In the beginning all he did was run. Shorter, slighter and more easily dismissed than almost every other kid he encountered on his path from Reservoir Old Boys to the big time, Brent Harvey soon discovered that it would help if he was at least able to out-run them.
For Harvey to stand in the spotlight as he does now, North Melbourne’s head recruiter Neville Stibbard had to ignore the protestations of Denis Pagan and just about every other person in the room when he plucked the featherweight prospect out of the 1995 national draft. A day later the new recruit and his premiership-bound Kangaroos team-mates assembled at Melbourne’s Tan running track for a time trial. “What have we got here?” joked grizzled veteran Ian Fairley after the rookie stepped out of his parents’ car and onto a set of scales. “Have we drafted a jockey or something?” North defensive enforcer Glenn Archer thought Harvey had wandered up to the training session in search of autographs.
But now, 7,538 days after his AFL debut, Brent Harvey has outlasted every player in league history to knock off Michael Tuck’s totemic AFL record of 426 senior games. He’s not being nursed across the finishing line, either. Harvey powers past it with his decades-long status as one of North Melbourne’s best and most reliable players firmly intact. He’s still being tagged. He’s still breaking those tags. The day opposition sides don’t bother with the tactic it might crush his spirit. To defeat Harvey is to wound North Melbourne’s chances.
This year Harvey is also on track for his highest goal-kicking tally in 21 seasons and come September he is likely to poll votes on Brownlow medal night, as he always has. He is, says veteran team-mate Drew Petrie, still as frenetic and excitable on the training track – all those endless hours, days, weeks and months of the same old training drills, carried out when nobody is around to cheer – as he is during games. Such dedication stops even 300-gamers in the side from easing back on the intensity in their preparation.
Harvey keeps running because he’s afraid of real life catching up with him. In his first year at North Melbourne – when he was undersized and battling for a spot in the side – his first coach, Pagan, would ask Harvey and another hopeful to stay behind at the end of training. The coach would line both men up, kick a football away from them and then time and time again make them fight to the death for it until one brought it back to him. Should their efforts slacken a single percentage point Pagan would know, and he wouldn’t pick them in his fearless and devoted team. At 38, after three decades of professional football, Harvey still doesn’t think he’s fully proven himself. Every week there’s another scrap to win, another opponent to beat, another doubter to silence.
The doubters have been a constant presence in Harvey’s life. Often in the past six or seven years, the end of his career has felt imminent. As early as 2009 – when Harvey first started playing on the succession of one-year contracts that have followed since – the club was preparing for life after Boomer. But a season later he won the club’s best and fairest award for the fifth time. Two years on from that, coach Brad Scott slung a substitute’s vest over his shoulder and assumed he’d be drilling the veteran for only the remainder of that season, not factoring Harvey into the club’s game plan or salary cap for 2013. So it got a little ugly. For the second time in Harvey’s career, a Hawthorn contract was dangled in front of him but for the second time, he rebuffed it. He’d just finished third in the Kangaroos’ best and fairest, after all. Common sense prevailed. Brent Harvey had evaded another tackle and set off again into the distance with the ball tucked under his wing.
This is just the business of football, most would say. Harvey’s done well out of the game and, having grown up in the blue collar suburb of Preston in Melbourne’s north, he knows it. And for all Scott’s doubts along the way, the admiration for his oldest player is clear. “While I’m coaching this footy club, if anyone wants to come after Brent Harvey, they come through me,” he barked in 2014. Scott has spoken before of the figuratively large shadow Harvey casts at the club. Now every single player to have pulled on a boot at league level stands in it too.
We shouldn’t even be having this conversation, when you think about it. When the Roos called Harvey’s name in that 1995 draft, 46 other hopefuls had already been given the nod – three of them heading to North, who had rated Scott Welsh, Chris Groom and Sam McFarlane as higher priorities. Six of Harvey’s Northern Knights Under-18 team-mates went before him. Pagan thought he was too small and by any logical judgment he was – 172cm (Wikipedia says 167cm, Harvey protests otherwise) with arms like stovepipes and weighing in at 64kg dripping wet. Tony Lockett could have eaten him. Mick Martyn probably considered bench-pressing him.
More than half the players picked ahead of Harvey in that class of ’95 never reached their 50-game milestone in league ranks. Ten never cracked it for a single appearance, beneficiaries of fame’s first flirtatious greeting but not its lasting embrace. But if he was as small a player as one could possibly locate in the talent pool, he was far from unassuming. “A little boomer” is how one of his junior coaches had described Harvey as she handed the eight-year-old a “most courageous player” trophy. Along with the daredevil playing style, the nickname stuck.
That it was Harvey who would achieve such lasting brilliance at AFL level would surely confound the talent scouts who overlooked him. Geoffrey Blainey once said that if you’d asked an overseas guest to pick the greatest player in the league from a line-up of Geelong’s side in the early 1990s, none would have pointed to the hunched, chunky and balding figure of Gary Ablett senior. Similar might have been argued in December 1995 of the kid built like a Dickensian chimney sweep.
