In May 2019, Tom Boyd shocked the AFL by announcing his immediate retirement from the game. He was only 23.
On the outside, he had it all. He’d only three years earlier won a premiership with the Western Bulldogs. He kicked a bag and starred in that game, too.
He was being paid a million bucks a year to play the sport he loved. He had wonderful family support, was surrounded by teammates he loved and who loved him, and was still in the honeymoon phase with new girlfriend.
But behind the scenes, he’d long been fighting a battle with severe depression and anxiety, symptoms of which included equally severe insomnia and panic attacks.
He’d barely slept for 18 months. Lying awake in bed, his mind bounced between the 400 things that could go wrong the next day. Some might have been real, but were exaggerated. Others were straight manifestations of his own mind.
He took prolonged leave at the end of 2017 to deal with the depression. He returned in 2018, but suffered a back injury in a round 18 loss to West Coast. It would be his final game in the AFL.
He wanted to quit at the end of 2019, but the club doctor told him to give it some more time to work out if it was the back injury talking or a sound mind.
So that’s what he did. He returned to the field in the VFL in 2019, but quickly realised nothing had changed.
“I had not a single real desire to continue,” he told Wide World of Sports.
“I really wanted to leave in as good terms as I could, and I made the decision relatively quickly.”
On May 16, 2019, Boyd announced his retirement. He still had two years remaining on his Bulldogs contract, and forfeited more than $2 million.
“Walking away from a couple of million dollars at the age of 23 when it seems like I basically got the greatest existence the world has ever given anyone. I mean that not in an arrogant way, but much more in an appreciative way,” he said.
“When I look back at that period of time, on paper I was a premiership player in a club who hadn’t won in 62 years, I have highlights from that day that will last forever. I was getting paid a million dollars a year to play football, which is the game that I grew up loving, wanting to play as a professional athlete.
“Even off the field, I had great family and friends, a beautiful partner who’s now my wife and mother of my daughter. I literally had the most perfect, beyond your imagination life that could possibly ask.
“But I was using that exact circumstance as a reason why I wasn’t dealing with the issues.
“The decision to walk away, and in particular the decision to give back that amount of money is a really foreign concept to people. And I understand that, absolutely. I understand how much money it was, I understand how many people wish they could play football for a living.
“But it was the right decision for me at that time, and it’s been proven to be the right decision over the last five years.”
Since retiring, Boyd has switched his focus to mental health advocacy and public speaking, and also runs performance measurement company Everperform in the private sector.
When he retired, he knew he was going to work in and around mental health, and remain involved with football.
The public speaking thing came in a roundabout way. He was asked to come and give one talk, then another, then another. Just as that was starting to gather momentum, the world shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic, so he wrote a book. Nowhere to Hide was published in 2022.
In his break from the sport in 2017 and in his retirement announcement, Boyd was very open in the words he was using. Even then, ‘mental health’ was still relatively taboo. It’s much better now, and Boyd’s choice of language in the media – he was fighting clinical depression – at the time was a contributing factor in the advancement of how mental health is treated in elite sport.
He just doesn’t take credit for it.
“From a cultural and societal point of view, we didn’t talk about this stuff. I don’t pretend or expect people to think I’m a trailblazer by any description,” he said.
“But I will say the one thing I did was intimately describe the specific issues that were going on, rather than blanketing it under one ‘mental health’ term.
“I’m not suggesting that’s wrong or right, but it could put it into perspective for people to go: ‘Oh, that’s what that actually looks and feels like’.”
Boyd is still involved in the Bulldogs through its community foundation. He is also an ambassador for Movember.
He said there was something “incredibly pure” in growing a moustache to support men’s mental health outcomes.
“My beard is horrible, but my moustache is quite strong,” he said. “I’ve recently been overseas on a family holiday and I tested out the growth capabilities – still terrific.
“A very strong, traditional moustache will be what I’ll have by the end of the month, hopefully.
“It’s incredible to be a part of ensuring as many people as possible not only understand what Movember is trying to tackle and improving the health outcomes of men worldwide, but also just the sheer importance of being able to check in with your friends and your family about all of this stuff.
“So many of the issues we face in life are the ones that we let slide, that we don’t look at, that we don’t want to deal with.
“Eventually they often pop up when they’re at their most severe.”
