International Rules Ireland v Australia: Tom Humphries talks to legendary AFL coach Kevin Sheedy, whose larrikin good humour conceals a nimble mind
If you sat at a press conference any time over the past couple of weeks and watched Kevin Sheedy sitting beside Seán Boylan, you'd be hard pressed to pick which man you'd want as your favourite uncle. Oddly, if you wanted somebody to lead you into war you wouldn't have to look further than the two grinning greybeards at the top of the room either.
Boylan's longevity in Meath is matched by Sheedy's at his beloved Essendon. He has been turning up for work at the club's training facility at Windy Hill on Napier Street every day since 1981. Those days begin at 6am, and when necklaced they make for the greatest career in modern AFL history, with four premierships as the centrepiece pearls.
And for those hoping that tomorrow's proceedings in Croke Park will be as genteel and dainty as those in Pearse Stadium last week, Sheedy's sides have always had a pragmatic approach to the aesthetics of winning.
Just as Seán Boylan's Meath learned at the hands of merciless Dublin teams that nice guys finish last, and that any place other than first was, in fact, last, so Essendon in the early 1980s had their character hewn in a blood feud with Hawthorn.
Sheedy's first title win in 1984 came the year after his side had endured a then-record 83-point defeat at the hands of Hawthorn. He retreated with his tail between his legs and the sound of scoffing ringing in his ears. After that, Essendon began to play the game in a slightly different fashion.
Dermott Brereton, who was part of those Hawthorn teams and who is as tough a hombre as ever played the game (in 1988 he planted a kiss on the head of Essendon's chief enforcer, Billy Duckworth, and then galloped right through Essendon's third-quarter huddle), has written of his memories of Sheedy's Essendon side post-1983.
"At times in 1984 I was genuinely scared of being hurt by Essendon players. There you go, I've said it, I was genuinely scared of being hurt by one of several Essendon players outside the rules of our game . . . That doesn't mean I went at any contest lightly or withdrew from any situation, I just knew that a lot of the hard Bombers had the crosshairs on us and they were only too willing to pull the trigger."
Having lost to them by 83 points in 1983, Essendon beat Hawthorn in the Grand Final the following year, a game which marked Essendon's maturity as a fighting force and which made Sheedy's bones as a coach. His third-quarter speech that day and his switches in the remains of the game have become the fabric of legend.
The next year, the relationship between the sides had tilted emphatically. The 1985 Grand Final saw one of the most memorable and intense outbreaks of fighting ever witnessed in an Aussie Rules game. Essendon were unruffled. They went on to win by 78 points. You do what you have to do. It would be a mistake, though, to judge Sheedy on the basis of that grainy footage. As the game's most outstanding and most long-standing coach, he has become an ambassador for the AFL. His larrikin good humour and ready Blarney conceal a nimble mind, and he will, if and when he retires at the end of next season, assume an emeritus place in Australian life not dissimilar to that which Boylan enjoys among us.
He has been here before, of course, and is of us in that distant way that so many of his countrymen are. He was here in 1978 as part of the tour organised by Harry Beitzel, the former umpire, promoter and commentator. Sheedy broke his leg on that trip, but the memories lingered longer than the fracture. He continued on touring Europe on crutches, and by the time he returned home had formed the germ of an idea about wanting to be a coach.
"From that first trip, it's just the excitement I remember. It was my first trip as a player, and I was very proud to be able to achieve that in what was the VFL (Victoria Football League) back then. The way we were accepted is what stayed with me. I remember Harry Beitzel and myself were invited to a wedding in the hotel we were staying in. Just like that. I said, 'You can't do that'. They said, 'We can', and then they dragged 10 of us in. I was sitting there thinking, what an amazing country.
"I have a memory of the beauty and the excitement of being away, but I was one of those players determined to lock myself in and play well. I didn't get the most out of it in that way, but the time was exciting."
So, when the AFL, having for a long time treated the International Rules coaching job as a sinecure to be handed out to the Best Blazer in Show or Most Affable Former Great, decided to approach their coaches association for an experienced figure to coach the national side, Sheedy was the first to be asked.
The request was made partly through veneration, partly because of his experience and partly because, if the AFL were to be seen to make a leap of faith with the series, Sheedy was the man to be seen to do it with.
