Tony Armstrong on how failure made him fearless
The star TV presenter’s career has been shaped as much by his failures as it has by his successes. As he tells Men’s Health, a willingness to share your vulnerabilities can be the building block of boldness
ABOUT THREE MONTHS ago, Tony Armstrong couldn’t get out of bed. This wasn’t a case of hitting the snooze button after a 3.30am wake-up call for the ABC’s News Breakfast. Or even a half hour scrolling on his phone before reluctantly planting his feet on the ground. No, Armstrong couldn’t get out of bed, period.
“I tried to get out of bed one week to go to work. The alarm went off, I was awake, I just couldn’t. I was like, Oh yeah, okay, that’s not good,” says Armstrong, who’s speaking to me today, shorn of his trademark mop of black hair and his ’70s Aussie cricketer-style moustache, from a house up in Bangalow in northern NSW, where he’s come to decompress after signing off from the nation’s TV sets a week or so earlier. “That’s because of the load, the mental load. I wasn’t just doing News Breakfast. I was doing a bunch of other things. And I was just cooked, fully cooked. Entirely no energy. I was sleeping like 16 hours a day. And I’ve never dogged anything before. I always rock up. No matter what, fucking just get there. So yeah, that felt really gross, because I was like, Fuck that, this isn’t me.”
Armstrong knew something was wrong. More importantly, he knew what he had to do. The 35-year-old has faced dark times before. He knew he needed to get moving and to do things “I like doing”. He also knew he needed to see his psychologist.
“I actually started seeing a psych when I was playing footy,” says Armstrong, who had a peripatetic eight-year, 35-game AFL career from 2008 to 2015 with the Adelaide Crows, Sydney Swans and Collingwood. “I never had stigma around psychology. Sometimes you’re lucky with your take on the world. So, despite being in a hypermasculine type of space, I was just lucky I never had that prejudice.”
Mental recuperation is part of the reason Armstrong has moved up to Bangalow. To get out of the fishbowl, off the treadmill and to look after himself. “Just for the time being, I’m trying to get some of my bounce back,” he says. “Hit the ocean every day, all that kind of stuff. Because I lost a bit of spark. I was starting to form some bad habits, not respecting my sleep cycle, eating poorly, having a few too many glasses of wine. All of that becomes a reflection of where you’re at. So, I’m just trying to get back to the best version of myself.”
When did he feel he was last in that space, I ask.
“A while,” he says. “Over a year.”
Armstrong shares all this without a hint of self-consciousness or shame. In the hour or so that we chat, he’s an open book, sometimes funny, occasionally emotional, often reflective, cradling the top of his shaven head in his hands. It’s tempting to credit the emotional rawness to his new ’do and the absence of his trademark moustache, as if losing some follicles has helped shed a weight, possibly helped reveal the man behind the famous mo. But that would be too neat and a little disingenuous. He lost the locks and fur on his upper lip (which grows back impressively in time for our shoot) as soon as his TV commitments wrapped up. “The facial hair I get, I look like a magician who hasn’t quite made it onto the main strip at Vegas,” he laughs. “I’m like a couple of blocks off Broadway-type thing.”
And besides, Armstrong is one of those what-you-see-is-what you-get type of guys, or what he calls “boring”. “Maybe not boring, but I think I’m just like, my cards are pretty on the table the whole time,” he says. “And I think sometimes that surprises people because they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, you are exactly the same’.”
That lack of pretence, the guilelessness, can’t-bottle-it authenticity, may have been what’s allowed him to connect with the Australian public in a way few TV stars have in recent times. But tied up in that unvarnished approach to life is a willingness to be vulnerable and from that perhaps, something potentially transformative. Because when you lay your cards on the table, when you own both your successes and your failures, as Armstrong so readily does, you expose yourself. And without anything to hide, you also have less to fear.
