Australian Football

Few footballers have been blessed with such exorbitant amounts of talent as Ted Whitten senior and, unsurprisingly, his son, also named Ted, was not one of them. What he was though was a perfectly capable footballer who might have achieved much more during his career had not the curtain come down on it, owing to injury, so prematurely.

Whitten junior made his senior VFL debut in 1974 when aged just seventeen. Between 1974 and 1982 he played 144 VFL games and kicked 133 goals and was good enough to earn selection for Victoria twice. His enforced retirement came after a botched knee operation when he was just twenty-five.

In later years Whitten junior helped set up the EJ Whitten Legends Game, a charity football match which raises funds for prostate cancer research, the disease which claimed his father.

Author - John Devaney