In a game of such relentless physical challenges and myriad chances of injury, Harvey’s indefatigability and the consistency of his form place him in rare territory. He has survived 166 games on Etihad Stadium’s notoriously shonky surface. History has shown that players as small as him simply aren’t built to last at senior level. Every single player in the league’s 300-game club has him covered for height, most by 10 centimetres or more.
Harvey has never accepted what seemed the inevitable fate of a permanent, career-dwindling move to the full-time small forward role in which so many comparable players ended their careers. Pigeon-holed thus, Harvey’s lookalike, playalike brother Shane made his debut seven years later than his older sibling, but his three-year league career petered out 12 years ago. How many times he must have wondered when his brother would finally join him in the country and suburban leagues.
The cheap trick here is to rattle off a list of everything that’s come and gone since Harvey first laced up his boots for the Kangaroos – Napster, flip phones, the first and second comings of both Pokemon and Pauline Hanson – but it honestly is a superhuman longevity. His career has spanned four coaches, as many captains (he had a go himself between 2009 and 2011), six club chairmen, three league CEOs, the death of one league club and the birth of three more, not to mention five prime ministers and eight lead singers of INXS.
Dustin Fletcher, the contemporary with whom Harvey once shared an odd couple pursuit of Tuck’s record, earned his stay of execution on account of biology as much as merit; reliable key position players are thinner on the ground than the running men, so in return for being nursed towards 400 games the Essendon champion had every bit of utility wrung from him, standing the behemoth forwards who were too strong and experienced to be handled by younger team-mates.
Harvey has needed to do far more to survive, so much so that comparisons for his current decade hovering just below the elite level of his very peak are better found in other sports; Roger Federer’s ceaseless excellence in this lengthy era in which he has stopped winning grand slam titles but still beats everyone bar the men who usurped him at the top, or perhaps Dallas Mavericks NBA star Dirk Nowitzki, now 38 like Harvey so no longer the subject of hype and platitudes, yet still somehow a champion in the present tense.
Harvey’s accolades are too many to mention, though North’s 1999 premiership triumph, the EJ Whitten Medal that cemented his stardom the same year and his five Syd Barker medals probably sit at the top. His only flag win came three years after the greenhorn had watched from the sidelines as a rookie of the ’96 squad and a season after he had stood in the middle of the MCG watching Adelaide players lift the ’98 cup – the first time he’d ever cried on a football field. The echo of that golden era must surely ring louder in his ears with every nearly-there finals campaign that has followed.
Harvey has always been an interesting player to contrast against those around him; he arrived at the peak of Wayne Carey’s brilliant, combustible and deeply flawed reign of superstardom, then took centre stage himself in a dowdier era. For durability and his ability to handle himself physically you could say he shares many of Glenn Archer’s vaunted “Shinboner” credentials, only with nothing close to the fanfare. If Harvey’s frequent midfield companion Daniel Wells whispers his passes off the boot, Harvey has always attacked games like a schoolboy celebrating the ringing of the lunch bell. His foot-passing skills should be rated as highly as his goal sense. Archer says Harvey was the only team-mate he had who, via some extra sensory power, could direct a leading player into the ball’s precise flight path before he had even laid boot on it.
This extraordinary AFL career has also spanned the most drastic tactical and philosophical evolution the modern game has known – from the abandonment of semi-amateurism (Harvey worked in a gym, a sports store and incurred Pagan’s wrath by considering a plumbing apprenticeship early in his career) and one-on-one contested play through the onset of floods, zones and presses, plus the frenetic player-rotations that have made the game so relentlessly physical in the past five years.
Harvey has answered all of these challenges and adapted almost seamlessly, as damaging with the ball now as he was in his prime. Unsurprisingly, his 1,035 bounces in league ranks are unmatched in the time such stats have been recorded. As nimble and quick as he is, when the ball is in his hands the game slows just a little. When Harvey finally does call it quits, the only just ending would be for the siren to blare as he’s arching his back to avoid the grasp of tackler and setting off once more with childlike abandon.
Harvey is also an old-fashioned football person, as distinct from a celebrity footballer. In the absence of major scandal, infamy or a personal brand, we judge him on the simple criterion of what he’s done on the football field. Neither his playing career nor his lifestyle capture the zeitgeist, nor do they offer any kind of allegory on the game in his time. Not even the most simpering assessment of his career could be headlined “What Brent Harvey’s AFL games record tells us about...”, well, anything.
Harvey’s Instagram account @boomer.29 doesn’t document any of the lavish trappings of fame so eagerly shared by most modern athletes, instead letting fans in on downright daggy moments such as him and wife Shayne sharing their “snuggle chair” with the family dog, or Harvey hanging out at the Pancake Parlour with his kids. The most glamorous it gets is a screen shot of his guest appearance on Family Feud, which if you were to pick a television program that best represents Brent Harvey, is probably spot on – not a Hollywood production but a Reg Grundy job.