THE YEAR 2015 was not a great time to be Tony Armstrong. After eight years as an AFL journeyman, his career was on life support. His childhood dream hadn’t been the gilded highlights package of premierships and best-on-grounds he’d imagined as a kid growing up in Brocklesby, near Albury. Sure, he’d made the AFL, but as Armstrong points out, no kid who kicks the Sherrin around in his backyard, dreams of eking out a game or two here, getting dropped, warming the bench or basically being an AFL player in name only.
“Oh man, for sure,” says Armstrong, when I ask, rather bluntly, if he feels like the reality of his childhood dream was a pale reflection of what he envisaged in his mind’s eye. “I still think I’ve failed at my childhood dream, but I’m okay with it.”
Sometimes Armstrong’s mates will attempt to lift him up, to offer him some perspective. He won’t hear it. “If I’m sitting around a table with friends and we talk about fame, that kind of thing, they’re like ‘We all would’ve killed to play’. I’m like, ‘Shut up, man, no-one dreams of playing 35 games’. If you say that, you’re lying. You want to win premierships, Brownlow Medals, captain. That’s what I was thinking.”
The vigil to learn if he was playing each weekend, Armstrong says, was like a tide, slowly eroding his mental shoreline. Some weeks he felt like he might slip beneath the surface. “I don’t think there’s any other industry where you so relentlessly get told you are not good enough, either directly or indirectly,” he says, his voice becoming brittle. “Quite literally, every week they select a team who are good enough. I was on the list for eight years, so that’s 200 games including finals. I played 35. That’s a lot of being told you’re not good enough.”
Even if he played well, Armstrong couldn’t enjoy the moment. He was already thinking ahead to the following week, wondering if he’d done enough. Of those 35 games, Armstrong reckons he left the field satisfied in a handful at most. “There was probably five where I was like, Yeah, I know I’ve played well. I know I’ve done enough. This is fine. I’m going to play next week, and I could enjoy it.”
When his career wrapped up after he was delisted by Collingwood at the end of the 2015 season, Armstrong felt rudderless. What do you do when you fail at the thing you’ve worked your whole life for? The thing that’s defined you? “It was tough when I came out of it just because it was so much part of my identity,” he says. “I was a footballer. You’re looking around and everyone else is eight years into whatever they’re doing. They’ve all finished their degrees, killing it in their jobs, and you’re back at the start.”
The psychological kick in the teeth opened Armstrong’s eyes, disabusing him of tired and trite notions about the importance of hard work in achieving success. “It taught me that the biggest fallacy in life is being told that working hard means you’ll get what you want,” he says. “I think we can all agree that it’s not the working hard bit that gets you everything you want. It gives you the best opportunity, but it doesn’t mean you get what you want. And that’s helped me infinitely now.”
As he would find out later in his career, luck is the silent partner in all great success stories and more than a few failures. But an awareness and appreciation of the role it plays, as Armstrong seems to have, can help insulate you from both the gifts and the gut-punches it might bestow.
ARMSTRONG ONLY MET his father, who hails from Gamilaroi Country in northern NSW, in the past year. How was it, I ask. “Fine,” he says. “I thought it would be more emotional than it was. It was fine”.
We leave it there, as we begin to talk about Armstrong’s childhood, growing up with a single mother, first in Western Sydney, then in Brocklesby. Moving to the sticks was a culture shock, he says, particularly going from a school of nearly a thousand kids in Sydney, to one with just 23. “That was like, whoa. I was one of three year 6s.”
In Brocklesby, he leaned into AFL, the sport helping him get a foothold in the local community. “Sport is the thing that kind of keeps those towns running,” he says.
He describes himself as a cheeky kid who pushed up against the discipline his mum, a schoolteacher, tried to instil. “She wanted me to be really studious and me just doing the bare minimum of what I needed for mum to be happy,” he says, smiling at the memory. “Any more than that, I was like, I don’t really care, I want to be out kicking the footy. I was never a bad kid, I just wanted to do jokes.”
In high school, he attended the prestigious Assumption College in Kilmore, an hour or so north of Melbourne. Those school days, he says, looking back, were the best of his life. “It was like Wonderland,” he says. “I think about how tight we all were, how we all helped each other out. You don’t realise how close you’re all becoming until later on.” He tells me he attended the bucks’ night of an old school mate on the weekend just gone. “It was just us tight schoolmates. Probably 10 of us. And it’s just awesome, we’re still best of friends. That’s all come from back then.”
