Free Hockey: Not Your Average Joe by Madonna King Page B

being launched by big retailers. Joe was involved in reviewing the documents and helping negotiate the deals. He worked hard, and late, and although Cowpe was his supervising partner, he had other masters, too.
    Cowpe says that, around that time, Joe was the subject of a heinous bullying incident. Part of his job involved a huge coordination effort to ensure one loan could be repaid and another taken out at the same time. A couple of settlements fell over, or were called off. Joe walked into Cowpe’s office. ‘I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead,’ he said. Joe explained a second settlement had fallen over within a week and one of his superiors had ‘blown his stack and ordered him to stay in the office until he was spoken to in two hours’ time’. Cowpe told Joe to go home and was later met by the senior colleague, who stormed into his office looking for Joe. A nasty argument ensued. Cowpe says there was no doubt Joe was the victim of bullying. He tried to intervene. The next day the colleague turned his venom on Joe, who stood his ground. Joe puts the incident down to a difference in politics, and knows he fell out with some in the firm through his very public political opinions.
    But the final straw, he says, was a visit to a family in Chatswood on behalf of a bank. ‘On a Friday afternoon I had to go and serve notice to seize all their assets,’ Joe says. ‘There were two families – two husbands and wives. They were in business together and they had an office on top of the Pizza Hut in Chatswood.’ They had been unable to pay their loans, crippled by high interest rates. Joe remembers climbing the stairs, carrying the notices. He asked to speak to those named on the forms. ‘They were all standing around in this one room and I said … I’m here to serve notice to seize your assets. They all burst into tears. It was terrible. Everything – their home, cars, house. Everything.’ Joe, retelling the story more than 20 years later, tears up. ‘That broke me. I walked out and went to the Willoughby Hotel and thought, I can’t do this. I didn’t get into law to break people.’
    Around this time, in March 1993, Joe and Melissa got engaged – after Melissa presented Joe with an ultimatum. Joe remembers it along these lines: ‘Melissa said I couldn’t have the milk without the cow, basically,’ he says. Melissa scoffs at – and dismisses – how her husband remembers the conversation.
    ‘I had obviously made up my mind that he was the guy for me. At some point I said to him that no man is going to get more than two years out of me without making a decision one way or the other,’ she says. ‘And then I went on a bit. I said I wanted to get married in the summer and I needed nine months to organise a wedding.’ Joe negotiated for a few minutes, but was shocked. He didn’t quite know how to answer the ultimatum and wondered out loud whether four years was a more suitable length for a courtship than two. Melissa stuck to her guns. ‘I thought two years was good enough a time,’ she says. ‘You can make up your mind in that time.’
    Melissa wasn’t impressed. ‘Four years? Nobody’s getting four years of the best years of my life,’ she told him, and the conversation ended soon after. Joe’s parents had often indulged him. Melissa hadn’t; he knew the ultimatum was genuine. He had already made his decision, but it provided the impetus to begin plotting his proposal. Melissa didn’t make that easy either. In early 1993, Joe organised a weekend on the Gold Coast, at a unit his parents owned. Melissa thought it was a romantic getaway, and was slightly put out when she realised another couple had been invited along, too. Not knowing who they were, their faces obscured by a closed car window, she started an argument, only silenced when she found out it was her best friend. It was all part of the proposal lead-up Joe had planned but he kept his counsel, even on the way home, when Melissa expressed how