James Hird’s final game as a player in Melbourne was a bit over the top. But it was quite a scene. 88,000 people turned up. Kevin Sheedy had finally been pensioned off and the two great Bombers did a lap of honour. The Essendon theme song was playing, even though they’d lost. Supporters were clamouring to touch their golden boy. Commentating on radio, Dermott Brereton, who hated Essendon, wondered aloud whether their careers warranted such a send-off.
Later, he had a kick on the MCG with his daughter. He looked like he could keep playing. A few weeks later he won his fifth best and fairest. But he’d read which way the wind was blowing, the way so many champions don’t. “I’m spent, I’m tired and I’m gone,” he said.
Hird was untouchable back then. Question his all-encompassing magnificence to an Essendon supporter and they’d cock their head and look at you like you were half mad. It’s hard to think of a player more loved by his supporters; Lenny Hayes at St Kilda, Robbie Flower at Melbourne perhaps.
No laps of honour now. No more hashtags. No more golden boy. Nothing more left to say. Even the most crack-potted of conspiracy theorists have run out of fizz. He was one of those men you thought would be around footy forever. It’s hard to know what he’ll do now. It’s even harder to know what to make of him. Everyone knows he did the wrong thing. Few can agree on what he actually did, or to what degree. But he is gone, probably forever. Spent, tired and gone. An Orwellian unperson in the football community.
He very nearly didn’t make it. He could easily have been another Canberra public servant, carving up the dewy ACT grounds on Saturdays. When he arrived at Essendon, people thought he was anaemic. He was very nearly delisted. There was a 4-2 vote to jettison him. Coach Sheedy, his polar opposite, saw the joy in his game and stuck his neck out for him.
For a decade and half, he played a totally unencumbered game. He ran around like an 11 or 12-year-old boy who’s just beginning to realise how good he is. He “saw ball, got ball”. He was chesty, wore long sleeves and ran on his toes. He had an odd, bouncy gait that usually spells injury. He later wrote: “The simple thrill of watching the ball, running after it and jumping on it is as sweet as it gets for me.”
Martin Flanagan, who once compared him to a young officer on the Somme, said he played with “a look on his face like that of a man who is utterly awake”. But Hird was a stress-head. He would toss and turn late into the morning before a big game. He hid it well. He lived in East Melbourne and would stroll a few hundred metres to the MCG. He would stand at the top of the players’ race, lick his palms and run out a picture of composure. The bigger the game, the better he played.
Off the field, he seemed to be cut from a different cloth. After being dragooned into a footy trip to Ibiza, he set off on a long run at 6:30 each morning. The island was a circus – sunburnt geezers from Essex popping pills, people shagging on balconies. For Hird, it was hell. At the tail end of the 10-kilometre run, he saw one of his team-mates arriving home in a wretched state, having broken his collarbone at a foam party. Hird shook his head and booked the first flight home.
His coach was shrewd enough to leave his captain to his own devices. Few footballers trained harder. In the middle of winter, when everyone else had finished up and headed for the spa, he would be honing his skills in the rain. Trainers would be dispatched to bring him back inside. But ominously, he pushed the envelope. He sought dietary advice from a man who was later caught importing over 100,000 pseudoephedrine-based tablets from Malaysia.
In 2002, he suffered one of the worst injuries ever seen on a footy field. “This is a prick of a game,” he said afterwards. “I don’t want to play it anymore.” But he returned, made no adjustments, played with no restraint. In the autumn of his career, he won new admirers. He seemed too good to be true.
In retirement however, as a TV pundit, he was unknowable, inoffensive, a little dull. He played a straight bat. He wore sensible sweaters. He was always holding back. He was uncomfortable in front of the camera. He’d have made a terrible actor. He was always the one staring at the camera before looking away, like a schoolboy sprung. Blind Freddie could see he coveted the Essendon coaching job.
As the most rookie of coaches, he built what seemed like a formidable team around him. His assistant Mark Thompson knew what he was doing. He had stared down the loonies at Geelong and built a dynasty. He knew the Essendon players were too skinny. On a handshake, they took on a shadowy, ruddy-faced sports scientist who could charm the birds from the tress. He would change everything. Before too long, the whispers started. Journalists started perusing bodybuilding forums for clues - Peptides? What the hell is a peptide?