Armstrong’s gifts as an athlete and sportsman helped him find a footing in what he looks back on now as a Lord of The Flies-type atmosphere at the private school. “I didn’t realise it was like that when I was in it,” he says. “I was really lucky. I had something that gave me good currency, which was being able to play sport at a high level. So straight away, I was given a bit more leeway by everyone.”
Of course, as an Indigenous kid at an elite boarding school, he stood out. And while sport provided a shield, it wasn’t always enough to protect him in an environment in which racism was, if not entrenched, then certainly common. He shrugs when I ask him if he experienced much abuse. “Yeah, of course. But I think it was more through ignorance, right? Some of my best mates have said some pretty cruel things to me. I guess the thing that I’m most proud of with my mates is just how much they’ve grown. This is boarding school, country kids, 2003, 2004, 2005. You don’t expect too much of them in terms of race relations. But I think you could take a slice of just about anywhere at any time, even now. It’s still everywhere.”
Complicating matters for Armstrong was that in his father’s absence, he was disconnected from his heritage. It was a source of shame and confusion, he says. “That was really tricky because that’s when you start realising just how different looking you are,” he says. “You get to an age where you’re starting to be able to look outside yourself and perceive yourself in the world.” In the absence of a connection to his people, Armstrong found himself filling in blanks. “There was a decent amount of lying about what I knew,” he says. “A bit of blagging. Not nasty lying, but just like, Shit, I’m embarrassed here. So, you just make it up. I have a bit of shame, I guess is what I’m saying.”
Part of this shame, Armstrong feels, is because of stereotypes of Indigenous people in our society. “If you’re Black, people expect you to know absolutely everything because there’s just this thing that we’re this all-knowing, almost mystical people, who are so connected with everything,” he says. “And that comes through tropes of TV and whatever it might be. So, you get asked these questions, and you’re like, I can fucking make this up here, no one’s going to have any idea. But obviously, you never feel good about talking shit like that, do you? So yeah, it was a really conflicting time.”
Indeed, it was only when Armstrong was drafted by the Adelaide Crows, that he began to connect more deeply with his roots, finding a brotherhood of Indigenous players at the club in Andrew McLeod, Graham Johncock, Jonathon Griffin, Jared Petrenko, Jarrhan Jacky and Jonathon Griffin, who took him under their wing. “That was the epic part of it,” he says. “There aren’t too many places where you’re going to meet that concentration of high-achieving Blackfellas. I think back then there was six or seven of us in a list of 45. It was more than 10 per cent, whereas we’re less than 1.5 per cent of the population. So hugely over-indexed. And I was really taken in. Not as a lost puppy, more as like, come on, we’ll show you around. I’d go hunting with them, do all sorts of things. It was fucking awesome.”
Race is a subject that comes up several times during our chat. Armstrong was recently the subject of online abuse after Media Watch aired a story on voiceover work he did for an insurance company without seeking prior approval from the ABC – his response when I ask him if he has anything to say about the report is: “No, honestly, whatever. Good on them. Got some clicks”.
He’s faced similar abuse whenever he’s spoken out on Indigenous issues, such as deaths in custody. It’s always there, he says. “That’s constant. And to be honest, I’ve worked hard on this. I still see my psych once a week. I’m in a space now where I’m like, that stuff isn’t the stuff that gets to me so much. It’s more the structural stuff. I was frustrated at the lack of foresight in leaving comments open, that kind of thing. I’m like, people need to remember that it is happening because I think so many people just have no idea. They think that maybe because things are going okay for me, that I’m cruising around and I’m oblivious to it. In actual fact, I’m probably on the receiving end a bit more.”
