The secret that Western Bulldogs legend Peter Gordon has kept for 30 years

At a cafe in Toorak Village in 2013, returning president Peter Gordon held court with Alan Johnstone and Garry Johnson, two of the Western Bulldogs’ wealthiest and most passionate supporters.

Gordon, who months earlier had taken over from David Smorgon in an orderly succession plan, delivered a pitch neither could refuse.

“I said to them, ‘You guys have got everything life has to offer: great homes in Toorak, great houses on the beach in Portsea, the best of everything, wonderful family, great businesses’,” Gordon recalled of what he said to the long-time club donors at the meeting also attended by then chief executive Simon Garlick.

“‘But there’s one thing you haven’t got, and you’ll never have it – and only I can give it to you’.”

Puzzled, Johnstone and Johnson, great mates, looked at Gordon with wide eyes and asked: “What’s that?”

“I can put you on the MCG holding a Bulldogs premiership cup.”

Here was the catch. At the time, the Bulldogs were $12 million in debt and could not afford to pay the full salary cap or the veteran’s allowance. Their total player payments were about $1.75 million less than the then reigning premiers Sydney. They were one of the last clubs to appoint a list manager because they could not afford one.

“We just have to pay more money,” Gordon said. “I’m going to put $1 million in this year. I’m not asking you to do the same, but I am asking you to elevate your contribution significantly.

“He said, ‘What do you have in mind?’ I’m hoping you can see your way in to put $400,000 each.

“They looked at each other and laughed. Alan said: ‘Well, I’ll do it if Garry will do it. I’m not sure if I want my family to find out, but as long as we sort that out then why don’t we do it?’

“He [Johnstone] said ‘We’ll start it next year’. I said ‘No, we’ll start it next week’. They did it.”

Three years later, Gordon delivered on his promise.

If Gordon and Smorgon, who between them oversaw the club for 31 years in a row from 1989-2020, in three separate terms, brought the political clout to Whitten Oval to take on head office, Johnstone and Johnson provided the financial power in the Bulldogs’ remarkable story of survival and prosperity.

Not many people outside the Bulldogs’ inner sanctum will be familiar with Johnstone and Johnson, whose quiet public profiles belie the significant contributions they have made.

The great friends, both lifelong Bulldogs supporters, have each donated millions. Exactly how much, they won’t say, but it would be a significant seven-figure number. No one has given more.

At a club with deep working-class roots and few connections to the top end of town, supporters like Johnstone and Johnson, and for that matter, Gordon, Smorgon and former vice president and philanthropist Susan Alberti, have been integral to their survival.

Fans who visit the Whitten Oval can be under no illusion about the Smorgon family’s contribution to the Bulldogs. The foyer is named “The George Smorgon Family Foyer”, the words emblazoned above reception. Take a left turn past the museum and you’ll see the “David Smorgon Theatre”, where coach Luke Beveridge addresses his players.

Reflecting the size of their donations, which grew significantly after Gordon’s return as president, the Dogs named the football and advanced performance centre in their $78 million redevelopment after the Johnstone family and Johnson.

There are others. The indoor field recognises Neville Bertalli’s family, likewise the pool for the family of the late Peter Greenham, who was part of the funding drive that enabled the Bulldogs to field a standalone reserves team in the VFL under their foundation name of Footscray.

Johnstone and Johnson are the Bulldogs’ equivalents of the powerbrokers at Essendon and Carlton, though seldom get involved in the day-to-day running of the club.

In a rare intervention in 2023, Johnstone confirmed he urged the Dogs to launch a review after their failure to make finals, but he was driven by his desire to see the club flourish rather than a thirst for power, influence or bloodletting.

Dogs legend and football romantic Bob Murphy describes the pair as “gentlemen with big, kind hearts”.

Johnstone, 85 – who made his wealth with the company he founded, Penfold Motors – hails from Deepdene in Melbourne’s leafy east. His love of the club traces back to the 1940s when, wearing the No.6 of his boyhood idol Charlie Sutton, he would often take the bus and train across town to watch his beloved Bulldogs.

He and Johnson founded the exclusive Coaches’ Club, which has a membership of about 20 wealthy Dogs fans who pay $13,500 a year for the privilege of access to coach Luke Beveridge and chief executive Ameet Bains at several dinners a year. It is the most expensive of the Bulldogs’ coteries, which also includes the $3750-a-year Westerners.