Not content with winning this series or the last, he has been at pains to stress that he is laying down a reservoir of experienced players to see Australia through future series. That's the sort of noise which reassures the blazers on both sides.
His CV runs far deeper than the four titles and the amassed years of continuous employment. The current Australian tour party has four Aboriginal players with it, and when Sheedy picked Michael Long for Essendon in 1989 he made Long the club's first Aboriginal player in over 40 years. At the time, there were a handful of Aboriginal players in the game. Today there are well over 50, and Australia's indigenous people are represented twice as heftily within the game as they are within the general population.
Sheedy has remained a supporter and a fan of Aboriginal players, and his influence and backing has been important especially at turning points, such as when Long cited a rival player for racial abuse on the field.
More recently, Sheedy drew controversy on to himself when he urged Australians to back their country's servicemen in Iraq. Given he did his national service during the Vietnam War, the pronouncement was less surprising than it would have seemed coming from any other coach.
Indeed, Sheedy's time in the army and the time he spent training and working as a plumber define him as purely as the decades within the game do. It was in the army he first had a crack at coaching.
"Before you coach you never know if you will be able to connect with people. I did national service, and that was the first time I thought I could relate to people. I mean, it's very hard to relate to senior officers, to majors and lieutenants, when you are a young sergeant coaching them. When the siren to start the match goes, you're the boss; when it goes at the end they are the boss again. That's quite a path to tread. I was 21 and I got away with it."
That ordinariness, that sense of who he is and where he has come from, is essential to the Sheedy legend. When he speaks, he does so with an openness borrowed from his father, Tom, whom he describes as the "friendliest man you could meet, he'd pull over the road and talk to a farmer. He was never in a hurry if there was a conversation to be had".
(Tom Sheedy was a generation closer to the family's Irish roots. Kevin Sheedy went to Cobh in 1978 and met his distant relative, Mamie Swanton. Her children are still there or thereabouts he thinks, but he hasn't met them this trip. By way of public service announcement, he asks that any Swantons related to Mamie contact him at the Berkeley Court.)
Tom Sheedy was a racing man who raised his kids on the legend of Australia's racing wonder, Phar Lap, and big days at Flemington, but Kevin Sheedy became a professional rules player in 1974, an exciting time within the sport.
Back then the Aussie Rules landscape looked a lot different. Various state leagues were clamouring for the creation of a national league, but the VFL (the game's stronghold is Victoria) held out and in the end finagled a arrangement whereby they kept most of their clubs and permitted new clubs from other states to enter instead. Licence fees and TV revenues started to flow. The game survived and changed quickly.
Sheedy is conscious of the broad parallels with the GAA and the crossroads it will come to over the next few years, but he is adamant the GAA must decide for itself.
Every model is different, and in Australia the recent decades of change in the game have worked out reasonably well. We consider the culture of the sport has changed more drastically in recent years as television's influence became more pronounced.
"I think if you look back, most players have gained through the times. Most people have done well. I think there's a downside to what happened. Television changed the culture of the sport more dramatically than anything lately. When I turned professional in 1974 - it was a very interesting period for me. As a plumber by trade I'd worked for nine years. I had gone through a lot of changes playing in the '60s, but I had experienced the real world.
"I think that a lot of professional players need to get a real life, to get a connection with the basics of life. Turning pro young has some great benefits, but you lose a lot. The chance to work in the normal workforce, the chance to relate to the people generally and the business of general, everyday life. We have to look at that, keep guys going through college and university so they have a career when they finish football."
That's a recurring theme of his work, the quality of the person, the quality of their future. He brought the great Australian star Michael Voss on this tour with him. Voss will play his last ever game in Croke Park tomorrow, but Sheedy is unsentimental, speaking instead of the future involvement he hopes Voss will have, bringing up again the effect 1978 had on him.
Sometimes with the International Rules series it is hard to see a future or, indeed, a point beyond the short-term entertainment the game brings around every now and then. Beyond the boundaries of the field, the people who embrace the game and evangelise for it are its best commendation.
Seán Boylan and Kevin Sheedy sitting at a top table. Anything they're selling, you have to be interested in.