Once again, Armstrong attributes his ability to deal with the abuse and to detach from it on a personal level, to his psychologists. “I keep banging on about my psychs, but they’ve been so helpful for me,” he says. “Like win, lose, or draw, I don’t take anything personally. That’s a ‘them’ thing. I feel sorry for a lot of people who see the world through a prism like that. And I know that I’m very lucky to be in a headspace where I can deal with it [racism] when it happens.”
I ask Armstrong if he sees the abuse as symptomatic of the cowardice and lack of accountability social media encourages or as a sign of more deep-seated racism in the Australian community. His reply is succinct.
“I think the Voice will give you your answer.”
ARMSTRONG’S INTEREST IN in psychology extends beyond treatment. He began a degree in the field during his final years at Collingwood, completing one unit – he got a distinction – before deciding study wasn’t for him. “I think something that I would say is a character strength is empathy and wanting other people to feel good about themselves,” he says. “I thought that would line up with my kind of inner being and purpose and all that kind of shit.”
In the years between 2015 and 2019, Armstrong would try out a lot of vocations, as he searched, increasingly desperately, for the thing that might fill the void football had left in his life. “I tried advertising, I tried mentoring, I tried being an agent,” he says. “I had skills, but I didn’t know what they were. I lost hope a bit. I don’t want to think too much about what might have happened. I was pretty hopeless.”
The story of Armstrong’s ‘big break’ contains some of the narrative tropes common in myth making – right person, right time, right place – that can create a sense that it was always meant to be. But Armstrong, who lost any sense of destiny after his AFL dream petered out, is able to look back at what happened with a reflectiveness and sense of objective detachment that’s probably rarer than it should be in the media industry.
He was doing some mentoring work at the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience, he says. That took him to a school attended by former Brisbane Lions star Chris Johnson’s kids. He and Armstrong got talking. “I’m like, ‘What’s up? Because we knew each other from the Indigenous camps. And he’s like, ‘Brother, do you want to do some commentary on the weekend?’ And I’m like, ‘Fuck, man, that actually sounds fun’.” He shakes his head. “If it was half an hour earlier, half an hour later…”
The commentary gig was with the National Indigenous Radio Service and from the moment Armstrong sat down to call a game, he knew he’d found, if not his calling, then something close to it. “It was crazy. As soon as I walked through the door to do the job, it was like, bang. I just had a knack. Obviously, you have to hone your craft. And I wasn’t afraid of hard work. But I finally found something I was good at. I was like, Oh, it fucking fits.”
It kind of had to, for as Armstrong admits now, he was a little desperate. “I think the other side of fearlessness is desperation,” he tells me. “Because I think in both of those situations, you’ll do the thing that is uncomfortable. When you’re desperate, you’ll do it because you’ve got nothing else. I was desperate in that moment.”
He isn’t any longer, he says, yet having tasted failure, grappled with it, grasped its jagged contours and talked it out with his therapists, he knows he can deal with it. “I now like to think of myself as being on the other side of the coin where it’s like I’m not scared to try things,” he says. “I think that’s what’s happened now. I don’t have shame to try something and then fail because I don’t think I’ll ever be as at rock bottom as where I was.”
This suit of mental armour, built up over more than a decade when he seemed to be constantly building sandcastles at high tide, is what allows Armstrong to maintain his mental equilibrium, not to mention his perspective. “Even when I’m working out or footy training or doing my job, I think one thing that’s been consistent the whole time is to take it really seriously, but at the end of the day, I’m like, Fuck, if something goes wrong, yeah, mourn it, but also be happy that you tried your hardest,” he says. “So don’t get stuck, don’t be so serious. It’s not like you’re trying to save lives.” He recalls his early days at the Crows when there was a perception that he didn’t take things seriously enough. “I was always doing everything with a smile on my face or laughing,” he says. “I look back on it and there was no maturity around the fact that two things can be true at once.”
Without really meaning to, Armstrong has hit on one of the central tensions of modern life: it’s complicated. None of us really know what’s going on in each other’s lives – beneath the surface, below the shoreline. But as Armstrong has found, there are ways to dissolve the tension, to remove the mask, remove the contradictions and reveal your whole self. “As I get older, I’m so comfortable in who I am and I’m at a level mentally where I can kind of take or leave what people think about me,” he says. “I know that I’m working hard, I know that I care. That’s all that matters.”
