really, and if I have any spare time I like to fit in a round of golf. It’s relaxing for me and therapeutic.

I enjoy cooking and we get all our ingredients delivered from a company called Thomas Farms Kitchen. It’s not frozen meals, it’s really fresh and we will get three or four meals worth of ingredients delivered on a Monday. It saves a bit of time going to Coles or whatever. I’ll get a pasta one which I can have the night before a game. It sounds a bit lazy but it’s really good, their meats are really good.

Things happen along the way in your career. I got into trouble early in 2012 for playing for Stansbury Cricket Club. Me and Jared Petrenko had played most of the year. We couldn’t play in the semi final because Adelaide had a NAB game, but the next week we had the weekend off. I had played in eight previous cricket grand finals, but when we went and asked Brenton Sanderson if we could play—doing the right thing—he said he didn’t want us to. We still went over for it, but the problem was we started drinking earlier! It made us worse off. It was the next day when we were having a few beers in the pub and we called it Undy Sundy and we were sitting around in our jocks. Someone wrote in and I didn’t realise there was anyone else in the pub. We had the NAB Cup the following weekend and I was suspended by the club until the following Tuesday. But the CEO Steven Trigg overruled it because they were getting so many letters criticising them for it. They put me back in the team and then I won the best-on-ground medal, the Michael Tuck medal. It was all a bit over the top. No doubt other boys were having a beer that weekend. I was a bit annoyed at the time, more because they hadn’t let me play in the cricket grand final. It was like a little soap opera for a while there.

Apart from my dad and family, Simon Goodwin has been by far the biggest influence on my career, first as captain, then as assistant coach and coach at Melbourne. He had the most influence at Adelaide when he taught me how to play and took me under his wing on how things had to be. He didn’t have to do that because he had already made it and was a champion of the game.

People have said to me that they were surprised Adelaide traded me. It is what it is, but honestly, moving to Melbourne has opened up so many opportunities for me and I have not regretted it one bit. The decision was made for me because Adelaide was looking to get back into the draft after the penalties in the Kurt Tippett suspension. It was a big sanction and I was the player that they could get a pick for. It wasn’t a great feeling for me when I was told but I just thought, you know what, I will move to Melbourne and enjoy it. People ask whether I am disappointed about not getting to play on Adelaide Oval every second week and I say it’s pretty good playing 13 out of 22 games on the MCG!

Everyone has their own personalities in a footy club and we have a lot of different personalities across the board at Melbourne. We have got a great group that can challenge for success in the next few years. I am big on not changing people’s personalities. Jayden Hunt is a different sort of character, but he is himself and gets the best out of himself. Tommy Bugg goes about things differently. If they are getting the best out of themselves, that is helping the team, not hindering it.

What will I be doing in 10 years? I don’t know what I will doing in 10 days! I just enjoy every day as it comes and every week as it comes. I know that’s the old throwaway line but honestly I do. I really appreciate the position I am in and I’m not sure a lot of players do. Imagine if I didn’t have this I would probably be back on the farm. I love it back there and love the lifestyle, but it’s the same thing all the time and there’s not much going on.