Adam Goodes opens up about major family loss
Dual Brownlow medallist Adam Goodes has opened up about his late mother in a candid interview on the Get Real with Rio WeAre8 series.
Speaking to former English professional footballer Rio Ferdinand, host of the show, Goodes revealed the heartbreaking news that his mother had passed away of a heart attack in February 2022.
“She was 62, man,” Goodes said.
He went on to share that his mother - Lisa May Goodes - had had “a really tough life”, having been the single parent to Goodes and his two younger brothers for “most of her life”. And that while she “did an incredible job … she had a lot of trauma from her childhood”.
“She was taken away when she was five,” he explained, “put into a white family, like a lot of her siblings were, and she didn’t know at the time that she was one of 10 [children].
“That’s the reason why I wasn’t connected to my Aboriginality [early on] because of that disconnect when she was five.”
Goodes admitted that he had often considered what his family’s life might have looked like had his mother not experienced systemic racism and its associated practices during her early years, when she was a child of the Stolen Generation.
And now, with children of his own and a third on the way with wife Natalie, his perspective has widened, with Goodes confessing that his own experiences have influenced how he looks at his mum’s past.
“It just breaks my heart to think that she was living in fear her whole life that someone could knock on the door and take her kids away at any moment if she wasn’t doing the right thing by us kids,” he said.
“So if I could go back and change anything, I would just love to have gone back to my mum’s life, and in that moment, change the fact that she was taken [away from her family]. And how just that one sliding door moment might have changed the world and life that I had.
“And if that meant I may never have played professional sport, if it meant I might not even be alive today, just that moment that meant my mum was still connected to her family and didn’t have to live the life that she did, and how tough it was for her.
“I’d love to be able to do that just for the old girl.”
He then revealed that every move he makes now is weighed against the time he can spend with his family, given how he had “sacrificed having children” until he retired from the AFL.
“That’s really important to me because I sacrificed having children when I was playing,” Goodes said. “I had my first kid when I was 39, I’d been retired for four years, I was ready to dedicate my time and energy to something else.
“My family, even though I didn’t think of it at the time, the sacrifice I made during my football career, they’re now benefitting because of that. Not only from the success but from the financial benefits of the sacrifices that I made - being able to buy my mum a first house that she’s ever owned.
“I’m grateful I did make those decisions at those times. It wasn’t easy to do that.”
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