“They tell us a bit about what goes on in the Coaches’ Club, we get more information than the average supporter, which is fair enough, but it’s not happening all the time,” Johnstone said. “I don’t think we have powerbrokers. We’d come under a different category. We’re behind the club for the sake of the club.”

Gordon could not speak more highly of Johnstone, who was once on the other side of the political fence.

“One thing you can bank on with him, whoever has the job of running the club he’ll have their back,” Gordon said. “Lots of clubs have high net worth supporters, but I’d be very surprised if there was a high net worth supporter of equal or greater quality than Alan Johnstone in the entire history of the competition.”

The same could also be said of Johnson, whose contributions to the club began 25 years ago and increased as the company he co-founded in 1971, Burson Auto Parts, grew.

His association with the Dogs began through his parents, who both grew up in Footscray. He has hosted player barbecues at his home in Portsea, a holiday haven for Melbourne’s well-heeled, where few are for the red, white and blue.

Johnson is close to Luke Beveridge. The pair often brave the chilly waters of Port Phillip Bay for a morning swim. But he has given the club distance when the coach’s future was clouded.

“I’m not one to influence change, I haven’t been one to influence with my views, I’m not a Bruce Mathieson,” Johnson said, referring to the billionaire pokies king and former Carlton heavyweight.

Despite their generosity, both Johnson and Johnstone credit Gordon and Smorgon as being the club’s saviours.

The reverence the former political foes hold for each other speaks volumes about the power of love – the love for a football club.

To fully appreciate this, we have to go back to the turbulent spring of 1996. Johnstone and Gordon were on opposing sides of the political divide when the Smorgon-led Bulldogs Taskforce swept to power at Footscray, as the club was known then.

Even today, well after the major protagonists have made peace, the events of 29 years ago remain hotly contested. Smorgon and Gordon are friends these days, their bonds strengthened by the historic premiership in 2016, but this could not be said 20 years earlier when suspicions were high, funds low and on-field wins at a premium.

Upon taking over the club, the Taskforce ordered two independent audits of the club’s finances, a measure of the scepticism they had for the previous administration. Neither found any improper doing.

“I know we asked for some audits,” Smorgon said. “What I haven’t told you is we got a letter in the first week when I officially became president, we got a note from a major bank demanding us to repay the loan within 30 days.

“When I went to visit that bank, they said we’ve got no interest in banking with the Dogs, which was a bloody shock.”

Gordon, fiercely protective of his contribution to the club, was shattered at his treatment.

“Let’s be clear, they were preceded by accusations and questions as to whether there had been chicanery or defalcation of monies,” Gordon said.

“They demanded the CEO get the sack and demanded an independent audit. When the independent audit ended up clean they said they didn’t believe it and wanted a second one. We’re all a big happy family now, but it was pretty insulting.”

For decades, Gordon has not challenged the $2 million loss publicly, only privately, but now sees no harm in doing so. He claims the figure was inflated by the money the club owed to then Maribyrnong City Council (now known as the City of Maribyrnong) for renovations to the John Gent Stand at the Whitten Oval.

Under the agreement, the money would be paid back at an annual rate if the club continued to play home games at the venue. The move to Carlton’s Optus Oval (now IKON Park) meant the council wanted their money back.

“They booked that as a debt in that year,” Gordon said. “It made political sense for them to say ‘the old board was a disaster, Peter Gordon’s f—ed up and it’s a $2 million loss’.

“I thought to myself, ‘I’ll bite my tongue because I want their success’. I let that go and so did my board for years. But in 2025, with the history as it is, there’s no harm in me telling the truth about what the numbers were – and that’s the truth of what the numbers were.”

Though deposed in a bloodless coup, the handover was so bruising that Gordon, proud and fiercely protective of his contribution to the Bulldogs, did not return in an official capacity until 2008 when the club named him their No.1 ticket holder.

“It’s fair to say there was a minimum of goodwill between us,” Gordon said. “It was pretty hurtful to be honest, I didn’t go back to the club for years after that.”

The Smorgon years marked an era of great change. One of his first courses of business was the controversial rebranding of the club from Footscray to the Western Bulldogs. The move was both a recognition of Footscray then troubled reputation for drugs and ethnic crime gangs and the growth potential in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

Smorgon, whose father George was a board member in the early 1980s, would not say how much he has donated to the club but multiple sources familiar with such matters say he has given millions.

What is more difficult to value are the countless hours he devoted in his 16 years in charge, a contribution so significant he became just the fourth administrator to be inducted into the Dogs’ hall of fame in 2018.

