A. A long time but it has gone very, very quick. It has been educational in the sense of getting somewhere in my life and learning a lot about the country and moving around Australia with the team – it has been tremendous from that journey point of view.
Q. How have you found the 22 years at the club?
A. I think that it has been a little bit difficult at times but history has shown it has been worthwhile staying – both the club and myself have been fairly good to each other.
Q. Are you happy to still be at Essendon?
A. I was pretty happy to still be at Essendon – there has been a lot of offers over the years where I could have possibly left at times or could have been sacked. To be quite honest you very rarely get the opportunity to coach top clubs and I am very fortunate to still be around in the job because it is a very, very difficult job and a lot of people don’t understand how difficult this job is and how difficult it has got since I first took on the job in 1980.
Q. You say you are privileged to coach a top club but Essendon weren’t a dominant force when you took over – how big a role do you think you’ve had to play in making it a top club?
A. I think probably my knowledge and perhaps benefit was learning off some tremendous administrators at Richmond. Ray Dunn actually took Richmond to the MCG in 1965 – so it took a long time after that for any other club to go to the MCG. So when you look back and you are learning from people around you it is quite remarkable. Graeme Richmond and of course Alan Schwab – they way they developed people and kept bringing on junior teams. I think at one stage we won the premiership in every competition – I think it was about 1973 or 1974. To learn that from those people are pretty good times.
You try and bring it here to Essendon and work with the people at the club. Essendon at that time really wanted to get back to where they should be and that is up there. Probably you would have to say if you looked at Carlton at the time, Collingwood, Richmond, Hawthorn and the Kangaroos – they were all ahead of Essendon at the time. At the moment I think Essendon is level on premierships with Carlton, has been on the top more times than Carlton and have won more McClelland trophies than Carlton. So we feel that we are back up there with a chance to be a strong club and we have done it where it needs to be done - that is not only off the field but also on the field.
Q. Most people would say that you are the driving force behind that success – how does that make you feel?
A. I think the driving force really comes from the people that you work with and around the club. Whether you know it or not they are fine tuning your thinking and watching you grow as a person. There are times where you are not performing as good as you would like to and sometimes it is very difficult to realise that – I think I have had those sort of people to point me in the right direction. I think a lot of that drive comes from people that you work with. There are probably many people I have worked with over the years that I could thank – probably 30-40 people. People I worked with when I first started here, many of the coaching people, many of the board people, many of the players because the players are actually the guys that are being coached and perform out there on the ground and I think all of my assistants. I have had many, many assistants and many of them have gone onto bigger and better things and have developed themselves as people.
Q. Can you give us some insight to what the club was like in 1981?
A. It was a situation that was a little bit difficult because I asked the club to be a full-time coach and they had not considered that when they went out to appoint a coach. I said I may as well stay at Richmond because I am a full-time coach at Richmond. They had to re-assess and I think that is what got me a second interview.
At that time we didn’t have any full-time recruiting people because there was no such appointment in any club in the VFL in those days. We went and got Noel Judkins who I had worked with pretty well at Tigerland – he was appointed six months later. We were really moving into a new land of hope and vision.
Q. Most of the support staff have been with you for your entire time at the club
A. Doc Reid has been here 21 years and Paul Lew has been here about 21 years. So we have all basically started together. I think physio Bruce Connor has been here probably 20 years so we have been here a long time together. There has not been a lot of changes – in some areas there has been naturally but we feel we have grown the coaching field fairly well but you would have to say that Kevin Egan and myself have been here for the whole time. Kevin Egan has probably seen me develop my footy from a different angle.
Q. How has footy impacted on your life?
A. It is very difficult to say you have a normal life because you don’t have a normal life. The kids in some areas have missed out on having their father around them compared to the 30-40 hour week father – I haven’t been that, there is no doubt about it. Geraldine has been absolutely sensational in that area - she has been half the mother and the father time wise. I rang Sam my son before and just wanted to see what the kids were up. Even now your kids are on school holidays but you are not home with them. There are difficulties – you would love to spend a lot more time with them. I think Geraldine has done a marvelous job and when you see them in public you are very, very proud of them.
Q. Did you really have to sell yourself back in 1980 to get the job?
A. Well I think you had to sell the position more than yourself. If you are going to sit for an interview you need to get your point of view across to make sure that organisation wants to head down the same road as you. Regardless of whether I got the job or not I think I did the right thing by telling them they needed a full-time coach. Hopefully I was going to be that person but I was still going to go after being a full-time coach. Our club at that time were getting part-time results. Now everyone is a full-time coach. People forget 22 years ago there was no such thing.
Q. What have been the best times in footy?
A. The best times have been watching people with talent come to the club or selecting talented people whether it is off the field or on the field and seeing them develop into terrific people and take the game up to another level. That is the really enjoyable part of football. We have seen people come to Essendon from previous jobs that had never had a full-time coaching position ever and changed from being a teacher into a coach or young people coming from school and taking over in the video area and become coaches and operators.
Q. What are the disappointing things over the years?
A. Disappointing parts – your losses are disappointing. You put all of this effort in and you see your team loses and you see injuries happen to players over the years. You feel very, very sorry for some players because it may mean the end of their career.
Q. You have done many interviews over your career – can you tell us something we don’t know about you.
A. There are some things you like to keep in your life – you can’t tell everybody everything.
