IT always seemed blunt and brutal with Charlie Dixon. Be it in the goalsquare as the main go-to man in attack or in the centre square as the supposedly reluctant ruckman answering his team’s Hail Mary prayer, Dixon was big, bold and loud.

If the Port Adelaide fans – to whom Dixon was a true cult hero – did not fully test the bolts and rivets at Adelaide Oval with their cheers (and appeals for those rarely granted free kicks) after Charlie took a contested mark or kicked a much-needed goal, Dixon certainly made the stadium shake with his lion-hearted roars on nailing a major. And that fist pump!

He had passion. He had a full-on competitive spirit that coaches crave in their players. He brought energy to the Port Adelaide game, on the field and across the terraces where his fans hailed him as their “King Charles”. His entire demeanour was of a spirited warrior competing as if his life – his kingdom – depended on the match result.

But our Charles never had the airs and graces of a regal ruler. He was as blue collar as the genuine Port Adelaide image could conjure. His image with beard and tattoos was true to the colonial docks of Port Adelaide in the late 1880s than any Royal palace. 

Dixon seemed tough, Hard Yakka tough. But the body was not indestructible – and Dixon did not hide his mental demons. 

Dixon could wave off a television boundary rider waving a microphone to him after the final siren on match day, perhaps fearing what he could say when adrenalin was racing through his veins. Yet, he could speak with unfiltered reality in a weekly radio or television segment. And he would smile.

Charlie Dixon came to Australian football in 2003 – at the age of 13 – after following his parents’ path in basketball in Cairns, north Queensland. He was in a hotbed for Australian football created by Victorians who fled the grey skies of Melbourne in search of sunshine from dawn to dusk. Four years later, he was the first player on the books with the newly formed Gold Coast Football Club – and in 2011 Dixon put his name permanently in the history books as the first goalkicker in Gold Coast’s AFL launch against Carlton at the Gabba.

Dixon arrived at Port Adelaide – following Ken Hinkley, one of his mentors at Gold Coast – for the 2016 season with dodgy ankles … and supposedly the promise he would be kept at the goalfront rather than have those ankles tested as a ruckman leaping into a rival’s body and landing with no surety on his footing.

Hinkley told everyone at Alberton as the trade papers arrived from Gold Coast in October 2015 that they would need no more than five minutes to appreciate how driven Dixon was for success as a footballer – and “you’ll love him as a team-mate; he will pick you up at times and take you with him.”

There is a long-standing, special relationship between Hinkley and Dixon – an understanding that defines much more than a player-coach partnership.

“Ken was the one at Gold Coast,” recalls Dixon, “who would keep me accountable. He’d really ride me. That was something I needed.”

Dixon needed Hinkley to shake him out of his misguided understanding of what he needed to deliver as an AFL player, particularly at Port Adelaide.

Dixon recalls the moments of blunt guidance from Hinkley: “Kenny would tell me, ‘You don’t know what it’s like in the AFL,’ but I didn’t really take it on board. It took me so long to have an impact on games … “

By the start of the 2024 season – by his own admission and concern – Dixon had more than dodgy ankles to nurse after repeatedly putting his body on the line for Port Adelaide, particularly against West Coast at Adelaide Oval late in 2018. The right ankle endured further cartilage damage, requiring repeat surgery and created “heartbreaking” frustration – as he put it – while Dixon was restricted to just nine AFL matches in 2019.

Dixon’s revival in 2020 was a critical part of Port Adelaide’s rise to the minor premiership amid the challenges of dealing with the demands of a worldwide pandemic. The All-Australian selectors noted such by honouring Dixon with his only selection in the AFL team of the year.

The numbers tell of Dixon’s power at the goalfront. In 221 AFL games (65 at Gold Coast and 156 with Port Adelaide), Dixon scored 357 goals (1.62 average).

Dixon three times topped the goalkicking list at Port Adelaide – in 2017 with a career-high 49 goals; in the shortened 2020 season with 34 goals that put him second on the Coleman Medal tally count as the AFL’s leading goalkicker; and in 2021 with 48 goals.

In total, there were 263 of those roars and fist pumps after goals with Port Adelaide – placing Dixon at No.5 in Port Adelaide’s AFL journey behind Warren Tredrea (549), Robbie Gray (367), Justin Westhoff (313) and Jay Schulz (275).

Dixon’s biggest game-day haul was seven – 7.2 while playing for Gold Coast against North Melbourne at Carrara in 2015. His best for Port Adelaide was six goals – 6.2 against West Coast, also at Carrara, in 2020.

There are two columns in Dixon’s career statistics that cannot be overlooked in reviewing his AFL career. He was handed 301 free kicks – but deserved more while opposition defenders double-teamed him and found ways to hold him without drawing the umpire’s whistle. He gave away 265 … and did protest every one of them.

There also is the contested marks – 419, as Dixon took his 200cm frame into packs or he created them by having two or three opponents riding on his back to a marking contest.

“Charlie always,” notes Hinkley, “put his body on the line for his teammates … and with a number of opponents hanging off him.”

Dixon started this season knowing how vulnerable he was to his body’s battered state, particularly with the lingering pain from a broken foot suffered in 2023. He entered the pre-season feeling “sore” but with that typical Dixon mentality that “I am going to do everything I can, like I do every year, to win.”

The best-laid plan at Alberton was to repeatedly rest Dixon at regular points during the marathon home-and-away season – and then the first curve ball to this strategy came with the three-match ban from the SANFL tribunal in mid-June for a high bump to a West Adelaide opponent. Considering he had been dropped to the SANFL circuit (after scoring 13 goals in 10 games), Dixon wisely used his enforced time on the sidelines to improve his fitness with a weight-shedding training program. He was declaring his commitment to improve to be part of Port Adelaide’s finals campaign – “He was up for the fight,” as Hinkley put it.

So Dixon abdicates from his kingdom in the Port Adelaide goalsquare having given everything he had to that fight … and with the fans to note his absence when they no longer hear that roar echo across Adelaide Oval after one of his goals. He was bold, he was blunt and he played with a burning passion that coaches wish was a given with every player. 

King Charles departs. But he will not disappear from the memory.