The Smorgon years on the field were largely successful, yielding five preliminary final finishes, but the club again hit hard times financially, racking up a debt that would balloon out to $12 million.

Smorgon – who, after 16 years at the helm, did not have the energy for another three-year term – and his board wanted Gordon to succeed him. The humility he showed in coaxing his former political foe to take over should not be undersold.

Gordon’s law firm, Gordon Legal, was in the midst of a landmark class action for thalidomide victims against German pharmaceutical company Grünenthal, but Smorgon was persuasive.

“He both berated, cajoled and tugged at the heart strings,” Gordon said. “He talked me into doing it.”

Gordon was the youngest person to lead a V/AFL club when he took over as a 32-year-old after the famous Fightback campaign of 1989 that scuppered the planned merger with Fitzroy.

A rising star of Melbourne’s legal community at the time, Gordon yearned to be in a better financial position so he could give more to the Dogs and garner more respect from the AFL.

“I didn’t have a brass razoo to my name,” Gordon said.

By 2013, that had changed. He lent the club $1 million as a buffer against cash flow problems and the wages bill. What started as a loan became a donation. Asked if the sum was actually greater, as told to this masthead by sources familiar with the matter, Gordon confirmed he gave a further $2-3 million in 2014-16.

“I used to have this conversation with [wife] Kerri,” Gordon said. “When you’re the president you just have to do it when we’re in debt and in the situation we were in.

“She was very understanding of it. Life changed after 2016 because we were out of debt. All of the line revenues that went up with winning the flag we didn’t really need it. I continued to contribute but not at the rate of the first four years.”

Graciously, Smorgon describes his and Gordon’s terms as thus: “If we won bronze medal in 1989 with Peter and the Save the Dogs Campaign, we then won the silver medal in 1997 when the Taskforce got into power. I’d say we won the gold medal when Peter got back into control.

“Through Peter’s influence and commitment to the club from 2012 that’s how we’ve ended up with the amazing facility. We reckon our facility is second to none and we’re very proud of that. Peter Gordon needs to be complimented for what he and his board have done to achieve that result.”

Told of Smorgon’s summation, Gordon was moved. In 2014, when former skipper Ryan Griffen walked out and Brendan McCartney was sacked as coach, Smorgon could not have been more supportive.

“It would have been the easiest thing in the world for David to say, either on the record or off, ‘I didn’t expect this, I’m pretty disappointed’,” Gordon said.

“That’s when you really need friends, and he couldn’t have been a better friend then.”

They shared a special moment in 2016 when Gordon, at a grand final eve dinner at his Hawthorn home for a who’s who of the Bulldogs community, gave him a wrist bracelet allowing access to the MCG if they won.

“Money can’t buy those bracelets or entry tickets,” Smorgon said. “He did it out of the goodness of his heart. That’s one of the nicest things that’s happened to me. He paid respect to the 16 years involvement I had. I’m proud he did that.”

Alberti is another who has given substantially, about $4 million on top of 12 years on the board as a director and vice president. A life member of the club, she has also served on their Forever Foundation, the Dogs’ philanthropic arm. The Bulldogs’ community children’s centre, located adjacent to the club’s headquarters, is named after her.

One of the first women on the board of an AFL club, Alberti, who has donated millions to medical research, was accustomed to being a woman in what had traditionally been a male domain. After her first husband died, she took over their construction business.

“It didn’t take them long to realise I was a force,” Alberti said. “I don’t think they took me seriously as to what I could do to support them, but over time I’m sure I was able to show them what I could do and produce.”

No longer a donor, Alberti these days does not have to worry about the crowd being big enough to pay the bills.

“They’ve got their future mapped out now, I’ve done what I need to do, I’m incredibly satisfied,” Alberti said.

Of the current board, former club champion Luke Darcy is the director with the highest profile and influence, as the father of generational star Sam Darcy and a football director who was on the subcommittee that hired Beveridge in late 2014. A former captain, Darcy had a distinguished career in the media before leaving to focus on his business career and enjoy his son’s career.

The club’s most famous supporter Irene Chatfield – who, along with Gordon and former club chief Dennis Galimberti, helped save the club from merger in 1989 – rarely misses training. She writes a letter every week to Beveridge to fire up the team.

She was stunned when Dogs chief Ameet Bains invited her inside club headquarters to show her the meeting room named after her. “I had tears in my eyes, I was so honoured,” Chatfield said.

If not for Chatfield, Galimberti said, “we wouldn’t have a club”.

“You don’t have to have money to be influential, she’s the best case in point.”