At the end of the 2012 season, Hird toured the Real Madrid Football Club. He sought out Jose Mourinho, one of the great sports coaches of his generation, a swaggering mass of contradictions. Hird, as ever, was a sponge. “What’s the secret to your success?”, he asked. ‘The Chosen One’ jutted his jaw and sized up this antipodean pretty boy… “Win, quick,” he said.
“Run Jimmy, run,” Hird told himself. He was like that as a player. He was always in a hurry. He’d won a premiership in his second year, followed by three consecutive best and fairests and a Brownlow medal. But he’d run headfirst into the perfect sporting shitstorm. There was a Prime Minister in an election year, the most powerful and defensive sporting organisation in the country, new drugs, links to organised crime, a criminally underfunded peak anti-doping body, a conservative football club, a haughty AFL CEO, a rabid press, senior bureaucrats, crack silks, human rights experts, conspiracy theorists, flag wavers.
Everyone had different needs, a different angle. But they all had one thing in common – they’d never dealt with anything like this before. The public and press couldn’t make heads or tails of the whole thing. It didn’t feel like a drugs scandal. Ben Johnson getting so big he couldn’t walk through his front door – now that’s a drugs scandal. Bodybuilder Paul Dillett literally freezing during a posing routine and being carried off stage like a cardboard cut-out – that’s a drugs scandal. Lance Armstrong freezing his own blood – that’s a drug scandal. This was something else altogether.
The scandal needed a face. For months, Hird’s ashen mug was plastered the front and back pages. The AFL, as always, sought to control the narrative. Essendon countered with anaesthetic press releases and lame hashtags. The natural inclination, whether you were a columnist, a tweeter or a water cooler bore, was to take as strident a stance as possible. On the footy websites, the sub-forums had their own sub-forums. The conspiracy theories could be funny. But the anger and the sense of betrayal took you aback. It brought into sharp focus just how much the game means to people.
The story droned on and on. In the media, battlelines were drawn. Nuance is not something the predominantly Melbourne-based football media traffics in. The shades of grey in the Hird case were too much for them. Bereft of any idea of what was going on, they turned on one another. One bemoaned Justice Middleton’s decision to release his Federal Court verdict on the day before the grand final.
Through all this, Hird stood as stubborn as a mule. With her husband muzzled, Tania Hird became family spokesperson. She was no bird-brained WAG. “She’s a bit uppity, isn’t she?” people would say. Her husband was filmed reading to his kids. Cadet journos were camped outside her house. Every time the Hirds stepped outside, the snouts of TV microphones were thrust in their faces. “Fight, James,” you can imagine her telling him…. “Fight the pricks.”
The AFL, whose precious brand had been trashed, were incredulous. Their chairman, a Rhodes scholar and a former premiership captain, finally cornered him. “Why haven’t you stood down,” he said. “Because I haven’t cheated,” Hird replied. Part of you admires him for that. Part of you then checks yourself. It was that sort of scandal.
The terms of his exile were ridiculous, insulting. He set off for a French university campus in the middle of an oak forest, regarded as one of the most beautiful places in Western Europe. He returned tanned, but doomed. The imperious golden boy of yore cut an almost apologetic figure. His team was hopeless. The old veterans Essendon had gambled on couldn’t go a yard. The players pointed fingers and bickered amongst themselves on the field. This sickeningly successful club was now a laughing stock.
On one of the most miserable Melbourne days in living memory, Hird was nearly killed when his bike got stuck in tram tracks. When he returned, he seemed to have aged a decade. He looked utterly fed up. His players looked fed up. Everyone was fed up. His final press conference was eerily cordial. It seemed like a relief.
Things change. Footy’s four biggest names of last quarter of a century – Wayne Carey, Gary Ablett Snr, Ben Cousins and James Hird – have all been shrivelled to mortal proportions. Hird, more than any of them, was someone to apparently model yourself on. “Play, train and carry yourself like Hird,” parents, coaches and teachers would say. “He’s so smart,” people would tell you. “How so?” you’d reply? “Well…he goes to university…. he studies engineering!”
None of that now. No more golden boy. Footy moves on, bankrolled by another obscene TV rights deal announced on the same day that Hird fell on his sword. Footy’s latest unperson retreats to his Toorak mansion. The rest of us try and make sense of the whole thing.
Fair dinkum, this sport does your head in sometimes. What a debacle.
