Over the decades, footy has thrown up all sorts. We’ve had war heroes, petty thieves, Rhodes Scholars, drug addicts rogue biochemists, tribal leaders, members of parliament and also Mark “Jacko” Jackson. These days, as Hawthorn’s Will Langford demonstrated, it doesn’t take much to be deemed “a weird unit”. In Langford’s case, a couple of philosophy textbooks and a surplus of camping gear in his car did the trick.
In recent years former Geelong and Essendon coach Mark Thompson has strayed into genuine oddball territory. On Fox Footy panels and in his post-match press conferences, he has cultivated one of the more intriguing TV personas – the tics, the fidgeting, the way he punctuates his sentences with a “hmmm”.
But Thompson’s new book, Bomber, co-written with veteran football writer Martin Blake and released this week, reveals the surprisingly logical and organised mind of a born teacher and a man with supreme confidence in what he does best. This is a man, after all, who once stood at his club’s AGM and announced to the members, “You know what? I know how to coach, hmmm”.
At the same time, it reveals a man clearly not cut out for footy’s politics, its moral turpitude, its confected drama. In many ways its most noteworthy feature is Tim Bauer’s cover photograph – the seared, exhausted, drooping, Tolkeinian face of a Baby Bomber slowly worn down by the game and all its associated bullshit.
Footy was so different when Thompson started. More than half of that mighty dual Essendon premiership side of 1984-85 were smokers. Indeed Bomber features a picture of Thompson – about to set off on a lap of honour of the MCG following the 1985 grand final – sucking on a dart. They all had full-time jobs. Simon Madden was a teacher. Paul Van Der Haar built swimming pools. One of Thompson’s earliest team-mates, Alan Reid, later worked as a senior trade commissioner in China. Kevin Sheedy always rode the white collar guys hardest. Thompson, the cheeky sparkie from Airport West, was a natural favourite.
Far from the batty figure of later years, the Sheedy of the early-to-mid 1980s was the hardest of hard bastards. He liked rough-hewn tradie types – guys who worked on the tools all day and then trained their backsides off at Windy Hill. Electricians, he figured, knew about risk and making good decisions under pressure. Thompson, who was running his own electrical business at 21, once saved the life of a colleague who electrocuted himself after becoming impaled on a conductor. He says it taught him to be methodical and vigilant. The other guy dusted himself off and went into hospitality.
Though never a dirty player, Thompson had that Sheedy edge. He came off the bench and kicked a clutch last quarter goal in one of the most famous grand finals of all. He was 20 years old but looked about 13. For the next dozen years, he was a cool head in heavy traffic, a calculated risk taker. He played in three flags, captained a 50-1 shot to a premiership and limped to 200 games.
From the moment he took up coaching at Geelong, his mantra was “teach – don’t command or judge”. He lobbed at a club crippled by debt and inclined to eat its own. “A savage club,” he called it. “Not the kind of club you would enjoy being drafted to as a young man.”
His young players needed time and patience, rare commodities in football. Three years yielded finishes of 12th, ninth and 12th. On a surreal Sydney night, just when it all seemed to be coming together, Nick Davis unleashed 10 minutes of pyrotechnics that still haunts Geelong supporters. Thompson was in tears afterwards but resisted the temptation to lay into the players. He had seen Sheedy go berserk following the 1996 preliminary final, effectively breaking several young men in the process. Thompson spoke calmly, insisting it would be the making of them.
But 2006 was a disaster. His own marriage ended. Sam Newman bagged his game-plan mercilessly. The team coughed up a 54-point lead against the eventual premiers. Cameron Mooney spent the whole year trying to clock his opponents. Darryn Cresswell was sounded out for the senior coaching role. If that had happened, the players might have mutinied and the club would have gone up the spout. A few years later, Cresswell was in jail.
After an exhaustive and sometimes messy review, the club stuck by him. But things needed to change in a hurry. Steve Johnson had been banished and was working part time in a real estate office after falling asleep in a random backyard and drinking from a bottle of sunscreen. After five weeks, Geelong had won just twice. The Herald Sun published an article that is still pinned to a wall at Kardinia Park – “Cats’ Double Standards and Inflated Egos”.
One of Thompson’s good friends, curiously, was the Victorian Attorney General, Rob Hulls. “Do it your way,” Hulls told him. Having spent years teaching the Cats how to defend, Thompson finally unleashed them. They committed to what he called “kamikaze” football. It was high possession, high octane and high risk. Its first victim – as if they hadn’t been through enough – was Richmond. By the 15-minute mark of the round six match, Geelong had kicked seven goals and the Tigers had barely touched the ball. Gary Ablett was finally realising how good he was. Johnson had relinquished his administrative duties, was off the grog and back in the side. Geelong won by 26 goals and would win 40 of their next 42 games. It was the heaviest defeat in Richmond’s history. Terry Wallace said it was the worst day of his football life.
Some of the most revealing parts of Thompson’s book are his notes for the various grand finals. “Brave, ballsy, risky, no cheap crap” were his instructions prior to the 2009 grand final. The year before, he wrote, “We get them by kamikaze best – play our way”. He readily admits he coached poorly that day. He sat in the box with a bewildered look on his face. There was no Plan B. Paul Chapman devoted a chapter of his book to a game that still sticks in the craw of everyone at Geelong. “What in the Hell was that?” he titled it.
You took the good with the bad with Bomber as a coach. He liked instinctive and proactive footballers. “Give me someone coachable and I’ll train ‘em up,” he’d say. He hated anyone, opposition coaches included, who “played safe”. In an era where many opted for athletes, he preferred slow, smart, pure footballers. He liked big bodies and had an aversion to drafting anyone under 5ft 10. He didn’t like his players sporting tatts, earrings and loutish haircuts. He trained his teams hard. They did considerably more competitive work than other sides. In 2007, there were more than a dozen punch-ups at training.
But he needed a clear head, a long term goal and a definitive role. Burnt out and unsure of what he was actually there for, he returned to his old club in the pre-season of 2011. True to type, he didn’t tell anyone at Essendon. He simply strolled on to the training ground, found James Hid and said “let’s go”. He’d never been one for written contracts. A handshake was always enough.
Soon, Thompson was embroiled in a shit-storm. The supplements scandal broke him, you suspect. He’d log on in the wee hours each morning to read the latest from The Age. The whole thing confused him. It confused all of us. Even now, it won’t go away. Just last week, the man at the centre of it all was shot.
Thompson recalls a screaming toe-to-toe with Stephen Dank and imploring him to cease the injections program. “OK son,” Dank replied and promptly stepped it up a notch. While Hird was completing his business management course in a French oak forest, Thompson took over the main job for year. For Bomber, and for anyone watching, footy was fun again. His press conferences descended into vaudeville. He didn’t bother turning up to many meetings. The club were wary of him, especially after he’d played hardball with the AFL and Asada. But the fans and his players thought he was a gem.
And then, just like that, he was gone. When the club was finalising its coaching structure for 2015, Thompson was drinking pina coladas in Playa del Carmen in Mexico. He baulked at paying the AFL imposed fine. He didn’t attend the 1984-85 premiership reunions. Rumours spread that he was a drug addict, which he strongly denies.
He admits that he misses coaching. But he no longer sees the game as fun.
Despite the tumult, Bomber Thompson always sought to foster an enjoyable playing environment. On Friday, two of the players he trained up – Thompson footballers to a T – play their 300th game and break the club’s games record respectively. Their former coach will most likely be up the highway in the Fox Footy studios, cracking gags, speaking sideways and shuffling his papers – a man with five premierships to his name, a man who understood coaching better than nearly anyone and a man who seems lost without it.
