Mason Cox addresses public perception following Collingwood career status

Nathan Buckley says Mason Cox is still the ultimate opportunist in big moments.

“The bigger the game, the bigger the opportunity he feels to prove his worth and elevate above the rest,” said Buckley, who coached the Dockers big man through almost seven seasons at Collingwood.

“He’s the ultimate role player and he seizes the opportunity in big moments.”

Thrown on the scrapheap by the Magpies at the end of last season, Cox has another opportunity to prove Buckley’s point in Saturday’s grand final.

No one needs to remind Richmond supporters of his big-game credentials.

In the 2018 preliminary final, Cox produced the game of his life at the MCG as Collingwood stunned the reigning premiers and the American became an unlikely cult hero.

“He’s had 15 disposals and taken 11 marks; eight of them contested,” Buckley said.

“That’s pretty significant in a preliminary final.”

Five years later, Cox was a premiership player, sharing the ruck with Darcy Cameron in the Pies’ 2023 flag.

Why does a footballer who has spent so much of his career fighting for his place seem so comfortable when the stakes are at their highest?

Cox’s older brother, Nolan, has a theory: Mason didn’t grow up with the game.

There were no childhood dreams of running onto the MCG on grand final day, no posters of AFL champions on his bedroom wall and no lifetime spent being told that September was where reputations were made and destroyed.

“I think, honestly, a lot of it is that he didn’t grow up in this bubble,” Nolan said.

“He doesn’t have these massive expectations on him from a group of people or a junior club that are idolising him.

“He had never even heard of this sport until he was 23 so, it’s sort of just a bit of fun for him. In a way, he’s playing with house money.”

It also helps explain another defining characteristic of one of football’s most polarising players.

Mason Cox doesn’t particularly care what people think of him.

For more than a decade, Australians have struggled to decide precisely what they make of the 211-centimetre Texan.

Nolan has watched the relationship evolve from afar.

Initially, there was scepticism. Why was one of the AFL’s biggest clubs investing time and resources into an American basketballer who had never played the game?

Then Cox became a curiosity. The giant American was learning Australian football. He later wore prescription goggles. He kicked goals. He celebrated them differently.

It was fun. Until, for some people at least, it wasn’t.

The novelty wore off. Cox became more confident, more demonstrative and more successful. The American wasn’t merely participating in Australia’s game any more. He was getting in opponents’ faces, celebrating in front of enormous crowds and, occasionally, deciding the biggest games of the season.

“I was never really familiar with the term tall-poppy syndrome until Mason got a few years into his career in Australia,” he said.

There can hardly have been a more literal candidate.

Nolan knows not every criticism of his brother has been cultural. Across more than a decade in the AFL, there have been times when Cox has struggled badly, and others when he has looked capable of changing a final.

But the intensity of the reaction to Mason has occasionally surprised his family.

What Nolan eventually realised was that his brother possessed an enormous advantage when dealing with it.

But the criticism mostly bounced off him.

The champions of the 1990s and 2000s whose opinions still carry enormous weight in Australian football were not his childhood heroes.

“He wouldn’t have grown up watching any of these people, or even knowing who they were,” Nolan said.

Ex-players’ opinions never carried quite the same emotional weight for Cox.

There is an irony there, too.

Cox spent years being criticised partly because he hadn’t grown up with the game. Yet the very thing that made him an outsider may have become one of his greatest strengths.

It might also explain why he has never seemed interested in becoming less conspicuous.

And if you have ever wondered where the celebrations, confrontations and occasionally infuriating competitiveness come from, Nolan can help there too.

The Cox household was competitive long before anybody in it knew what a Sherrin was.

Mason was the youngest of three brothers and spent plenty of his childhood being picked on by his older siblings.

He was also, Nolan recalls, the sort of kid capable of flipping over a Monopoly board when things weren’t going his way.

“He’s always been super competitive,” Nolan said.

When Cox’s time at Collingwood ended, even Mason had expected to be there for another season. Then came the uncertainty of the delisted free-agency period and, for a while, very little interest.

Nolan considers what happened next extraordinarily fortunate.

Mason got another opportunity.

There is, however, another way of looking at Mason Cox and luck.

Footballers are forever told they make their own. Maybe that’s why Cox keeps appearing in these big moments and, as recently as last week’s preliminary final win over the Swans, owning them.

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