Andrew Macpherson bent down and gave his niece, Charlie, a cuddle. He managed to manufacture a smile, but it was only for the six-year-old’s benefit. The night before this morning had been a bad one. His sister, Laura Clarke, had raced over to his place to pick him up and found him in a state she had seen before.
“I drove him back to my house, he cried the whole way,” Clarke says. “Like a baby, just broken. He had drank and was devastated he’d let himself get to that point again.”
She sat at the foot of her little brother’s bed until he fell asleep. When he left early the following morning no one was up except for Charlie. The little girl kissed her Uncle Mackie goodbye. Then he went home and took his own life.
Macpherson played footy for some two decades, throughout school and in the West Australian Football League. He spent much of that time running at bigger men and landing himself in hospital with concussions. That is before considering the many more sub-concussive blows he likely sustained.
For a while after his death, as the family awaited autopsy results from the Australian Sports Brain Bank, Clarke told her two daughters that Macpherson had died after an accident. They thought it meant a car accident. “I struggled with it,” Clarke says. “Charlie is a really deep thinker. They had a particularly lovely bond – she adored him.”
A few months later Clarke changed the story. “I said Uncle Mackie’s brain was broken and that caused his death.” This time she was telling the truth. His brain was broken, riddled with chronic traumatic encephalopathy lesions which scientists labelled “strikingly abnormal” for a 33-year-old.
A year before Macpherson died on 28 February, 2021, he had made a first suicide attempt while in the depths of addiction, bouts of mania and impulsivity. Initially he did not understand what was going on, all he knew was that he was not himself.
But during the intervening 12 months he watched the documentary on NFL player-turned-murderer Aaron Hernandez and became certain he, like Hernandez, had CTE. Some of his own symptoms felt similar, and he asked his family in advance to donate his brain for testing.
The autopsy found six CTE lesions and a large amount of a protein called tau – the marker for the progressive and fatal brain disease, which is associated with repeated traumatic brain injuries and manifests as behavioural changes, mental health issues, impulse control problems, memory loss and other cognitive impairment.
“There was a significant burden of tau in his brain, which is strikingly abnormal,” says Michael Buckland, the executive director of the Australian Sports Brain Bank and the neuropathologist who examined Macpherson’s brain. “He had half a dozen CTE lesions in the blocks we looked at, but in pretty much every block we looked at from his frontal cortex there was a bit of tau. That isn’t a CTE lesion as it’s defined, but I would expect, if I studied the frontal cortex of a normal 33-year-old male, I would find nothing.”
Macpherson’s brain is among 21 to have been tested by the Brain Bank since its inception in 2018. In preliminary findings released last month, the researchers found CTE in 12 of that cohort, a disturbing sample-sized glimpse into what scientists believe is an undiagnosed epidemic.
He is one of three under the age of 35.
***
For the first 30 years of Macpherson’s life he was the quintessential charmer, an initially shy dyslexic Perth boy who painted his Rossmoyne bedroom West Coast yellow and blue, and grew in confidence each time he stepped onto an Aussie rules field.
The general consensus is he was charismatic, good looking and quick-witted, but always selfless. He was everybody’s best friend. Everyone had an Andy Mac story.
“He had this gravitational pull,” says friend and former East Fremantle teammate, David Bongiascia. “He would turn an average night into a fun night, just because he was there.”
No one, though, was as fond of him as his mother. The running family joke was that Anne-Marie loved her two children 100%: Laura 5% and Andrew 95%. He called her “mummy” his entire life.
Macpherson spent his high school days riding his dinghy across the Canning River to Aquinas College, for whom he played in the firsts and developed a reputation as a lockdown defender who “didn’t take a backward step”.
“His courage on the football field was the highest courage level in the team by a long way,” says best friend and former teammate, Alex Mcleod. “When we were 17 he got taken away in an ambulance twice – and we only had 10 games that year.
“I just remember him going for the ball with a bloke who was a fair bit bigger than him and his head hitting into this guy’s shoulder while he was side on. He was out cold straight away, for more than a minute.
“This was in the early 2000s so it definitely wasn’t like it is now where you’ve got to have the mandatory week off after. He definitely played the week after. I would’ve seen another four or five big ones in the next three or four years and there were another couple when we played in Melbourne together after the WAFL.”
A neck brace became a regular accessory for Macpherson. The school nurse said one of his concussions was the most severe she had ever seen. Another time, his late father, Patrick, spotted him throwing up off the side of the oval. He asked his son if he had told the coach. Macpherson responded no, because he wanted to play the following week.
“He would often play a role where he’d come off his man,” Bongiascia says, “float across packs and run back with the flight of the ball to try to assist other defenders. And when you’ve got someone coming the other way you get cleaned up.
“I don’t think it’s wrong in saying Macca probably wasn’t the most skilful player I’ve ever played with, but I’d struggle to find a braver player. He played with ferocity, and that ferocity put him in the line of some hits.”
Macpherson was 18 when he made his senior debut for East Fremantle against Subiaco in 2005. In his very first contest he tried to take out all 120kg of an opposing ruckman and came off second best. For four years until 2009 he was one of the most disciplined backmen in the WAFL, beating the likes of Jeff Farmer, Paul Medhurst and Hayden Ballantyne. At one point he came close to being drafted in the AFL and had talks with North Melbourne, though the step up never came to fruition.
“He ended up doing a business degree,” Clarke says, then laughs. “Or I ended up doing the business degree. His name was on it. Mum and dad paid for it. We say it was a family effort.”
