Marlion Pickett (born 6 January 1992) is a professional Australian rules footballer playing for the Richmond Football Club in the Australian Football League (AFL). At age 27 and after a six and a half season career with in the West Australian Football League which included a club best and fairest award, Pickett was drafted by with the 13th selection in the 2019 mid-season rookie draft.
He won the Norm Goss Memorial Medal as best on ground during Richmond's reserves side's premiership in 2019 before making his debut in a victorious AFL grand final the following week. Pickett was the first player to debut in a VFL/AFL grand final in 67 years and the first to win a premiership in his debut game since 1926. He became a two-time premiership winner with Richmond's grand final victory in 2020, earning the second honour in just his 20th game at AFL level.
Early life
Pickett was born in Perth in January 1992 to parents Thomas Pickett and Angela Smith. The third of seven children, Pickett spent his early childhood in the northern suburbs of Perth. Pickett is of Noongar Aboriginal Australian ancestry. He was raised in difficult circumstances, witnessing family violence and drug and alcohol abuse within his immediate and extended family, while experiencing food insecurity due to his parents being out of work and supported entirely by welfare.
Pickett first played football at age seven, playing alongside his older brother in the under 9s division at the Puma Panthers in Balga. At age 11, Pickett's family relocated to the south-west regional Western Australian town of Manjimup, where he played junior football for the Manjimup Tigers, including in a Colts premiership for the side at 14 years of age.
He returned to Perth at age 15 in 2007, settling in Eden Hill in the city's north. While there, he played football with the Nollamara Junior Football Club and senior amateur Indigenous club, Koongamia. He experienced racial abuse at the hands of teammates while at Nollamara and sat out a junior grand final in protest of his club's failure to act on the issue, before departing the club entirely.
Later in 2007, Pickett was involved in a brawl alongside family members in the northern suburb of Bassendean and was subsequently charged with committing grievous bodily harm. While on bail for that charge, Pickett was arrested for engaging in a brawl and charged with both robbery and assault. He was convicted for both the grievously bodily harm and robbery charges and served a six month juvenile detention sentence at Rangeview Remand Centre in Murdoch.
Pickett left school at age 16. Soon after his release from juvenile detention he moved away from his parents and into his partners' family home in Hamilton Hill. He resumed football with Koongamia, but was unable to find work, instead being charged with more criminal offences including driving without a licence and burglary. As a bail condition for failing to appear in court for the latter charge, Pickett resumed living with his parents, who had relocated east of Perth to the town of York. At age 17, he played seniors for the York Roos in the Avon Football Association. Later that year he was charged with assault and reckless driving that year for his part in a public fight between feuding families, though those charges were later dropped.
Picket moved homes more than a dozen times over the next year, still unable to find work, before becoming an ice user and dealer not long after his 18th birthday. He began burgling local cars to fund the habit. He and a group of friends conducted two major early-morning burglaries by smashing into local shopping centres with sledgehammers on back-to-back weekends. Pickett was charged and found guilty of 17 counts of burglary and one count of aggravated burglary. He was sentenced to one month imprisonment for each count of burglary, each served concurrently, and 18 months for the aggravatedly burglary, for a total of two and half years imprisonment.
Pickett served the first portion of his sentence at Acacia Prison in Wooroloo, where he suffered from serious mental health episodes and attempted suicide on four occasions. After being transferred to the lower security Wooroloo Prison Farm, Pickett was the star member of the prison's travelling amateur football team, a program covered by the ABC's 2014 documentary television series, Outside Chance. He struggled with the un-structured environment of the prison farm, staging a drugs infraction to force a move to the main prison campus for the remainder of his sentence.