Collingwood great Nathan Buckley has opened up on the traumatic breakdown of his marriage and the effects it has had on him as an individual looking for happiness in a vulnerable interview with News Corp.
Speaking to Hamish McLachlan, “Bucks” spoke on how and why the footy world had seen a different side of his personality to the hard-nosed midfielder they knew from the 1990s and 2000s.
“I’ve learnt things about myself in the last five years that I didn’t know,” Buckley said.
“I’ve unpacked a lot.”
Asked what the impetus was for those lessons, Bucks pointed to his 2020 separation from wife Tania.
“The most traumatic thing that’s happened to me recently was my marriage breaking down,” he said.
“The two most important things to me were family and footy. That was pretty much me. And when the family element started breaking down, my immediate family, I lent on football even more than I had before.
“It wasn’t just kicks, marks and handballs – it was the people in at footy in the footy club, and I think because they saw me vulnerable and imperfect, I actually think that deepened the connection.
“They realised that I needed them, potentially for the first time in our respective relationships.
“For the first time they saw that I needed support, and that I didn’t have all the answers, that I wasn’t bulletproof, that I wasn’t putting on this facade of ‘I’ve got it all sorted’.”
Buckley admitted it wasn’t the first time he’d had to use the football club as an outlet, telling McLachlan that he would often cry on field as a younger player.
“I used to run around the training track at the Brisbane Bears in 93’ and early at Collingwood, with tears running down my cheeks, sobbing uncontrollably,” he said.
“I always thought I was quite a resilient character, and I didn’t understand what was going on. I just wiped them away and kept going.
“I still remember sprinting from the centre square out to the wing to break the space to receive a kick and that wave comes for 15, 20 seconds. If it’s raining, it’s better because no one can see it!
“I reckon it happened four or five times that I can remember in the early stages of my career, and you’d just brush it off, push it back down.”
Since separating from Tania in 2020, Buckley was reflective of the time he had in his previous marriage, which bore two sons – Jett, 16, and Ayce, 14, but said he was happy in his current relationship with Melbourne business manager Brodie Ryan.
“Sometimes you think things are going to be forever, and they aren’t, and that’s OK,” he said.
“I think that it’s OK to celebrate, and to be grateful for a period of time that you have had, with someone, or at a job, or being in a sweet spot. But there’s no guarantee that it’s going to last, so be grateful for it. I’ve got two boys that I love dearly, from marriage.
“Tania was a big part of helping me through my life, and hopefully I did that for her as well.
That was hard to let go of, but I’m working my way through it and there’s still a lot of emotion with it, there’s still a bit of anger, still a bit of mourning, but I think that’s part of living, part of going through experiences in life and you find yourself in situations that you’d never thought you’d find yourself in.
“That’s life … you don’t control it all. I feel very fortunate to have met a partner in Brodie that I love and respect. Life is good.”
Buckley went on to say that the adversities he’s faced gave him a bigger picture outlook on life.
“To sum it up, don’t sweat the small stuff,” he said.
“Everything was always huge to me. Even the small things! It’s taken like a long time to be half comfortable with not sweating the small stuff and remembering ‘This too shall pass’.
“Not everything that is bad now, will stay bad, and not everything that’s great now, will stay great. So just breathe through it and do the best you can when you can and then when you know better, do better.”
— You can read the full interview in News Corp Sunday newspapers