It matters because appearances can be deceptive. Smiles can conceal grit, hide heartache and give the impression that things are okay, even when they’re not. Similarly, you can be strong while asking for help – two things can be true at once. But that’s something you often only see when you lay those cards on the table.
Tony Armstrong’s mental strength workout plan
- Exercise: “I know that the first thing that goes when I’m really struggling is exercise. It’s the very first thing. So, I really try to make sure I’m going for a long run or in the gym or going for a walk.”
- Get outside: “This is a really big one. I try to get outside early in the day.”
- Chill: Armstrong is a music fan and bookworm. He’s currently reading Night Angel Nemesis by Brent Weeks. “It’s a sci-fi book about a guy who’s the best assassin ever and he’s dealing with everything that comes with that and being immortal.”
- Create: “I love creating, even if it’s for nothing. I think it’s really important to just make something for you, because that feels good. And try to finish things. So many things get left on the table. But even if it’s just for you, finish it, whatever it is that you’re doing. And finish strongly.”
Tony Armstrong’s workout plan
Armstrong kept playing local footy after his AFL career wrapped up, which helped keep him in decent shape. “It doesn’t take me long to get back into reasonable enough nick and when I train, I know how to train hard,” he says. “I know how to hurt myself in the right way, in a good way. And I fucking love it.”
Running is Armstrong’s go-to, knocking out 10km three days a week with a 25km hit-out on weekends. “I get into that meditative zone quite quickly because I find that the syncopation, like the pattern of my feet and breathing, is almost like a mantra and I’m just like in a euphoric state. It’s awesome.”
Over the past month, Armstrong has been training with trainer Jono Castano, owner of Acero. Here’s his weekly routine:
MONDAY CHEST/TRICEPS
STAIR MASTER x 10 mins
1A Barbell Bench Press x 5x 15,12,10,10,5
2A Single Press DB x 4×12
2B Cable Flys 4×12
3A Single Arm Chest Press 4×12
4A Triceps push down drop set s 4×12
4A Overhead extensions x 4×12
5a 100m / sit ups x 6 sets
TUESDAY BACK – ARMS
STAIR MASTER x 10 mins
1A T Bar Rows Semi Neutral x 4×12,10,7,5 drop set last set
2A Straight arms pullover rope x 4×13
3A Pronated Lat Pulldown Single x 4×8
4A Reverse flys x 4×10
5A Arm curls rope x 4×12
5B Single cable curl / alienate dumbbells 4×12
WEDNESDAY – LEGS
STAIR MASTER x 10 minutes
1A. Leg extensions x 4×8
2A deficit lunge x 4×12
3A Sumo Db deadlift x 4×12
3A Single leg curl 4×12
4A Standing Calf Raise 4×12
THURSDAY – SHOULDERS
STAIR MASTER x 10 Minutes
1A Shoulder Db Press 4×12,10
2A single arm lateral raise 5×12
3a rope frontals 4×12
Rears 4×12
4B traps 4×12
Ski 4×400,300,200,100
Slams 4×12
FRIDAY – BICEPS/TRICEPS
STAIR MASTER x 10 Minutes
1A Standing Barbell Curls 5×20,15,12,10,6
2A DB Alternate Curls 4×10
3A Ez Curl 4×12
4A Skull Crusher 5×20,15,12,10,10
4B Close Grip Press 4×12
5A Push Down Rope 4×12
Tony Armstrong’s nutrition plan
Breakfast
- 1 whole egg 3 egg whites
- 1tsp coconut oil
- Banana
Mid-morning snack
- Whey protein isolate
Lunch
- Turkey mince 100g
- Avocado oil 1tsp
- Garden salad/brown rice 50g
Mid Afternoon Snack
- Whey protein isolate
Dinner
- Turkey mince 100g
- Avocado oil 1tsp
- Garden salad/brown Rice 50g
Bedtime snack
- Peanut butter 2 tsp
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