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It all made for a mixed first impression. When I watched training with the new draftees, I could see this was an AFL team with some seriously good players. But the infrastructure around the team was relatively scant, felt amateurish and was not what I expected from an AFL club. It was all by virtue of not having a home; we had a nomadic existence in those formative years. At that point most Victorian clubs too still had to be satisfied with unprofessional working environments at suburban grounds, but it is fair to say that Fremantle was at the extreme end of the scale.
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Matthew Pavlich (Purple Heart)
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Forest Grove was ideal, cool at night and just warm enough in the afternoon, with Mount Hood’s majestic snowcapped peak visible in the distance and salmon running in nearby rivers. The quiet campus of Pacific, a private school known for its music and optometry schools, was lush with evergreens and white birch. The local residents were so excited to have an NFL team around that they fought to loan their cars to the players for use on the team’s days off.
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John Eisenberg (Ten-Gallon War: The NFL's Cowboys, the AFL's Texans, and the Feud for Dallas's Pro Football Future)