Max Tetley

Maxwell Joseph Tetley (22 April 1909 – 9 February 1997) was an Australian rules footballer who played for the West Perth Football Club in the Western Australian National Football League (WANFL). A defender, he played 210 games for the club between the 1931 and 1941 seasons, playing in the team’s 1932, 1934, 1935 and 1941 premiership sides.

Tetley played a trial match for East Fremantle in 1930 after being recruited from amateur club North Fremantle, but when Cardinals president Alec Breckler offered Tetley employment and he was cleared immediately.^[1] Tetley wasted no time establishing himself, for he was named West Perth’s best first-year player in 1931 and a key member of their drought-breaking premiership team the following season, when he also won his only Breckler Medal for the club’s fairest-and-best.

In the following season, Tetley played for Western Australia in the 1933 Sydney Carnival, and was to play fourteen games for his State over the following six seasons. His reputation as a hard and strong defender grew over the years, and Tetley was a crucial factor in holding East Fremantle and Subiaco to extremely modest scores in the 1934 and 1935 Grand Finals, which produced as of 2014 the Cardinals’ only back-to-back premierships.

Although the following five seasons were extremely lean for the club, Tetley maintained his reputation as a tough defender so well that he captained the State team in 1937^[2] and 1938, besides being captain-coach of the Cardinals in 1938 and 1939. However, Tetley’s two years in charge of West Perth were an unmitigated disaster, with the Cardinals winning a total of four matches and finishing a clear last both seasons – in the process suffering the equal-worst losing streak in WANFL history. The club suffered severely from the retirement of Ted Flemming and the loss of future Essendon champion Wally Buttsworth,^[3] along with a crippling run of injuries. Tetley continued to play in 1940 under future politician Ross Hutchinson, but like his contemporary Tyson contemplated retirement in 1941 before staying on and helping a Cardinal team rebuilt with young players like Stan Heal, Bill Kingsbury and “Spike” Pola to a surprise premiership win over East Fremantle.

With the WANFL competition restricted to players under eighteen from 1942 to 1944, Tetley was forced into retirement and, unlike Tyson and a number of other pre-war stars, did not make any comeback after the war.

Tetley died in Mount Hawthorn, a northern suburb of Perth, in 1997, aged 87.^[4] In 2004, he was an inaugural member of the Western Australian Football Hall of Fame.^[5]

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