North Melbourne supporters have inexhaustible reserves of goodwill for their record-breaking champion, and well they might after watching him swerve his way around opponents and kick so many team-lifting goals for all these years. Opposition fans, on the other hand, tend to loathe him with fiery passion. Perhaps this is just the reflexive football fan response to Harvey’s physical stature. Short players have always been easily pegged as a sufferers of “small man syndrome” and a related range of character traits projected onto them. The fact that Harvey is so yappy, goal-hungry and quick with a fist pump probably plays a role there, so he sits somewhere in the middle of the Ballantyne-Milne continuum.
Harvey is, naturally, a player whom each of his loudest critics would appraise very differently in their own colours. Perhaps he’d get a better run if the persona truly matched the flashy playing style. Earlier this week Harvey claimed that the club’s focus should be on beating St Kilda and shoring up their finals spot, not on his 427th appearance, but that’s a hard sell when the entire team is wearing a specially-minted guernsey with details of your milestone printed across it in bold 200-point font. A similar one was produced for his 400th game. There’s no I in team, but there are a few other vowels in Boomer.
Unsurprisingly he’s hawking a book of the same name, not coincidentally released this week. It’s typical of its genre: unlikely to be purchased by anyone bar North Melbourne fans and short on any major revelations (North didn’t capitalise on its golden era, Pagan was a hard taskmaster, the club’s facilities and finances used to be poor, Wayne Carey received preferential treatment, etc etc). For its only moment of mild controversy – Harvey describing Carey’s affair with the wife of their colleague Anthony Stevens as “despicable” – the author has already publicly and privately apologised. Carey honestly did well to reach the offending passage without nodding off.
Which is not to say that Harvey’s first foray into publishing is unenlightening. In fact it probably gives us some clear explanations for his longevity in the game, in that it’s so full of cookie-cutter tropes – mum’s broken vases, disapproving school teachers, epic backyard battles, the doubters who wrote him off – that you conclude his mundane ordinariness and narrow focus on a singular pursuit must be at the heart of his invincibility. Football is all Harvey knows and he is its loving and devoted dependant. Right down to its cover – the stubbly veteran’s sub-blistered, leathery face squinting unfashionably into the sun as he plays clothes horse for the Boomer-branded guernsey – everything about it is pure Brent Harvey. There are 40 whole pages about taggers.
In one of the more amusing passages of Boomer, Harvey shares his obsessive compulsions, from the standard alphabetisation of DVDs and touching of the walls of the players’ race as he runs out for games, to the more unusual removal of excess coathangers in the cupboard and the specific positioning of his shoes therein. Strangest of all is his aversion to the use of the family cutlery on “wet dog food like PAL” when it comes time to feed the pets (there’s an endorsement deal that’ll go begging). You’re left with the image of a man who leaves absolutely nothing to chance, even in his utensil drawers. When the time eventually comes for him and North to part, one wonders whether they might just let him maintain the spiritual equilibrium he derives from his anally retentive training regimes and daily locker room rituals.
For the cynics who find Harvey’s worldview and style of football self-absorbed, the book provides a decent amount of fuel; as a junior used to hogging all the attention (Harvey once kicked 21 goals and 10 behinds in an under-15s game) he resents the growth spurts of his peers, complaining: “I still wanted to be the standout player on the team and dominate games”; descriptions of team dynamics and what made the golden era North collective so great are few and far between; Harvey appears to have kept the letters of praise sent by every club who was interested in drafting him and he’s harboured a lifelong obsession with the individuals who have written him off (“people are naturally waiting for me to fall off the cliff and retire”).
Yet you don’t envy him these overriding insecurities, about his size particularly, but also his need to be recognised and reassured of his greatness by team-mates, opponents and the public. “There hasn’t been a day in my football career when I didn’t feel like I had to try to impress someone,” he writes at one point. The sensation is no more acute than when the newest crop of recruits first arrive at the club. Harvey details one training session in which he fails in a goal-kicking competition against the likes of club newcomers Jarrad Waite and Shaun Higgins – a source of mild and passing amusement to most of his team-mates but a genuinely wounding experience for the veteran.
For all the song and dance made of Harvey’s record this week, his family emerge from the book as much more dedicated to the joy of mere participation in sport than the accumulation of individual acclaim. His father Neil, who played VFA football for Brunswick and at one stage trained with Collingwood, still plays club cricket well into his 60s and brother Shane remains a dominant suburban footballer. It was not until 2000, when Harvey was already a premiership star at the Roos, that he was casually informed by his grandmother that her husband, William Harvey, had played a couple of games of senior football for North Melbourne too. It was just another game of footy to the Harveys.
But this weekend it’s not just another game. Boomer Harvey will do something we may never see again. A footballer like him can only be truly appreciated and understood through his most compelling means of self expression – when he’s streaming through the centre of the ground with a Sherrin in his hands and a goal in his sights. How much longer he maintains the standards that have placed him in this uncharted territory remains to be seen. He looks good for 450 games or more. You’d think a man so obsessive will be shooting for an even number, whatever it is.
“Not to sound cocky,” Harvey writes in his book, “but there’s only one ‘Boomer’ that I’m aware of.” And he’s right. Brent Harvey is now literally one-of-a-kind.