In the end he started a plumbing business with Clarke. He was especially close to his sister, meaning she was one of the first to notice signs of his decline. “Certainly in the last two years there was a massive change in his personality,” she says. “Manic and addictive behaviours, things that had never been there before.”
One of those was gambling. Macpherson would bet big sums of money. At its worst, he put down $100,000 in one hit. “It was random and it was massive, massive amounts of money,” Mcleod says. “He’d never had a gambling problem throughout his whole life but he would bet on almost anything and hide it. And his drinking, he definitely hid that.”
The secret was out when Clarke discovered an influx of alcohol-related expenses on his company credit cards. “At one stage he was also abusing dexamphetamine,” she says. “He took up to 100 at one point in a day. I think he was just so desperate.”
There were more subtle shifts, too. He would pop in to family events but leave soon after he arrived, or engage in a conversation physically while his brain was noticeably somewhere else. He’d ask Mcleod to catch up for a chat and clearly have something on his mind, but stop short of sharing it.
***
On a Saturday night in 2020, about 12 months before he died, Macpherson went out to pick up some dinner and did not come home. His wife, Lana, had just gone into early labour with their twins and she couldn’t reach him. “We were calling and calling, and his friends were doing drive-bys of all the local pubs,” Clarke says.
“We had enough reason given his manic behaviours. He was very fast-talking, on the ball, kind of almost like somebody who had taken too many drugs. Not aggressive, just in a very erratic, anxious state and being very secretive, covering his tracks.
“The kinds of behaviour any addict would have, and I think that’s the thing with CTE – so much you can attribute to other things like addiction or mental health.”
The following afternoon Clarke decided to try the business work yard. When she opened the door, the office had been turned upside down. The thing she noticed first were the bookcases, which were moved out from the wall and covered in illegible scribbles – an incoherent train of thought.
“I could understand the first couple of words, and then it was made-up words,” she says. “I’ve seen movies where there are people who are just so out of their minds, and it was like that.”
Paperwork was scattered everywhere. A tap was running water. On the wall was some blood. Or was it dirt? She couldn’t make out which.
“And he had turned a chair upside down and put a sign on it saying ‘nobody is authorised past this point’,” she says. “I just remember looking at the sign and thinking, ‘what has he done?’ Everything drained out of me.”
She phoned her dad and then an ambulance, but could not bring herself to venture any further until the police came. They found Macpherson in the adjoining mezzanine, alive but only just. He had left a note. Hospital staff found in his system – among other substances – such a high level of dexamphetamine that they initially assumed he was a meth addict.
Clarke wants to share these upsetting details not for the sake of it, but to shock people into understanding the devastating outcomes of repeated brain injuries from collision-based sport.
“I just want education,” she says. “I want people to be aware of it, and if Andrew’s story helps someone then his death is a little bit less of a waste. It is uncomfortable and it is horrifying, but I think people need to know the truth about it. It’s not a nice story, but it is his story.
“We’re a really lovely family, and there are thousands of kids out there wearing Eagles jumpers and scarves and supporting other teams. Show Andrew’s photo to any mother who has a son doing the same things and they might consider that it could happen to them. This is a reality – CTE can happen to anyone.”
***
After Macpherson’s suicide attempt, while an inpatient at the psychiatric hospital Graylands, doctors found it difficult to land on a diagnosis for any specific mental illness. He was prescribed antidepressants, but mostly took it upon himself to get better through regular meetings at Gamblers Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous. Sometimes his dad joined him for support, sometimes it was Mcleod.
He tried other things, too. Clarke even drove him to a monastery to meditate with Buddhists. “He was trying so hard to be who he used to be, which was impossible,” she says. “He said to me that, if and when he dies, to get his brain tested for CTE. It wouldn’t have been a consideration otherwise.”
Macpherson’s father died a few months after he did, having been ill with mesothelioma. He took some comfort and closure in learning his son’s deterioration could be linked with something tangible.
“I think to some degree he held on wanting to find out,” says Clarke. “The second we found out it changed our mindset. It’s devastating, obviously, to know that he had struggled with it, but we were no longer blaming each other or ourselves.
“Because obviously you are looking for answers with suicide. Could we have done something different? Did we not notice something? You know, what was our role in all of it? To find out that CTE was the reason was a comfort – there was nothing we could have done differently.
“CTE robbed his brain and then robbed him from us. It’s just a complete injustice, you know? He was such a beautiful human. He was 33 – he was just a baby.”
Clarke has since spoken with other affected families, including Shane Tuck’s wife Renee and Danny Frawley’s wife Anita, who discussed the declines of their own loved ones with CTE. It was the first time she found something she didn’t know she needed.
His friends, too, have directed their grief towards a cause. Last September, on AFL grand final day, Mcleod, Bongiascia and Selby Lee-Steere staged the inaugural Mackie Cup, a charity football match contested by former AFL and WAFL players including premiership Eagles midfielder Chris Masten, Tyson Goldsack and Sharrod Wellingham. It raised more than $55,000 for the Kai Eardley Foundation, which runs workshops to prevent youth suicide in Australian men.
The tradition will continue this year. In the interim, from time to time, Macpherson lets his family know he is still there.
“It’s funny, the day he died it rained and rained and rained, and it felt like mother nature was mourning,” Clarke says. “The rain came again the day my dad died, and again on Andrew’s birthday.
“I suppose we look for the signs, and he put on a good show. He rained for us.”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
