Damien Hardwick uncovered: Former teammates and Richmond staffer on what he was like as a player and coach
Kane Cornes can recall the pressure on the Power after falling short in the years leading up to the 2004 finals, but a meeting away from coaches organised by Hardwick helped change that.
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Damien Hardwick had a favourite saying which he would wheel out religiously, particularly in his early days at Richmond.
It was “lo and behold”, an expression of surprise or wonder which was ironically exactly what he elicited from the football world this week.
His exit from the Tigers caught everyone on the hop and resulted in his favourite saying getting some airplay among his premiership players.
“I remember early days he would run out of things to say and everything was ‘lo and behold’,” former defender David Astbury said.
Hardwick has made a habit of surprising people throughout his 30 years in the game which saw him play in two premierships with different clubs and then win three flags as Richmond coach.
DIMMA AT ESSENDON
Hardwick arrived at Windy Hill after spending time in the North Melbourne under-19s and reserves and Springvale in the VFA. He won the Essendon reserves best and fairest in 1993 and didn’t make his senior debut until the age of 22 in 1994.
DUSTIN FLETCHER
Essendon 2000 premiership teammate
“He was all about getting in, getting the training done and then getting home. He had no interest in team meetings and he had his own way of doing the training, particularly when it came to weights.
“We’d be told to do three sets of six on the bench press and he’d just do 18 bench presses straight out to get the exercise done as quickly as possible. If it was three sets of 10 chin-ups, he’d try to do 30 straight and that would be another one done. Then he’d be in his car on the way out because he lived a fair way out (he came from Upwey, about an hour’s drive east of Windy Hill). He was also working as a bank teller when he started at Essendon.
“Then there was the massage table. The boys were always hanging to get on it but ‘Dimma’ wouldn’t go near it. If anyone touched his legs, he hated it. Never once did I see him get a rub down or a massage.
“On the field, well, (my youngest son) Max came home last week and he was watching a few of the highlights of the old days on YouTube. He said to me, ‘Who was this No.11 Dad? He just seemed to be in, out, in at them, throwing blokes around and really into it’. I said, ‘Mate, that’s Dimma, he’s the man’.
“He was great to play with, there were no holds barred and I remember he terrorised (Fremantle’s Shaun) McManus one day and at the end of the day I even thought he’s gone pretty hard here.
“Between him, Mark Johnson, (Dean) Wallis, Harvs (Mark Harvey), (Paul) Barnard, you probably felt like you were going all right yourself because when you had blokes like Dimma around you could get away with a few things because you knew it probably wasn’t coming back with these guys backing you up.”
What about coaching? “I didn’t see it.”
DIMMA AT PORT ADELAIDE
After winning Essendon’s best and fairest in 1998 and being named All-Australian in the Bombers’ premiership year of 2000, Hardwick was pushed out of the red and black because of salary cap issues after 153 games. He moved to Port Adelaide at the end of 2001 and played in his second premiership in 2004.
KANE CORNES
Port Adelaide 2004 premiership teammate
“He was completely different to how he played, he was quite mild-mannered. He had white line fever and he and Michael Wilson are the toughest players I ever played with. It was just his blind courage which I respected so much.
“We choked in the finals after winning more home-and-away games than anyone. We choked in the finals in 2001, 2002 and 2003.
“We won 18 games in the home-and-away season of 2004 and everyone was saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, these guys are no good. they’ll choke’. It was all about let’s judge them in the finals and even the head sponsor said we would never win it and all that.
“Dimma organised a dinner on the eve of the qualifying final, just the players and no coaches. He just came in with a whole fresh look at it and he got up and essentially said, ‘Look, just forget about that. Attack the first contest tomorrow and we’re going to be all right’.
“He was just a real calming influence, there was nothing really scientific about what he said but it was just one of those really pivotal meetings you remember. Then in the Geelong game Byron Pickett kicked the first goal and we were just away from there.
“He had a finance background and he used to give good advice on tax and all the boring sh.t you’re not thinking about when you are 21 years of age. I thought he was going to go into that.”
What about coaching? “I was actually quite shocked when he went into coaching. He would always push authority, he detested authority. He didn’t love meetings, he hated all the bullsh.t, if we were there for too long or coaches were going on too long, he didn’t love that side of it.
“Maybe that has helped him with his coaching, what he didn’t like as a player, maybe his meetings were shorter, maybe he had a good lens on it from his time as a player.”
DIMMA AT RICHMOND
After five years as an assistant coach with Hawthorn under Alastair Clarkson, Hardwick arrived at Punt Rd at the end of 2009. The Tigers made three consecutive elimination finals in 2013-15 then lost their way in 2016, finishing 13th. The club launched a review that had the coach’s job hanging by a thread. Hardwick survived, travelled to Harvard University in the USA for a leadership course and came back a different man and coach, radically changing the way he did things and how his team played.
EMMA MURRAY
Richmond’s mindfulness coach – arrived at Richmond in 2016
“I still quite often marvel at how someone has two completely different ways in them. He was doing it one way and then the new way he was able to embrace wholeheartedly. It was like chalk and cheese.
“You could see the old Dimma, the over-analysing accountant side of it and then he made this transformation which was so mind-blowing. I often reflect on that, he must have it in him but he just didn’t know how to access that.
“He was incredible at being super consistent in the mental space. What we are trying to do is to hold a player’s focus, not hold their focus on the outcome, but hold it on the process and to be in an emotional state which allows you to execute that process.
“What Dimma is so good at once he made that decision to do things in a different way, he was so good at controlling the players’ emotional states regardless of the score. You saw that in the 2020 grand final at halftime against Geelong. He had the ability to commit to the journey and process of what the boys were doing regardless of the outcome and that is a really difficult thing for a coach to do.
“He gave my program enough trust and enough space to actually solidify and grow, which is a difficult thing. When you are playing a sport which is physical and when things aren’t going right in the physical, it is very counterintuitive to take time out of the schedule to address the emotional side of things.
“But he really stuck true to that, never wavered on that which is a very courageous thing for a coach to do. It’s a difficult thing to do when the temptation is like we didn’t do well because we didn’t move the ball so the sensible thing to do is to do more physical work but he really gave it (the mental side) the space, trusted it.
“He was very good at listening to the messages in that space and bringing that into how he coached.
“Phil Jackson, the coach of the Chicago Bulls, his belief was always that if I can get the boys into the right emotional state then anything they come up with under pressure is going to be better than what I did as a coach.
“I think Dimma was really great at taking a group of boys and holding them in an emotional state and that’s where all the music, he got a Queen cover band in once, the gifts and the stories he did for his players, that created this emotional state which gave them the permission to wholeheartedly bring their best.
“People think coaching is about the game plan, it’s not about that at all. The most fascinating thing is you have got this guy who is this accountant and over-analytical who then flipped, literally flipped a switch.
“It must have been in there, innately been in there or he wouldn’t have been able to do that. You can’t just do it to the degree that he did it because he’d been told to do it.”
WHAT’S NEXT?
So what’s Dimma’s next surprise?
On Thursday morning he arrived at Punt Rd for the final time and cleaned out his desk. He’s often talked about seeing Greece in summer so expect a European vacation to be quickly planned in the coming weeks.
Richmond chief executive Brendon Gale has no doubt Hardwick will coach in the AFL again. “I just think he is too good of a man, too capable as a coach, the game to be as good as it can be needs people like Damien Hardwick involved in it,” Gale said.
“He needs a break, he deserves it. He will be back.”
So come September and there are some job vacancies, in particular one up north, could the football world be uttering: “Lo and behold, Damien Hardwick is the coach of …“
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